Reviews and News:
Interest in the Old Masters is down: “The London dealer Guy Sainty, who has long specialized in old masters, said that he is mystified and frustrated. ‘I’ve been an art dealer for nearly 40 years, and I just don’t get it — I don’t understand where the collectors have gone, the people with knowledge,’ he said. ‘There’s a sense somewhere that the American collector has simply lost interest in European culture.'”
* *
How gentrification killed the jellied eel.
* *
How to think like Shakespeare: “Class of 2020, welcome to college… Building a bridge to the 16th century must seem like a perverse prescription for today’s ills. I’m the first to admit that English Renaissance pedagogy was rigid and rightly mocked for its domineering pedants. Few of you would be eager to wake up before 6 a.m. to say mandatory prayers, or to be lashed for tardiness, much less translate Latin for hours on end every day of the week. It would be hard to design a system more antithetical to our own contemporary ideals of student-centered, present-focused, and career-oriented education. Yet this system somehow managed to nurture world-shifting thinkers, including those who launched the Scientific Revolution. This education fostered some of the very habits of mind endorsed by both the National Education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning: critical thinking; clear communication; collaboration; and creativity. (To these ‘4Cs,’ I would add ‘curiosity.’) Given that your own education has fallen far short of those laudable goals, I urge you to reconsider Shakespeare’s intellectual formation: that is, not what he purportedly thought — about law or love or leadership — but how he thought. An apparently rigid educational system could, paradoxically, induce liberated thinking.”
* *
Adam Kirsch reviews Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment: “Nietzsche is usually classified as a philosopher, Donne as a poet, and Galileo as a scientist. But one of the premises of Anthony Gottlieb’s new book, The Dream of Enlightenment (Liveright)—the second installment of his lucid, accessible history of Western philosophy—is that thought cannot be divided according to disciplines in this way. For philosophy, in particular, such a division is misleading. Today, we tend to think of philosophy as a specialized academic pursuit: a philosopher is a professor of philosophy. But none of the founders of modern philosophy whom Gottlieb discusses fit that description. Some were mathematicians: René Descartes invented the Cartesian coördinate system with its x- and y-axes, and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus (around the same time as, but independently of, Isaac Newton). Some were professionals: Baruch Spinoza ground lenses for optical equipment; John Locke was a doctor and a diplomat. And some were literary writers, like David Hume, who was better known in his lifetime for his History of England than for his philosophical works. Usually, they overlapped several categories.”
* *
The sad state of U.S.-Israel relations: “When Barack Obama’s chances of re-election looked uncertain in May 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu came to the White House to lecture its occupant. In front of ‘astonished’ journalists and ‘furious’ White House aides, Netanyahu publicly rejected the framework for peace the President had endorsed the day before. Bibi wasn’t done. Over the coming months, Netanyahu seemed to be actively intervening in favor of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, an old friend from the Boston Consulting Group. The Prime Minister was campaigning against the sitting Democratic President of the United States, Israel’s most important ally and most faithful friend. Although his motivation was part personal and part political, Netanyahu’s brazen interference in U.S. politics also reveals a new and growing tension in the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Mapping this growing divide, and suggesting a possible “grand bargain” to mend it, is the project of seasoned policy scholars Dana Allin and Steven Simon in their timely and well-considered book, Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the U.S.-Israel Alliance.
* *
How Damien Hirst made it.
* *
Essay of the Day:
In National Review, J. D. Vance explains why race relations are getting worse in America:
“2016 offers reasons for unique alarm. The progress of recent decades, both political and social, appears to have evaporated in the past few years. And the problems, as so often, are focused on the two oldest classes of our poor.
“These two underclasses pre-date the United States as a political union. The black underclass, brought here in chains, toiled for centuries in the hopes of earning freedom — first physical, then political. They found themselves concentrated in the South — the home of King Cotton. The white underclass, many of whom descended from Scots-Irish peasants of the motherland, came here freely. They tended to concentrate in the rural parts of the eastern United States, especially along the Appalachian Mountains.
“The paths of these tribes have sometimes intersected. When recently freed slaves began to marry the white indentured servants of Virginia planters, their children took on a color that entitled them to all of the burdens of their darker-skinned parent. So they moved to eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee, called themselves Cherokee Indians, and attempted to live in peace. The locals, unsure what to do with their new neighbors, derisively called them ‘Melungeons.’
“A century later, as the industrial economies of the North created millions of new jobs, the white and black underclasses went hunting for opportunities. The black folks encountered a spate of indignities and a government housing policy that forced them into artificial urban ghettos. And the white establishment, confronted for the first time with people who looked like them but possessed none of their sensibilities, treated these seemingly foreign whites with scorn…”
* *
Image of the Day: Hawaii’s Kīlauea Volcano
* *
Poem: Gilbert Allen, “Two Become One Flesh”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
