Day: September 19, 2007

Brooklyn Book Festival was great fun. Fantastic turnout too.

Friend of mine e-mailed me the NY Times article that May May Chinese Gourmet Bakery is closing by the end of the month.

Judge Mukasey nominated for US Attorney General. Notably, Judge Mukasey was the graduation speaker when I graduated from Alma Mater Law School. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick did an interesting analysis on the right wing’s – umm – concern about Judge Mukasey:

So there you have it: Some conservatives object to Mukasey because he’s an outsider (read: independent), others because he’s not a pro-life judicial activist (read: independent), and still others because he is respected by some liberals (read: independent). As criticisms go, these objections say more about the critics than about Mukasey. Except they suggest that he may not be the worst choice to restore independence to the Justice Department. Regardless of whether he’ll help Congress ferret out where the bodies are buried there, at least he does not appear likely to grab a shovel and start digging deeper. [….]

[Plus, Judge Mukasey’s decision in the Padilla case] suggests that at the very least Judge Mukasey understands the value of a lawyer. And if he grasped so well why Padilla needed one, he can surely appreciate why now, more than ever, the country needs one, too.

My undergraduate Alma Mater’s school newspaper’s all excited that Judge Mukasey is an alumnus AND an editorial page editor of the school newspaper back in the day.

A new exhibit on Rembrandt at the Met – however, it seems to be more about the historical view of who owned what of Rembrandt’s work. NY Times’ Holland Carter writes:

For “The Age of Rembrandt” it has come up with a theme, and a perfect one for our time: money.

The work has been sorted not by artists or dates, but by the names and dates of the collectors who bought and gave the paintings to the museum. In this arrangement the history of Dutch “Golden Age” art begins in the American Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when the Met first opened its doors. The exhibition’s stars are not Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals, but J. P. Morgan, Collis P. Huntington, William K. Vanderbilt and Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer. [….]

The arrangement has some advantages. It gives a good sense of the overall “look” of Dutch painting: an art that can glow like gold syrup but is mostly the color of sauces and gravies. We get a realistic sense of the crazy-quilt mix of portraiture, landscape, still life and history painting that simmered together in the 17th-century pot. We also gain quick perspective on relative talent. To see Rembrandt next to Bartholomeus Breenbergh or Jacob Duck is to know in a flash who was ahead of the curve, and why.

But the show’s primary theme — Dutch art seen through American money and taste, and coincidentally the wonderfulness of the Met — is a limiting gambit. That story begins in the first gallery, labeled “The 1871 Purchase,” which revisits, in highly edited form, the museum’s inaugural exhibition. After the Civil War, as the country was fast becoming an international power, Americans decided they needed a major art museum, and the Met was founded in 1870. [….]

Rarely in these galleries did it occur to me to ask who once owned these pictures, or when the Met acquired them, or their dollar value. Instead I wanted information about what they depicted, about the paint they were made of and about the hands that brushed the paint on. I wanted to know what the artists — Rembrandt, say — might have been thinking. And I wanted to know what 17th-century viewers saw when they looked at these pictures, what these pictures said in their time. I wanted, in short, a different show, one with exactly the same art but with less institutional ego and more art-historical light.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that lately – these exhibits about the collectors. Not to knock the collectors, who I’m sure were great humanists and fantastic captains of industry who had oodles of money and hearts of philanthropists – but in the end, I don’t care about them – I care about the art and the history. I guess it is a question of who controls what – if it weren’t for these buyers or millionaires who commissioned art in the 19th Century, would we have preserved art or created art since the 19th Century? We wouldn’t have had the Met, obviously. Ok, maybe the development of art history is a lot more complicated than that and maybe, my odd thoughts might explain why I didn’t major in art history in college.

A look at trends in tea – with a reference to Pu-Erh, which is one of those teas that I probably do drink too much.

Ah, and by Thursday, I’ll be far, far away…