Martha Bayles is a cultural critic and professor at Boston College who writes about arts, media, and American culture. She contributed criticism and essays to The Weekly Standard from 2005 to 2014, covering film, television, visual arts, and broader cultural topics. She is the author of books on American popular culture and its global influence.
Age of Ambition opens with a comparison between early-21st-century China and late-19th-century America. Citing such impressive statistics as a sixfold increase in the amount of meat consumed by the average Chinese and a 30-fold rise in annual income, Evan Osnos likens contemporary China to “America…
What was modernism? Many well-educated people would be hard pressed to answer, even (especially?) if they were exposed to it in college. Of all the topics in the humanities, modernism may be the most ill taught, because it is both too close (having flourished between the 1880s and World War I) and…
Toward a New Public Diplomacy
"We used to see games like that in Denver." The speaker was a petite, intense-looking Hispanic woman accompanied by her son. I could be wrong, but she did not seem like a regular museumgoer. The setting was the exhibition currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM): "1934: A…
Edward Hopper
The sideburns and ducktail haircut, the flashy clothes, the curled lip, the unnerving body language--the deathless image of Elvis Presley in the 1950s was no public relations stunt.
Henri Rousseau:
Paul Klee and America
Dada
American Vertigo
ON A MISTY APRIL MORNING in 1607, three tall, square-rigged English ships glide up the wide, luminous estuary of what is now called the James River. Instead of discovering the land from the ships, we discover the ships from the land, as a band of Powhatan Indians trot along a ridge, marveling at…
THE PR FOR STEVEN SPIELBERG'S Munich has been deftly engineered. First, the film blends pro-Israel romance, moral equivalence with the Palestinians, and artistic pretension in just the right proportions to stir controversy among the chattering/blogging classes. Second, Munich makes a great pretense…
LET ME START ON A positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-54 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck…
FROM ARISTOTLE TO TOCQUEVILLE, wise critics of democracy have noted that comedy debunks the high and mighty. Its targets are vanity, arrogance, moralism, and ambition: all the vices of power. So comedy is the natural vantage point from which to compare two remarkable television shows about…
I Feel Good
The Big Picture
PEOPLE WHO LOVE MUSIC HATE medleys. And people who love movies hate those "Celebrate the Movies" clip reels shown on cable TV to promote movie channels, and in theaters to promote moviegoing. As one of the diehards who sat up to watch the 77th Academy Awards, I really hated the opening clip reel,…