Art Writing

4
ORDAINED ART APPRECIATORS are, in the main, a predictable tribe. Often enough, the freshest and most intellectually satisfying comments on art from outside the expected punditariat. Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence, by Raymond Tallis, is an engaging, erudite excursion into what it means to be human. Tallis, a professor emeritus of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester and one of Britain’s finest public intellectuals, offers as a guide the human forefinger. He does so with all the wit and eloquence of the poet, novelist and philosopher that he is also. Continue Reading
Modigliani: Middling Modernist & Peacock

3
“I WANT A SHORT LIFE BUT A FULL ONE.” Amedeo Modigliani got his wish. In 1920, at age thirty-five, he died, toothless, of tubercular meningitis in a Parisian pauper’s hospital. It was a sordid end to a confident stride into the trenches of la vie maudit. The romance of heroic nonconformity, vital to the cult of bohemia, absorbed the squalor and blessed it. Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s first dealer, declared him “made for the stars.” Clement Greenberg, writing under the pseudonym C. Continue Reading
Pre-Raphaelites and the Myth of Italy

6
DANIEL B. GALLAGHER is an American philosopher and theologian stationed in the Vatican. He is exquisitely placed to pursue interest in aesthetics and, if I can phrase it this way, the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics. Fr. Gallagher’s specific concerns are the adjoining issues of classical, medieval and modern theories of art and—beginning to assert itself once again—beauty. He writes in the current issue of The Berkshire Review for the Arts, a small, elegant international e-journal devoted to just what its name indicates. Continue Reading
Roger Scruton's Olympia

5
ROGER SCRUTON’S HANDBOOK OF ESSAYS, Beauty (2009), is more appealing in its parts than in the overarching thrust of his argument. His insistence that beauty—the quest for and recognition of it—is a function of the rational mind rings off key. Few of us are unfamiliar with the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty of some kind. At the same time, what moves one of us, however deeply, does not necessarily move another, equally rational, fellow. But setting argument aside for the moment, Beauty, like everything else Scruton writes, is worth reading, worth owning. Continue Reading
Sacred and Profane, Mainly

4
HOW TO BEGIN? Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art does not make it easy. I could take the high road and start this way: “Memory of the sacred lingers even among secular moderns who proclaim themselves celebrants of a totally profane world.” Or I could be up front about the unbearable shallowness of being (an academic in the arts) that skews its subject into a myopic caricature of religious culture. The exhibition concerns itself with correspondence between certain contemporary artworks and ancient reliquaries. Continue Reading