Art and Politics

Byronic Hero, Then and Now

Where is Byron when we need him? This is what George Gordon Lord Byron, sexual magnet and progenitor of the Byronic hero, looked like: // / Oh, the melancholy tilt of the head, the dark eyes shining with sensitivity, his pale skin so delicate, so caressable! And that mouth! Small wonder Byron was the toast of London’s social circuit in 1812, celebrated and sought after.  Woman, especially, thrilled to the handsome, capricious, lame-footed man who exploited female emotionalism with calculated aforethought:
Who does not write to please the women?
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Disposable=Sustainable

IN CASE ANY OF YOU WONDERED WHETHER SUSTAINABILITY was, at heart, an ideological love affair with subsistence living, take a gander: /// Take this as a fashion forecast of our new footgear when the sustainable crowd finally erases the Industrial Revolution and its works from the planet. The shoes on the left are a bit hard to see in their full splendor but they are made completely of plastic packaging. In good weather, we can always go barefoot. Look again at the one on the right: //  How uncomfortable to wear! Continue Reading
Et tu, Superman?

WHEN I BEGAN THIS BLOGGY THING, I never intended to drift into politics. Quite the opposite, really. My fantasy—and it was fantasy—was to transcend politics, leap over or slide under it. Good luck with that, Maureen. The art world itself is so sodden with politics that it becomes impossible to ignore the drift. Even comic books are driven to parade some political stance or other.buy Flomax generic https://buywithoutprescriptiononlinerx.com over the counter//// Thanks to Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, we learn today that, now, even Superman considers himself a citizen of the world and is trading in his American identity. Continue Reading
How Much Ruin is in a Nation?

By Christopher S. Johnson “BE ASSURED MY YOUNG FRIEND, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to his distraught friend, John Sinclair, after the battle of Saratoga (1777).  Smith’s words are a model of equanimity; the defeat would bring French forces into the conflict and effectively decide the outcome of the Revolutionary War.  Britain would lose its American colonies. Sinclair had reason to be unhappy. Yet as it turned out, Smith was right: The loss of the American colonies was not a decisive blow to the burgeoning British empire. Continue Reading
Censored in United Arab Emirates

CONTEMPORARY CENSORSHIP IS A FUNNY THING. Art that mocks Christianity or displays hostility to Israel, is fine, thank you. But our institutions walk on eggs not to offend Islamic sensibilities. So it is cheering, to a point, to see a petition circulating on the internet to protest the dismissal of Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation. He had the poor taste to include in the 10th Sharjah Biennial an artwork offensive to the religion of peace.// The artist is Algerian. Continue Reading