“The genuine artist is never ‘true to life.’ He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life. The poet sees with a poignancy and penetration that is altogether unique. What matters is that the poet must be true to his art and not ‘true to life,’ whether his art is simple or complex, violent or subdued. Emotion is thought to lie at the center of aesthetic experience. That, however, is not how the matter appears to me. If I am right, the essence of art is insight of a special kind into reality. But such insight is bound to be accompanied by remarkable emotions. A poem would be nothing without some meaning. The truth is that meaning is an awareness and a communication. But it is no ordinary awareness, no ordinary communication.
Novelty must be inspired. But there must be novelty. This crisis is most evident in religion. The theologians whose thought is most astir today do make articulate a supreme need, and one that has now become also an imperative, as their urgency shows, the need to infuse into the ages of enlightenment an awareness of reality adequate to their achievements and such as will not be attenuated by them. There is one most welcome and authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered. It is here that the affinity of art and religion is most evident today. Both have to mediate for us a reality not ourselves. This is what the poet does. The supreme virtue here is humility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts,” – Wallace Stevens, “On Poetic Truth,” in Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose.
Eric Dean Wilson muses about the varied history and uses of diptychs, the art that consists of two panels, usually joined by a hinge. He notes that the diptych was, for the ancient Romans, often used as “a ceremonial notebook used to track and record consular appointments by year” – but that Christians made it their own, finding the form well-suited for expressing the nuances of their faith:
The rise of iconography in the Christian church evolved the diptych into a narrative form. A scene—most often the birth, crucifixion, or resurrection of Jesus—was painted on one panel and hinged to another. Larger diptychs could be slightly closed to stand on the altar of a side chapel; smaller diptychs could be shut and carried, the paintings inside protected by the decorative casing. Narrating complex stories from the New Testament to illiterate Christians, these diptychs worked much like stained glass windows would in later cathedrals.
The narratives of the New Testament are filled with paradox—Christ is both fully human and fully divine, both dead and alive—and the diptych offered reconciliation. Two stories, set parallel and given equal weight, merge into one, and the hinge offers a moment to chart similarities and differences. The iconic diptychs also became holy objects themselves, capable of healing and calming the mind. A meditation on the two panels could bring one closer to God.
(Image: A 17th-century diptych-style icon, featuring, from left to right: Archangel Michael, Theotokos, John the Baptist, and Archangel Gabriel, via Wikimedia Commons)
Laura Cok, whose mother is a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of America, describes how her own atheism is now a family taboo:
[O]f course she has not asked [if I am an atheist], because she does not want to know. Every week she prays, researches her commentaries, procrastinates on writing her sermon, colour codes it and prints it out in increasingly large font. She visits elderly women and eats their cookies and counsels young couples who want to get married. She baptizes babies and takes terrified women to shelters and sits in family court and sees the best and the worst of people, every day. Her whole life has been bringing her to this; it is all she wanted, and faith is all she wanted for me. When I rejected it, I rejected everything: her dreams for my life, all the hope and the grace that she sees.
When she was young, she wanted more than anything to be a minister in a world that would not let her in. And all I have wanted is to be let out. I no longer worry about going to hell, but the same is not true for everyone in this world that I hold dear. To them, I am a lost soul. They may pray for me but it will never help, and I cannot grant them the comfort of an afterlife. My grandparents, my cousins, my best friends: they all believe that I am damned. That is a terrible burden to lay at their feet. And so for so long I have pretended, and not spoken of this, and let my grandfather die believing that my soul was safe. But it goes on for so long, and I am a tired and faithless child, and they will have to let me go.
The Missing Scarf, the above short film by Eoin Duffy, is “a virtuosic piece of motion design, character animation, and above all, storytelling”:
The Missing Scarf becomes an analytical examination of the aftermath of loss. How do we deal with fear of the unknown, of failure, and rejection? Moreover, how do we process? What’s the point of living if we’re all just molecules floating through the universe, slowly counting the clock ticks until our eventual demise? The existential concepts may not be new, but Eoin’s approach to the subject certainly is. Using the tone of a child’s storybook reading, the film lulls the viewer into a certain sense of complacency. So, when the more philosophical topics hit, the change in dynamic is a punch in the metaphorical nards. It’s cute, dark, and even a little bit cheeky.
As for the narration, well, if the voice sounds familiar that’s because it belongs to none other than George Takei. In his search for famous vocals, Duffy presented Takei with polished animatics of the film. The actor loved the look and story and agreed to take part in the project.
Alva Noë recalls the time, driving in California, he went to pay a toll, only to discover the vehicle ahead of her had taken care of it – in his words, he was “the target of a random act of kindness.” What he learned about such acts when he tried to do the same:
Some weeks later, I was driving with my boys and we approached the toll plaza at the Bay Bridge. Cars changed lines repeatedly, cutting each other off, jockeying for position. I formed an intention: If that mini-van behind us — a man and woman up front, two kids in the back — stays put in my lane, I’ll pay their toll. I explained my plan to the kids. They were confused. Why would I do that? I explained what had happened to me. They were excited.
That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake sharing my plan with the kids. I’d given myself an audience and that made my intentions somehow less pure. As if I were doing it so that I could feel good, or we could feel good, or, even worse, so that I’d look good in the eyes of my kids. What’s more, now the kids couldn’t stop looking back. After we went through — I paid the mini-van’s toll as well as my own — my kids kept looking to the car to see their reaction to what we’d done.
So, now a toll was being exacted from the other vehicle after all. My kids and I were letting them know that we had done them a random act of kindness and we expected or hoped for or waited on their reaction. We took pleasure not in doing them a good turn but in, in effect, getting thanked for it. We intruded on their privacy.
Martin Gayford asserts the painter’s style “changed to one of profound originality” in the early 1650s – and holds up “The Jewish Bride” as an example of that mature brilliance:
There are two figures in the painting, a man and a woman; he is embracing her in the tenderest of ways. ‘What an intimate, what an infinitely sympathetic painting!’ as Vincent [van Gogh] wrote to his brother Theo in 1885. It scarcely mattered that he, like all his contemporaries, was under a misapprehension about the subject.
That familiar title, ‘The Jewish Bride’, was not Rembrandt’s; it first appeared in 1835, and with it a mistaken view that the scene was a contemporary one from the artist’s lifetime. In reality, as Jonathan Bikker, the research curator at the Rijksmuseum, pointed out to me as we stood in front of the picture, the story he was painting was a Biblical one, that of Isaac and Rebecca (or Rebekah). The two were married, but such was Rebecca’s beauty that Isaac — a refugee in Philistine lands — feared it would lead a Philistine to kill him, and marry her himself. Cautiously, he pretended that he was her brother. One day, however, ‘Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.’ This is the incident that Rembrandt painted. But, characteristically, he omitted the figure of King Abimelech.
Consequently, we, rather than the Philistine king, become the witnesses of the couple, and what we see is the emotion between them. This is one of the most modern things about Rembrandt. ‘You don’t have to know all about the subject of the painting,’ Gregor Weber observed. ‘You feel straight away that it is about intimacy.’
In March, Scott – a former International Space Station commander and veteran of the space program – departs on a one-year mission to the ISS, alongside Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko. Meanwhile, Mark, who is now retired from NASA, will stay on the ground, at home in Arizona. A group of researchers will track Scott in space, and his genetic doppelgänger on Earth, to get a fuller picture of the myriad effects of long-term space travel – crucial information if we hope to send astronauts to Mars and beyond.
The twins study brings NASA into a new realm of science, what Craig Kundrot, at NASA’s human research program, calls “21st-century omics research.” This includes genomics (the study of the Kellys’ DNA), metabolomics (their metabolism), microbiomics (the bacteria in their guts), and more. “The twin study is really a baptism for us,” says Kundrot, who’s based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But there’s another reason NASA has largely avoided this type of research, until now. “NASA has never been in the genetics game for one simple reason,” says Fred Turek of Northwestern University, one of the investigators on the twin study. “Astronauts have only one fear in life: that some scientist is going to find something wrong with them.”
Samantha Allen takes stock of Viagra’s legacy. While its impact on older men’s sex lives hasn’t quite measured up to the hype, its impact on dick-related comedy has been outstanding:
According to The Wall Street Journal, it took Jay Leno only four years to make nearly 1,000 Viagra jokes on The Tonight Show. In 2008, too, TIME published a compilation of 10 years of Viagra jokes. Saturday Night Live, in particular, has a long history of constantly returning to the well of Viagra humor with parody commercials and a particularly memorable installment of the popular Ladies Man sketch. If you were in the business of telling jokes in the 2000s, Viagra and erectile dysfunction were the gifts that kept on giving. And 15 years later, comedians are still keeping it up. Just last week, for instance, Conan O’Brien compared the iPhone 6’s issues with bending to erectile dysfunction in a mock advertisement.
To an extent, Pfizer’s advertising has embraced the humor of Viagra throughout the drug’s history. While Pfizer tends to play it straight in the U.S. with straightforward advertisements that show men involved a variety of manly tasks like surfing, sailing, and commercial fishing, their international approach has been much more light-hearted. In South Africa, for example, Pfizer promoted the drug with a playfully suggestive image of a milkman re-buttoning his jacket as he leaves an estate. A Saudi Arabian television ad for Viagra shows a man struggling to push a straw through the lid of his beverage. And a Canadian spot promotes Viagra as a way for men to get out of tedious household responsibilities like helping out with the redecorating.
Christopher Orr sets up the story of David Fincher’s new movie, an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel:
Like the book, the film tells its story, for a while at least, in the form of two interwoven strands of he-said/she-said: the narrative DNA of an unraveling marriage. We watch as Nick [Dunne (played by Ben Affleck)], on the morning of the couple’s fifth anniversary, goes to the bar he co-manages with his sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), for a far-too-early whiskey. When he returns to his home—a lifeless McMansion in depressed North Carthage, Missouri—his wife [Amy (Rosamund Pike)] is missing, and there are signs of a struggle. He calls the police, and two detectives (Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit) arrive to conduct an investigation that leads, inevitably, to Nick himself. Does he seem insufficiently concerned about Amy’s disappearance? How can he be so clueless regarding her daily life? Why doesn’t he even know her blood type? And what’s with that shit-eating grin he seems incapable of suppressing?
Some people said that this was a film that only Mr Fincher, the director of “Seven” and “The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo”, could have done well. They were right. Mr Fincher has managed to pace this perfectly, showcasing snippets of scenes before ruthlessly cutting away and moving on to the next.
“Gone Girl” isn’t Mr Fincher’s best film. It suffers from too many of the same flaws as the novel: a tendency towards absurdity that undermines its granular observations about the reality of domestic life. And yet this could be Mr Fincher’s most exemplary film. He is known for his cold, clever precision, and “Gone Girl” is ever so cold, ever so precise. It is drowning in muted colours and a sense of inevitability. Like Ms Flynn’s novel, its cleverness lies in the fact that it is so raw and yet so empty at the same time. This may not be the perfect film—but it is a perfect adaptation.
In a review that merits a mild spoiler alert, Kevin Fallon goes wild over Affleck’s performance:
[W]hen Gone Girl’s famous mid-point twist arrives, Affleck’s performance zings with sudden energy as Nick transforms from douchebag to Erin Brockovich, diving into the case of Amy’s disappearance (of sorts) himself. Critics often describe the kind of barreling, madcap work Affleck does in the second and third acts of the film as a “wild ride,” and, truly, the one Affleck goes on could not be more entertaining to watch. By the time he lands the line reading of the year—“you fucking bitch”—at the film’s climax, you’re a fool not to erupt in applause: As it turns out, Ben Affleck, star of Gigli and survivor of Bennifer, is a fantastic actor.
Andrew O’Hehir finds Affleck’s “bland characterization … a weak spot,” but heaps praise on Pike’s acting:
Pike may well get an Oscar nomination for this performance, and I daresay she deserves it, but not because Amy resembles a human being. She resembles about six of them, as if Amy were a female archetype splintered into overlapping and competing personalities by the pressure of trying to live up to her beauty, her blondness, her wealth and her “love affair” with the “perfect guy.”
An unimpressed Ryan Gilbey, however, suggests that Fincher – who used to direct commercials and music videos – here “is falling back on his skills as an adman.” Meanwhile, David Thomson sneers that the film “is not just a stepping stone in Fincher’s absorption in misanthropy, but a willful plunging off its cliff”:
Fincher is fifty-two, and one longs to see him reaching out for more than cruelty. Yet, somehow character and intelligence have not emerged. You may know a film is Fincher from the snap of his film-making and its remorseless, depressive view of human situations, but there is no sense of these criminal melodramas amounting to a portrait of the world as a whole. Gone Girl promises to be an unnerving portrait of marriage as ruin, but then it opts for madness and implausibility. Can he find himself and keep working within the mainstream? I’m not sure, and I remain uncertain as to whether he is simply a glittering craftsman in compelling but sometimes self-satisfied pessimism.
Matt Zoller Seitz agrees that “the director is a misanthrope, no question,” but maintains that “misanthropes can be entertaining”:
The most intriguing thing about “Gone Girl” is how droll it is. For long stretches, Fincher’s gliding widescreen camerawork, immaculate compositions and sickly, desaturated colors fuse with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s creepy-optimistic synthesized score to create a perverse big-screen version of one of those TV comedies built around a pathetically unobservant lump of a husband and his hypercontrolling, slightly shrewish wife. For most of its running time, “Gone Girl” is “Everybody Loves Accused Wife-Murderer Raymond,” sprinkled with colorful-verging-on-wacky supporting players (including Tyler Perry as a Johnnie Cochran-like defense attorney and Neil Patrick Harris as a former flame of Amy’s who’s still obsessed with her). Then it takes a right turn, and a left turn, and flips upside down.
Dana Stevens questions how the film handles gender roles:
There’s no way to wade into the stickier wickets of Fincher and Flynn’s gender politics without giving away large chunks of the mystery plot. But there are moments, several of them, in which Nick’s unsavory feelings about his complicated missing wife and about women in general—feelings that might be charitably summed up as “bitches be crazy”—seem indistinguishable from the filmmaker’s own vision of Amy as a black hole of ineffable female needs, moods, and desires. Does this make Gone Girl a sexist movie? A movie about sexism that isn’t fully in control of its tone? Or some unholy hybrid of the two?
David Edelstein also wonders about how the film represents women:
I can’t leave Gone Girl without going back to its depiction of women, though here I risk the dreaded “spoiler.” (Stop reading if you wish.) The timing for a film that features instances of trumped-up sexual assaults could hardly be worse, and while it’s nowhere near as extreme as Fatal Attraction—which discredited feminist shibboleths by putting them in the mouth of a psychopath—the movie, like the novel, plays to the stereotype of weak men entrapped by pretend-helpless women. The Spider Woman is, of course, a noir archetype, and I’m not prepared to renounce my affection for Double Indemnity and its ilk. But I can’t say those movies don’t have real-world consequences, and coming in the middle of mounting outrage over the pervasiveness of sexual abuse, I’d hate to see the likes of Rush Limbaugh buoyed by the film’s bloodcurdling specimen of a predatory slut. For the rest of us, it’s preferable to view Gone Girl as a profoundly cynical portrait of all sides of all relationships: First you’re blind to the truth of other people, then you see and wish you could go back to being blind. See it with your sweetie!
Alissa Wilkinson insists “this is not a movie about modern marriage at all”:
[I]t is about surfaces and images that we project to one another, but it’s a farce, a movie that takes our silliest ideas about what constitutes a marriage and slams them against the wall repeatedly till they go insane. There’s a lot that’s wrong with a lot of marriages, and plenty to criticize about how we approach marriage. But seriously: this movie does not take place in our universe, or at least, it stops being our universe when they walk through the door of their house. It is, if anything, about one truly messed-up marriage that is so messed up not because of ordinary human flaws, but something like psychosis, maybe.
“Gone Girl” is meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares? All I could think of was the verdict of Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.” Or, in the words of Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), Nick’s unflappable attorney: “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.”
Peter Schjeldahl scoffs at New Portraits, the new Richard Prince exhibit that consists of Instagram pictures printed onto canvas:
Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sincere abhorrence. My own was something like a wish to be dead—which, say what you want about it, is the surest defense against assaults of postmodernist attitude. Come to think of it, death provides an apt metaphor for the pictures: memento mori of perishing vanity. Another is celestial: a meteor shower of privacies being burnt to cinders in the atmosphere of publicity. They fall into contemporary fame—a sea that is a millimetre deep and horizon-wide.
You needn’t visit the show to absorb its lessons about the contagion of social networks. But there’s a bonus to viewing the images as material stock in trade, destined for collections in which they will afford chic shocks amid somewhat subtler embodiments of the human spirit. They add a layer of commercial potency to the insatiable itch—to know oneself as known—that has made Instagram a stupefying success.
But Jerry Saltz defends Prince’s “genius trolling”:
With these new works, the protests against him center on three things. First, he’s making money from these things, a lot of money, and given how easy they seem to be to make, that seems like theft, or at least a con; second, he’s using other people’s Instagram feeds without their permission; and most prevalently, he’s a lech for looking at and making art with pictures of young girls. Never mind that all these images shadow us everywhere now and already exist in a public uncopyrighted digital realm. And yes, he’s making money. About $40,000 a pop, to the best of my knowledge. And even though the thought of an artist raking it in at such rates when so many other artists — many of them as well known as he is — can barely get by and sell next to nothing makes me hate our current bifurcated top-versus-everyone-else system even more, the guy is a famous artist in his mid 60s. If anyone deserves it, he does.
As for him “stealing other people’s pictures,” my view of an artist using other people’s Instagram pics is no different than an artist using any other material. By now, we have to agree that images — even digital ones — are materials, and artists use materials to do what they do. Period. In my way of thinking, too many artists are too wed to woefully outmoded copyright notions – laws that go against them in almost every case. … Prince’s new portraits number among the new art burning through the last layers that separate the digital and physical realms. They portend a merging more momentous than we know.
And Rhett Jones appreciates what Prince brings to the images through his comments:
These comments appear to be mostly tongue in cheek, like “I remember this so well (tent emoji) glad we had the tent” under Kate Moss posing with her legs spread. The frequent use of emoji adds an extra graphic layer. The comments themselves create another level of participation in the work. If nothing else, you can’t say Prince didn’t add anything this time. His name’s right there. He’s saying something. …
Your average Instagram comment isn’t, “ah yes post-modern redux meets Warhol celebrity-bacchanal meets Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction flipped back on itself.” You say “I’ve never seen a tat like that.” Then you click like, because you like it, and sometimes that’s enough.
The exhibition runs through October 25th in New York City.
The Dish 
