January 1, 2018 Best of 2017 Degas’s Model Tells All By Jeff Nagy We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Edgar Degas, Sulking, ca. 1870, oil on canvas. Chrissakes, Pauline! No one would have been more horrified than Edgar Degas at the thought of a model taking up the pen. Not a fan of working-class literacy in general, he might well have died of apoplexy at the very idea that a model might dare not only to write about art but about his art. And from the very first words, we know that Alice Michel’s memoir is not going to be a typical hagiography of a great dead artist. This Degas is not the elegant gentleman, proud member of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie and scion of a well-to-do and diasporic family, with branches running banks in Naples and plantations in New Orleans. Nor is he the grand habitué of ballets, café concerts, and the opera, haunting the loges alongside his one-time friend librettist Ludovic Halévy. Not the cultivated disciple of Mallarmé who tried his hand at the occasional sonnet, not the obsessive aesthete who co-organized the exhibitions that made Impressionism an art-world phenomenon, and certainly not the purveyor of cutting, perfectly formed witticisms at exhibitions and dinner parties. Read More >>
December 29, 2017 Best of 2017 What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector. They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them. Read More >>
December 29, 2017 Best of 2017 I Must Enter Again the Round Zion of the Water Bead By Anthony Madrid We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! An illustration from Struwwelpeter. It is not my habitual practice to go toe-to-toe with Mark Twain. I revere him, have made lengthy extracts from his works, have read aloud many times from Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. I find Twain much funnier than [insert the name of your favorite humorist here]. But. Read More >>
December 29, 2017 Best of 2017 At the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations By Aysegul Savas We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Museum of Anatolian Civilizations We arrive at the hospital at seven in the morning. It is still dark, and the air is heavy with exhaust. Patches of muddy snow dot the streets, which branch out without a discernible plan. The taxi ride from the hotel has taken less than five minutes, and yet once we step out of the car, it is impossible to tell which direction we came from in the midst of overpasses and underpasses and the highway warping the hospital. “Shit-town Ankara,” my brother says. We take the elevator to the ninth floor and walk down a hallway, deserted except for an old man in pajamas and a woolen vest, who stands holding onto his serum pole, staring out the window. Up ahead on a hill is Atatürk’s pillared mausoleum, rising high above the city. Read More >>
December 29, 2017 Best of 2017 The Inventions of Witches By Kathryn Nuernberger We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886. The inquisitors wanted something old from each witch they tortured—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. They also wanted something new, so they could feel, with each trial and execution, as if they were getting somewhere: With what instruments do you fly? What did the toad in the pot say? Which direction do you turn the horseshoe over the door to summon your demon? Read More >>
December 28, 2017 Best of 2017 On Making Oneself Less Unreadable By Hernan Diaz We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! A photograph of H. W. Fowler in sporting attire from his biography The Warden of English. Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud. A few entries from the second edition, revised by Ernest Gowers: avoidance of the obvious is very well, provided that it is not itself obvious; but, if it is, all is spoilt. [If the reader believes] that you are attitudinizing as an epicure of words for whom nothing but the rare is good enough, or, worse still, that you are painfully endeavouring to impart some much needed unfamiliarity to a platitude, his feelings towards you will be something that is not admiration. The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it … Read More >>