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God Hates Renoir, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Photo: Courtesy Max Geller

  • If the prospect of another literary awards season has you rolling your eyes and grumbling about the tastelessness of the establishment, try spicing things up the old-fashioned way: gambling. You’ll find that a well-placed bet, or even a poor one, can bring a certain frisson to even the fustiest book prizes: “I allotted a budget of £100 for the Nobel and Booker combined. My rule was that, with one exception, any winner among the bets I placed had to win me back at least my entire stake. I tend to make three categories of bet: (1) a likely winner; (2) a writer I really admire who’s also a patriotic favorite; (3) a writer I’ve reviewed negatively. There’s often overlap between categories 1 and 3 … Philip Roth has 8-to-1 odds, but I’ve given up on him since he gave up writing books. He seems cursed by Stockholm. I put the rest of my Nobel money on Marilynne Robinson (£4 at 25-to-1) and Don DeLillo (£10 at 50-to-1).”
  • Or you can rage against the arts-and-culture machine with a nonviolent protest, as these enemies of Renoir—who’s plainly the shittiest of the Impressionists—have done outside Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “The rally, which mostly bewildered passersby, was organized by Max Geller, creator of the Instagram account Renoir Sucks at Painting, who wants the MFA to take its Renoirs off the walls and replace them with something better. Holding homemade signs reading ‘God Hates Renoir’ and ‘Treacle Harms Society,’ the protesters ate cheese pizza purchased by Geller, and chanted: ‘Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!’ and ‘Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!’”
  • As unrest seizes the globe and the model of the nation-state faces collapse, theorists are frantically debating the fate of geopolitics—but no one is worrying about the video-game designers. How are they supposed to make a decent historical strategy game when no one knows what it looks like to win the twenty-first century? “In the twenty-first century grand strategy game, we wouldn’t be looking to conquer the world, we wouldn’t be looking to buy it and we wouldn’t be looking to leave it in our technological wake either. So what does that leave? … Perhaps we’re destined to nestle into a historically obscure crack between the tumult of the twentieth century and something spectacular or horrible yet to come. It is nice to think, however, that the times we live in are at least interesting and that maybe we’ll get to see it all laid out in a game one day.”
  • Francine Prose looks at the frightening but tender psychology underpinning Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, The Lobster, which “posits a dystopian near-future in which it has become illegal not to be part of a couple”: “Lanthimos’s films often contain such disturbing moments of unexpected, startling violence that people who have never been able to watch Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to the end might be wise to spare themselves. Like Sophocles, Lanthimos understands that sudden self-mutilation generates a particular kind of adrenaline in the viewer. Consequently, the director’s fans learn to brace themselves every time one of his characters stands in front of a mirror.”
  • Dude: Creedence. Creedence Clearwater Revival. There’s a band. I mean, that’s a band for everyone, a band for all times! Talking to John Fogerty reveals some tricks of the trade, including the band’s go-to themes, “foremost among them the nostalgia for some lost agrarian past. But, of course, that same nostalgia was a founding theme of the South … If this vision was itself a sort of cartoon—a brutal and deadly one, with strange fruit hanging from the trees—an odd thing happened when you spread the cartoonish map of ‘Born on the Bayou’ across the partly real, partly imagined Southern landscape: you got a one-to-one ratio. The result was something like realism.”