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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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That Beleaguered Cross Again

JUDGING FROM EMAIL RESPONSES, the accidental cross-shaped form left standing at Ground Zero rouses great ire. All my mail has been sympathetic to the lawsuit against it on the grounds that the cross is not a secular symbol. (I never said it was. I said it resonated beyond sectarian distinctions. Quite a different thought.) It was erected “by CHRISTIANS,” one reader screeched. Some of the mail considers wariness toward Islam “defamatory” and, in the main, just plain not nice. For clarity’s sake, let me take these one at a time, beginning with the (Christian) origins of America’s enthusiastic sectarian religiosity. Continue Reading

The Art of Punishment?

ONCE RADICAL EVIL SHRINKS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS, society’s ability to inflict hardship—including the psychological pain of deep remorse—diminishes. Restitution and rehabilitation become one and the same thing.  That pulls the rug out from under an artist’s capacity to conceive anything close to the grand hellscapes, sublime in their gravity, that came freely to Hieronymous Bosch. When intuitions of the demonic are disarmed and superceded by a therapeutic culture, what images are left to draw upon? Bosch lived in age that made this plausible: //// Contemporary Norway appears to have progressed to, even surpassed, this: //What brought Bosch to mind—more precisely, the contemporary impossibility of his hellscapes—is the post that appeared on the blog of Foreign Policy: “The Not-So-Terrible Fate of Norway’s Alleged Killer.” Continue Reading

The Responsibility of the Artist

A small gem of a book that artists should have on their shelves is Jacques Maritain’s The Responsibility of the Artist. Together with Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art, it is all anyone needs to think or talk about the artist’s ultimate purpose. Dover keeps Barzun in print. Sadly, it does not do the same for Maritain. But scout around for a used copy. (First published in 1960, there exists also a 1972 edition.buy cialis professional generic https://yourcialisrx.com/cialis_professional.html over the counter ) Neglect is owed, most likely, to Maritain’s dual ambition: the pursuit of scholarship and the pursuit of sanctity. Continue Reading

More on the Pointing Finger

READER SAM’S REFERENCE, in a comment on the previous post, to the biblical story of Adam naming the animals lends thrust to Tallis’ argument on—for lack of a better term—the metaphysics of pointing.// The Genesis narrative distills into a simple, vivid anecdote the substanceN of Raymond Tallis’ thesis in Michelangelo’s Finger. The mythical Adam could hardly identify every beast of the field or fowl of the air. He did not emerge from the dust of creation a systematic taxonomist on the qui vive for all that tagging and classifying. Continue Reading

Michelangelo’s Finger

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
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