Tag Archives | art

Weimar America

Feature Article by , May 16, 2017

A bunch of “alt-right” neo-Nazis decided to stage a torchlit mini-Nuremberg rally in my town. Or maybe it was supposed to evoke a Ku Klux Klan rally instead of Nuremberg. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference. Ostensibly, they were protesting the proposed removal of statues of Civil War heroes Stonewall Jackson and Robert […]

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Can the “Fearless Girl” Stand on Her Own?

Feature Article by , April 13, 2017

As a PR stunt—advertising disguised as an idealistic political message—a Wall Street investment firm hawking a “Gender Diversity Index” placed a statue of a young girl in front of the famous Wall Street statue of a charging bull. It was put there on International Women’s Day, you see, and it was taken as a symbol […]

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Counter Culture

Feature Article by , March 21, 2017

The Trump budget is actually a big disappointment to anyone who wanted to see Republicans take a hatchet to federal spending. Trump’s request for $1.151 trillion in discretionary spending in 2018 is actually slightly more than the $1.145 trillion President Obama had projected we would need for the same year. So why are people hyperventilating […]

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We Accomplished More When Everybody Was Naked (in Art)

Feature Article by , June 30, 2016

Amy Otto recently argued in The Federalist that “Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder to See Boobs.” Expressed in amusingly colloquial terms, this is a variant on a fairly standard social conservative outlook in which sexuality is viewed as a kind of dangerous or dissipating force that needs to be sublimated and redirected […]

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The Death of the Highbrow

Feature Article by , April 26, 2016

The singer Beyoncé Knowles just released a new album, or video, or whatever it is, and it has been greeted with yet another flurry of “Beyoncé thinkpieces” in the middle-brow publications. It’s part of a distressing pattern these days of overwrought commentary about popular culture. There are the Stars Wars thinkpieces, of course, and the […]

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Hollywood Baroque

Feature Article by , March 31, 2016

So I sacrificed my two free passes at the fancy new movie theater in town, and an evening in which the kids were staying at grandma and grandpa’s—which is much more valuable—in order to take my wife out to see Batman v Superman. As we left the theater, she asked me whether it was possible […]

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Among the Olympians

Feature Article by , February 7, 2014

A few months ago, I had a conversation with someone who repeated an old cliché: the idea that heroic portrayals of idealized human figures are reminiscent of Nazi art, with its emphasis on the chiseled physiques and square jaws of young blonde men. Unfortunately, the person who told me this was someone connected to the […]

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