{"id":100979,"date":"2016-07-29T09:34:58","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T13:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100979"},"modified":"2016-07-29T10:43:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T14:43:49","slug":"the-backside-of-the-painting-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/29\/the-backside-of-the-painting-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The Backside of the Painting, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_100981\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-100981\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-100981\" class=\"wp-image-100981\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"415\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300-300x207.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300-768x531.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/verso-5-ilha_itamaraca_300-1024x708.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-100981\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Vik Muniz, <i>Verso (Illha de Itamaraca)<\/i>, 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>The hatchet job isn\u2019t what it used to be. To read Tobias Smollett\u2019s book reviews from the eighteenth century is to discover, as J.\u2009H. Pearl writes, ever-higher concentrations of venom: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.themillions.com\/2016\/07\/literary-beatdowns-or.html\" target=\"_blank\">Smollett, who helmed\u00a0<em>The Critical Review\u00a0<\/em>from 1756 to 1763, never minced words in his judgment of whether a particular text was worth the paper it was printed on<\/a> \u2026 All Smollett needed, it seems, was a target for his wrath. And as the pages of the <em>Review\u00a0<\/em>attest, targets abounded \u2026 Specific reviewers remained anonymous, the better to create the impression of a unified voice, but writers of badly reviewed books tended to blame Smollett, returning their fire on him. It\u2019s easy to understand that anger. Would you want your book called \u2018a very trivial, insipid, injudicious and defective performance, without plan, method, learning, accuracy, or elegance; an unmeaning composition of shreds, rags, and remnants \u2026 a patched, a pie-bald, linsey-woolsey nothing\u2019? (That was the assessment of a book called\u00a0<em>A New and Accurate History of South-America<\/em>.)\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Because people excel at finding new ways to waste other people\u2019s time, a small but vocal faction of conservative educators and politicians have called on our schools to start teaching cursive again. Tamara Thornton, the author of the 1996 book <em>Handwriting in America<\/em>, sees the reactionary anxiety at the center of their argument: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/local\/education\/once-all-but-left-for-dead-is-cursive-handwriting-making-a-comeback\/2016\/07\/26\/24e59d34-4489-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">Learning cursive has never been just about learning how to express yourself in writing \u2026 In the early twentieth century, it\u2019s about following models and suppressing your individuality<\/a> \u2026 We get very interested in cursive when we feel that our morals are in a state of decline, all hell is breaking loose, people are doing whatever they want \u2026 And I don\u2019t think it\u2019s that much of a stretch that the sort of people who believe in the standard model of the family get very nervous when we depart from the standard models of the cursive script. So there have been periodic bouts of hysteria about the decline of cursive. And it\u2019s always when we feel that as a society, we\u2019re going down the tubes.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The artist Vik Muniz\u2014clearly a very patient and detail-oriented man\u2014has created a series of painstakingly accurate emulations of the backsides of famous paintings. Claire Voon writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/309086\/vik-muniz-painstakingly-reconstructs-the-backs-of-famous-paintings\/\" target=\"_blank\">With all their hardware\u2014the wooden beams, wires, nails, and other knickknacks\u2014the fading stickers, and the inked scribbles from the hands of conservators or handlers, the frames often reveal additional stories to the much-discussed paintings\u00a0they cradle<\/a>. You have to wonder if there\u2019s a reason why someone, for instance, scrawled\u00a0a north-facing arrow and the French word <em>Haut<\/em> on the Mona Lisa\u2014essentially, shorthand for \u2018This side up\u2019 \u2026 The Mona Lisa was one of the largest challenges: Muniz had to buy a tree in Tennessee to re-create its frame, making sure to also precisely reconstruct\u00a0the museum\u2019s own contemporary\u00a0update: an electronic device that monitors a gap nineteenth-century conservators had closed with a butterfly joint. If that gap widens a single micron, someone will receive a text notification.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Given the unhinged chaos that characterizes politics at the moment, why aren\u2019t there more political novels? \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2016\/jul\/29\/if-politic-has-become-stranger-than-fiction-novelist-try-harder?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks\" target=\"_blank\">My sense is that quite a few writers\u2014and also their readers\u2014feel somehow duty-bound to be in opposition; and what results is a certain lacuna in our collective imagination<\/a>.\u00a0Hanif Kureishi\u00a0has lamented that, unlike in Dickens\u2019s time, there is not one contemporary writer with \u2018a sense of the whole society, from prisoner to home secretary.\u2019 But there is often a difficulty for writers who adopt an overtly political stance. A novelist may set out purposefully to make a book that furthers a cause, but it is not likely to be any good, since good books don\u2019t carry messages like sacks carry coal.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>At the White Plains Annual Reptile Expo, Madeline Cash dissects the strange bond between lizard and lizard keeper: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/theawl.com\/among-the-lizard-people-99826d6476e#.qunz2vlc6\" target=\"_blank\">That unspoken connection no one else could understand, which maybe didn\u2019t even exist, echoed all over the Convention Center<\/a>. A lizard\u2019s inhuman qualities are its appeal. They are whatever you need them to be\u2014loving, smiling, a good listener\u200a\u2014\u200abecause the relationship is all a projection \u2026 When I saw the bearded dragons, my heart swelled. The gold-breasted beasts had the same long mouths carved across their faces that, as a child, I\u2019d understood to be a smile. The vendor handed one over in an attempt to make a sale off my nostalgia. It cocked its head up at me with that permanent grin and it all flooded back.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The hatchet job isn\u2019t what it used to be. To read Tobias Smollett\u2019s book reviews from the eighteenth century is to discover, as J.\u2009H. Pearl writes, ever-higher concentrations of venom: \u201cSmollett, who helmed\u00a0The Critical Review\u00a0from 1756 to 1763, never minced words in his judgment of whether a particular text was worth the paper it was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[23594,21078,478,8062,71,8914,23592,23596,4154,2426,13535,477,22209,23595,23593],"class_list":["post-100979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-backsides","tag-conventions","tag-criticism","tag-cursive","tag-fiction","tag-handwriting","tag-handwriting-in-america","tag-lizards","tag-paintings","tag-politics","tag-reptiles","tag-reviews","tag-tobias-smollett","tag-verso","tag-vik-muniz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Vik Muniz Pays Attention to the Other Side of the Painting<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This and more in today\u2019s roundup.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/29\/the-backside-of-the-painting-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Backside of the Painting, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 29, 2016 \u2013 The hatchet job isn\u2019t what it used to be. To read Tobias Smollett\u2019s book reviews from the eighteenth century is to discover, as J.\u2009H. 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