Oscar Wilde the would-be saint and Oscar Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other… By Joseph Pearce|Liberal Learning, Literature. Oscar Wilde’s life is more scandalous today than it was during the Decadence of the 1890s. In fact, it is so scandalous that a current exhibition of his life and legacy… Read More Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Secret
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and in some degree Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the binary… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and in some degree Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the binary… Read More Rehabilitating Rockwell from the Culture of Kitsch
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
“In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell’s book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty ‘vacations’ that are but interruptions in work. He… Read More Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire
Authority and Freedom:A Defense of the Arts–by jed perlknopf, 176 pages, $20. First Things Magazine In the slim volume Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, the longtime New Republic and New York Review of Books art writer Jed Perl assigns himself such a gigantic challenge that I found myself blushing on his behalf… Read More Great Art Can Be Propaganda | First Things
Andy Warhol’s self portrait (not the first photo seen here, but the purple thing…) sold some years back for $32.6 million. But that’s mere chump change; the highest price I’d seen fetched for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. Imagine. I mean, the pop painter, printmaker and so-called… Read More Perception as Value. Andy Warhol.
“Jesus is a garlic-eating, stinking, little yellow, greasy fascist bastard, Catholic Spaniard.” —John Lennon, Spaniard in the Works, June 1965 Remaking the World. Dionysianism made flesh. I used to think The Beatles more or less existed alongside the 1960’s counterculture, more than they ever led it (they didn’t play at Woodstock after all). But the… Read More The Beatles and Where We Are.
“What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame [Paris] would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter’s in Rome. It’s a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.’ … Under new proposals confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be scrapped for trendy art murals,… Read More Notre Dame reportedly ‘being turned into woke theme park’
The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg by Bruce Bawer, The New Criterion On Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 1985. I’m so lucky to be nutty.—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949) The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 [1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It is titled “In Society,” and it dates from 1947, when the… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon Perhaps it is one of those curious fearful symmetries that the words of John Lennon quoted above are found in the Beatles’ album titled ‘Revolver’…and that he was finally gunned down, shot multiple times in the back by a “fan”. I grew up reading Kerouac… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing
Catholic Critique 