Recent stories of note:
“Why art biennales are (mostly) trash”
Digby Warde-Aldam, The Spectator World
The last time The New Criterion covered any of the international art world’s many-hundred biennales in depth was 2017, when James Panero visited the Venice Biennale. He concluded his appraisal of the affair—which is supposed to be the world’s premier art show—by noting that it resembled “Las Vegas, with its flood of modern effluvium.” In the years prior to that essay, our coverage of the event had primarily taken notice such recurring themes as: misadventures in American foreign policy and art, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism. The intervening years have only witnessed increased madness, none of it worth wasting ink on. But things weren’t always this way—biennales were once stimulating and unique gatherings. It is only in the last few decades that they have become “trash,” to use Digby Warde-Aldam’s colloquial but accurate descriptor in The Spectator World. Warde-Aldam traces this deterioration and offers his own solutions.
“How an English Poet Became a Greek National Hero”
John Psaropoulos, The Wall Street Journal
Lord Byron’s last words, according to one legend, were as follows: “Come, come, no weakness! Let’s be a man to the last. Now, I shall go to sleep.” But according to the poet’s official eulogist, Greece’s Spyridon Trikoupis, Byron’s last breath was spent otherwise: exclaiming “Ada!” the name of his only (legitimate) offspring, and then, with his dying gasp, “Greece!” This would be a fitting final word for the man who just one hundred days earlier had sailed to the nation to fight in its war of independence. Though he died there, Bryon never resided in Greece, nor did he have any family ties to it. What, then, explains his fatal dedication to its cause? This is the question John Psaropoulos takes up in The Wall Street Journal. Byron, Psaropoulos writes, considered the Greeks to be nobler than their Ottoman rulers, and the Greeks in turn considered him a bosom friend. And though his idealism was repeatedly mugged by reality—as when a Greek army he raised took his money and sailed into the sunset—he nonetheless retained belief in their potential.
“America’s Great Poet of Darkness: A reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150”
Ed Simon, Hedgehog Review
Robert Frost’s sesquicentennial is passing with surprising quietude. It has occasioned neither a major reissuing of his work nor splashy reevaluations. But a thoughtful reconsideration of the poet has been conducted here by Hedgehog Review’s Ed Simon. Simon brings to the fore what he calls Frost’s “Yankee existentialism,” his ability to confront forthrightly the abyss. Frost has suffered from the misfortune of popularity. His work has typically been twisted and reduced in the public consciousness to little more than a collection of blindly optimistic phrases (“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the road less traveled”; “Freedom lies in being bold”). Simon seeks to combat this rampant misunderstanding and reveal Frost’s true nature: not as a disciple of idealism, but rather as a prophet well acquainted with gloom.