William Eaton

Olive Pierce: Children, Cambridge, Iraq

September 13, 2016 by William Eaton

By您好, yangyang Geng Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds. — Michael Ignatieff[1] It requires constant vigilance to see people as they are. — Olive Pierce The Portraits of the Jefferson Park Housing Project in Cambridge and No Easy Roses Olive Pierce was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and died on May 23, 2016. She was a lifelong photographer and political activist. She was educated at Vassar College and, in 1948, she traveled with […]

Categories: Article • Tags: adolescence, childhood, children, girls, Iraq, photography, war

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view of Alberto Burri’s Cretto di Gibellina, Sicily

Smithson, Tuymans; Art & Explication

September 6, 2016 by William Eaton

Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I Robert Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (images above) is a long, low, floor-lying crest of sand (approximately 30 feet by 5 feet), which is divided in equal parts by 50 double-sided mirrors.[1] Division and reflection—reflection in the sense of light, images, and ideas being thrown back without being absorbed—are central concepts here. As regards division, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, beauty, capitalism, cultural criticism, intellectuals, Oscar Wilde

Philip Guston, "Aggressor," 1978, private collection

Guston, Schapiro, Rosenberg, . . . Dialogue

July 13, 2016 by William Eaton

Why do we think Guston made paintings like these? This becomes a question, too, about how we are compelled, how we respond. By William Eaton I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait. I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation. […]

Categories: William Eaton • Tags: Abstract Expressionism, art, CIA, Clement Greenberg, Cold War, Harold Rosenberg, McCarthyism, Meyer Schapiro

Exhibition image for Jewface, Yiddish Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research - detail from larger image

Jewface: Comic Songs, Vaudeville Stereotypes

June 14, 2016 by William Eaton

Mock Yiddish and Ethnic Parody in the Vaudeville Melting-Pot While weary critiques of Blackface, Yellowface and Redface have become almost a Halloween tradition in their own right, “Jewface” in popular music has largely been forgotten.[1]). However, this past spring, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted an exhibit by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research: “Jewface: ‘Yiddish’ Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley.” I quote from the exhibition’s website: With his fake beard, putty nose, […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: comedy, Irving Berlin, Jews, popular music, stereotypes, vaudeville

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Photo of third suicide bomber behind Stade de France blasts - photo released by French police, 22 Nov 2015 - AFP; Getty Images

Numantia, Cervantes, Vicksburg, Terrorists

June 2, 2016 by William Eaton

. . . though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. — U.S. Grant, writing, years later, about the Confederate surrender at Appomattox[1] Ellos con duros estatutos fieros y con su extraña condición avara pusieron tan gran yugo a nuestros cuellos que forzados salimos […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Cervantes, civil war, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roman history, Spain, terrorism, theater, Vicksburg, war

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Plato’s Shaggy and Sly Victory

May 23, 2016 by William Eaton

A comparison with a shaggy dog tale—with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—may help us appreciate and begin to think about an “elusive passage” in Plato’s Symposium. In Twain’s text, the narrator goes seeking news of the Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley and ends up hearing stories about an inveterate gambler named Jim Smiley. In Plato’s case, Apollodorus, who was not at a wonderful party many years prior, tells what he has heard about this party from Aristodemus, who […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: competition, eros, love, Mark Twain, Plato, Socrates, Symposium, theater

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Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Ceiling, Lunette - Aminadab

Michelangelo’s Jews

May 12, 2016 by William Eaton

The Treatment of Jews in Renaissance Rome and on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling By Chantal Sulkow Introduction After the earliest stage of the cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in the early 1980s, the lunettes depicting Christ’s ancestors were the first to emerge from beneath centuries’ worth of darkened layers of dirt. (Fig. 1) Michelangelo’s brilliant use of color was not the only revelation; previously obscured details also came to light. One of these was an element of […]

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Berlinde De Bruyckere, No Life Lost II, Installation view, Hauser & Wirth, 2016, photo by Mirjam Devriendt

De Bruyckere, Ibsen, Gatsby, Graceland

March 31, 2016 by William Eaton

Or, Dying, “What does it feel like?” First approach Torvald Helmer: Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child. Nora, his wife: Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Adorno, aporia, art, Belgium, Berlinde De Bruyckere, death, dying, Gatsby, Ibsen, Jean-François Lyotard, juxtaposition, Paul Simon, popular music, reverie, sculpture

Whig primary, 1848 - An Available Candidate, The One Qualification for a Whig President

Trump, de Tocqueville, Democracy, Materialism

March 14, 2016 by William Eaton

Many people in Europe believe without saying, or say without believing, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is that it calls men worthy of the people’s confidence to take charge of public affairs. The people do not know how to govern themselves, but, it is said, they always want the State to thrive, and they but rarely fail to choose for leaders people who both share this desire and are the most fit to wield political power. […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, corruption, de Tocqueville, democracy, Donald Trump, New York Times, Presidential campaigns, Socrates, United States of America, Yeats

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ZETEO

Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

Author Archives: William Eaton

Olive Pierce: Children, Cambridge, Iraq

Smithson, Tuymans; Art & Explication

Guston, Schapiro, Rosenberg, . . . Dialogue

Jewface: Comic Songs, Vaudeville Stereotypes

Numantia, Cervantes, Vicksburg, Terrorists

Plato’s Shaggy and Sly Victory

Michelangelo’s Jews

De Bruyckere, Ibsen, Gatsby, Graceland

Trump, de Tocqueville, Democracy, Materialism