Danny Heitman writes about Charles Dickens’s 1842 trip to Washington that “left the novelist profoundly unhappy with America and its capital.”
Muriel Spark’s faith: “Spark explained that ‘the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I had always felt and known and believed; there was no blinding revelation in my case.’ The conversion marked an artistic as well as a spiritual turning point. She said that after becoming Catholic, ‘I began to see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings. I think it was this combination of circumstances which made it possible for me to attempt my first novel.’”
“Silent Night” at 200: “On Christmas Eve 1818, in the church of St. Nicholas in Oberndorf near Salzburg, ‘Stille Nacht’ (‘Silent Night’) was sung for the first time.”
A short history of the poinsettia: “Joel Poinsett is to the poinsettia what Christopher Columbus is to America; a lot of folks like to say he discovered it, but someone was definitely already there. ‘Poinsett was a diplomat who facilitated the trade of plants,’ says Jim Faust, a Clemson University horticulture professor who studies poinsettias. ‘He built a network of people interested in plants because he saw it as an economic opportunity for South Carolina.’”
Green madness: “The doctrine of deep ecology declares that we must keep our hands off the divine order of nature—even if it kills us.”
Essay of the Day:
The visual arts MFA is a sham, Charlie Tyson argues in a long review of Gary Alan Fine’s Talking Art—“a report on three M.F.A. programs in the Chicago area”:
“Seven of the 10 most-expensive higher-education institutions in the United States, after financial aid is factored in, are art schools. In 2014, Fine reports, tuition and expenses for a two-year M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design cost $253,000. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at a mere $204,000, begins to seem like a bargain. Fine’s study focuses on art departments within universities; at freestanding art schools, debt levels are even higher.
Fine examines three institutions: Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Illinois State University (the last an enclave of eccentricity in a town called Normal). Only at Northwestern are M.F.A. students fully funded by fellowships. So, what are these students paying to learn?
Not craft or technique, it turns out. We are a long way from late-19th-century Paris, where ‘academic painting’ signified technically dazzling neoclassical figures, lush but sterile, and where the brutal disruptions of Manet and the Impressionists were consigned to the ‘Salon des Refusés.’ Beauty within the academies, scandal without. Today these positions are reversed, and the academic institutions that serve as gatekeepers for the art world praise the conceptual, the alienating, and the abstract while disparaging craftsmanship as ‘merely’ pretty and ‘merely’ illustrative — and a sure sign of political quietism.
“In the programs that Fine surveys, students take no classes on technique, and most take no art history. One senior faculty member likens a course on drawing to learning Latin. Another scoffs at the ‘preciousness’ of Northern European Renaissance painting. ‘I’m sure we could all make beautiful Monet paintings or Picasso paintings if we wanted to,’ one student says brazenly, ‘but that’s not what we want to do.’”
* * *
“One of the glorious features of contemporary art is that any material — tangled museum ropes, used lipstick tubes, untreated lumber — can be made interesting with the aid of a canny framing. (One student brings in a basket of bread for participants in his critique; the program director hastens to explain that the bread is not part of the work.) The ability to position one’s efforts as protest or satire, experiment or dream, is more than glib posturing. What the ritual of critique tests, however, is command of a particular vocabulary, one that emphasizes transgression, resistance, and rupture. An irony is that this insistence on verbal virtuosity privileges certain educational and class backgrounds.
“In today’s M.F.A. programs, Fine concludes, ‘learning to think takes priority over learning to make.’ But do M.F.A. students learn to think well? Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory. But the students seldom do more than skim the reading, Fine reports, so as to reserve the bulk of their time for work in the studio. Seminar discussions of these complicated theoretical texts — led, typically, by professional artists, not art historians, literary theorists, or philosophers — do little to explicate the ideas. Students are encouraged to invoke theory, Fine suggests, as a way of claiming authority. The actual texts often remain unread.”
Photo: Mount Hood
Poem: Ruth Fainlight, “Somewhere Else Entirely”
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