Month: March 2014

by Jessie Roberts

Sanford Schwartz reviews the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit on the devotional works of Piero della Francesca, writing that his “figures can be strangely contemporary in their sexiness, and there is nothing dated about the way they encounter and judge one another, or appraise us”:

The most impressive work in the show is Madonna and Child with Two Angels…. With her downcast eyes, gentle demeanor, and small features set in a large, wide-nosed face, the Madonna is a choice example of a kind of woman, at once regal and rustic, that Piero created. Her quiet strength is reiterated in the work’s painted surface, which has an enamel-like density.

The angel in pink is an attentive young person, but the angel in blue (who is possibly the same model seen in a different way) is, along with the suggestion of a room behind him, transfixing.

Piero’s angels, whether attending a Nativity, a baptism, or a Madonna, can be guarded or genuinely sweet. They almost always have a distinct presence. The angel, or seraph, in blue here, whose arms are crossed before his chest and who might be blocking entry to the background space, would seem to be Piero’s last word on the subject. His baby-blue outfit is exquisitely touched with bits of white and gold, and his white-blond hair is set in little electrified ringlets. Kenneth Clark, in his book on the artist, called him “daunting,” and [curator Keith] Christiansen says he is “implacable.”

But surely his protectiveness has something sensual and brazen about it, and the glimpse we have of the bare space behind him, where all we see are shadows of window blinds and a patch of strong sunlight on the wall, is uncannily of our day and age. Am I alone in thinking that this part of the picture might be set in Palm Springs? The angel and the mysterious area he is linked with form almost a painting within the painting. It is kind of a gift within the larger gift that is Piero’s art.

(Image of Madonna and Child with Two Angels (ca. 1464–74?), also known as the “Senigallia Madonna,” via Wikimedia Commons)

by Matthew Sitman

Last week the Dish featured an interview with Peter Watson, author of The Age of Atheists, an intellectual history of European and American thought since Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is dead.” Emma Green accuses Watson of “intellectual snobbery” for believing that because “intellectual history trends toward non-belief, human history must, too.” Why she objects:

For one thing, it suggests that believers are inherently less thoughtful than non-believers. Watson tells stories of famous thinkers and artists who have struggled to reconcile themselves to a godless world. And these are helpful, in that they offer insight into how dynamic, creative people have tried to live. But that doesn’t mean the average believer’s search for meaning and understanding is any less rigorous or valuable—it just ends with a different conclusion: that God exists. Watson implies that full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism, and that’s just not true.

We know it’s not true because the vast majority of the world believes in God or some sort higher power. Worldwide, religious belief and observance vary widely by region. It’s tough to get a fully accurate global picture of faith in God or a “higher power,” but the metric of religiosity serves as a helpful proxy. Only 16 percent of the world’s population was not affiliated with a particular faith as of 2010, although many of these people believe in God or a spiritual deity, according to the Pew Research Center.

Green goes on to cite a litany of statistics, broken down by region and country, showing just how many people still believe in God, even in Europe. I find this a puzzling and unpersuasive retort.

To begin with, the distinction between “intellectual history” and “human history” is a strange one – isn’t the former part of the latter, and might it not portend the shape of things to come? Even more, large numbers of people across the globe still having a “religious affiliation” doesn’t mean such social facts will be durable, or indicate how strong such affiliations are, or predict how the ongoing churn of the modern world will impact areas outside the United States and Europe. That 30 percent of the religiously unaffiliated in France believe in God, a number Green trots out, seems irrelevant to me; one can imagine a survey respondent shrugging and saying, “Sure, I believe in God,” with that belief being of no practical import to that person. The Pew study she cites specifically notes that such numbers only deal with the self-identification of those surveyed, and “does not attempt to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how religious they are.”

Most of all, in her own summary of his book, Green describes Watson as implying that “full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism.” That means he’s making an argument that an array of forces in contemporary life – from modern science to capitalism to the overturning of traditional ideas about sex and morality – mitigate against religious belief, or at least make it more tenuous and difficult. In other words, there are reasons, intellectual and cultural, that make Watson predict an atheistic future. I’m not convinced Watson is right, but responding with rather weak survey data does nothing to address these deeper issues. That’s why John Gray’s review of The Age of Atheists (along with Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God) is so on point, getting at the true intellectual and moral alternatives at stake. Here’s why he praises Watson and Eagleton as the rare exceptions who take Nietzsche as the “central reference point” in their books:

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche is the most important figure in modern atheism, but you would never know it from reading the current crop of unbelievers, who rarely cite his arguments or even mention him. Today’s atheists cultivate a broad ignorance of the history of the ideas they fervently preach, and there are many reasons why they might prefer that the 19th-century German thinker be consigned to the memory hole. With few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals. Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together. Illustrating this fact, Nietzsche can only be an embarrassment for atheists today. Worse, they can’t help dimly suspecting they embody precisely the kind of pious freethinker that Nietzsche despised and mocked: loud in their mawkish reverence for humanity, and stridently censorious of any criticism of liberal hopes.

I want more discussions prompted by this line of thought, more atheists who have absorbed the full import of what rejecting Christianity really might entail, especially the faith’s deep, if not uncomplicated, impact on the West’s moral and political heritage. To the extent Watson’s book, along with Eagleton’s, contribute to this happening, I rather enthusiastically welcome them.

by Matthew Sitman

A couple months back, a Reddit user spotted the above pamphlet from a Christian organization, replete with garbled texts that make it seem like Jesus didn’t have time for the person he was messaging. The episode prompts Billy Kangas to lament evangelicals’ “groan worthy” attempts at making Christianity cool and relevant, arguing that when “the Church employs superficial symbols to communicate the Gospel, the Gospel can only take hold of people on a superficial level”:

A slogan-branded faith can’t communicate the depth of the mystery of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Perhaps this is part of the reasons there has been such a mass exodus of evangelical children after they graduate from youth group.

Historical Christian symbols, on the other hand, are primordial and polyvalent:

Flesh, blood, light, water, birth, death, eating, drinking, hunger and thirst. These symbols are not seeking to emulate the ephemeral but they encompass our entire existence. The symbols not only contain a wealth of meaning, they contain us. They dig deep into who we are as people in our deepest depths, in our hopes and fears. They are the building blocks of poetry, romance and drama. They have layers of meaning and depths that require a lifetime to divulge. They captivate rather than entertain. In many places these images have been lost, and I believe they need to be reclaimed.

One alternative he suggests Christians cultivate – “create space for silence”:

It’s no secret that we live in a noisy world. Part of the reason the creating of a pop-culture Jesus is so tempting is because many in the Church realize that they are competing for the attention of people who are constantly bombarded with images and sounds designed to overwhelm the senses. The fact that there is rarely a moment of stillness in our lives means that we rarely give images and symbols the space they need to settle deeply within us.

(Image via Imgur/theqwoppingdead)

by Katie Zavadski and Jessie Roberts

Nymphomaniac, the third installment of Lars von Trier’s Depression trilogy, opened in theaters this weekend (and is available on demand here):

The smut in question involves Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a woman who’s found lying beaten and bruised in an alleyway by nearby resident Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). Taken back to his apartment where she gets into bed, she recounts, over the course of both volumes, the erotic adventures of her life: her early days trawling train cars with her friend looking to see who can screw the most men (the prize: a bag of chocolates); her recurring encounters with Jerome ([Shia] LaBeouf), the man to whom she lost her virginity; her juggling numerous lovers a night; and her eventual frigidness and subsequent career as a criminal debt collector. Joe is a self-professed nymphomaniac, and her story is of alternately embracing and struggling against her “dirty, filthy lust.”

Will Leitch praises von Trier as “a beautiful lunatic”:

The movie is ostensibly a look at a lifelong nymphomaniac (played by Gainsbourg as an adult and newcomer Stacy Martin as a younger woman) telling the story of her life and her addiction to an academic named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) who finds her in the street. That’s not what it’s really about, though: It’s about von Trier, as always, exorcising his personal demons in plain view, in the most over-the-top, lunatic ways as possible. If you take a step back from it and realize that von Trier is essentially filming sex shows with Hollywood actors and having them do horrible things to each other and occasionally showing two-minute montages of flaccid penises, and he’s doing all this to let us know he feels lonely a lot and wonders if maybe he’s a bad person … it’s sort of the most insane thing in the world. Fortunately: He’s so, so good at it. Von Trier is an idiot, but, you know, the genius kind.

David Denby finds the film best when it’s “bookish and artificial”:

Von Trier links his hungry woman to philosophical ideas, mathematics, digressions of all sorts. Sex, it turns out, is meaningless without interpretation. The character has only one way of experiencing her life; the director has many ways of telling it. He gives us a catalogue of male members belonging to Joe’s lovers, and, in medical-textbook mode, drawings and photographs of female genitalia. However profane, “Nymphomaniac” is a modern variant of illustrated seventeenth-century books of miscellaneous erudition, like “Angler” or Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and of such eighteenth-century libertine texts as the Marquis d’Argens’s “Thérèse Philosophe”—a volume in which the sexual “education” of the heroine gets interrupted by discourses on the truth of philosophical materialism and the falsity of religion.

But Eric Sasson isn’t impressed:

I suspect that von Trier, like many of his European counterparts, views American sexual mores as fairly puritanical. And yet there’s something awfully retrograde about a film which offers us a nymphomaniac only to have a man defend her. For all the talk of Nymphomaniac being a “shocking” film from a “radical” director, von Trier’s depictions of a woman incapable of enjoying sex and despising her sexuality are fairly conventional. A truly novel film would star a sexually adventurous woman, not devoid of love and compensating for her lack of it, not hating herself, but instead embracing her sexuality and feeling content with her decisions.

Lindy West isn’t sold either:

I’m not wholly certain that woman-as-sexually-compulsive-cypher is a thought experiment new enough or true enough to bother undertaking. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t love it and I wasn’t scandalized in the ways I expected (this much explicit sex becomes mundane—by design, I expect); Nymphomaniac just feels like a slightly tedious and under-justified art film. Like American Apparel Ad: The Movie—long on the male gaze and short on female humanity; long on self-importance and short on meaning.

Andrew O’Hehir is split:

I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece or a failure; it’s a thrilling, uproarious visual and intellectual journey that doesn’t always connect and surely will not please every viewer, but along the way breaks free of all established notions about what a respectable movie is and how it’s supposed to behave. Von Trier sometimes writes awkward lines of dialogue for Joe, where she speaks all too obviously for his political or philosophical views. He also creates episodes of brilliant verbal repartee, ludicrous slapstick comedy and piercing emotional power, often overlapping. Arguably “Nymphomaniac” has way too much sex, but isn’t that the point? The most intimate, most transcendent and most liberating of human experiences is also a commodity, an unquenchable cultural obsession and an incurable addiction.

by Jessie Roberts

Wayne Curtis investigates whether drinking can make you funnier. He looks to an experiment by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, authors of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny:

The instructions to the subjects were straightforward: Come up with a gag. Have a drink. Repeat. After each round, the subjects [all from the creative team at Grey New York, an advertising firm] were asked to rate their drunkenness on a seven-point scale ranging from “sober” to “shit-faced.” (McGraw admits that his study “will never make its way into a peer-reviewed journal.”) They were also asked to rate their own jokes, on a scale of “slightly amusing” to “hilarious.” The jokes were later judged independently by a sober online panel.

The experiment was designed in part to test McGraw’s “benign violation” theory of humor, one in a long line of attempts to offer a universal explanation of what circumstances make us laugh. McGraw theorizes that humor arises when something “wrong, unsettling, or threatening” overlaps with a safe, nonthreatening context. So somebody falling down the stairs (violation) is funny, but only if the person lands unhurt (benign). Slapping is funny; stabbing is not. A faux-clueless Sarah Silverman saying racist things is funny; a drunk and hostile Mel Gibson is not. Each gag the Grey New York folks created was to take the form of a Venn diagram illustrating benign violation. Among the early contributions were two circles labeled “Grandpa” and “Erection,” the overlap of which was deemed “funny.”

The results?

“Drinking reduces inhibition,” McGraw says. “But it opens the door to failure, with failure likely to be on the side of going too far.” In the end, only three of the ad folks lasted for five stiff drinks at the Hurricane Club before they decided to call it quits. Among the final gags was a Venn diagram with “cancer” in one circle and “unpoppable pimple” in the other. The creator rated it hysterical. The online panel, not so much. “As people became more intoxicated, they thought they were funnier, but a sober audience didn’t see it that way,” Warner notes.