{"id":108654,"date":"2017-03-10T09:24:44","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T14:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108654"},"modified":"2017-03-10T11:14:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T16:14:58","slug":"ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_108656\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-108656\" class=\"wp-image-108656\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"755\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy-300x227.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy-768x580.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy-1024x773.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-108656\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, <i>Fantasy<\/i>, 1925. Image via <em>New York Review of Books<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I\u2019ve written in this space before about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/04\/miami-2017\/\" target=\"_blank\">my affection for Billy Joel<\/a>. I think he has catchy tunes. But in the interest of fairness, it must be said: some people think that Billy Joel is an agent of Lucifer, his baritone a cancer metastasizing across radios worldwide to poison all that is gay and true in popular song. Liel Leibovitz is in the latter camp, and that\u2019s her right. Joel, she says, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/jewish-arts-and-culture\/music\/226414\/billy-joel-trump-of-pop-music\" target=\"_blank\">is so nefarious precisely because [he] was given great gifts\u2014his songs, as Bruce Springsteen correctly noted, are masterworks of musical construction\u2014and yet chose to squander them in the service of nothing but his own lust, vanity, and insecurity<\/a>. You can tell just by looking at him: While Dylan\u2019s face is still a mask protecting him from having to deal with emotions, and Young\u2019s face is a topographical map of misfortune, Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>An exhibition at the Royal Academy pays tribute to a famous 1932 Soviet art show, \u201cFifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic\u201d\u2014the last gasp of the avant-garde before the state tightened its grip and forced\u00a0its artists to churn out only propaganda. Jenny Uglow writes of the new show, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/03\/08\/when-art-meets-power-russia-revolution\/\" target=\"_blank\">This is a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair. It is all about power and its perils<\/a> \u2026 At first painters, composers, and poets thrilled to the Revolution, which seemed to offer untold freedoms, a chance to use bold new forms\u2014Cubism, abstraction, street art, film, jazz, satire, fantasy\u2014and to share in the making of a new nation. The mystical Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, and the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Lyubov Popova, responded with equal euphoric intensity \u2026 Yet there is a sense of terror, as well as hope, in these blazing, color-filled canvases. As cosmic spheres hurtle forward in spear-like shards of light in Konstantin Yuon\u2019s apocalyptic\u00a0<em>New Planet\u00a0<\/em>(1921), the dwarfed crowds seem to cower as much as to rejoice \u2026 Even the distinctive figurative paintings of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin \u2026 feel full of a yearning nostalgia. In his huge canvas, <em>Fantasy<\/em> (1925) the peasant riding the leaping red horse of revolution does not look forward, but back, to a vanished world.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>H. P. Lovecraft had a robust correspondence with one of his young fans, Robert Barlow. Their friendship, as Paul LaFarge writes, came to surpass the confines of fandom in an unusual and extreme way: \u201c\u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-complicated-friendship-of-h-p-lovecraft-and-robert-barlow-one-of-his-biggest-fans?mbid=social_twitter\" target=\"_blank\">I had no friends nor studies except in a sphere bound together by the U.S. mails,\u2019 he wrote in a memoir about his summer with Lovecraft, published in 1944<\/a>. Letter by letter, Barlow drew Lovecraft into that sphere. He offered to type Lovecraft\u2019s manuscripts. He told Lovecraft about his rabbits. He wrote stories that Lovecraft revised. Finally, in the spring of 1934, Barlow invited Lovecraft to visit him in Florida, and Lovecraft went. Barlow hadn\u2019t mentioned his age, and he was reluctant to send along a photo of himself, because, he said, he had a \u2018boil.\u2019 Lovecraft was surprised to discover, when he got off the bus in DeLand, [Florida,] that Barlow had just turned sixteen. Lovecraft was forty-three.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Here\u2019s Phoebe Boatwright on the power of the degraded image\u2014\u201ca DVD filmed from a theater, dragged from computer to computer, sold a couple times over; an image stolen from news site, edited, reposted, edited again, reposted again\u201d\u2014as samizdat: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/reallifemag.com\/illicit-material\/\" target=\"_blank\">When images are restricted and coveted, image quality becomes irrelevant<\/a> \u2026 accessibility trumps technical quality, and \u2018poor images\u2019 capable of being easily spread, optimized for the broadest possible availability under adverse circumstances, become the most valuable\u2014for the people, if no longer for markets. These images do not conform to any sovereign nation\u2019s intellectual property law. They become mass art by and for the masses, not because of their content (which is mostly U.S. entertainment industry product) but because of how they are circulated. Mass art, then, turns out to be a means rather than a particular message.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Amanda Craig has a primer on <em>Beauty and the Beast<\/em>, a fairytale whose various iterations over the centuries have usually not worked out well for the beauty: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/mar\/10\/beauty-and-the-beast-the-dark-history-of-a-literary-fairytale\" target=\"_blank\">Originally one of what the psychoanalyst\u00a0Bruno Bettelheim\u00a0called \u2018animal groom\u2019 stories, intended to reassure virginal brides about sex,\u00a0<em>Beauty and the Beast\u00a0<\/em>has itself been repeatedly transformed<\/a>. The original interpretations of it are distasteful. From depictions in antiquity to Canova\u2019s sculptures, artists have tended to present a swooning Psyche in Cupid\u2019s embrace rather than showing her as an active protagonist winning love and divine status in her own right \u2026 The Disney cartoon, perhaps surprisingly, is the best version yet. Disney\u2019s Beast begins as the incarnation of the spoilt rich kid but love turns him into a brave, generous and self-sacrificing hero. He steals the show even as the feminist, bookish (and rather prim) Belle reforms and loves him.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: an exhibition remembers the burst of artistic optimism that began the USSR; and Billy Joel may suck.<\/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":[27770,9942,14279,6861,10661,27768,22191,27769,14340,17046,15948,7090],"class_list":["post-108654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-beauty-and-the-beast","tag-billy-joel","tag-fandom","tag-h-p-lovecraft","tag-images","tag-kuzma-petrov-vodkin","tag-piracy","tag-poor-images","tag-propaganda","tag-samizdat","tag-social-realism","tag-soviet-art"],"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>When Soviet Art Was Full of Hope<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: an exhibition remembers the burst of artistic optimism that began the USSR; and Billy Joel may suck.\" \/>\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\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 10, 2017 \u2013 In today\u2019s roundup: an exhibition remembers the burst of artistic optimism that began the USSR; and Billy Joel may suck.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-03-10T14:24:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-03-10T16:14:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1208\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-03-10T14:24:44+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-03-10T16:14:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/\"},\"wordCount\":871,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/10\/ride-your-sky-horse-peasant-and-other-news\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/petrov-vodkin-fantasy.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Beauty and the Beast\",\"Billy Joel\",\"fandom\",\"H.P. 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