“I Shall Exterminate Everything around me That Restricts Me from Being the Master,” George Grosz, 1921

(image scanned from the book that accompanies the show)

I went back to the Met yesterday to see the “Glitter and Doom” show before it closes. It is a stunning exhibit. David Cohen describes the period in which this work emerged:

The Weimar Republic was an interlude between German disasters. As the journalist Hans Sahl, who is quoted in the catalogue by historian Ian Buruma, put it: “Germany had lost a war and almost sleepwalked into a republic for which it wasn’t prepared. It was a time of great misery, with legless war veterans riding the sidewalks on rolling planks, with a nation that seemed to consist of nothing but beggars, whores, invalids and fatnecked speculators.”

The painters in this show took ghoulish delight in presenting such a cast of freaks. They also reveled in the extravagance, exoticism, and release of a racy, licentious city in their depiction of nighttime Berlin. In their own perverse way, in scathing portraits of generously thick-skinned patrons, they celebrated the achievements of a progressive bourgeoisie.

The style of artists like Dix and Christian Schad fused the vehemence and brutality of Expressionism with a medieval meticulousness. Neue Sachlichkeit [the New "Objectivity" or "Dispassion"] was a term coined by the Mannheim museum director, Gustav Hartlaub, to describe a tendency toward verisimilitude among artists who emerged from the twin shadows of Expressionism and the Great War. A neoclassical “return to order” was concurrently felt across Europe, particularly in France and Italy, but in Germany it took on a character and force of its own. Hartlaub identified two wings of the movement in Germany, roughly corresponding to political orientations. The right appealed to the consolations of the bucolic and the familiar. Meanwhile, the left, which Hartlaub championed and named “Verists,” used realism to confront and satirize a corrupt society.

The artists who fell under this Verist banner were diverse in style and attitude. George Grosz (who had Americanized his name from Georg Gross) was less steeped in tradition than, say, Dix or Schad. While he emulated Hogarth and Daumier, his harsh, explicitly leftist satires of the new republic employed a crudity and cruelty that were unmistakably modern. “I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master” (1921) is a grotesque portrayal of a gloating capitalist with a porcine nozzle and a cigar smoldering.

The significance of the show is best described by Roberta Smith in her review:

[T]hroughout this amazing show, we are looking into faces that are watching the world as it slides from one cataclysm to the next.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of people who have been living the good life for 60 years or maybe we are just too far removed and too insulated and too addicted to escapism, but I can’t get the thought out of my head that contemporary artists are unequal to the task of describing life in the early 21st century, as we slide “from one cataclysm to the next”…
On the other hand, having just seen “Glitter and Doom” for the second time, I was struck by Gawker’s “pinup series”:

In the blogosphere, everyone is under 50. Well, almost everybody:

According to a 2005 study by Perseus, a Web survey firm, less than half a percent of an estimated 53.4 million bloggers are 50 and older.

Dude, where’s my cohort?

This is entirely too sensible to get much traction in the current political climate, but if you’re interested in intellectually honest debate, read what Reihan Salam has to say.

It could both be true that Iran is a bad actor and that we shouldn’t take military action against Iran. The notion that the American public is so war-mad that troubling facts about the Iranian military will inevitably lead to an invasion strikes me as strange. I take it DeLong believes we should take reports from the Bush Administration and the Pentagon with a grain of salt. Somehow I think the American public agrees. This idea that the establishment media is obligated to take on a tutelary function, calmly and carefully editing the news in such a way as to calm the easily-enraged beast that is public opinion, strikes me as faintly … undemocratic.

Hear, hear. And illiberal. And incredibly irritating. Via Ankush, at Penguins on the Equator, who adds:

if you’re going to criticize [NYT reporter Michael Gordon] at length, a fair assessment of his work as a reporter requires acknowledging the good as well as the bad he’s done, even if you do it simply as an aside. I’m all for ideologically-motivated media criticism, but it should still be competently done, which, to my mind at least, requires not giving a completely one-sided assessment of a person’s work.

And that goes for bloggers, too, he says:

Any blogger, for instance, has written his/her fair share of bad posts (myself included). [guilty, your honor! --ed.] It’s not particularly fair to call someone an irredeemable hack by singling out a post, if you happen to know that other things he/she has written are perfectly sound if not brilliant.