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.

Saturday, September 19, 2020

August 31, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Peter Schjeldahl’s delightful “The Great Outdoors,” an account of his recent visit to Storm King, “the marvellous sculpture park—or, better, landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York.” The piece exudes bliss. Schjeldahl writes, 

In lockdown times, there’s euphoria in going much of anywhere, not to speak of a journey to a tract of paradise. You could say that I was primed for giddiness on this occasion. I noticed unaccustomed intensity in my responses to the art works that I encountered, taking them in like gulps of air after escaping a miasma. It was a gift of refreshed aesthetic innocence, which I think awaits us all when we are set free in even non-curated environs—I’ve been feeling apologetic to certain trees, near my home, for my past indifference to their beauty—and a lesson in joys that we used to take for granted. We will have peeled eyes. 

His descriptions of the sculptures are superb. He says of Louise Bourgeois’s “Eyes,”

Louise Bourgeois’s writhing cluster of silvered-bronze eyeball shapes that electrically light up from within now and then—“Eyes” (2001)—requires a bit of a climb to be viewed properly. You may then be reluctant to move along, so engrossing is the work’s rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood. That’s a happenstantial quality of the finest things at Storm King: art that, beyond looking good, feels keenly aware of where it is and what it’s doing there. 

That “smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

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