The artist and critic Fairfield Porter once suggested that painters have an easier time of it than sculptors. He contended in a 1960 essay that it “requires much more imagination to be a sculptor than to be a painter” and that “a sculptor’s activity is consequently more serious.”
Porter fails to back up this blunt Read More
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. Viking, 576 pages, $29.95.
In the summer of 2003, when shells killed 20 people sheltering in the U.S. Embassy compound in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city, and fighting so bad it was called World Wars I, II and III had been raging for weeks, Liberians Read More
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island , the first U.S. exhibition devoted to the art of (as its homelanders refer to it) Rapa Nui. It’s a gem of a show, and by “gem” I refer both to the exhibition’s quality and size. Occupying an inauspicious nook of the Read More
