Remembering Peter Schjeldahl: Peter Schjeldahl, head art critic at The New Yorker, passed away last Friday at age 80. Born in North Dakota and raised in Minnesota, Schjeldahl moved to New York City in the sixties to write poetry and became an art critic along the way, writing for ARTnews, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. A touching memorial by David Remnick in The New Yorker describes how Schjeldahl’s art criticism remained inflected by his poetry: “epigrammatic, nothing wasted.” The critic remained a staple of the art world until his last day, and his aesthete’s perspective and poet’s voice will continue to move readers for years to come.
Christopher Lasch’s right-wing revival: Republican Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters recently came under fire for recommending paleoconservative and white nationalist author Samuel Francis’s Beautiful Losers in a now-deleted Instagram story. But in the same post, Masters also praised a book that may well have more influence on the American right today: Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites. Lasch, who synthesized a leftist critique of capitalism with cultural conservatism, has received renewed attention among the populist right. But this warrants skepticism. Lasch argued that capitalism not only erodes the independence and competence of communities, but also reduces individuals’ senses of self. However, it seems that many conservatives who cite him as an influence remain content to reproduce his critique of the irresponsible elite that arose alongside modern-day capitalism without pursuing the leftist economic project his diagnosis implies.
Monochrome Multitudes at the Smart Museum of Art: At the University of Chicago’s campus art museum, the one and the many collide: New exhibition Monochrome Multitudes approaches the quintessential artistic genre of the monochrome, in which each piece is only one color, from varying perspectives. The show includes classic monochrome artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Yves Klein alongside single-color works spanning centuries and cultures. This ambitious breadth includes the show’s written and audio guides, with an audio clip featuring a college football player and a wall label by University president Paul Alivisatos. And, of course, keep an eye out for wall labels by our editor Suzanna Murawski on works by Jules Olitski and Ted Stamm. The exhibition will be on display through January 8, 2023.
Biden’s cancer moonshot: Last month, on the sixtieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s moonshot speech, President Joe Biden declared an ambitious goal of his own: cutting deaths from cancer in half over the next twenty-five years. Oddly, the reaction from the media and the public has been a striking silence. While Kennedy’s announcement aroused tremendous initiative and excitement in the 1960s, Biden’s has fallen on deaf or harshly critical ears. It’s fair to criticize the policy’s specifics, but this state of affairs raises crucial questions. Have we become addicted to the banal, short-term fights that define modern American politics? Will we not jump on a chance to unify even if it walks up to us and introduces itself? Can a unifying, ambitious political vision be executed without the past’s Cold-War tribalism or today’s hyperpartisanship?