The Odd Decline Of Raphael

In recent years, the art of Raphael seems to have fallen out of favor with the public. “While Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo leap out of the past as living men – their lives intense and fascinating, their works disturbingly immediate – Raphael has become remote. The recent fuss over the National Gallery’s bid to buy his Madonna of the Pinks revealed just how distant we are from him. No one could say why he is so special.” Could it be that Raphael’s embrace of a style which attempted to impose order on chaos is so foreign to us, in an age in which chaos is the accepted norm, that we have forgotten how to view it?

Roth Novel Gets New Cover

The cover of Philip Roth’s new novel, The Plot Against America, has run up against the German government’s ban on any display of the swastika. The cover features a black stenciled swastika superimposed over a U.S. postage stamp. A shipment of the book was held up by customs at the German border last week, and the publisher announced that a new cover would be printed for the German market, with the swastika replaced by a black ‘X’.

D.C. City Museum To Close

Washington, D.C.’s City Museum, which was designed to showcase the history and heritage of the city’s neighborhoods, has announced that it will close its exhibit galleries next spring, less than two years since the museum opened to the public. The materials exhibited at the space will remain available for viewing by appointment, but the museum was forced to acknowledge that it had failed to develop any sort of audience for itself. “It [had] hoped to be a gateway for tourists whose interest in the city would be whetted by the materials there and who in turn would discover areas off the Mall by themselves.”

Canada’s Paltry Support For The Arts

Canada prides itself on its willingness to pay high taxes to support a considerable social safety net, but according to some in the arts industry, the country has a long way to go to approximate the level of arts support appropriate for a developed nation. “The Canada Council’s grants for all cultural organizations across the country… totals $142 million — about half the annual subsidy received by Berlin’s three opera houses.”

The Art of Living Dangerously

You don’t often think of art as a physically dangerous profession, but the fact is that artists of all stripes routinely work with a wide array of exceedingly hazardous machinery and chemicals, and many are not well-trained in coping with the dangers involved. From acids to paint fumes to turpentine, artists exposed to chemicals over time are at risk for a variety of long-term illnesses.

Reinventing Government, Or At Least Its Look

Architect Enric Miralles died in 2000, four years before his design for the new Scottish Parliament building was realized. And the reaction to the building from the general public has been widely negative. Still, says Christopher Hume, the complex “reverses the notion of the national legislature as a place that towers above the landscape, a beacon of state power. The Scottish Parliament reinvents the political system as a city within a city, a community set apart yet deeply connected to its surroundings.” And the public distaste for the project may well have much to do with the widespread antipathy towards the government itself.

What Good Is The Nobel?

Certainly, great writers deserve wide recognition, but does the Nobel Prize for Literature really come close to delivering such immortality? “Even the most erudite among us will have a hard time naming a single book by a great chunk of past laureates. How about that Sigrid Undset (1928)? Who could ever forget her, right? Or how about Par Lagerkvist (1951)? Or Jaroslav Seifert (1984)? Got those names tattooed on the brain, don’t you?” Even if you see the Nobel’s mission as bringing attention to unjustly neglected authors, the prize could be considered a failure in that regard as well.

Well, It Sells Books, Anyway

“Readers are eager to learn more about Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek, who was virtually unknown in the United States before the announcement that she had received the Nobel Prize for literature. Within 24 hours of Thursday’s citation by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, four of her books had jumped into the top 70 on Amazon.com’s list of best sellers.”

Charges Of Anti-Semitism In Frankfurt

“Publishers from Arab countries came to the Frankfurt Book Fair as the guests of honor, seeking understanding and tolerance as well as a greater appreciation of Arab culture and literature. But several publishers, as well as the book fair itself, have attracted criticism and charges of anti-Semitism for their display of at least a dozen books with strong anti-Zionist themes.”