Letters to the Editor
wonder woman
Published Letters: 47 Editor's Choice: 7
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The world is flat.
[Read the article: My walls are covered with my mother's paintings]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you're driving a $250 car, a digital camera may not be a priority. Still, Cary's catalogue is a good idea. (slide libraries are moving to digital)
I'm going to guess that since mother painted in oil, she wasn't painting on panel. If that's the case, remove the frames then take the canvas off the stretchers. Conservation-wise, it is best not to roll the canvases, but they wil stack and store nicely under a bed. Hang the one you like best.
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Wiki-criticism
[Read the article: The greatest living critic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to agree with hexis.
As a critic, it seems that James is battling the most widely disseminated argument of French literary theory, that the author exists in the text rather than the biography. James is rolling back the clock on critics like Barthes who took their egos and identities out of the work and made loverly bedfellows of high and low many times over. He expressly takes on the act of close reading in his essay on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
The pull quotes and other reviews suggest one is in the presence of a truly towering intellect instead of an excellent writer who is well and widely read. There is something disconcertingly narrow about slamming Benjamin (ignoring the proto post-modernism of The Arcades Project) in a book containing a self congratulatory reference to one's own 'premature post-modernism'. James allows himself the amnesiac symptom of forgetting reading and privileging text are equally important hallmarks of critical postmodernity.
He gives the impression it is not fashionable to smart, but smart to be unfashionable.
Having not read the book, but the many excerpts posted on Slate (hyperlinked in my signature) -- I can't help but notice the lack of any substantial criticism of visual art. In a book that purports to be about history and the arts, his 'wide net' has a huge hole in it. Aporia, I think the theorists call it. Given James' appreciation of the cinema and its players, it seems he is just one more student abusing Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" without acknowledging how that theory lends its aura to his own criticism. High hat, indeed.
What is most interesting about the author and his writing(word quilting, more than smithing) is the choice to reposition biography at the center of the act of crtiticsm and place it in a cultural context with very little if any any examination of actual work. When he examines work instead of life, he skips over salient elements that could produce an effective act of criticism. A curious performace of polemic.
How much more compelling would his thoughts on torture in Terry Gilliam's Brazil be if placed alongside its simultaneous representations of terrorism and surveillance? His indictment of Borges criticizes his political failings, at the expense of acknowledging Borges' foreshadowing of culture not yet come. How many other writers hinted at the paradoxes of authorial identity and hyperreality in so pleasing a mode as short fiction? Does James' report of Borges' failures deepen our understanding or reveal new facets of art and history?
James' breezy omniscience gives the impression of a 'drive-by' approach to being in the world, and reinforces the misperception that criticism and theory come from someplace other than engagement with the work of art.
He may in fact be the greatest living (wiki)critic. The form of Barra's review underscores this perfectly, if not intentionally. It seems in fact, that Barra and many other reviewers have not identified the argument woven in the work. It is an important book if only because it illuminates as much about living in our time as it does James' 'greatness'.