Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare
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Jarring Bottles
Arthur C. Danto: The paintings of Giorgio Morandi render new meaning to the term natura morta.
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Unlovable
Arthur C. Danto: The contemporary art world, reflected in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is themeless and heading in no identifiable direction.
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Just Looking
Arthur C. Danto: Mapping the difficulty, danger and beauty in the art of Nicholas Poussin.
Shakespeare's audience had to be able to disentangle quadruple puns as the lines flew back and forth. It is a comedy in which, as one of the male characters remarks, "Jack does not get his Jill." Everyone has to take a respite of a year and a day before they will be ready to face one another again.
I met a real life Jill not long ago--Jill Davis--who has just published a comic novel called Girl's Poker Night. Her book too has a team of daunting women, pessimistically looking for love. Her heroine, Ruby Capote, might well have made good material for the Princess of France's team of ladies who use language as a blood sport, though mostly she talks to the reader, since the males are more or less hopeless. In the end she opts for happiness with a man who is far from good enough for her. But--as she observes--"Happy endings are not for cowards."
Here, for those who frown on such light reading for these heavy times, is a word from Hegel:
"The modern world has developed a type of comedy which is truly comical and truly poetic. The keynote is good humor, assured and careless gaiety, despite all failure and misfortune, exuberance and the audacity of a fundamentally happy craziness, folly, and idiosyncrasy in general."
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