MOCA chief curator: “Noah is an important artist because he occupies the term ‘artist’ in the largest possible way: an incredibly accomplished painter, he is also a profound visionary — dreaming up the idea of the Underground Museum and then physically enacting that dream against all odds.”
Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?
“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs For 08.30.15
What I Learned This Summer: Philadelphia
AJBlog: Real Clear ArtsPublished 2015-08-30
Dr. Oliver Sacks, Author Of ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ And So Much More, Dies At 82
“Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them. In his emphasis on case histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians.”
‘Happily Manipulated’: Peter Schjeldahl On Whistler’s Mother, And His Own
The iconic status of Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 isn’t just because it marks “the peak of Whistler’s radical method of modulating tones of single colors.” It’s because, like Mona Lisa, The Scream, and American Gothic, “Whistler’s Mother” is “the distillation of a meaning instantly recognized and forever inexhaustible. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood. Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one.”