The New Yorker & Me: June 25, 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.

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

June 25, 2018 Issue

In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” Peter Schjeldahl shoots a poison-tipped dart at Damien Hirst’s Colour Space Paintings, currently showing at Gagosian Gallery, New York City. He writes,

Superabundant multicolored dot paintings, randomly composed in sizes from smallish to giant, are as perfectly dead as a trisected shark in formaldehyde-filled glass cases, which is also on view. There’s no formal structure or even optical dazzle, except by occasional accident. These aren’t active pictures. They’re passive slabs, yielding nothing to contemplation that they don’t impart at first glance. Neither good nor bad, they maintain an imperturbable, mortuary dignity—Hirst’s cynosure. He creates visual curios that look like art while dispensing with art’s pesky demands on thought, feeling, and perception. His works are aesthetic cryptocurrency. There are worse things in the world.

Wow! I’ve rarely seen Schjeldahl so negative. But it’s not unexpected. He’s been on Hirst’s case for years. In his “Spot On” (January 12, 2012), he called him “a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” I agree.

Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” note is even more dismissive of Hirst’s dot paintings than “Spot On” is. In the earlier piece, he memorably describes them as ‘intellectual formaldehyde.” But he also said, “Tastiness applies, too, in the pleasantly disorienting effects of colors that appear to be distributed at random: bright or muted or warm or cool, all ajumble.” Well, there’s no tastiness now. They’re “aesthetic cryptocurrency” – a brilliant description of bad art that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker criticism.