The Importance of Being Odd: Nerdrum's Challenge to Modernism
Odd Nerdrum’s work calls into question all our customary narratives about art history, and especially the modernist dogma that the artist can be creative only by turning his back on the past. Essay
Read More
Much Ado about Nothing in the Art Market
The recent sale of an invisible statue for £13,000 is symptomatic of the thoroughgoing financialization of our economy. Investors have become ever more obsessed with the symbols of economic reality and less concerned with underlying economic facts. Essay
Read More
O, Cleopatra
What we refer to as Hellenization or Romanization in the ancient world may well be the first examples of the phenomenon we now call globalization. Essay
Read More
American Classic
Wood seeks to produce the paradox of an American Gothic, to combine the best of the New and the Old Worlds--a synthesis he found adumbrated in the quaint house that inspired the painting and led to its name. Essay
Read More
Felix the Great
Mendelssohn's works obviously deserve to be called great. He may not have changed the course of music history, but think of how much poorer that history would be without the likes of the Octet, the Violin Concerto, the Italian Symphony, and Elijah. Essay
Read More
Listen to Wagner
Wagner, for all his faults, his reprehensible behavior, and his contemptible beliefs, made a unique contribution to the world of music and expanded our awareness of the range of the human soul’s possibilities. Essay
Read More
Unearthly Delights
The seemingly innocuous occasion of commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of the great painter Hieronymus Bosch touched off a battle of museums. Essay
Read More
Extraordinary Ordinary
Vermeer did not acquire his reputation as one of the great masters until the second half of the 19th century, when the Romantic idea of genius had triumphed. Essay
Read More
Northern Eye
It sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch when you first hear about it. Steve Martin— the Steve Martin—is curating a museum exhibition of works by a supposedly famous Canadian painter you've never heard of. Essay
Read More
