It was only a matter of time before someone picked up the cudgels on behalf of the “starchitects”—that new but already tired term for our celebrity architects—but it is surprising that it would be the New York Times’s architecture critic. Last Sunday, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote with great urgency in praise of starchitects, touting them not only for the audacity of their imagination but for their ability to work with gargantuan real estate developers. Why the Times would cheer the rise of the international starchitect, which is an aspect of globalization, is not entirely obvious. It may be a sufficient explanation that the phenomenon has been criticized by certain critics on the right, such as John Silber and me.

For Ouroussoff, the starchitect is not a shallow and ambitious showman but a seasoned master—someone who is likely to have paid his dues, often in academia, toiling for decades in obscurity to refine and distill his visionary ideas:

Today these architects, many of them in their 60s and 70s, are finally getting to test those visions in everyday life, often on a grand scale. What followed has been one of the most exhilarating periods in recent architectural history. For every superficial expression of a culture obsessed with novelty, you can point to a work of blazing originality.

Ouroussoff dismisses the notion that the starchitect is a new phenomenon. After all, was not Bernini “a tireless self-promoter,” and should not our own “greatest architectural talents also be celebrated for their accomplishments?”

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CORRECTION: Michael J. Lewis, in this post, substantially understates the extent of John Silber’s errors and the breadth of the praise Millennium Park received in the national press, as well as misstating Blair Kamin’s position on Silber.

It did not take long for the bouncers at the flashy and exclusive nightclub that is contemporary architecture to show John Silber the door. Silber, the former president of Boston University, has just published Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art, a heartfelt essay about the state of architecture today, and the visual mayhem wreaked by the cult of the celebrity architect. Already the first snide response has come in and—predictably—it does not so much engage the book’s ideas as condemn the author’s temerity in writing about architecture in the first place.

The review of Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, is remarkable for its quality of vitriol. For him, Architecture of the Absurd is “just another rant in the culture wars,” written by someone who “isn’t an architect” and who has not even inspected the buildings he reviles, merely “bloviating from afar.” Nor does Silber’s criticism offer anything new: “architecture critics have said it all before.” In the end, Architecture of the Absurd is written off as “more rant than reason.”

Such is the magisterial disdain reserved for outsiders from whom one expects no retribution and whom one can attack with impunity. But is it true that outsiders—those who bloviate from afar—have nothing to offer? What about those who bloviate from within—like, for example, Kamin?

Kamin makes much of a factual error by Silber concerning Chicago’s Millennium Park (Frank Gehry was not its planner, as Silber stated, although he designed its Pritzker Pavilion). Having found this slip, Kamin acts as if one need pay no attention to anything else that Silber says. In fact, Silber looked at Chicago’s new park, with its thicket of eye-catching public sculptures, critically, something that Kamin himself never did. Throughout the long history of that controversial project, Kamin was a dependable cheerleader, praising the park as “a real public space, not a gated fantasyland.”

It’s something of an occupational hazard for critics at municipal newspapers to be civic boosters. But Kamin’s embrace of local pieties blinded him to one of the most intriguing (and disturbing) developments in contemporary architecture. One of the reasons that Millennium Park was built so swiftly was that its planners divided it into a series of discrete features, giving donors the right to choose their own architects and sculptors. Instead of providing a comprehensive aesthetic vision, in effect the park presented, as I wrote at the time, “a series of detached vignettes—in effect, naming opportunities.” The results may indeed be extraordinarily popular, but their broader ramifications are ominous, especially once other cities relinquish aesthetic control to their fund-raising operations.

So long as there are architecture critics like Kamin, who cannot separate aesthetic judgment from civic boosterism, we have all the more need for the fresh outside perspective of an audacious and delightfully independent critic like Silber.

What aspect of the life of the late Norman Mailer last week has not been examined, from his revolting pattern of violence against women, to his boxing and penchant for speaking in comic accents, to the strange décor of his Brooklyn apartment, with its apparatus of “ship’s rigging and nets”?

There is one: a brief but explosive public campaign against modern architecture in 1963 and 1964. The story is told by Neil Levine in Modern Architecture and Other Essays, an anthology of writings by Vincent Scully, the celebrated Yale professor who inadvertently became Mailer’s foil in that campaign.

Modern architecture was still at its summit of prestige and cultural authority in 1963, although the grumbling over Frank Lloyd Wright’s recent Guggenheim Museum and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building, which closed off Park Avenue’s long vista, was an indication of latent but unfocused public unhappiness. Mailer used his monthly column, “The Big Bite,” in Esquire magazine to rail against these and other buildings. His prose was characteristically bombastic: modern architecture was “totalitarian” and thrust us alone into “the empty landscapes of psychosis, precisely that inner landscape of voice and dread which we flee by turning to totalitarian styles of life.”

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A conspicuously embarrassed University of Delaware abandoned its residence life education program last week after details of its curriculum were made public by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). At issue was the training manual prepared by Shakti Butler, a diversity training specialist with a national practice, who has conducted facilitator training sessions for Shell Global and the Kellogg Foundation. Butler’s Diversity Facilitation Training manual was meant to guide the university’s resident assistants in their meetings and training sessions with students (a one-on-one meeting with the RA was mandatory).

The manual begins with a fascinating glossary, according to which all whites, without exception, are racists, while non-whites cannot be (“by definition,” it explains helpfully). To read the entire glossary is to take a nostalgic journey into the identity politics of a generation ago (in fact, it is a 1995 revision of an even older document). For example:

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists . . .

A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called “blaming the victim”) . . .

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America’s cultural institutions have been quietly selling off their art collections, and bad publicity—however shrill or indignant—seems no deterrent. One year ago, Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University sold off Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic—a masterpiece of American realism—to the acute distress of its alumni. Although the sale was criticized widely, the only element of the story that seems to have left a lasting impression is the sale price: $68 million. Two other colleges now seek to turn their own art collections into ready cash. Randolph College in Roanoke hopes to net over $30 million from its upcoming auction at Christie’s, while Fisk University in Nashville is expecting the same amount for a 50 percent share in its collection.

One can sympathize with Fisk, which is in dire financial straits. Ever since it was founded in 1866 as a school for freed slaves, it has teetered on the precipice of bankruptcy. Now, with all of its buildings mortgaged to the hilt, it has turned to this sale as a last resort. This is one case where a sale might do some good to gallery-goers: Fisk has never been able to exhibit its 101-piece collection, a gift from Georgia O’Keeffe, properly. The agreement to share its collection with the new Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas means that the public will at last be able to see such extraordinary works as O’Keeffe’s own Radiator Building, along with major works by Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin. Although the O’Keeffe estate is contesting the sale, claiming that it violates the terms of the gift, it cannot claim that the college has acted in bad faith.

Matters are less clear-cut at Randolph (which has just changed its name from Randolph-Macon and admitted its first male students). While the school pleads financial hardship, it is hardly at the point of shutting its doors. It is for this reason that a group of alumnae and donors have sought a court injunction to prevent the sale, which involves four paintings, including George Bellows’s Men of the Docks and one of Edward Hicks’s many versions of A Peaceable Kingdom. “Artwork should be used for the purpose for which it was given,” the group insists, “which is to educate women in the liberal arts, not to support Randolph College’s endowment.”

One should watch these sales closely: it’s not only colleges that own collections of this scale and value, but libraries and churches, historical societies and social clubs. Up until recently, these institutions have tended to view the stewardship of their art as a public trust, to be passed on to posterity. I think it’s safe to say that there’s now a growing tendency to view them less sentimentally. Depending on the outcome of these two proposed sales, one might expect other institutions to decide that it is time—as one trustee memorably (and somewhat frighteningly) put it—to “monetize their non-performing assets.”

After expressionism comes minimalism. Whether or not this is always the case, it is so in museum design, where flamboyant gesture is now out and modesty and circumspection in. New York’s forthcoming New Museum of Contemporary Art, set to open on December 1 at 235 Bowery, confirms the trend with a remarkable essay in neo-minimalism.

A decade ago, the fashionable museum was a strutting and swaggering thing, a jagged scribble in titanium (Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) or a St. Vitus’s dance of geometry (Richard Meier’s Getty Museum in Los Angeles), or a jaunty hybrid of a racing yacht and space shuttle (Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum). But at a time when all are shouting, one must whisper to get attention.

The trend toward reticence began in 2004 with the remodeling of the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Yoshio Taniguchi. The museum was massively enlarged but without any assertive monumental impression whatsoever; it offers virtually no arresting architectural forms or shapes, no structural acrobatics, and in fact no visual architecture at all other than the wall planes that define its spaces. Much the same approach characterizes the new New Museum of Contemporary Art, now nearly finished. It is the first major work here by the Japanese firm SANAA (the name under which Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa practice).

The building, which is now nearly complete, looks like a stack of seven white boxes, piled loosely atop one another to break up what would otherwise be a monolithic tower. Its walls are sheathed in galvanized zinc-plated steel and are windowless (light filters in from above where the stories do not precisely align). In an interview several years ago, SANAA stressed what they called the “reticent” nature of their building: “the galleries will be neutral in character, with white walls, exposed ceilings, and concrete floors.” Buildings, they insisted, should be “open and communicative, not bastions.”

It is remarkable that American museums, aspiring to ego-free buildings, have had to turn to Japan to find their architects, not only Taniguchi and SANAA but also Tadao Ando, designer of the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. But then again, when has self-effacement ever been a strong suit in American architecture?

It was only appropriate that the recent obituary for Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic of the New York Times from 1992 to 2004, was written by his successor, Nicolai Ouroussoff. This is one case, however, where the deceased ought to have written his own obituary—for Ouroussoff’s sober and respectful notice manages to present all the facts of Muschamp’s career but none of the truth. Missing is the sense of the outrageous, at times bordering on hysteria, which characterized Muschamp’s style, both literary and personal, and which ultimately cost him his perch at the Times.

Muschamp’s downfall goes unmentioned in Ouroussoff’s article, which only hints genteelly about his “quirky and, some argued, self-indulgent voice.” It has nothing to say about his disastrous attempt to insert himself into the rebuilding of New York’s Ground Zero as a kind of architectural impresario, as was shown in a 2004 essay in the New York Observer by Clay Risen. As long as Muschamp merely hobnobbed at night with the architects he praised by day, bemused readers could forgive his naughtiness. But once he started playing the roles of both critic and player, he committed the journalistic equivalent of a war crime: to act as a combatant while claiming the privileges of a neutral observer. In the end, as the Washington Post obituary recognized, he “had been corrupted by the power he wielded.”

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According to the London Times, “Shibboleth,” the Tate Modern’s new installation, has already claimed its first victims. Last week, three visitors fell into the work, a 548-foot-long crack that runs through the floor of the former power plant like an earthquake fissure. Since the visitors were not injured (unlike a young lawyer who fell to his death at the Tate earlier this year), the British press treated the incident light-heartedly. “Mind the gap,” joked the Guardian, invoking the loudspeaker warning at London underground stops. But if the press has been light-hearted, “Shibboleth” is anything but.

“Shibboleth” is the creation of Doris Salcedo, who was born in Colombia and studied at New York University, and whose work invariably is political. She first won international attention five years ago, when she encrusted Bogota’s Palace of Justice with a mantle of wooden chairs, her memorial to the violent coup attempt of 1985. Her new work aspires to more universal symbolism. As the Tate proclaims, it depicts the

long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase, or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

It is hardly novel for an artist to mutilate, disfigure, or otherwise violate an object in order to represent violence; on the contrary, one might call it art school vernacular. It is the atrophied symbolism of the political poster, the absolute literalism of graphic art, rather than the imaginative language of allegory. But what is novel about Salcedo’s project is that the artist was able to persuade one of Britain’s most prestigious art institutions to mutilate itself, as it were, and at considerable expense.

Of course it is possible, as the Independent points out, to enjoy the spectacle without subscribing to its ponderous theoretical program. Perhaps this is why the British press has been generally respectful about the exhibition (apart from waggish comments about “Doris’s crack”). Only the Times brought a refreshing skepticism to the spacious claims made on behalf of Shibboleth. Its review concludes with this gem of British dryness:

According to Salcedo, the fissure is “bottomless . . . as deep as humanity.” However, it appears to be around three feet at its deepest point.

When artists practice such blatant literalism as Salcedo does, they can hardly blame their critics for doing the same.

Unctuous bows, veiled threats, and smug mockery do not an edifying speech make, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s performance at Columbia University offers at least one consolation: the cartoons. The utter absurdity of the event has drawn forth a pageant of arresting editorial cartoons, some quite amusing. But only one managed to capture its essential grotesqueness—the ostentatious display of tolerance to a man whose most notable characteristic is his murderous intolerance, killing with roadside bombs today and atomic weapons tomorrow.

Presumably because of the pressure of deadlines, most cartoonists did not deal with the substance of the Iranian president’s talk, and depicted the event only in generic terms. Ed Stein of the Rocky Mountain News, for example, simply showed the worm in the Big Apple. Others focused on the theme of free speech. Pat Oliphant showed a disdainful Statue of Liberty, holding a diminutive Ahmadinejad at arm’s length as he jabbers away harmlessly; for Tom Toles, Columbia gave its speaker a rope long enough with which to hang himself, the noose labeled “free speech.”

Those who waited until after the speech to draw produced more penetrating images. Jerry Holbert of the Boston Herald had Ahmadinejad telling a politically incorrect joke (“a bunch of American infidels, a rabbi, and a suicide bomber walk into a bar”), which, while amusing, was not enough removed from reality to be truly funny. Far less amusing was the smattering of cartoonists who evidently have no objection to Ahmadinejad at all. Some like Tony Auth, the graphically inept cartoonist of the Philadelphia Inquirer, did not even think the event worthy of note. But then this discreet silence is preferable to the work of Lalo Alcaraz, who writes the daily comic strip La Cucaracha. His cartoon showed the Iranian under a sign labeled Republican Party Dept. of Homosexual Control, sitting between a photograph of President Bush and a sign “22 days gay free.” In other words, the only real problem Alcaraz finds with Ahmadinejad, whose regime enforces the public execution of homosexuals, is that the Iranian leader reminds the cartoonist of Republicans—whose actions might just conceivably remove the death threat from those same homosexuals.

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Higher education deeply cherishes the notion of skeptical and unsparing critical inquiry—just not about itself. Last year, the Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) drew up a Student Bill of Rights, a carefully worded manifesto about the importance of intellectual freedom for teachers and students. Insisting that students not be subjected to political indoctrination in the guise of instruction, the document invoked the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, drawn up by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

According to it, “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” The AAUP is evidently unhappy at having its own words quoted back to it. It has just issued a lengthy committee report, suggesting that those words don’t exactly mean what they say:

Modern critics of the university seek to impose on university classrooms mandatory and ill-conceived standards of “balance,” “diversity, and “respect.” We ought to learn from history that the vitality of institutions of higher learning has been damaged far more by efforts to correct abuses of freedom than by those alleged abuses. We ought to learn from history that education cannot possibly thrive in an atmosphere of state-encouraged suspicion and surveillance.

The AAUP considers four specific charges leveled against the modern university: that many professors routinely practice political indoctrination, fail to present alternative points of view, are hostile to students’ political or religious views, and introduce irrelevant political digressions into class. In each instance, the charge is not so much as considered but explained away.

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Can anybody explain the New York Times’s infatuation with Christoph Büchel, the Swiss artist now embroiled in a lawsuit with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (Mass MoCA)? Last Sunday Roberta Smith, the Times critic, wrote an 1800-word essay on the controversy that amounts to a journalistic billet-doux to Büchel.

A year ago, the artist was commissioned to create “Training Ground for Democracy,” a vast installation piece crammed with a 1930’s movie theater, a children’s merry-go-round, and a full size replica of Saddam Hussein’s spider hole—and much more. As I described in contentions, it did not turn out as planned. Costs mounted, and when Büchel insisted on one more item (one 737 jet fuselage, scorched), Mass MoCA balked. Having already spent more than double its $160,000 budget for the show, it covered the incomplete exhibition with yellow tarps and went to court. The case opens today in Springfield.

For many of us, a case like this raises a host of interesting issues—the role of the modern museum as impresario in the creation of art, for example, or whether it is salutary for an overindulged artist to be checked from time to time. But not for Ms. Smith. For her, the matter is open-and-shut: Mass MoCA “has broken faith with the artist, the public, and art itself.” Moreover, it “does damage to itself and to its reputation as a steward of art and as a conduit between living artists and the public.” In sum, it is “a meltdown [that] is sad for all concerned.”

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The poet of putrefaction strikes again. Or should one say festers again? Since Damien Hirst first achieved notoriety in 1990 by placing a rotting cow’s head in a glass vitrine, he has gone on to immerse a shark in formaldehyde, saw a cow and calf into precise cross-sections, and even to congratulate the hijackers of 9/11 for creating a “visually stunning” work of art. Now the 1995 Turner Prize winner has achieved another milestone. His work entitled For the Love of God, which consists of an actual human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, has just been sold to a consortium of anonymous investors for £50 million. It is (by far) highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.

Virtually every aspect of the work has been the subject of controversy—Hirst was accused of plagiarizing the idea of the skull; of making use of smuggled diamonds; and even of staging the entire sale as a hoax—every aspect, that is, except the use of a human skull as an artistic material. Hirst was quick to insist that he used only “ethically sourced diamonds” but has little to say about the ethics of body parts; presumably the Islington taxidermist who he says sold him the skull, qualifies as an ethical source. (Radiocarbon analysis showed the skull to be about 200 years old.)

Given that Hirst’s career has been based on the exploitation of revulsion, it was probably inevitable that he proceed from the use of animal cadavers to the parts of actual human corpses. Still, it is unclear whether or not he would have crossed this line if it had not been for the international success of Günther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibition, whose playfully posed “plastinated” cadavers have done much to erode the powerful social taboo against irreverent treatment of the human body.

A year ago, writing in COMMENTARY about Body Worlds, I suggested that works of art that are deliberately repellent, as offensive as they may be, “at least presuppose the capacity to be disgusted—which places them in a moral universe.” But now Hirst has lost the last vestiges of that capacity; rather than finding his grinning skull disturbing, he reports that it is “quite bling.” For the love of God, indeed.

A new chapter is about to begin in the story of art looting during World War II. Up until now, attention has centered on the Nazis’ systematic, pitiless theft of art treasures from occupied countries and from Jews destined for extermination camps. The return of this art to its rightful owners is no simple matter, especially where entire families have vanished; not until last year, for example, did the Belvedere in Vienna return to Maria Altmann the five Gustav Klimt paintings that had been extorted from her uncle in 1938. (The most ravishing of these, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, subsequently was sold to Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, for $135 million.) The critical success of the 2006 documentary The Rape of Europa, which looked both at art theft and recovery efforts, shows that public interest remains strong.

Less well-known is that, at the close of the war, Germany’s art treasures were plundered just as ruthlessly and (perhaps) just as systematically. On the part of the western allies, this consisted of individual thievery, such as the American army lieutenant who stole $200 million worth of art treasures from the cathedral of Quedlinburg. On the part of the Soviet Union, however, art plunder was conducted as a matter of state policy, and viewed as the legitimate spoils of war. Some 180,000 items were lost, chiefly to the Soviet Union, and now Germany has at last begun to ask, quietly and discreetly, for the return of that art.

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Benjamin Ivry’s fascinating post does a welcome job of setting the record straight on Philip Johnson and his appalling record of cheerleading for the Nazis. If anything, it is even more shocking than Ivry relates. He might have mentioned how Johnson accompanied Hitler’s panzer divisions on their Blitzkrieg through Poland in September 1939 and watched the bombardment of Warsaw. (His chipper report? “It was a stirring spectacle.”) An obituary of Johnson by Anne Applebaum, published in the Washington Post on February 2, 2005, provides much additional useful material.

In his response to Ivry’s post, Lawrence Gulotta asks if we can “enjoy the art and ignore the politics.” The answer is maybe—but not until we have fully and honestly explored the connections between the art and politics. In the case of Leni Riefenstahl, for example, the political content of their work is explicit, and we know precisely how much we may permit ourselves to admire the editing of Triumph of the Will. In the case of Johnson, is there a connection between the sinister politics and the frosty, impersonal austerity of his International Style architecture? So far, there has been no thoughtful exploration of the question. It is easy to see why: for over sixty years, Johnson was the most influential figure in the Museum of Modern Art, exerting ferocious power in the architectural profession, architectural publishing, and schools of architecture. No such investigation was possible. Now it is, and until it has been completed, perhaps Johnson’s architectural legacy must be accompanied by an asterisk, much like those that mark the records of steroid-using baseball stars.

The public image of the college professor has certainly changed since 1941. That year, Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire featured Gary Cooper as an academic so completely insulated from life that the slangy patter of a gangster’s moll, played by Barbara Stanwyck, baffled him. Since then, the cinematic professor has become more worldly. He is likely to be a womanizing alcoholic (One True Thing), a suicidal Proust scholar* (Little Miss Sunshine), or a womanizing failed writer (both Wonder Boys and The Squid and the Whale). William Deresiewicz dissects these and other examples in a provocative essay in the American Scholar, which looks at the public image of the contemporary college professor—and its underlying reality.

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The new Seven Wonders of the World, which were announced last week with great fanfare in Lisbon, are a droll affair. Two are from pre-Columbian America (the citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru and the temples of Chichén Itzá, Mexico), two from Asia (the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China), and one from the Middle East (the rock tombs of Petra, Jordan). The modern world comes up rather short (the mountaintop statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro), as does European civilization in general (represented only by the Coliseum in Rome). Is this list something to take seriously? Does its comprehensive global sweep give it an authority that the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—mostly huddled around the Mediterranean—lacked?

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What exactly is a memorial? If you are someone who thrives on the sneers of the cognoscenti, try saying that it is the physical manifestation of an abstract idea (such as grief, triumph, or resolution), presented in symbolic terms. You will be told in no uncertain terms that a memorial is not an object but “a process,” an open-ended and indeterminate series of negotiations that can never be brought to resolution. So I learned last year when participating in a panel discussion hosted by WNYC-FM on monuments and memorials in the wake of 9/11 (which you can hear here).

The champion of the “process” concept of memorial was James Young, whose views enjoy great prestige in academic circles. (He was a juror on the panels that chose the designs for both the World Trade Center Memorial and Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.) His views might be paraphrased thus: In our postmodern age, we no longer possess the collective certainty to make bombastic civic monuments like the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials; we should recognize that there are multiple constituencies and multiple claims on the truth, and that each of these should be given voice in a memorial. The notion that a memorial can effectively symbolize a single abstract concept is the discredited vestige of a simplistic age.

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So respectfully does A Mighty Heart, Michael Winterbottom’s film about the death of the journalist Daniel Pearl, treat its subject that criticism seems indecent, like rebuking someone for their tears at a funeral. It depicts Pearl’s kidnapping in January 2002 and the anguish of his French wife Mariane—then six-months pregnant with their first child—waiting in torment for news of him. The outcome of this vigil is no secret: Pearl was beheaded a week after his kidnapping, although another three weeks would pass before the videotape of his murder was recovered. Mariane’s book about this experience, Un coeur invaincu (literally, “an undefeated heart”), serves as the basis for Winterbottom’s often poignant film.

One can see why the story appealed to Hollywood, or—to be precise—to Angelina Jolie. It is difficult to imagine a better role for an actress aspiring to real gravitas. Mariane Pearl has become, in the years since her husband’s death, a kind of secular saint. (Slate’s review aptly called the film “a hagiographic chronicle of the martyrdom of Mariane Pearl.”) In the wake of her husband’s murder, Mariane refused to stoop to public hatred or to become a shill for any political cause, devoting her energy instead to creating the Daniel Pearl Foundation, a philanthropic organization of deliberately ecumenical scope. But if Mariane Pearl eschews politics of any color, the film about her does not, to its ultimate detriment.

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Do I really teach at America’s best liberal arts college? Absolutely, according to the annual college ranking system published by the U.S. News and World Report, which assesses academic quality by looking at such factors as class size, graduation rate, and student SAT scores. For those of us on whom the list smiles, it seems to have the finely calibrated authority of an astronomical instrument. For those further down the list, it seems on the order of goat entrails, or something even less innocent. To be sure, a slight change of position on the list—especially one into or out of the top ten—can have dire consequences for student applications, institutional morale, and even the job security of administrators.

Now a revolt against the ranking system is in full swing. Last week, a meeting of college presidents and administrators in Annapolis discussed a boycott of the questionnaire the magazine uses to compile its annual ranking. Although a total boycott was rejected, most colleges represented at the meeting pledged that they will cease cooperating with the most controversial aspect of the magazine’s ranking, its “peer assessment score.” Whether this will make the ranking a better or worse proxy of academic quality remains to be seen.

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The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts pulled off an audacious feat of showmanship last Friday. As it announced its acquisition of the Manton collection of British art, it simultaneously unveiled that collection in a surprise exhibition, startling even the institute’s own employees (they had assumed that the closed galleries were being prepared for this summer’s Monet exhibition). One can pardon the Clark’s showmanship; the Manton bequest is truly remarkable. It comprises over two hundred paintings and drawings by the luminaries of early 19th-century English painting, with particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and the incomparable J.M.W. Turner. Moreover, it comes with an endowment of $50 million, a bequest of extraordinary generosity.

The collection was assembled by the reclusive Edwin A.G. Manton (1909-2005), the longtime president and chairman of the American International Group (AIG). Though the British-born Manton (born, in fact, only a few miles from Constable’s own Suffolk birthplace) took up residence in America in 1933, he remained deeply appreciative of the English landscape and began collecting paintings in the 1940’s. He was a great supporter of London’s Tate Museum, for which he was knighted in 1994, although his gifts were invariably anonymous. According to the Daily Telegraph, his reasons for anonymity were strictly pragmatic: “I made my gifts anonymously to protect myself from people importuning me. It was not a noble feeling. I was simply protecting my purse.”

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Why did Antioch College fail? The announcement that the celebrated college in Yellow Springs, Ohio would be closing its doors in July 2008 sent a collective shudder through the academic establishment. Corporations go bankrupt, automobile manufacturers and commercial airlines go bankrupt, but not prominent colleges—and certainly not one founded by Horace Mann (1796-1859), the “Father of American Education.” In all the speculation about what went wrong at Antioch runs a distinct current of apprehension: it can’t happen again—or can it?

A consensus has already emerged that Antioch was the victim of its own progressive agenda. And indeed, from its inception in 1852, Antioch has been assertively progressive, accepting female students and—after 1863—black ones as well. During the 1920’s it established an innovative cooperative education program, giving students practical work experience. Later it was one of the first schools to abolish traditional letter grades in favor of “narrative evaluations.” It was this varied and intense liberal-arts education that produced such alumni as Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling, and Stephen Jay Gould.

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It would be too much to expect that Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress and recently (re)incarcerated drunk driver, would inspire a great work of art. And Daniel Edwards’s Paris Hilton Autopsy, recently on display at Capla Kesting Fine Art, is certainly not great. But even a bad work of art can have something interesting to say. A life-size bronze, the Autopsy depicts Hilton in the wake of a fatal car crash, her body exposed for forensic examination. While the subject matter is grisly, the execution is lighthearted: Hilton is shown in beatific slumber while her pet chihuahua, wearing a party hat, capers friskily around her head. Moreover, the position of Hilton’s legs, spread wide for the purposes of medical examination, suggests an entirely different kind of readiness.

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Generations of schoolchildren once learned that George Washington was the Father of the Country—a platitude, of course, but one that encapsulated an essential truth. Now an exhibition on the site in Philadelphia where he lived during his presidency will concentrate on his role as a slave-owner. This too is a truth, a tragic one that requires telling. But is this the central truth about our first President—that he hypocritically spoke of liberty while enslaving others?

This question has become urgent with the rediscovery of the first President’s house, where Washington (and later John Adams) lived between 1790 and 1800, when Philadelphia served as the country’s capital. The house was demolished in the early 19th century, leaving behind only a few print images, and its precise form and location became a matter of historical controversy. This was recently settled, and in spectacular fashion, by Edward Lawler, Jr.—not a professional historian but a singer. (Full disclosure: I knew Lawler in graduate school in the early 1980’s.)

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Strange as it sounds, this summer’s “must see” art exhibition is a “may not see.” Training Ground for Democracy, a colossal installation by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, was to have opened last December at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. But last week, after a series of fitful and last-minute demands by the artist that tripled its cost, the museum cancelled the exhibition and is now pursuing court action against the artist. Until the dispute is resolved, the installation will remain in limbo, roped off from the public—leaving only tantalizing glimpses of objects peeking out forlornly from above the yellow tarps.

Training Ground for Democracy is installed in MASS MoCA’s Building Five, a former mill that measures some 300 by 75 by 40 feet. Over the years, this hangar of a space has invariably affected artists in one of two ways, pushing them either to playfulness or to portentousness. Tim Hawkinson is an example of the first type; in 2000 he filled the gallery with a mad array of sputtering organ pipes, a Dr. Seuss fantasy that he called the Überorgan. Similarly lighthearted was Ann Hamilton’s Corpus (2004), in which machines mounted in the building’s roof truss released sheets of paper, to waft down like autumn leaves. An example of the portentous type is Robert Wilson, whose 14 Stations (2003) made a grim sacred procession out of concentration camp barracks. Büchel’s installation is of this sort.

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We mark our wedding anniversaries with ever more precious materials—progressing from paper to gold to diamonds—but the process seems to be reversed with our national anniversaries. Over the years, the establishment of the first successful English colony in North America, which took place in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia, has been commemorated with ever diminishing means. This month, the 400th anniversary of the settlement was marked with a curiously stilted ceremony that, by official policy, actually avoided the word “celebration” itself.

One can understand why Native Americans and blacks might find little in this anniversary to celebrate. But it is noteworthy that the angriest attack of all should come from a British newspaper. According to the Guardian, if Jamestown is to be remembered at all, it should be as “the birthplace of African slavery, Native American genocide, and the global tobacco trade,” a veritable trifecta of human misery.

The newspaper has been widely and justly ridiculed for its remarks. African slavery, of course, existed long before 1607. It’s true that the American colonies served as a point of expansion for the international slave market into the New World. But the nation that grew from those colonies, along with its mother country, participated powerfully in the moral critique of slavery that led to its eventual extirpation in the West.

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