The Anglican choral tradition is one of the great successes of English cultural diffusion, to rank with Association Football (soccer), cricket, and the works of William Shakespeare. It has a cultural heft way beyond its parochial and very specific origins, and it turns up in the oddest places. The most incongruous example must surely be the upmarket gloss that Thomas Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in Alium lends to a down-and-dirty scene in the film Fifty Shades of Grey.
Books
Remembering Paul Robeson
To the Editors: Simon Callow’s article on Paul Robeson, who was a childhood (and beyond) hero of mine, was a powerful reminder of what a great man Robeson was and how shamefully we all neglected him. It also brought back to me two memories of the only times I saw him in person, each of which may add a little to the list of his deeds.
Putin: From Oligarch to Kleptocrat
Oligarchical capitalism destroys legitimate competition and eats away like a cancer at the resources of a nation. Any semblance of dynamic, healthy competition is strangled by fake competition based solely on firms’ relationships with people in power. The twenty or so oligarchs in Putin’s Russia do not get access to powerful people in government because of their wealth, as is the case, say, with many billionaire political donors in America, but rather, the reverse. Russian oligarchs get access to obscene amounts of wealth because they are loyal to the only person in government who matters: Vladimir Putin.
A Plate of Jellyfish
Ernst Haeckel’s intention was to make the natural forms of elusive organisms accessible to artists, and supply them with a new visual vocabulary of protists, mollusks, trilobites, siphonophores, fungi, and echinoderms. In his first book are jellyfish that look like flowers, protists that resemble Fabergé eggs, presented like crown jewels on black velvet, the seeming cosmic vastness of the images belying their actual, microscopic size. Haeckel’s name has not endured as well as the words that he coined—among them, phylum, ecology, and stem cell. But artists took heed. Art Nouveau is crowded with the natural arabesques and patterns that seduced Haeckel.
The Nunes Memo Kremlinology
On this black Monday, congressional Republicans undermined generations of legislative history and precedent to help a president who then, before the sun had set, undermined the will of Congress in its battle to rein in the Russians. Some will call this treason. Others, obstruction of justice. I’d rather call it giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The really bad news of the day was the inescapable conclusion that the real enemy America faces is not foreign, but domestic.
The Nonbinary Gender Trap
California legislators, and progressive lawmakers in other states, may be acting from the best of motives, but this swath of new legislation rests on a dangerous mistake. I say this as a nonbinary person, one who identifies as genderqueer and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them. Adding “nonbinary” to the list of legal gender options does not address the core problem: any legal system that requires a person to record their gender perpetuates government control over our bodies and identities.
The Worst of the Worst
On January 10, The Washington Post reported that Donald J. Trump passed a milestone that none of his predecessors is known to have attained: just short of the anniversary of his first year in office, he told his two thousandth lie. The path from the first lie to the two thousandth (and now beyond), a veritable Via Dolorosa of civic corruption, has been impossible for even the most resolute citizen to avoid. Trump is in our faces, and our brains, constantly. Yet the barrage is so unceasing that we can’t remember what he did and said last week, or sometimes even yesterday.
Consciousness and the World
You mean, essentially, that we are objects, and objects “take place,” rather than act.
We are part of the physical world, hence objects. What else could we be—immaterial souls? As for identity, we are what we are because we are identical with a portion of the world that has come together over the years in a certain way. The traditional separation of subject and object that underpins all standard thinking on consciousness and identity lies at the heart of our troubles as individuals and as a society.
Art in Free Fall
The Los Angeles artist Laura Owens brings a light touch and a tough mind to a new kind of synthetic painting. Her exuberant, bracing midcareer survey at the Whitney beams a positive, can-do energy. As a stylist and culture critic, Owens is neither a stone-cold killer nor a gleeful nihilist, traits embraced by some of her peers. She’s an art lover, an enthusiast who approaches the problem of what to paint, and how to paint it, with an open, pragmatic mind. Her style can appear to be all over the place, but we always recognize the work as hers. Her principal theme may be her own aesthetic malleability.
Stephen Shore, Seer of the Everyday
The Stephen Shore exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art casts a wide net, including the anomalous periods when Shore worked abroad, but its main focus is his many photographs of hyper-quotidian America, our stalest shades of red, white, and blue. These quiet and straightforward pictures—of food, buildings, cars, and toilets—show that Shore is best understood as a photographer uninterested in photographing what is agreed to be worthy of capture.
Sig Nordal 