[Posted 11:47 PM by James Panero]

THE NEW CRITERION’S PRECIS FOR DECEMBER, 2002:

A cold snap hits town. Seasons greetings are here. And The New Criterion delivers a special gift for the holidays: a greatly expanded section on art. Contributors to this important issue include Alex Katz, Hilton Kramer, E.V. Thaw, Michael J. Lewis, Roger Kimball, James Panero, Karen Wilkin, Eric Gibson, Daniel Kunitz, and Mario Naves? But first, some words of encouragement from Roger Scruton (writing in today’s Wall Street Journal):

"... It is one of the great merits of America’s conservative movement that it has seen the need to define its philosophy at the highest intellectual level. British conservatism has always been suspicious of ideas, and the only great modern conservative thinker in my country who has tried to disseminate his ideas through a journal -- T.S. Eliot -- was in fact an American. The title of his journal (the Criterion) was borrowed by Hilton Kramer, when he founnded what is surely the only contemporary conservative journal that is devoted entirely to ideas. Under the editorship of Mr. Kramer and Roger Kimball, the New Criterion has tried to break the cultural monopoly of the liberal establishment, and is consequently read in our British universities with amazement, anger and (I like to think) self-doubt."

Thanks Roger! In the spirit of St. Augustine: "Tolle lege! Tolle lege!"

CONTENTS:

* Notes & Comments (page 1): "Tenured adolescents" on Professor Peter N. Kirstein versus the United States Air Force Academy; "Meanwhile, at Cornell?" on the university’s health service consideration of whether to sell vibrators in its dispensary.

* Special art section--

--"Starting out" (page 4). Alex Katz looks back on becoming a painter: "The challenge for me has been to paint a painting thatt could elicit the impact of art I received looking at great paintings. To response I experienced looking at great paintings. To engage in primary structures of novelty art was, for me, a cop-out."

--"Does abstract art have a future?" (page 9). Hilton Kramer considers the fate of abstraction: "I think there is a reason whyy the place occupied by abstract art is now so radically diminished not only on the contemporary art scene but in cultural life generally. At least I have an hypothesis as to the cause or causes of the diminished power and influence that abstraction has suffered since the acclaim it met with and the spell it cast in the 1960s."

--"The art of collecting" (page 13). With two of collections on view at major New York institutions this season (The Metropoliitan Museum and the Morgan Library), E. V. Thaw states his defense: "But what to do or to say about the sadly diminished reputation of the art collector, both private ones and museums as collectors, in our peculiar times? What was once a prestigious and admired activity, thought to have public benefits for education and aesthetic pleasure, has now become a dirty word, joining the denigration of both ’connoisseurship’ in the study of art history, and the concept of ’quality’ as applied to the art of the present?. If the collector is seen to spend a large sum on a Degas or a Pollock, somewhere criticism is likely to flow that the money would have been better spent on a neighborhood youth center or the battle against AIDS."

--"Art History, Oxford style" (page 17). Jean-Baptiste Greuze? Never heard of him. William Hogarth? Barely worth mentioning. MMichael J. Lewis explicates the bizarre Oxford History of Art: "In appearance and format these books are as conventional as can be. The casual reader, flipping through the 150 or so photographs, would have little inkling that the series represents a defiant challenge to ’the elitist, connoisseurial approach of the past.’ But this becomes abundantly clear at the table of contents, which radically rejects chronology as a basis for ordering information. Instead, chapters are arranged thematically, according to such collective abstractions as nature, community, and money (in Dell Upton’s ’Architecture in the United States’) or gender, aesthetics, and deconstruction (in Donald Preziosi’s ’Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology’). Here is no opportunity for ’grand narrative,’ or indeed for any narrative at all."

--"Architecture & ideology" (page 22). If architecture is a one-party system, Roger Kimball enters central headquarters. At thhe invitation of Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture, Kimball delivers the keynote address for the symposium "Eisenman, Krier: Two Ideologies." He sees the blueprints for disaster: "There is a mocking quality to some of the images on view in this exhibition; there is certainly a mocking quality in some of the architectural visions that the exhibition represents; but it is a mockery directed outward, toward the viewer, toward the public, not inward toward the maker. The great social theorist Phineas Taylor Barnum is alleged to have remarked that ’There’s a sucker born every minute.’ Although a proof of this proposition awaits definitive formulation, ’Eisenman, Krier: Two Ideologies’ deserves an honored place in the annals of corroborative incident."

--"Bonnard’s butterflies" (page 32). From "hideous" to "the greatest among us," for one hundred years Pierre Bonnard has confoounded the world of art. On the occasion of a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, James Panero considers the great painter’s slow metamorphosis: "Few artists from the first half of the twentieth century have created such a stir in the second. His reversal of fortune from obscurity and critical disdain to the ranks of one of France’s great masters in the eyes of some and an artist with undeniable mass appeal speaks to the strength and longevity of his work. It also points to a slow evolution in the history of taste, a shift in cultural priorities that only now may be coming to light."

--"Adolph Gottlieb" (page 36). On the occasion of "Adolph Gottlieb: A Survey Exhibition" at the Jewish Museum, New York, Karenn Wilkin explores the new show and remembers her own relationship to the artist: "Gottlieb’s loft in a former bank building on the Bowery was the first important downtown artist’s studio I ever visited. It made a big impression on a teenager raised on the Upper West Side, even more than his next, more luxurious, two-floor living-studio on West Broadway, which I visited as an adult. Gottlieb was notably kind and generous to me, first when I was a student, and later, a fledgling curator. I had the privilege of going around his last New York show with him, when he was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke in 1970, and listening to his diffident comments on a group of sensuous, ambitious paintings that showed no sign of debility."

--"The writings of Henry Moore" (page 41). Drawing on HENRY MOORE: WRITINGS AND COVERSATIONS, by Alan Wilkinson (University off California Press), Eric Gibson appreciates the "down-to-earth" approach and "workmanlike" prose of the great sculptor’s commentaries on art: "’It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job,’ cautioned Henry Moore in 1937, relatively early in his career. ’It releases tension needed for his work.’ Strange, then, that over the next fifty years (he died in 1986 at eighty-eight) Moore was to prove one of the most voluble of artists."

* New poems by Chelsea Rathburn (page 41).

* Theater: "No vital sparks" (page 50). Mark Steyn sees the New York theater season go out with a whimper: "A gloomy OKLAHOMA!, an unfunny BOYS FROM SYRACUSE, a kitsch FLOWER DRUM SONG: even Rodgers’ many enemies would not wish him a centenary year like this."

* Dance: "Fight club" (page 55). Baryshnikov by Tharp? Tharp by Jacobs? New Criterion dance critic Laura Jacobs goes after Tharp for MOVIN’ OUT--and finds the choreographer bow-legged.

* Art: "Gallery chronicle" (page 58). Daniel Kunitz reviews "Robert Ryman: New Paintings" at PaceWildenstein, Elmer Bischoff: Paintings" and "Paul Resika: Paintings" at Salander-O’Reilly, and "Jeff Wall: New Work" at Marian Goodman Gallery. "Exhibition note" (page 62) Mario Naves takes delight in "Masterpieces of European Painting from the Toledo Museum of Art," now on view at The Frick Collection, New York.

* Music: "New York chronicle" (page 64). Jay Nordlinger appreciates the glamour of Anne-Sophie Mutter more than her music. Also, reviews of the Guarneri String Quartet, Jose van Dam at Alice Tully Hall, and Berlioz’s DAMNATION DE FAUST by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

* The media: "They still don’t get it" (page 69). James Bowman takes in the positive gloss on the Washington sniper case. Read one headline: "5 Shooting Victims. Reflect Mongomery [County]’s Growing Diversity."

* Verse chronicle: "The real language of men" (page 73). William Logan reviews BOOK OF MY NIGHTS by Li-Young Lee, NOW THE GREEN BLADE RISES by Elizabeth Spires, SOURCE by Mark Doty, EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST by B.H. Fairchild, THE NERVE by Glyn Maxwell, and MOY SAND AND GRAVEL by Paul Muldoon.

* Books: Gordon Corrigan WELLINGTON: A MILITARY LIFE and Andrew Roberts NAPOLEON & WELLINGTON: THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO AND THE GREAT COMMANDERS WHO FOUGHT IT reviewed by Victor Davis Hanson;

--B.R. Myers READER’S MANIFESTO: AN ATTACK ON THE GROWING PRETENTIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN LITERARY PROSE reviewed by Mark Bauerlein;

--Constance Brown Kuriyama CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: A RENAISSANCE LIFE reviewed by Paul Dean;

--W. S. Merwin SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION reviewed by John J. Miller;

--Dave Eggers YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY reviewed by Max Watman

FORTHCOMING IN THE NEW CRITERION

* Why I became a conservative, by Roger Scruton; Who reads H. L. Mencken now? By Hilton Kramer; The achievement of Stephan George, by John Simon; Anthony Caro, by Karen Wilkin; The world of Samuel Pepys, by Brooke Allen; Does Eric Hobsbawm write history? By David Pryce-Jones; A new kind of Science? By James Frankin; Ovid today, by Gerald Rusello; Paul Valery, by Joseph Epstein.

NEWS

* For a free digital look at portions of the December issue, please do not forget to visit the website at www.newcriterion.com. The December issue has just posted.

* The New Criterion collection SURVIVAL OF CULTURE (Ivan R. Dee) is now available. Orders for the book and the accompanying video may be placed online at www.newcriterion.com.

* Michael Dirda names Roger Kimball’s new book LIVES OF THE MIND a top-ten book for the holidays! From The Wasington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48792-2002Nov27.html).

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