Recent stories of note:
“Van Gogh’s potatoes: few artists would choose this subject for a still life”
Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper
“If the field has an odour of ripe wheat or potatoes or—of guano and manure—that’s really healthy,” wrote Vincent van Gogh. The artist may be best remembered for his blazing and startling use of color, but he was also attracted to the muted features of the humble potato. He long considered The Potato Eaters (1885) his best work, wherein the eaters look as earth-worn as the potatoes they’re consuming—you are what you eat, after all. And as Martin Bailey points out for The Art Newspaper, the artist dedicated many canvases throughout his career to the apple of the earth. Though these pieces are nowhere near as flashy or adventurous as the floral still lifes for which he is more known, they still boast the intensity of feeling that is the artist’s trademark. Bailey takes a healthy bite into this delicious and neglected part of the artist’s career.
“The Invisible American Founding”
Dan Currell & Elle Rogers, National Affairs
Much has been made of The 1619 Project’s dishonesty, racism, and divisiveness. That’s all good and well. But too little has been made of the way it conditions its pupil-victims to think like Marx. As Dan Currell and Elle Rogers argue in National Affairs, the curriculum is raising a generation of Americans unwittingly beholden to Marx and Engel’s material-dialectic framework: the version of history they’re being taught has no space for ideas, only material conflict. Thus, missing from our most popular history books is any substantive discussion of the Gettysburg Address, the Federalist Papers, MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and even the Declaration of Independence. There’s no time for such airy subjects when you’re busy teaching historical untruths. Currell and Rogers take the project to task for its ideological insanity and suggest a small suite of alternatives to the curricular madness, including Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope.
“The misanthropic history man”
Andrew Orlowski, The Critic
Yuval Noah Harari’s pop-history oeuvre is full of delightful quotes, among them: “Human life has absolutely no meaning”; “Any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion”; and “We should never underestimate human stupidity.” His body of work seems to confirm the last of those. The author was launched to international fame in 2014 with Sapiens, a superficial and obnoxious “overview to the major stages of human history” that might as well be the definitive reference book for faux-philosophical freshman dorm-room conversations. He continued the shallow shtick with 2015’s Homo Deus, a “prophetic” text that predicted we’d never again see a pandemic, and then in 2018 wrote 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which proclaimed that “individuality too is a myth.” How exactly this sophist achieved such heights is the question Andrew Orlowski has taken up for The Critic, examining the superstar’s sloppiness and the strange cult that has formed around him.