Criticism

By David Auerbach × Criticism

Yet why is “liberalism” such a bogeyman to this movement? Is it because the non-liberal left appears so dispossessed? We live in an age where the most “radical” book of economics to make a splash, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, explicitly distances itself from Marxism on numerous occasions, and ends by calling only for a modest wealth tax . We live in an age where the Occupy movement, despite its sometimes radical appearance, orients itself around such conventionally liberal reforms as the campaign for a living wage, prosecution of criminal bankers and tougher financial laws (e.g., “Occupy the SEC”), and exhibits a polite antagonism toward the one percent of plutocrats.

By Matthew Wolfson × Criticism

We’re living in a golden decade for rural escapist fare: the latest, most extreme iteration of a cultural construct that effectively removes people living there from society’s list of concerns. The effect of these savvy new Westerns is, in some ways, even more insidious than their progenitors’, since they incorporate the countryside’s decline into the genre’s standard narrative, and, in so doing, effectively ignore that decline by aestheticizing it. Now the cowboys aren’t discovering the west, they’re preserving it, this parallel society living alongside ours, all unknown and neglected folkways and byways, comfortingly unchanged in the face of global hyperactivity…

By Eric Dean Wilson × Criticism

And yet, there is no escaping the strength of the number three. A triangle is the sturdiest shape in architecture. The Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, the pyramids, the molecular structure of diamond—all derive their stability from the strength of three. And of course, the Christian Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—a holy triptych that collapses into one idea: God. The diptych can’t escape this rule of three, and perhaps this is also part of its power. Just as the triptych is secretly a portrait, the diptych is, in a sense, a triptych…

By J. D. Mersault × Criticism

And now, in 2014, Durrell has failed to be appreciated in any substantial way by modern audiences. In fact, the opposite is true: he is positively derided in most serious literary circles nowadays, and his books are rarely studied in universities. His novels are said to be antiquated and selfish, indulgent and over-written. His prose, once thought to be incisive and muscular, is now judged as florid and confusing…

By Anna Shechtman × Criticism

At this point in his speech, Steinberg suggested that the ever-widening gender gap in crosswords might be explained (or “boysplained,” as one puzzle blogger snarked) by the field’s shift to software-facilitated constructions. Like photography, film, and any number of once-analog trades, the process of puzzle-making has been digitized in the past twenty years…

By Drew Calvert × Criticism

If Rilke’s poetry has any relevance to twenty-first century Americans, it’s because we worry, now more than ever, that we are losing unmediated experience. We’re busy, we’re sleepless, we’re medicated, and we’re marooned in the everyday.

By Sal Randolph × Criticism

Even when you’re in the right place and time, participatory art fails because art fails: too often nothing actually happens between a work and its viewer. We are so many strangers walking the streets of the city, hardly glancing at one another.

By Tara Isabella Burton × Criticism

To walk in the country is to walk in and among life. That which is growing is growing of its own accord; there is a dynamic force—what the Romantic poets called Nature naturans—that suffuses the natural existence. A single blade of grass may be impermanent; a field of grass is not. But to walk in a city is to walk among ghosts, the narratives of onetime denizens building up like layers of clay shards…

By Arno Hofstadter × Criticism

This removed, and slightly veiled, narrative condescension is a trademark of Ms. Davis’ writing in Can’t and Won’t, a collection which takes empty, circular bourgeois life as its subject, and then immediately seems to resent having done so. Ms. Davis writes as if she were forced to take on this subject, as if it were an assignment, and so many of her stories here read like transcriptions of (elegant) tantrums.

By Jeff Kuperman × Criticism

Why sad here? Why happy there? Wouldn’t it feel the same if they were switched?

By Sal Randolph × Criticism

The painting, in this moment, needs you, exactly you. Nothing less.

By Kyle Beachy × Criticism

The gears of capitalism create spaces in which behavior is prescribed and easily accounted for. Skateboarding’s opposition is thus a compositional process, partially of the individual body, which is recomposed against the “intense scopic determinations of modernist space,” and partially of a deeper critique of urban life: “production not as the production of things but of play, desires and actions”…

By Adam Fitzgerald × Criticism

Enter into the arena Kate Durbin, whose latest book, E! Entertainment has just been published by Wonder Books, demonstrating seven years of atomically precise attention paid to the linguistic ecosystem of reality television. Deliciously designed in the prettiest of pink pages by Joseph Kaplan, E! Entertainment arranges, annotates, reports, and represents our favorite national pastime…

By Patrick Carroll × Criticism

Billups was the archetype’s quintessence: experienced but expendable, affable but reserved, resilient and lonely. Yes, Chauncey, great work, bye. Welcome, Chauncey, powerful and baldheaded sharpshooter, we need you, we don’t, begone, be good. I can’t imagine Billups took all this with anything other than measured acceptance, a tip of the jockstrap, a grinning-bare of his huge many teeth, before zooming off in his Mercedes to some new part of America…

By Kelly M.S. Swope × Criticism

A democratic vista is prose that is pliant to poetry. When prose is pliant to poetry, it means that prose bends to the authority of poetry without giving up its own self-concept…