Recent stories of note:
“Dreamers and Plagiarists”
Jacob Howland, Tablet
Pick your poison: a world in which each person believes that he alone understands things for what they are, or one in which everybody has succumbed to oceanic feeling at the cost of individuality and ambition? These prophetic possibilities are presented by Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Polish author Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz respectively. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the murderer Raskolnikov dreams of a worldwide plague that causes its victims to become absolutely certain in their views and certain also that everybody else is mad. The contagion makes people incomprehensible to one another, and murder and cannibalism ensue. Conversely, in his novel Insatiability, Witkiewicz tells of a future Poland deluged by addictive drugs that bring about ego-death, preparing the populace for capitulation to tyranny. Unfortunately, writes Jacob Howland for Tablet, we don’t have the privilege of picking one or the other, because both stories presage essential characteristics of the contemporary West. Extreme subjectivism and capitulation to authority are the hallmarks of the cultural vanguard, he says. We can only wait and see to find out whether Dostoevsky’s or Witkiewicz’s vision proves more apt.
“‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades’ Review: Drawings of a Seasoned Master at the British Museum”
Cammy Brothers, The Wall Street Journal
Late in life, after establishing renown, many artists change course. Think of Matisse’s jubilant cut-paper collages or Goya’s not-so-jubilant Black Paintings on the walls of his Quinta del Sordo. An exhibition at the British Museum displays the drawings of another artist, Michelangelo, from the latter part of his career. Occasioned by the recent restoration of a large-scale preparatory drawing by the artist—one of only two extant—the exhibition features works that diverge from Michelangelo’s typical modus operandi. In the first half of his career, as the artist cemented his fame in Florence, his drawings tended to portray a single figure. But the restored sketch Epifania (ca. 1550–53), as well as various smaller sketches for The Last Judgment (ca. 1536–41), feature multiple figures in the same scene. Alongside these are religious drawings with a remarkably personal, devotional quality. In his final years, for example, Michelangelo drew and redrew the Crucifixion, another scene with several figures, “as a form of prayer,” Cammy Brothers suggests in this review for The Wall Street Journal. As the drawings become increasingly peopled, they are also increasingly for Michelangelo alone.
“Progressives Realize They Have a Jew-Hate Problem”
Suzy Weiss, The Free Press
Last summer was the “Picasso Celebration,” a series of fifty-odd exhibitions worldwide commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death. The Brooklyn Museum, for its part, mounted an exhibition called “It’s Pablo-matic,” reviewed for this publication by Julia Friedman. With all the originality and critical nuance suggested by the exhibition’s title, here is the curator, the comedian Hannah Gadsby: “Picasso said, ‘You can have all the perspectives at once!’ What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested.” Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said that the exhibition “invites complexity.”
Now, the progressive chickens have come home to roost, or so writes Suzy Weiss for The Free Press. Pasternak’s Brooklyn Heights home was vandalized this week, doused with splatters of blood-red paint and hung with a banner calling her a “white-supremacist Zionist.” Painted accusations that Pasternak, who is Jewish, has “blood on [her] hands” smack of blood libel, and the red inverted triangles sprayed onto the building’s facade are a touch too reminiscent of the patches used to mark political prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Nobody deserves such a horrible attack, Weiss insists. Even so, Weiss can’t help but relish the irony.