Reviews and News:
The artist who created Wall Street's "Charging Bull" says new "Fearless Girl" sculpture distorts his work: "With hopes of dispensing the 'perfect antidote' to the stock market crash of 1987, Italian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica spent two years welding a 7,000 pound bronze bull statue designed to capture the resilience of the American people. Under the cover of night and without a permit, he installed his massive 'Charging Bull' directly before the New York Stock Exchange, a gift New Yorkers loved but New York City initially hated. Authorities removed it, but later reinstalled it under pressure at a small public park in the financial district. In the 18 years since, it has become an institution. Then last month, on International Women's Day, a new statue of a symbolically brave 'Fearless Girl' stole its spotlight — and, Modica says, fundamentally corrupted the artistic integrity of his 'Charging Bull.'"
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W. H. Auden, detective: "My father, Cecil [Day-Lewis], writing as Nicholas Blake, used a detective called Nigel Strangeways in nearly all of his novels. In the first of these, a prep school story called A Question of Proof, Day-Lewis introduces Strangeways as every inch a portrait of his friend and fellow poet Wystan Auden."
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Jeff Koons cashes in (again): "'They touch on the metaphysical: the right here right now and its connection to the past and the future. They're about shine, the basics of philosophy, passion, what it means to be a human, what it means to be an animal, the idea of transcendence'... What was this wormhole to the eternal? Another enormous public sculpture, like 'Split Rocker,' the 37-foot-high flower-covered rocking horse bust that had pride of place in Rockefeller Center in 2014? A museum retrospective, like the career-defining show at the Whitney the same year? Broaden your minds, people! A new line of handbags. Also scarves, key chains and small leather goods, including wallets and laptop sleeves — 51 pieces in all — done in collaboration with the French luxury house Louis Vuitton."
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Stolen Norman Rockwell worth $1 million returned to owners after 40 years: "The unlikely recovery ends what the work's original insurance company has called 'one of the art world's greatest mysteries for over four decades.'"
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New Sylvia Plath letters show that "Ted Hughes beat her two days before she miscarried their second child and that Hughes wanted her dead."
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Read one book on transhumanism, and you've read them all.
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The women of Bauhaus: "The male icons of the early-20th-century Bauhaus school, like Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Paul Klee, are some of the most celebrated pioneers of modern art. But the women artists who taught, studied, and made groundbreaking work with them are often remembered in history books as wives of their male counterparts or, worse, not at all... Weavers, industrial designers, photographers, and architects like Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, and Gertrud Arndt not only advanced the school's historic marriage of art and function; they were also essential in laying the groundwork for centuries of art and design innovation to come after them."
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Essay of the Day:
What's wrong with Western republics today? It's not the lack of representation, Pierre Manent argues in First Things, but what we call freedom:
"Far be it from me to minimize the importance of the question of political representation. A good representative regime and a good organization of representation are fundamental conditions of a satisfactory political and social life for a modern people. The great modern political crises can often be described as crises of representation. Without entering the partisan debate, I would say that the 'French problem' now doubtless consists in the citizen's loss of confidence in his representatives.
"Nevertheless, even in a representative republic, the basis of political life does not lie in the mechanism of representation. Not only would it be hard to believe in the sincerity of a politician who would say 'my policy is to represent you'; in fact this would be a sufficient reason not to choose such a person as a representative. The French, like the citizens of other republics, choose their representatives in order to be well-represented, to be sure, but also, and first of all, in order to be well- governed. Representative government has over time been adopted in all European countries and many more besides, not from love of representation for its own sake, but because, in their experience, the representative has seemed to be the best form of republican government."
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"Today we expect from a republic the opposite of a republic. We demand from it the least possible action, or what we call 'freedom.' For us, freedom is a world without commandment or obedience. It is a world in which public action can neither begin nor commend anything. In practice, as I have noted, we ask our representatives and those who govern us to show their disinterestedness in defending our interests. In this we give evidence of a very naive immorality, especially insofar as we use a moralizing language that prevents us from grasping the moral bases of a truly republican regime. Service to the republic cannot be disinterested, because it is paid for by what is most precious in the eyes of ambitious citizens, that is, the honors granted by the republic, which boil down to public esteem. It is not disinterestedness that we should be asking of those who govern us, but rather ambition. It has been too long since we had the rare benefit of being governed by a truly ambitious statesman. The conviction has taken hold that our regime would be more republican if it ignored political rule still more. Political leaders are to serve our interests rather than commend our collective actions. The reigning social philosophy postulates the power and self-sufficiency of a spontaneous social form that would bring together order and freedom without the mediation of political rule. This is to abandon society to its inertia, that is, its corruption. Thus places and states of toxic stagnation have formed, spreading and producing cysts on the social body over the last ten, twenty, or thirty years; these places have never known the presence of political rule."
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Photo: Cherry blossoms
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Poem: Amit Majmudar, "Metamorphoses"
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Poem: Amit Majmudar, "Metamorphoses"
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.