Essays
On Satire in the Arts
Connections between the arts are particularly close in the genre of satire, which ranges freely through poetry, the visual cartoon, lampoon or caricature, serious painting and sculpture, photography, the novel, theater, film, opera, standup comedy, mime and, arguably, even music, dance, set design, computer games and architecture. Any... More »
Quantum Theory and the Arts
An increasing number of artists and poets are becoming interested in the perspectives that are afforded by current physics, in particular, quantum theory. The website http://quantumartandpoetry.blogspot.com/ is an example, as is the poetry of Ross Talarico and many others. David Bohm (with whom I once shared a memorable conversation... More »
A Defense of Virtuosity
Virtuosity in today’s art world presents a hard brief to argue insofar as it encompasses virtù, or excellence, which implies hierarchies of values, achievements and, at least in a narrow sense, persons. All of these are currently suspect if not, in the present parlance, downright transgressive. In some quarters, a craft tradition may... More »
The Singing School of the Humanities
In W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” the aged poet looks back at the world of his youthful creative muse and deplores its neglect of the “monuments of unageing intellect.” He turns his face then to his imagined destination, symbolized by the holy city of ancient Byzantium, where art is perfected and the soul in its tattered body of... More »