Backward and Downward with the Arts

The Moncler Enfant number of objects now claiming attention in the name of art is past calculating, and the size of the public more or less disposed to glimpse these objects, if not actually to acclaim them, increases at a velocity rivaling that of the population explosion itself. Yet the suspicion persists that this dizzying state of affairs, far from certifying the cultural health which all the yea-saying agencies of government, the foundations, museums, and other interested institutions gleefully affirm, might actually reflect a general decline in artistic seriousness. Art, self-consciously considered as such, has never been more popular, but the ventes privées moncler price of this popularity is certainly higher than anyone is willing to admit. One of its worst results may be seen in the way a dumb, factitious celebrity has come to exerciseand not only for the public, but for critics, museums, academicians, and even many artiststhe kind of authority formerly enjoyed by disinterested artistic accomplishment. For this new public and its captive artists, fame itself is the driving force and works of art only its incidental expression.
Where the great modern artists were obliged, often against their will, to carry on a kind of aesthetic guerrilla warfare against the tastes of the Moncler Gilet en Duvet Femmes public, today’s audience-oriented artist has placed himself in a position where only acts of violence committed against his own artistic resources can achieve the goal that has preempted all others: to win not necessarily the approval but the sustained interest of a public for whom the spectacle of such deliberate self-abuse has become virtually synonymous with creative vitality. An art so irredeemably mortgaged to its own destruction is barred, of course, from trafficking in the kind of values which in the past have conferred significance, great or small, on the objective work of art. In place of such values it substitutes the artist’s mythor Moncler Femme , to be precise, his publicity. This carefully constructed fabric of gossip, ideas, pseudo-ideas, and tendentious verbiage of every sort, makes its appearance initially perhaps to “explain” the inner logic of the work of art, but, being exempt from the destructions wrought upon the work itself, ends by triumphantly displacing it. The artist’s legend, carefully filtered through the intricate mechanism of commerce and communications, is what remains most vivid to the public eye. His works, though still necessary for sustaining the legend (at least in its early stages), become mere occasions for renewing acquaintance with it.

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MONCLER PROMOS The four “profiles” which Mr. Tomkins has brought together in The Bride and the Bachelors constitute the most straightforward exercise in legend-mongering which this situation has yet produced. The book is, in fact, a brilliant example of the deplorable tendency to mythicize rather than criticize works of art which attain any degree of notoriety, and its success is directly attributable to its author’s total lack of intellectual involvement with either the art in question or, indeed, with aesthetics as such. For unlike other writers who have addressed themselves to this task, Mr. Tomkins …

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‘The Voice at 3 AM&#8217

Ever Moncler Foulard since Charles Simic came to America from Belgrade in 1954, at the age of sixteen, he has been transmitting, in a rush of books of poetry and prose, images deriving from the traumatic no man’s land of his youth:
The Germans bombed Belgrade in April of 1941, when I was three years old. The building across the street was hit and destroyed. I don’t remember anything about that bomb, although I was told later that I was thrown out of my bed and across the room when it hit. The next day we left the city on Moncler enfants foot.

How many of us were there? I remember my mother but not my father. There were people I didn’t know, too. I see their hunched backs, see them running with their bundles, but no faces. My film keeps breaking.

Though by the usual systems of counting, Simic is now sixty-one, in his poems he is without chronological age. He has written that in its essence, “a lyric poem is about time stopped. Language moves in time, but the lyric impulse is vertical.” The poems are like self-developing Polaroids, in which a scene, gradually assembling vente privee moncler itself out of unexplained images, suddenly clicks into a recognizable whole. Here, for instance, is a poem from Simic’s newest book, Jackstraws:
Head of a Doll
Whose demon are you,
Whose god? I asked
Of the painted mouth
Half buried in the sand.
A brooding gull
Made a brief assessment,
And tiptoed away
Nodding to himself.
At dusk a firefly or two
Dowsed its eye pits.
And later, toward midnight,
I even heard mice.

One could call this a miniaturist’s rewriting of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” with its colossal head half-buried in the sand:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said”Two vast and trunkless legs of Moncler Vestes Homme stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Ozymandias’ severed head remains unmolested, and is merely observed by the traveler; but Simic’s severed doll’s head, “assessed” by the daytime gull flying over the sand, has its vacant eye sockets investigated by the firefly at dusk; and surely, at midnight, the mice approach to use their teeth. A painted simulacruma “doll”is what any statue, human or divine, Moncler Chandail Homme appears to be to an observer who is not a member of the cult that has erected it. The toppled Ozymandias and Simic’s half-buried doll have lost their personal and cultural significance; the blinded doll, half-buried already, is about to be consumed by the nibbling creatures. While Shelley’s speaker invests himself in the ruins of the sublime, Simic questions a broken “demon” or “god” of the most ordinary sorta child’s dollbringing his poem into the surreal of the everyday, Simic’s defining atmosphere.

Simic’s mind isbecause of …

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‘A Jewel of a Thousand Facets’

Getty Homme Research Institute, Los Angeles
Puzza, or the the Chinese Cybele, sitting on a lotus flower; engraving by Bernard Picart from Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, 1720s

In 1723, the engraver Bernard Picart and the printer Jean Frederic Bernard revealed the varied religions of the world to European readers. In seven splendidly illustrated folio volumes that appeared from 1723 to 1737, Religious Ceremonies of the World offeredat least to anyone strong enough to lift one of the volumes and open ita tableau of the world’s priests and believers, in action. Passing in turn before the reader were stately Moncler soldes papal rituals with casts of thousands and Jewish families around the Seder table, Russian Orthodox baptisms and Protestant funerals, Freemasonic temples and Chinese altars. Slabs of text compiled from the best sources elucidated each image, and elaborate references and bibliographies offered guidance to the reader who wanted to know more.
At first sight, these volumes seem dignified and ceremonious, not radical or critical. One could imagine a wealthy connoisseur buying them to amuse and edify a bookish child. In fact, the Swedish aristocrat Jan Jacobus de Geer did exactly that. He subscribed to the publication in advance, he explained, because Femme his son Charles “loved travel books which contain such extraordinary stories.” Unwieldy, weighty, dense with proliferating detail, the Ceremonies lacks the subversive look of “those books that one reads with one hand,” the neat little pornographic novels that, as Robert Darnton has taught us, spread the new ideas that booksellers and customers labeled “philosophy” through eighteenth-century France and beyond.
In fact, though, in the years around 1700, massive compilations were as likely as neat little octavos to pack an intellectual punch. Pierre Bayle infused seditious thought after subversive thought into the weighty volumes of his Critical and Historical Dictionary Sac à main , first published in 1697. He too deployed footnoteslayer after layer of footnotesto prove his own probity as a scholar, to expose the errors of his rivals and enemies, and to provide ironic commentary, rather like Stephen Colbert’s “The Word,” on orthodox inanities. The genre, format, and scale that Picart and Bernard adopted all exemplify a period styleone that they in turn helped to perfect, by adding their vivid visual commentary, and that reached its climax in that greatest of all polemical reference books, Diderot’s Encyclopdie, with its stunning illustrations of the arts and crafts.

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doudounes moncler homme Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, the three distin- guished historians who have now produced a major study of Picart and Bernard’s work, see Ceremonies as more than one ship of the line in the literary fleets of the Enlightenment. Ceremonies, they argue, not only provoked readers but actually “changed Europe.” Western Europeans had studied foreign religions for centuries. Scholars traced the genealogies and tabulated the attributes of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods. Catholic inquisitors and Protestant professors studied Jewish rituals. Dominicans copied out long explanations of the codices that survived Spain’s …

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