Reviews and News:
Michel Foucault’s late libertarianism: “Starting in 1978, in interviews and lectures, Foucault used modern libertarian and libertarian-leaning thinkers like F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Milton Freedman, and Gary Becker to challenge the Left’s orthodoxies, especially their veneration of a benevolent welfare state. Foucault stunned his acolytes by suggesting that these writers rewarded serious study. Worse still, he castigated democratic socialism’s failures and challenged his students to apply cost-benefit analysis to governmental bureaucracies.”
A letter in which Charles Dickens complains of Hans Christian Andersen’s disastrous stay at Gad’s Hill was sold on Saturday. Andersen was upset no one was available to shave him in the mornings, he cried on the lawn when he received a negative review of one of his books, and stayed five instead of two weeks.
James Bowman lances Kurt Andersen’s carbuncled Fantasyland: “To a man with a hammer, they say, everything looks like a nail, and Andersen’s hammer is fantasy, whether of God or of gold, of show-business or suburbia. Writing history backward by analyzing a contemporary phenomenon like the Disneyfication of culture (‘the fantasy-industrial complex’) and then projecting it onto the past can be done only by not making elementary distinctions, especially between religion as a historical phenomenon and the fantasy-mania we are observing today, which has also affected religion. As it has everything else, very much including Andersen’s sort of historiography, which seeks to translate historical phenomena into contemporary pop-cultural terms with which they can have had nothing to do. To him there are no difficulties, no mysteries in the past, just stuff that we’ve all seen already on TV and that the superior among us have always laughed at.”
Ian Buruma on taking over The New York Review of Books: “One can understand why Ian Buruma, when he was announced as The Review’s new editor in May, thought: ‘What the hell have I taken on?’ But that only came after a happier intitial reaction. ‘I thought it was a challenge I would regret not accepting,’ Buruma said. ‘The first feeling was a sense of euphoria, of a changed life.’ The Dutch-born Buruma, who officially took the reins of the magazine after Labor Day, is an award-winning journalist and the author of numerous acclaimed books. At 65, he has little experience editing but a lot of familiarity with The Review, to which he’s contributed since 1985.”
Mark P. Mills writes about the importance of “curiosity-driven” research: “The world awaits the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a researcher from Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or one of our other modern high-tech firms. These corporations are a very long way from business models that foster Nobel laureates.”
The Victorian world of Jane Welsh Carlyle: “When Chamberlain picks up Jane’s story, Jane and Thomas Carlyle had known each other for almost twenty years, about ten of which they’d spent in London fitting themselves in literary circles—Jane’s charm, for instance, inspired Leigh Hunt to write the equally charming little poem ‘Jenny Kiss’d Me.’ Their marriage was childless, and, while Thomas was writing, Jane filled much of her time as an intensely loyal and practical encourager to people in difficulties—most famously Giuseppe Mazzini who had been in exile in London since 1837, but also to powerless people such as two Germans: a governess whom she hosted for long periods and several times helped to a job, including one with the Home Secretary; and a young revolutionary exile who went mad and was incarcerated at Wandsworth Lunatic Asylum. Jane enlisted her friend Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s older brother) as respectable cover when she went there to extricate him. Somewhat surprisingly, the fusspotty Thomas, hypersensitive to the disturbances caused by neighborhood dogs, roosters, and little girls practicing the piano, generously agreed to have the recovering madman stay with them; in this self-denying offer, Thomas was, as Jane remarked, ‘good as he always is on great occasions.’ Behaving generously was usually Jane’s bailiwick…”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, James Panero laments the death of taste in Venice and takes stock of Damien Hirst:
“Venice is a ‘place made sacred by buildings,’ writes Roger Scruton—a wondrous man-made ecology in need of its own preservation. Many of us will lament its despoliation, but there are those who revel in its destruction. A decade ago I watched a horde of sportscar drivers revving their engines around the Piazzale Roma. Like the cruisers at the lower end of the economic spectrum, they come to Venice to get rather than give: to take home their selfies from San Marco; to take away the serenity of La Serenissima with the crack of their machines.
“It must be against this background, of a death of taste in Venice, that Damien Hirst has decided to mount his comeback performance with an exhibition called ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.’ The show has been much derided, a £50 million flop underwritten by Hirst’s private fortune and the mega-collector François Pinault, whose ‘museums’ now occupy two prime Venetian sites.
“But in Hirst’s latest pratfall I see more than abject failure…Spread across two massive venues, Hirst has created, or rather had manufactured, a sumptuous suite of 189 ‘treasures,’ supposedly salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. The exhibition begins with a mock underwater documentary of their rediscovery, perfectly executed in PBS-like tones. It continues with Demon with Bowl (Exhibition Enlargement), a sixty-foot colossus seamlessly inserted into the Palazzo Grassi’s atrium. This venue alone continues with twenty-three rooms of Hirst…
“And on and on, carried through to the former customs house of the Punta della Dogana, with five editions for each work exquisitely manufactured out of bronze, granite, silver, or gold. Thrown in the mix are models of the purportedly wrecked ship, ‘The Unbelievable’ (get it?), works on paper of the treasures, as well as many anachronistic salvages: Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse, a toy ‘Transformer’ robot, portrait busts of pop singers, and several references to Hirst’s own work, including a fragmentary sculpture of the artist himself.
“Like Jeff Koons, his American corollary, or the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, Hirst is nothing without the macroeconomics of contemporary art: the collaborations with the purveyors of luxury goods, the fetish finishes to sell the thin conceits, the consuming scale of the operations.”
Photo: Reinfjorden
Poem: Grey Gowrie, “Telstar”
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