march 6, 2006 talk and goings on, schjeldahl and hertzberg
Sometimes Schjeldahl really gets it. His description of the Goya stuff (23) makes me ache to see Goya. "A portly man lowering himself onto a toilet presents the mooniest buttock ever drawn [...] Wings have been strapped to a little dog, in the sky. They don't work. It plummets earthward." You almost don't even have to be there.
And he opens it so smartly, with a sharp invocation of war and its violent idiocy and the violent power of its critics: " 'Goya's Last Works' at the Frick isn't large, but neither are grenades."
Goya at the Frick, scroll down for the very images S. describes. Or don't. The drawings, seen on my computer anyway, actually pale in comparison to Schjeldahl's descriptions. I forget where I saw a series of Goya's little tiny Disasters of War etchings in a completely dark, circular room with warm yellow lights focussed on each drawing, separately. Very cool.
But wouldn't Hertzberg's "Count 'Em" have been better if in the middle of the second column on page 27 he'd said, "And then, hey presto!" instead of just "And then, presto!" ??
Categories: visual, literary, newyorker, kinesthetic, interest/excitement
And he opens it so smartly, with a sharp invocation of war and its violent idiocy and the violent power of its critics: " 'Goya's Last Works' at the Frick isn't large, but neither are grenades."
Goya at the Frick, scroll down for the very images S. describes. Or don't. The drawings, seen on my computer anyway, actually pale in comparison to Schjeldahl's descriptions. I forget where I saw a series of Goya's little tiny Disasters of War etchings in a completely dark, circular room with warm yellow lights focussed on each drawing, separately. Very cool.
But wouldn't Hertzberg's "Count 'Em" have been better if in the middle of the second column on page 27 he'd said, "And then, hey presto!" instead of just "And then, presto!" ??
Categories: visual, literary, newyorker, kinesthetic, interest/excitement
posted by zoe p. at 2:58 PM
2 Comments:
Was it in this issue--March 6--that the article about the Bush administration and science ("Political Science," I forget who wrote it) appeared? I thought it was fantastic: it was the article I wish I'd written. I'm glad that someone in a relatively mainstream publication laid out the compendium of this administration's efforts to politicize science--something that's really not been done before, and something that it'll be increasingly hard to undo. I was actually proud of the stodgy, damp liberal old NYer for this one.
I found it in my latest issue, March 13. Which I only just found. I'll definately read it, and I might post on it, but if you want to elaborate here, please do!
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