Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture How Dorothea Lange invented the American West
There is no American West without state-funded photography. I don’t mean the Old West of cowboys and wagon trails but the West as it shows up in today’s discourse: a dead heartland preserved in sepia like a body in formaldehyde, a place both pre-industrial and past its prime, whose glory can only be felt as…
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Culture In this shattering film, the faustian allure of Nazism
When you study the long, infuriating, and infuriatingly long careers of the Third Reich’s major creative figures, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the public doesn’t give a shit about art. The propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl were invaluable weapons for the Nazi Party of the 1930s, but after the war she was…
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Art Did Walter Benjamin understand his prize possession — Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus?
Of all the icons to emerge from the left-wing politics of the last century, it is among the most talked about and the least looked at, the most mystical and the most frightening. It is probably the unlikeliest and also, by a country mile, the weirdest. Its caretakers make up the most exclusive club in…
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Culture In A Classic English Comedy, A Sly Parable About Anti-Semitism
“England,” wrote George Orwell, “is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly […] A family with the wrong members in control — that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.” That was in…
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Culture Edith Halpert — Come Back, The Art World Needs You More Than Ever!
“Good taste,” the critic Dave Hickey wrote in “Air Guitar,” “is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Yes and no. Billionaires buy art and inflate artists’ reputations, but usually they need to be reminded of what they like before they cut the check. The key figure in the process of canonizing art is not the…
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Film & TV The Robert Moses Fetish Of Edward Norton
“Motherless Brooklyn” is the “La La Land” of noir, a work of exacting, exhausting competence that tries to summon the spirit of midcentury Hollywood films by recreating them shot for shot and trope for trope. Some things you’ll find in it: raincoated sleuths silhouetted by streetlights; garish neon mirrored in murky puddles; a pinstriped powerbroker…
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Culture The Classical Trouble With Daniel Mendelsohn
Ecstasy and Terror By Daniel Mendelsohn New York Review Books, 378 pp, $18.95 With Daniel Mendelsohn, there’s always a classics analogy. Magazine editors, let us say, then, are like Roman emperors: the longer their reigns, the more frantic the reshuffling of power that follows. Robert B. Silvers edited The New York Review of Books from…
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Culture In Chantal Akerman’s Final Work, Two Tragedies Come Into Focus
My Mother Laughs By Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp The Song Cave, $20, 175 pages “What would keep me alive.” It sounds like a question, but it’s not. Even if the punctuation mark were different, no answer would come into focus. It’s not quite a statement, either. The narrator, a woman in her sixties,…
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