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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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The Walrus and The Carpenter in Boston

God spare us any more of these interfaith shows. Organized to kick-off the civic healing process—a cant phrase for a delusional concept—these political reiki events presume to make us feel better about feeling bad in the wake of horrific assault. A Daily News headline intones “Boston Marathon Survivors Begin the Healing Process as President Obama Leads Prayer Service.” The article gives us the comfort of knowing that Barack and Michelle visited victims at Massachusetts General Hospital “to try to heal a little more.”  Continue Reading

Candy Floss & Camp

BBC News Magazine’ s Jon Kelly discusses Behind the Candelabra , a current movie about Liberace’s six year affair with a much younger man. Throughout his life , the entertainer strained to maintain the fiction that he was heterosexual:
Most famously, he sued the Daily Mirror over an innuendo-laden article by William Connor, who wrote under the pen-name Cassandra, which described the musician as “the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter . . . a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”.
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No Time for Silence

During last evening’s votes in the House, John Boehner ordered a moment of silence for the victims of yesterday’s terror bombings of the Boston Marathon. It was a timid, sentimental call, an act of retreat from any statement of rage or resolve. The president muttered something about “senseless loss” caused by “explosions.” Not deliberate bombings, just unspecified explosions . As if there had been a gas leak. There was nothing senseless about them. Terror has a purpose, one our political class and a courtier press prefer to deflect attention from. Continue Reading

Happy Tax Day

Norman Rockwell prepared each of his magazine cover illustrations as fully realized paintings. It did not matter to him that his audience would see his work only in reproduction. The image reproduced would only be as fine as the work it replicated. More recent artists—David Hockney is one—whose work is widely distributed in reproduction paint for the more limited capacities of the reproductive process. That permits the artist to work faster, omitting those subtleties of tone and touch that are lost in duplication. Continue Reading

In the End, Perhaps, Lightness of Heart

I came to Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis, first published in 1948 , through Roger Kimball’s essay in which he termed the text a “blistering polemic.” I confess a weakness for blistering polemics. Nothing warms the heart faster in these imperiously nonjudgmental days. Morevover, Sedlmayr’s cultural pessimism conforms more convincingly to fallen man and his ever-falling times than our current dalliance with the saving powers of beauty. For a concise bio of Sedlmayr go directly to the Dictionary of Art Historians. Continue Reading
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