Recent stories of note:
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker
“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” said John Stuart Mill. To this one may respond, “Better to be a fool alive than Socrates dead.” A secularist amid a hyper-religious society, Spinoza (1632–77) tried to have it both ways: he spent his life philosophizing contrary to the customs of his people, like Socrates, and yet, unlike Socrates, he never had that life taken from him by those same people. How he managed to do this is no simple matter. Adam Kirsch has taken to The New Yorker to illuminate the subtleties of the philosopher’s actions and words. In doing so, he provides an excellent introduction to the thinker and his turbulent times—and shows us how his thinking remains relevant to our own turbulent times.
My long strange trip to Aristophanes’ Gerytades
A. M. Juster, Antigone
A “rollicking comedic poet” is how Robert Erickson described A. M. Juster a few weeks ago. The occasion for the praise was Juster’s “translation” of Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play . . . sort of, in which Juster imagines the missing fragments of this lost comedy. Filling in the gaps of one the great playwrights is no small task—but Juster has taken to the online-journal Antigone to explain himself. More than that, he offers here a fascinating peek into the process of poetic translation, both “real” and imagined. A. A. Milne, JFK’s assassination, political ostracization, MRIs, and more figure into his career’s development. This is a vital read for anyone interested in translation, poetry, or comedy.
The Sotheby’s trial revealed the art market’s unsavory practices
The Economist
“The most artful members of the art market,” a dealer once told me, “are the conmen.” He went on to detail many of the shady middlemen and swindlers he’d encountered over the years and their wily ways. Perhaps the arch-hustler of the field is the “dealer” Yves Bouvier, who recently made well over a billion dollars off just a few dozen deals. Bouvier’s tactics were relatively simple. He simply told his buyers that the pieces they sought were more expensive than they actually were, pocketed the difference, and assumed no one would be the wiser. And nobody was the wiser until 2015, when the Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev found out over a casual lunch that he’d been fleeced for $25 million. Bouvier (whose methods are rumored to be relatively common) and Rybolovlev settled things behind closed doors last year. But the Russian also sought damages from Sotheby’s, whom he claimed had inflated appraisals as part of the racket. A Manhattan court, however, ruled against Rybolovlev this last week, deciding that the evidence presented was circumstantial. Perhaps he can console himself with the proceeds from his $450 million sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at Sotheby’s in 2021.