Word: criticism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even the arch-academic Meissonier over Matisse or Mondrian, and by his impertinent way of calling true-believer modernists les cocus du vieil art moderne, the cuckolds of old modern art. Dali flew into such flak right from the beginning of his career: in 1929 the avant-gardist critic Efstratios Teriade complained that Dali's talent was "the precise opposite of those qualities which make a painter." But without the power granted by illusion to overturn our sense of the world's plain factuality, his contribution to 20th century culture would have been slight...
...what's it really about? The question arises because the author of the new novel In America (Farrar Straus Giroux; 387 pages; $26) is the formidably intelligent critic Susan Sontag. Ergo, a long story that looks like a historical romance, a celebration of a 19th century woman who, in contemporary parlance, had it all--devoted husband (a Polish count, no less), passionate younger lover and glittering career--must be hedged about with postmodern ironies, runic clues to the reader not to mistake surface for substance. Mustn...
There was a time when Sontag the critic scorned scenery-crammed, realistic Victorian novels and their confident claims of authorial omniscience. Now she has written one and demonstrated, in the process, that narrative skill can come in unfashionable packages...
...stranglehold of the "complexity boys" (as critic-composer Virgil Thomson called them) was challenged by such older American tonalists as David Diamond and Ned Rorem and weakened in the '80s by the deliberately repetitive music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But minimalism has proved too simple-minded to satisfy serious listeners hungry for accessible yet challenging new scores. Liebermann, Daniel Asia, Jorge Martin, Paul Moravec and George Tsontakis were among the first younger composers to snub its stuttering chatter in favor of a full-blooded style that is at once unmistakably contemporary (Liebermann, for instance, was influenced...
...charitable description of Hazel's ignorance is ''dramatic irony''; a blunter critic would just call it a melodramatic contrivance. There is evidence of research into both the history and psychology of memory (she retells the story of Simonides, the Greek lyric poet who invented the art of memory), but in the end the book says little about memory, except that we can on occasion have a love-hate relation with our own sense of the past. At one point Jonathan wonders whether it might have been better if both he and Hazel had lost memory. Livesey has rightly called into...