Thomas Disch was a prolific American writer known for his science fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism. He contributed arts and culture criticism to The Weekly Standard between 2001 and 2005, writing on topics including visual art, museums, and literature. Disch died in 2008.
IN SPRING THE WORLD FILLS up with exhibitionists. All the flowers come up with colors they think bees will have to notice, and young people appear in class plays and dance recitals and get strange haircuts, all by way of saying, "Look at me! Look at me!" (Or, in this multicultural age, "Mira,…
IT'S A TENET OF THE received wisdom that museums are the cathedrals of our new era, however it is to be called. Who else, after all, can afford the prices? The Metropolitan Museum has just acquired its costliest work ever, at a price of between $45 and $50 million. And the awe-inspiring thing about…
Goya
WHEN JAMES ROSENQUIST'S great engulfing multipanel installation "F-111" was shown at the Castelli Gallery in 1965, the shock waves were felt throughout the art world. The shock combined visceral impact with scandal. Rosenquist, who'd gotten by during his apprentice years by painting outdoor…
EL GRECO is an anomaly. He was the most extremely mannered of Mannerist painters--yet he lived outside that tradition, having merely bumped into it in Italy on his way from Greece to Spain. He learned to paint icons in the outmoded fashion of a dying empire, and he adapted it to the needs of a…
Art
GERMAN PAINTERS are often hard to like, and the best of them can be the least amiable. Grünewald's "Isenheim Altarpiece" is the ghastliest of Old Master paintings, and there are entire galleries in both Hanover and Munich devoted to the martyrdoms of hecatombs of suffering saints as depicted by the…
MUSEUM FATIGUE is a familiar experience even for the most ardent art lovers. Sometimes it is simply that the flesh is weak, particularly the feet. But even martyrs and marathoners are susceptible to aesthetic overload, a sense that there can be too much beauty, too many centuries. For a while the…
ON THE COVER of the April 6 New York Times's Sunday magazine, the paper's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, declared, "The most influential American artists weren't Pollock or de Kooning. They were the ones who came next--Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists--who redefined what art was and…
Dancing in the Wind
THE TRANSFORMING FLOW of money through New York has accelerated over time. Thirty years ago the SoHo area, which had been the cast-iron district and a no-man's-land of warehouses and small manufacturing, was transformed almost overnight into a casbah of lofts and galleries that formed an immense…
IN HER LATEST succès de scandale, "The Rage and the Pride," Oriana Fallaci forebodes darkly about the fate of the West's amassed art treasures. Surely she has not been alone in extrapolating from the destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan--to say nothing of the World Trade Center--to a…
IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH to have voted for Bella Abzug or Ronald Reagan, then you may remember the great to-do surrounding the unveiling, in 1979, of Judy Chicago's cause célèbre, "The Dinner Party." That assemblage of thirty-nine vulviform table settings was denounced and hosannahed, the standard to…
What the Koran Really Says A Textual Commentary by Ibn Warraq Prometheus, 600 pp., $36 LIVING as an expatriate in Rome in the early 1970s, I came to know a young Arabist studying at the Vatican Library, who amazed me during the course of a long holiday banquet by explaining that the received wisdom…
Robert Creeley A Biography by Ekbert Faas University Press of New England, 513 pp., $35 POOR ROBERT CREELEY. Few poets can have led a drabber or more justly disgruntled life, winning a position at the very top of the B-list of his generation--only to be rewarded by a biography riddled with…
WHO WAS THE GREATEST FRENCH POET of the nineteenth century? André Gide’s immortal comment—"Victor Hugo, alas!"—is as true today as it was when Gide wrote it in a letter to Paul Valéry almost a century ago. But English readers have had to take it on faith. Few French poets of equivalent magnitude…
Few poets in this century have been at once so highly respected and so little read as Allen Tate. Born in 1899, he belonged to the second growth of modernists -- Hart Crane chief among them -- who were the epigones of the great expatriates T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Less gifted…