Amor Mundi 6/22/14

Hilton Als, in reviewing a new book co-edited by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. entitled The Image of the Black In Western Art, The Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, is struck by a particular painting, Portrait of Tonia Stieltjes by the Dutch artist Jan Sluyters. The book focuses broadly on “image of the black during the age of mechanical reproduction and how it changed, was modernized, denigrated, and, often, fetishized.” Als, however, fixes on the singular humanity of one portrait: “Tonia’s grave face is powdered white, as was the fashion of the time, but then there is her ‘real’ skin and her style, which is something ‘other.’ My imagination reacts to those levels of density and nonverbal expression more readily than to portraits of black people by artists ranging from Goldie White to Brent Malone. I find their work predictable: it elevates blackness to a kind of folkloric purity and strength that doesn’t allow for labyrinthine humanness, or for the fact that most blacks come from some place they don’t know but, like Tonia, make themselves up out of the whole cloth of Europe, or Africa, or whatever temporary home will have them.... It’s Tonia’s isolation in public, the theatricalization of her different self through paint and dress, that encompasses so much of what makes the black in Western art incalculably lonely, unknowable, troubling, and, sometimes, beautiful, just like other people.”

Speaking Truth to Power

In the New Republic, Christopher Ketcham makes the case that journalist idol Chris Hedges has a plagiarism problem. Ketcham's account, though bordering on the tedious, overly personal, and the monomaniacal, seems to make its case. It has recently been given further support by a long post by Adam Weinstein at Gawker, which both uncovers further instances of plagiarism and argues that Hedges habitually recycles 1000s of words of his own writing and even whole articles in longer articles and books that he claims to be original work. Hedges forcefully denies Ketcham’s charges and has written a response here that also includes responses from Ketcham and The New Republic. Ketcham’s thesis is that Hedges’s plagiarism must be outed to protect the integrity of journalism, an argument he puts in the words of a journalism expert: “Trust is a journalist’s and journalism’s most precious commodity…if there is even a hint of the possibility that misconduct was covered up, it’s even worse. Journalism will take another hit.” That is true. But equally central to this story is the nature of power. Hedges has said, “You have a choice between which two sets of principles you serve. Justice and truth or privilege and power…. The more you make concessions to those whose fealty is to privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth.” He is so right. Admirably, Hedges has stood up for his principles, angering the right and the left, and always speaking his mind. We need more publicly courageous intellectuals like Hedges. But in his belief in his own importance to the cause for which he fights, Hedges has not only made mistakes (which can be forgiven) but also has refused to own up to his mistakes and instead has sought to drown out his critics with bluster. His response suggests that privilege and power may mean more to Hedges than he lets on.

Osmotic Learning

In an interview with Granta, cartoonist Adrian Tomine discusses the value of a very informal education: "I've learned a lot of tangible, practical things from studying all kinds of things: comics, illustration, movies, prose, etc. But I think I've learned more from just hanging around creative people and talking to them and learning from their example. I suppose I'm talking about the kind of osmotic learning that comes from getting to know other artists (or writers or musicians or whatever). If you go over to the house of someone whose work you admire, and you look at their bookshelves and ask about things that jump out at you, that right there can be kind of an education. I've even learned a lot from just going to an art store with other cartoonists. Invariably they'll know about some drafting tool I'd never heard of, or have some preference for some brand of ink that they've arrived at after years of trial and error. And on a broader scale, it's really useful to watch how someone - especially someone who's been at it for longer - deals with issues that arise in their art and just in life in general."

The Beautiful Game as an Expression of National Character

In the midst of the international frenzy of the World Cup, Matthew Futterman describes USA's German-born coach Jürgen Klinsmann as soccer's "Alexis de Tocqueville," endeavoring to create an American style of the game, saying that "he wanted to create a squad that represented what he sees as the defining American characteristic-a visceral hatred of being dictated to." Since, paradoxically, this change came from the top down, it, of course, turned out to be more difficult than easy.

I Come to Praise the CPA, Not to Bury Him

Jacob Soll yearns for the heroic accountant of the early modern Dutch, for whom keeping one's books in order took on a spiritual meaning: "Double-entry accounting made it possible to calculate profit and capital and for managers, investors, and authorities to verify books. But at the time, it also had a moral implication. Keeping one's books balanced wasn't simply a matter of law, but an imitation of God, who kept moral accounts of humanity and tallied them in the Books of Life and Death. It was a financial technique whose power lay beyond the accountants, and beyond even the wealthy people who employed them. Accounting was closely tied to the notion of human audits and spiritual reckonings. Dutch artists began to paint what could be called a warning genre of accounting paintings. In Jan Provoost's 'Death and Merchant,' a businessman sits behind his sacks of gold doing his books, but he cannot balance them, for there is a missing entry. He reaches out for payment, not from the man who owes him the money, but from the grim reaper, death himself, the only one who can pay the final debts and balance the books. The message is clear: Humans cannot truly balance their books in the end, for they are accountable to the final auditor."

My Neighbor Marcel

Alexandra Schwartz, riffing off the recent release of a book documenting Marcel Proust's letters to his upstairs neighbor, considers the loneliness and alienation of the city's crowd and remembers that, far from the mere writer of In Search of Lost Time, Proust was a real person who lived under neighbors whose loud banging sometimes annoyed him, too. Here is one such missive sent upstairs by Proust: "Madame, I hope you won't find me too indiscreet. There's been a lot of noise these past few days and as I'm not well, I'm more sensitive to it.... If the hammering must be done in the morning, might it be done in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, not my bedroom.... If there's too much noise on Sunday morning I won't be able to get out of bed until the afternoon." Schwartz adds, "We who toss and turn, fantasizing about the exquisitely cutting emails we'll never have the guts to send to the invisible others keeping us awake, are happy to have him on our team."

From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Christopher C. Robinson discusses intergenerational justice and the ecological crisis in the Quote of the Week. Lord Byron provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the conscience of Edward Snowden in the Weekend Read.