Best of 2018: The Critics

Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Margin of Error"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “No Escape,” November 19, 2018 (“Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” February 5, 2018 (“Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires”).

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Performance,” October 1, 2018 (“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”).

4. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on ‘The Rose Tattoo’ (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park”].

5. James Wood, “Departure Lounge,” October 1, 2018 (“There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are”).

6. Dan Chiasson, “Anybody There?,” April 23, 2018 (“On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from ‘2001’ looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“She warns that ‘nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.’ This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey”).

8. Thomas Mallon, “Shots in the Dark,” May 28, 2018 (“With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees”).

9. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 8, 2018 [“In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool)”].

10. Alexandra Schwartz, “Margin of Error,” October 29, 2018 (“His John, by turns petty, aggressive, and self-pitying, looms a head above Radcliffe’s Jim, pouring whiskey and slinging insults, plus the occasional fist, as the younger man stands his ground, piously pelting him with inaccuracy after inaccuracy”).