The New Yorker & Me: October 22, 2018 Issue

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, October 26, 2018

October 22, 2018 Issue

The best writing in this week’s issue is in “Goings On About Town: Art.” Two notes, in particular, stand out: Peter Schjeldahl on the Met’s Delacroix retrospective and Johanna Fateman on the Trish Baga exhibition at Greene Naftali. Schjeldahl’s piece, based on his longer “Performance” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2018), contains this brilliant passage:

A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle.

Fateman’s capsule review is worth quoting in full:

A motley assortment of enchanting ceramic sculptures fills the first room of Baga’s installation “Mollusca and the Pelvic Floor.” A half-dozen glazed poodle heads accompany melting guitars, volcanic islands, and fossil-like abstractions; two busts—a self-portrait and a deft rendering of RuPaul—house virtual-assistant devices. In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan. We glean, from the fragmented narrative, that Amazon’s Alexa has been rechristened Mollusca. Baga takes viewers on a strange philosophical journey—an extended hallucination in a messy bedroom—to elucidate her curious relationship with her nonhuman helper.

That “In a darkened interior room, a video spills off the wall onto clusters of rocks, cardboard file boxes, a bottle of salad dressing, and an oscillating fan” is marvelous! The whole passage is inspired.