Why is it so hard for academics to write for a general audience about something as omnipresent and so appealing as visual art? I had planned to write an essay about a recent book on an American artist, a woman whose paintings have long deserved more attention than they’ve gotten, but I was so dismayedContinue reading “Who Cares If You Look?”
Tag Archives: universalism
Death and the Historian
Great historical writing paints vivid pictures, but also draws meaningful conclusions from those images. The dullest historical writing sinks into a heavy mass of abstraction: representative individuals are molded by the forces of their times, like so many pieces of cheap pottery made from the same thin mixture poured into a mold. Jules Michelet’s styleContinue reading “Death and the Historian”