November 18, 2016 On the Shelf “Painting Like a Man,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Grace Hartigan, The Massacre, 1952, oil on canvas. © Estate of Grace Hartigan; collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Image via The Atlantic. I always like to talk about The Paris Review’s shadowy CIA past. True, it all happened well before I was born, let alone before I was employed here, but I feel it lends my personal story an air of roguish midcentury intrigue. But I should knock it off, because the fact is this: the CIA’s alliance with belles lettres was quietly despicable, a mark on the magazine’s history. Rob Spillman spoke to Joel Whitney, the author of the new book Finks, about the broader, soft-power implications of the CIA in the early Review’s aesthetics: “[Review editors] interviewed Europeans and Americans who they put in a belles lettrist context. They basically were politicizing the apoliticization of art. They made it seem apolitical, and did so very effectively … There’s a de-emphasis on historical truth. You see that across all the CIA aesthetics that they championed. Abstract expressionism was depoliticized against the backdrop of social realism. You have new criticism, which was almost rabidly not interested in historical or the post-colonial context. The Paris Review pretended they didn’t do politics … If it looks apolitical, that doesn’t necessarily make it so.” Looking to the same period, Sarah Boxer renews a sixties-era argument about women and art: “Women artists have been put down in many ways over the years, but the basic technique boils down to this: A critic, a curator, a dealer, or an art historian describes how women paint differently from men, then declares this quality inferior. Women are pegged as controlled, tentative, personal … Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss. It is no accident that ‘painting like a man’ used to be dished out as a supremely delicious compliment. Irving Sandler once asked Grace Hartigan ‘if a male artist ever told her she painted as well as a man.’ She replied tartly, ‘Not twice.’ ” Read More
November 17, 2016 From the Archive Zebras Anything By James Tate From a 1938 WPA poster for the Brookfield Zoo. James Tate’s poem “Zebras Anything” appeared in our Fall 1975 issue. Read More
November 17, 2016 Our Correspondents In Step By Wei Tchou Taking to the streets for New York City’s Trump protests. Photo: Dustin Kirkpatrick. On Sunday evening, after four days of involuntarily clenching so badly that my jaw had started to ache too much to fully open, I dosed myself with painkillers and melatonin and finally got a full night of sleep. No bad dreams, only blackness. New York City has hummed with tension since the election—most people I know feel as though we’re in a nightmare we can’t wake from. The best I’ve been able to do so far is start at square one every day when I get up: turn on the kettle, read the headlines, jot a sentence in my diary, and remember to take a jacket on my way out the door. The protests that have roared up Fifth Avenue frightened me when they began last Wednesday evening; the pictures I saw on Twitter and Instagram captured a version of a city too unwieldy for me to comprehend. I flipped through countless posts of protesters’ faces, indistinct except for their anger. Their crudely made signs were chilling in their simplicity: FUCK TRUMP. I appreciated my peers’ passion and readiness to action, but I was still too numb to be moved. What was the point? Trump won the election fairly. Weren’t we flouting President Obama’s call to “go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens”? Weren’t we behaving like the faceless mob we’d spent this entire campaign decrying? These, and many other questions, rattled me. So on Saturday morning, I did what I am inclined to do when I don’t understand something: I grabbed a notebook and headed for the crowds. Read More
November 17, 2016 My First Time Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World By Dan Piepenbring Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his 1998 debut novel, Ute av verden (Out of the World): “I got up at six in the evening, I woke up, and then I sat and wrote all night, till eight or nine in the morning … I was so egocentric, it was really the only thing I cared about for sixteen months. When you write a book you don’t know why you’re doing it.” Knausgaard wrote the book for his father, who died just before it was published. “I realized the book was meaningless,” he says. “I wanted to say to him, Look, this is me, you don’t know me, you never knew me.” Read More
November 17, 2016 On the Shelf Don’t Be Fooled, Nerds Are Evil, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Revenge of the Nerds. In the black art of recent years, Thomas Chatterton Williams sees parables of wokeness: a worldview that sees historical black suffering stretching backward and forward through the generations, marked by fatalism and deeply skeptical of any notion of progress. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award last night, represents his first woke novel, Williams writes, and that makes it a radical departure from Whitehead’s previous work, arguably not for the better: “It’s difficult to accept that Whitehead really did squeeze himself into the artistic confines of wokeness. I would prefer to believe that the story he has given us operates on at least two levels, the second of which many of his new admirers may not immediately notice. I would like to think that he recognizes the patterns we are in thrall to, the ways we have come to rely on concepts such as the legacy of American slavery not as historical fact or even societal debt but as parable, as a teachable moment that can’t be—and never should be—conclusively apprehended. It’s a lesson that gains meaning not in the teaching but in the reteaching. It is here, in the realm of the parable, that most black art right now is being made … But the question remains whether parables of wokeness are the most effective tools for the task. Can you really extinguish a fire with more flames? Can you ever hope to disrupt a cycle of inequality by insisting ever more adamantly that it has and will always exist? At their best, artists like Whitehead show us another possibility.” Remember nerds—the nerds in high school movies? They seem so quaint now, don’t they, always getting shoved into lockers for their squirmy, pale, quietly noble nerd ways. Today’s “nerds,” by contrast, are busy spewing hate online and constructing a massive white-nationalist machine. It makes you wonder, as Willie Osterweil writes, what the notion of “nerdiness” was really obfuscating all along: “The nerd appeared in pop culture in the form of a smart but awkward, always well-meaning white boy irrationally persecuted by his implacable jock antagonists in order to subsume and mystify true social conflict—the ones around race, gender, class, and sexuality that shook the country in the 1960s and ’70s—into a spectacle of white male suffering. This was an effective strategy to sell tickets to white-flight middle-class suburbanites, as it described and mirrored their mostly white communities. With the hollowing out of urban centers, and the drastic poverty in nonwhite communities of the ’80s and ’90s, these suburban whites were virtually the only consumers with enough consistent spending money to garner Hollywood attention.” Read More
November 16, 2016 Arts & Culture A Poem Is a Naked Person By Dan Piepenbring From the poster to A Poem Is a Naked Person. I’m tired of writing about dead people, but people keep dying. Now it’s the musician Leon Russell, who died on Sunday at seventy-four. He’s the archetypally long-haired Southern dude who had his hand in a million hit songs without the public ever growing wise to him. He wrote “A Song for You.” He played piano on the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Elton John called him “the master of space and time,” which I just learned from the New York Times obit. His solo work is an easy slurry of rock, country, and blues: it has an aw-shucks accessibility at first but soon reveals its raw edges and winsome tattered patches. Here’s his song “Hummingbird,” later covered by B. B. King: Read More