Art and the Homeless

In "The Palace" (chapter 3), of Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy , Michelangelo is invited to a dinner party at the palace of il Magnifico: He was surprised to find himself in a severe room without a single work of art . . . Stone continues to describe a scene which may be familiar to readers—from cinema and life—as typical of festive Italian dining arrangements. Except for one, striking, detail: no art? One would expect the walls to be covered with paintings or, at least, traditional tapestries -given the importance of art to Florence's greatest patron of art. Lorenzo de Medici epitomizes "connoisseur of art." And yet (according to Irving Stone's description), there's no art— nessuno —in the Magnifico's dining room.  The reader is, as Michelangelo (presumably) was, left to ponder the enigma da solo . My narrative, too, sticks at this detail because, if we are to have an academic discussion of art, there must in some sense be an absence o...

Is plagiarism defensible? This is not an academic question. Authors can lose reputation for violating the rule. Worse, damages can be awarded if proved. You know that hurts. Having a low threshold of pain and suffering, both mine and other's, I accept the challenge. Let us invoke what is known to philosophers as aletheia . Aletheia   is, briefly, un- forgetting. The plagiarizer must own failure to attribute borrowed material, must confess to the misdemeanor of plagiarism. Acquittal is not to be expected. Mercy, and a mild sentence, may be the best outcome. The embarrassment upon the finding of plagiarism is  just desserts for what is called, colloquially, comeuppance. Although a matter of shame, I say it is nothing to be ashamed of. Plagiarism is trying too hard. Plagiarism, if anything, deserves a letter grade E (for effort.) If you must steal (so the saying goes), steal from the best.  Plagiarism is a compliment. We are a society of equals. The offender must be r...

The headline in last week's Post—that Buca di Beppo restaurants filed for bankruptcy—was shocking; that is, until I read the story. Only 12 restaurants have closed (out of 44). It could be worse! If the line about “restructuring” refers strictly to re-financing, all may yet turn out for the best; if, on the other hand, the signature theme of the brand changes, then the outlook is not encouraging. What does it portend? After I caught my breath, I felt like I'd been taken-in by another drive-by Post headline. The news (below the fold) appears to be only a panic attack at the restaurant corporate accounting office. Then again (on second thought), maybe there is more to it. Everybody knows the restaurant business has not fully recovered from the Covid pandemic. Reading further, the twelve restaurants “shuttered” are in locations which do not have the kind of demographic profile that you might call welcoming, to an Italian-theme experience like Buca di Beppo. What does it mean to sa...

Occasionally, I see a stray cat at a plaza which I frequent—where there is a restaurant—which means there's plenty of waste food leftovers for the cat's sustenance. It's a fine-looking animal. It doesn't get fat. It's well-bred. It's obviously a runaway. It might be sentimental, but I feel that the cat is too good for the streets. It needs a good home.  I resolved, therefore, to report it to an animal shelter. At least, to what I thought was a shelter, because, it's not only a shelter, as what this shelter does is catch, spay/neuter, and release. That's a new cat rescue process to me. This is not the first stray cat I have rescued. What is new is catch-and-release validates thoughts I have had about animals being better-off wild. All animal shelters are always over-burdened. I have been to shelters with hundreds of cats—none in cages—each and every one living together peacefully. It's an amazing sight. In other shelters, when a home can't be foun...

As an undergrad art student, I was unprepared for the mind/body problem in art, and deviated in my studies into design drafting courses. I was already an adept dimension drawing draftsman. At the same time, it wasn't what I always wanted to do. I had (at the time) a notion of the architecture of ideas, of a metaphysical space, but a real place, one in fact. I resolved to make it real, to create it, not debate it. It was a logical contradiction of formal opposition to the abstract/reality argument, intended to annihilate the dilemma, like Antimatter. De Chirico's Surreal space stood out as a prime example, but, it had already been done by de Chirico. I then began earnestly to look directly at the world, which, fortuitously for art, was a vital link to the classic "paint what you see" approach to making art. It might be a chimera I was pursuing, but I kept looking... At that time, I was reading a lot of cultural anthropology, much of which had come to the ironic conclus...