Work Is a Four-Letter Word
by Eve TushnetKayla Rae Whitaker’s debut novel about two cartoonists, The Animators, asks whether the overexamined life is worth living. Continue Reading »
Cult of the Cutting-Edge
by Peter WoodRuben Östlund's film The Square questions the assumption that art should aspire to be “cutting-edge.” Continue Reading »
Can Moral Monsters Make Good Movies?
by Peter J. LeithartShould we really despise certain movies simply because they're made by despicable men? Continue Reading »
Anselm Kiefer's Beautiful Apocalypticism
by Elliot MilcoAnselm Kiefer's paintings attempt to come to terms with Germany's past, yet always transcend the reminders of guilt and suffering. Continue Reading »
Hans Friedrich Grohs: From Bereavement to Benediction
by Timothy GeorgeHe was born four years after Kaiser Wilhelm II ascended the German imperial throne; he died nearly a century later, in the same decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. He was drafted as a soldier in both world wars and experienced firsthand the Nazi reign of terror in between. Few artists have lived so fully, or recorded so faithfully, such a vast sweep of human history. Continue Reading »
The Pieta of Joan of Arc
by Eva Marie HaineFort Drum, home to the 10th Mountain Division and, until very recently, to my family, has recently provided something rather unusual for its soldiers: great art. It is a very refreshing development that one can now walk into the main entrance of the Main Post Chapel of this large military . . . . Continue Reading »
Celibacy in the City
by Matthew MillinerThe day after the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage this summer, I was in line for the Ferris Wheel with my three year old daughter. An insufficiently directive ride attendant left me confused as to which car to enter. Do we get our own? Do we pile in with strangers? Whatever our options might . . . . Continue Reading »
Catholicism Before and After 1963
by Gerald J. RusselloIn trying to understand the extraordinary changes the Catholic Church underwent in the middle of the twentieth century, I recently came across two illuminating novels. Continue Reading »
Picturing Mary
by Nora HamermanThe new exhibit at Washington D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea,” conceived even before the museum’s birth in 1987, opened this year at long last, just in time for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The exhibit, which will continue until Easter, is under the curatorship of Msgr. Timothy Verdon, director of the Cathedral Museum of Florence, Italy and a leading scholar of Marian art. Continue Reading »
The Five Stages of Grieving the Art of Jeff Koons
by Matthew MillinerIt is Sunday night, and the Whitney Museum of American Art has been open for thirty-some hours straight. The line for this last chance to see the Jeff Koons retrospective wraps around the block. Fittingly, these are also the last hours of the Whitney Museum itself, at least in its upper East Side manifestation (their new building opens in Chelsea next year). Visiting the hideous structure one last time is like reaching out to pet the old family dog before he gets put to sleep—only to have your hand bitten. The inverted ziggurat architecture has always been an exercise in anti-effort with the art to match. A longstanding top floor feature was Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm—a snow shovel the artist purchased and declared art by fiat. Once elusive, the meaning is now clear. Here is the tool that has authorized the Whitney to pile it high. Koons’s towering mound of polychrome aluminum Play-Doh, the highlight of the show, is the simply the crest of the heap. Continue Reading »
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