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 Galchen, 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.

Thursday, June 20, 2024

June 17, 2024 Issue

I have absolutely no interest in what Ye did to his Tadao Ando beach house. Or do I? I dislike Ye (formerly Kanye West) and the vulgar lifestyle he represents. Yet I devoured Ian Parker’s “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in one delicious gulp. What hooked me? I confess it was the perverse spectacle of destruction, of seeing a gem of architectural art intentionally smashed with a sledgehammer. Parker writes,

Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers. “There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”

Ye, through his agent Saxon, also tore out all the Ando custom wooden cabinetry. Crazy! Parker tries to show that Ye had his own design in mind, that he was pursuing his own particular aesthetic. He says,

Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. “He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”

I don’t buy it. It’s like Al Weiwei deliberately dropping his Han dynasty urn. Peter Schjeldahl said of that dubious action,

We’re told in the show’s catalogue that photographs of Ai dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor, “captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values.” That likely reads better in Mandarin. The act strikes me as mere vandalism. [“Challenging Work,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012]

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