Following the theory of Peter Burger’s Theory Of The Avant-Garde, Menand and Rainey (Introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 3-4) note that avant-gardism is (of course) an assault on bourgeois art, “an assaultaginst art as . . . . Continue Reading »
Keith Miller has a perceptive review of Geordie Grieg’s book about Lucian Freud, Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter . He is perceptive on the paintings: “A large irony of Freuds career is that while he was, or seemed, . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernism was not simply a secularizing movement in art. As Richard Harries shows in his recent The Image of Christ in Modern Art , Christ and Christian themes remained important for visual artists during from the period before World War I to the present. His richly illustrated book focuses on . . . . Continue Reading »
Proust wrote that artists recreate the world, which survives “until a new artist arises” (quoted in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy , 200). Polanyi agrees, but thinks that Proust’s admission that this process is “not always pleasant” is too . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernism, Arthur Danto argues in What Art Is posed a fundamental challenge not only to artistic styles but to the very conception of art. As Ian Ground explains in his TLS review of Danto’s book, Danto believed that art as capable of definition even if we have lost the ability to make things . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernity rests on a distinction between Us moderns and Them primitives. Them primitive might be dead and gone; they might be somewhere south of Us, in warmer, wetter climates and with darker skin. But Them is primitive, even if they are contemporaries. The problem is, modernity spawns a continuous . . . . Continue Reading »
From the Economist ‘s review of Vic Gatrell’s The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age , the book sounds like a colorful read. Gatrell focuses on 18th-century London and finds it a merry old place: “At general elections in Westminster hecklers threw dead or . . . . Continue Reading »
In the NYTBR , Margo Rabb discusses the frequent experience of disillusionment that readers have when they meet the authors of books they love. When they aren’t perfectly loathsome, writers are often smaller, less witty than the constructed persona of the “author.” But then . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Kivy is known mainly for his work in the philosophy of music, but in his 2006 The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature he suggests that silent reading also has a musical quality: It is a performance by a performer to an audience of one who happens to be identical . . . . Continue Reading »
Museums exude a peaceable calm. Voices are hushed as if in the presence of the sacred, everything is arranged with symmetry. All is decent and in order, and it seems that the collection sprang into existence from nothing, or that each item was a generous donation from the artist or the product of . . . . Continue Reading »
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