Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Something must be in the water: now New York magazine has run an article by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The numbers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on display on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum displays art from its permanent collection of painting and sculpture. Of these, fourteen are by women, or 3.5%. Counting artists rather than artworks, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obviously important factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for someone who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar:

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This Sunday, Wilkinson’s Auctioneers of Doncastle, England will sell a 17th century copy of a book that appears to be bound in human skin. Even odder, the binding appears to some to show a human face.

The book, A True And Perfect Relation Of The Whole Proceedings Against The Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet A Jesuit And His Confederates, describes the death of Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit who was executed in 1606 for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. According to The Guardian,

Garnet’s involvement in the plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament was controversial. He claimed he knew about the conspiracy but was not involved. Some scholars now believe that he was most likely trying to prevent the action against James I rather than conspiring against him.

Sid Wilkinson, the auctioneer, is a man who clearly knows the value of a little pre-auction publicity. He said, “It’s a little bit spooky because the front of the book looks like it has the face of a man on it, which is presumed to be the victim’s face.”

That last presumption seems odd until one learns that Garnet’s face was already the subject of English Catholic legend. (more…)

It appears that E.O. Wilson has given up on consilience:

So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faithbased religion.

In place of religion, Wilson puts forth something he calls “scientific humanism”:

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

On its face, nothing could be more unobjectionable. (more…)

Michael Frumin over at Frumination has posted a scan of a poster for Norman Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign. Mailer was never one to underestimate the appeal of chauvinism, and his poster’s headline played straight to the hearts of his NYC-or-die audience (hi, Mike!):

The poster’s design is an early forerunner of the cartoon business maps that seem so popular these days, though Mailer’s map has this odd feature: it makes the five boroughs look like a squat version of Europe, with Staten Island occupying the Iberian peninsula, Brooklyn holding France, Breezy Point looking like a deflated Italy, and Manhattan looming as an oversize Scandinavia:

There’s also this gem:

Visit Frumination to see the full poster in all its glory.

1/ Gustave Doré’s illustration of Paradiso XXXI*:

2/ From An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” Garrett Lisi’s proposed model of the universe, which is based on the E8 geometry**:

 
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Wendy Doniger, circa On the Road.

Wendy Doniger makes a cameo in a Time article about Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Youth Without Youth:

One friend who sent Coppola encouraging notes on his Megalopolis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were students at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the ’50s. (Coppola has optioned the book.) He flew his private plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a University of Chicago professor of Hinduism and comparative mythology, and bring her back to Napa to discuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola’s cooking, they talked about his career. “He was stuck,” says Doniger. “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and therefore he didn’t have to do what anybody else said, and that paralyzed him. He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”

Hoping to help him with some of the themes he was struggling with on Megalopolis, Doniger gave Coppola some of Eliade’s works, including Youth Without Youth. (more…)

Filed under Movies/TV + Propaganda on November 21, 2007
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