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Category Archive: Art

Sacred Spring - August 14, 2007
Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Hardback, 339 pp. $25.00. Sacred Spring is part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism. Whalen's thesis is...

Water - May 25, 2007
Perhaps a history of modern aesthetic sensibilities could be written as a history of water. Consider: The shimmering liquity of some Romantic music (eg, Tchaikovsky), the muted submergence of Debussey, Monet's obsession with the play of light on water. Or...

Genius critics - January 03, 2007
Artists never accepted the attribution of genius as readily as theorists and bourgeois admirers applied it. Artists knew too much about the recalcitrantly physical qualities of words, paint, stone, ink, and sounds for that. Artists are as interested in technique...

Museums, Agents of relativism - January 03, 2007
Aesthetic consciousness - the capacity to abstract the aesthetic component in all perception, so as to view everything "aesthetically" - also implies, Gadamer argues, a particular notion of simultaneity. Because it abstracts the aesthetic value of the work, and downplays...

Art and appearance - January 03, 2007
After Kant, and especially after Kant's romantic disciples, art came to be viewed as a matter of beautiful appearance, consciously defined in contrast to practical reality. This had not always been the Western conception of art. Gadamer comments, "Traditionally the...

Classical and other bodies - September 28, 2006
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression) summarize a point from Bakhtin: "Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary...

Noah and the Sinners - April 02, 2006
At the end of his intriguing discussion of Gericault's painting Scene of Shipwreck, Julian Barnes gives a brief summary of the fortunes of Noah in Western art, which he says change significantly after the Sistine Chapel: "In the Sistine Chapel...

More on Postmodern aestheticization - February 16, 2006
Featherstone: "one of the characteristics of postmodern art in the 1960s was its attack on institutionalized art: on the museums and galleries, the critical academic hierarchies of taste, and the consecration of works of art as clearly demarcated objects of...

Postmodern architecture - February 16, 2006
Charles Jencks lamented in his Language of Postmodern Architecture that the term had been used in ways opposite to his own usage: "When I first wrote the book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only...

Modernism and Postmodernism in Art - February 16, 2006
The Modernday Dictionary of Deceived Ideas offers this definition of postmodernism "This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible." Mike Featherstone, who quotes this dictionary, offers a more serious discussion of what postmodernism means when applied to...

"Natural" architecture - January 23, 2006
In an overview of the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, Sara Williams Goldhagen (TNR January 23) cautions against the chimera of architecture grounded in "nature": "Maybe the first architects needed to pay obeisance to nature's designs, but that primal moment...

Allegory with Venus and Cupid - December 20, 2005
In his book, Erotic Faith, Robert M. Polhemus offers an intriguing analysis of Bronzino's Allegory with Venus and Cupid. The allegory suggests that "worship of Venus . . . blinds one to the menace of time and death." Seeking sexual...

Audubon - December 09, 2004
There's a fascinating review of Richard Rhodes' recent biography of Audubon in the Dec 6 issue of The Weekly Standard. The reviewer has this to say about the "pervasive strangeness" of Audubon's art: "Audubon's most powerful compositions (with few exceptions,...

Perl on Contemporary Painters - February 16, 2004
Jed Perl, art critic for the New Republic, has a rant about John Currin and other contemporary painters in the Feb 16 issue of TNR. Scathing is too weak for this review. He says that Currin produces trash, and incompetent...

Aesthetic Behaviour in Jewish Scriptures - February 10, 2004
F. Gerald Downing of Manchester has an intriguing paper on "Aesthetic Behavior in the Jewish Scriptures" in the December 2003 issue of the JSOT. Among the points he makes are these: 1) There has been remarkably little attention to Hebrew...

Hollander on Aesthetics - December 19, 2003
Since I've said some favorable things about Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, I should mention Anne Hollander's very smart review in the December 22 TNR. Hollander is, after all, far better qualified than I to speak on matters of...

Bloom's Tragic Aesthetics - November 05, 2003
And in case there is any doubt that Bloom's aesthetics is tragic: He claims that a poet is always one who is "rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death's necessity than all other men and women do." (Call this...

The Priority of Nature - November 05, 2003
In the introduction to Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom quotes Geoffrey Hartman to the effect that art seeks "to overcome priority," specifically the priority of nature: "art fights nature on nature's own ground, and is bound to lose." Bloom, of...

Style - November 03, 2003
I mentioned Virginia Postrel's book "The Substance of Style" some time ago, having read a review in The Atlantic. I've now had a chance to look at the book, and it is a bracing, forcefully contrarian book in defense of...

The Visual - October 16, 2003
Early in his book, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Victor Zuckerkandl is contrasting the phenomenology of sight and sound, and says this about the Greek emphasis on the visual: "It seems more than mere change that it...

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