That’s how Steve Boykewich described the first chapter of Ingrid Rowland’s book about Athanasius Kircher and Baroque Rome: That strange, bitter Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, who as censor of Kircher’s Coptic Forerunner had expressed such enthusiasm for the work, seems to have soured on his colleague’s enterprise some years later. Inchofer’s 1645 satire of the Jesuit [...]
Category Archives: Art
“Life Imitating Borges.”
03-Jan-13Vizcaya.
28-Dec-12The next day in Miami we visited some private collections of contemporary art, which closely resembled what we had seen in the exhibition center. But it was pleasant to walk from place to place in the sunny palm-lined streets. One of the private collections – supposedly in part funded by profits from the drug-fueled Studio [...]
Art Basel Miami Beach.
24-Dec-12My first full day in Miami was the “preview day” at Art Basel, the nation’s most prestigious contemporary art show. I had never been to anything like it and we had VIP passes, so I was raring to go. We ended up spending something like six hours at the show, in two separate visits during [...]
My last full day in Tucson was a Sunday, and the visit of a friend gave me a perfect opportunity to visit San Xavier del Bac one more time. I hope to write a bit more about this extraordinary church, which to my mind is the most extraordinary building and artwork in Arizona. After mass [...]
I am continually impressed by Goethe’s genius – his capacity to productively see. ”Beauty is perfection in combination with freedom” is put as no one else can put it, and the more you think about what keeps things and people which are formally perfect from possessing the elevating radiance which distinguishes true beauty, the more [...]
Alexander McQueen and the Met.
13-Aug-11I had an interesting visit to the Met last Saturday. Hoping to take advantage of the 9 p.m. closing, I went with a friend around 8 – a bit late, admittedly, because we had lingered a bit on our way – only to find the line out the Great Hall and down almost all the [...]
Our Lady of Loreto in Brooklyn.
13-Aug-11Having some friends in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn, I have driven Atlantic Avenue fairly often, the road which connects that part of Brooklyn with Richmond Hill in Queens. One day there was some work being done on the road, and I was detoured onto the streets of East New York, where I drove [...]
Bad Theology, Bad Art.
05-Jun-11An interesting hypothesis from Tony Woodlief that bad religious art – the sort that cannot stand on its own, but has to have an adjective affixed, like “a Christian novel” – is bad because it is serving a bad (i.e. false) theology. I largely agree with this: religious art used to be better because earlier [...]
On Artistic Discipline.
17-May-11From Carey’s Wallace’s essay on maintaining discipline as an artist. The most difficult of all tasks, for precisely the reason she indicates: There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives. So far I’ve kept to precisely the opposite pattern – bursts of [...]
Apologia Pro Carolo Gustavo Jung.
08-Jan-13There are some rules in the intellectual world which are pretty reliable for detecting bloviating stupidity, or blathering solipsism (or however you want to render b.s.), and one of them is this: if someone launches a five-thousand word attack on a noted author, and never once quotes a single line from the voluminous works of [...]