Deep down I know—I simply know—that the American people love me. After all that I’ve done for them and given to them, how can they help but love me? And I know that it is only a very small percentage that have given up, who have lost faith.

Who said it? (Answer after the jump.)

A) George W. Bush
B) Hillary Clinton
C) Lyndon Johnson
D) Britney Spears

(more…)

Once more, from J R:

those son of a bitches who still think winning’s what it’s all about give them a string of high p e ratios and a rising market it’s all free enterprise all they howl about’s government restraints interference double taxation, all free enterprise till they wreck the whole thing they’re the first ones up there with a tin cup whining for the government to bail them out with a loan guarantee so they can do it all over again…

From William Gaddis’s JR:

Yes no but of course in terms of the ongoing situation down to the bank the inferences of a story like this one are ahm…Yes the suggestion of ahm, of an overabundance of home improvement loans and mortgage risks calculated to undermine confidence in terms of the ahm, investment confidence on the part of investors that is to say which is hardly fair to…and yes well in the case of home mortgages like this which are insured by County Land and Title there should be no…no yes I know the premiums are high but of course the element of ahm…Yes no I wasn’t going to say risk of course but…

Courbet is the new Duchamp. We’re used to genealogies that trace the lineage of contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst back through Warhol to Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. But Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, in her new book The Most Arrogant Man in France, pushes that pedigree back two generations, to Gustave Courbet.

According to Chu, Courbet (who does his best Jack Sparrow in “Desperate Man”)

opened a perspective on a new culture in the art world in which the public’s approval was valued higher than that of the government or an official élite, and money was seen as a more legitimate gauge of artistic success than official honors….[He] demonstrated that controversy need not be harmful to an artist’s reputation, as it was just another form of publicity.

Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing the book for The New Yorker, points to present circumstances that shape the method and thesis of Chu’s book:

The book advances a present tendency among art historians to reconsider the Old Masters with reference to the art worlds that allocated wealth and prestige in their times. This emphasis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and biennials, roaring auctions, around-the-clock Web journals and blogs—exalt the grandstand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney.

Schjeldahl’s point is ratified by a quick glance back at another New Yorker article about Courbet, this one written in 1940 by Robert M. Coates. Coates says of Courbet, “it would be hard indeed to think of a painter of his general period who had a more powerful influence on the generation of the Impressionists.” When he speaks of Courbet as a “revolutionary,” he awards the term for the painter’s use of “direct observation, homely subjects, and ‘realistic’ portrayal.”

Chu’s book and Schjeldahl’s article (which includes the exquisitely absurd “reërection,” a construction only the New Yorker could pull off—or want to) present a resolutely different picture of Courbet than the one proposed by Michael Fried. For Fried, Courbet’s importance has to do with his reconfiguration of the field of representation. (Though all three agree that Courbet is proto-modern, if not quite modern himself, none agree on what that means.)

A stifling nostalgia suffuses Schjeldahl’s article, to the point that it can seem claustrophobic even to those who, like the critic, don’t care for “the grandstand plays” of Koons or Hirst. But still it’s hard not to be swayed by his closing paragraph, in which he issues a proclamation worthy of Gaddis’s Wyatt Gwyon—

[Baudelaire] saw that the fate of true artists would henceforth involve forms of internal exile, even in bright circles of cosmopolitan fame.

—before returning to his grumpy elegy:

That sort of compunction was lost on Courbet, and it is hard to imagine, let alone detect, in the conduct of the art world today….Dirty laundry has become the emperor’s new clothes.