William Eaton

In Kant’s Wood

June 7, 2015 by William Eaton

On freedom, competition, and the flowering of our species By William Eaton Note: This is the first in a planned series of articles and essays related to conflict—political, economic, social, artistic, internal, . . . Among the early spring-flowering trees the dogwood, Cornus florida, is unrivaled in beauty. It usually grows 15 to 25 feet in height and is generally wider than tall. With fall comes a brilliant show of scarlet to reddish purple foliage and bright red fruit […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: competition, dogwood, Ecclesiastes, freedom, Kant, Pierre Loti, Rousseau, United Nations

Outdoor Celebration at the Whitney

June 6, 2015 by William Eaton

To my surprise and delight, I like the new Whitney. And that is the consensus of the cities’ major critics. From the outside, all agree that the building is hard to take in. It looks as if a beginner at Legos piled up a variety of horizontal units and they somehow balanced. The eastern and western facades are opposites—closed on the west and wide open on the east—for reasons the architect, Renzo Piano, described in The New Yorker, On the […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, New York City, Renzo Piano, The Whitney Museum of American Art

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How does the good become good?

June 4, 2015 by William Eaton

Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these concoctions can do—lower high LDL cholesterol—the company engages its public relations and advertising arms in trumpeting the value of doing this thing. Lowering LDL cholesterol becomes something essential to prolonging human life. (And this in a time when, for example, obesity and poverty are much more life-threatening than LDL […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Marx, Thoreau

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What’s Holding Digital News Back?

June 2, 2015 by William Eaton

In the first of three articles in the New York Review of Books on “Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?” author Michael Massing gives himself this assignment: That digital technology is disrupting the business of journalism is beyond dispute. What’s striking is how little attention has been paid to the impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism. The distinctive properties of the Internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering and […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Edward R. Murrow, Internet, journalism, New York Review of Books, ProPublica

Haring and Koons–At a Crossroad

May 23, 2015 by William Eaton

A Tale of Two Artists’s Careers Keith Haring (1958-1990) and Jeff Koons (1955-) were born in Pennsylvania and grew up in middle-class families. Their careers as artists took off in the 1980s, at a time when contemporary art was just beginning to be looked at seriously. It was an exciting moment. The late Marcia Tucker was fired when, as a curator at the Whitney, she exhibited Minimalist artists like Richard Tuttle. One of his works consisted of a few inches […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, New York City

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Renoir, Love

May 22, 2015 by William Eaton

{click for Renoir, Love: Pdf} Harvard’s Fogg Museum does not think of itself as “portrait gallery”—it includes more than “just” portraits. Nonetheless, I am prepared to make the following, likely unprovable, assertion: The percentage of wonderful portraits to total number of artworks on display is greater at the Fogg than at any other museum in the world. Among my favorites is Renoir’s Victor Chocquet, shown at right. Renoir’s reputation as an Impressionist painter is rather in decline. His bathers, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Eakins, Harvard University, Impressionism, love, male gaze, painting, Renoir

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Almost Pure Pleasures

May 13, 2015 by William Eaton

At the end of a nature-preserve cove, I saw in the water some dark, complex something. Two box-like shapes, attached to one another. An abandoned part of a car engine? Approaching a little closer, I saw that it was two midsized, black-backed turtles, one clamped on the back of the other. They were rolling in the shallow water, and a stubby leg of the one on the bottom at times waved helplessly, and the one on top seemed at times […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: bicycling, Dr. Zhivago, inequality, money, nature, sex, turtles

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detail from Beth Lipman's "Laid (Time-) Table with Cycads," 2015. Glass, wood, adhesive and paint. 92 x 192 x 57 inches.

Beth Lipman, Artist of Glass

May 9, 2015 by William Eaton

How do we access Beth Lipman’s phantasmagoric sculpture, Laid (Time-) Table with Cycads, with its profusion of familiar material objects and organic matter all made of clear, sparkling, crystal-like glass? We recognize immediately its alignment with the tradition of still lifes. But, look again, and notice that most of the perfectly crafted pieces are broken and spilling over the sides of a long, traditional-looking wooden table painted a stark white. Unlike paintings of still lifes, this conglomeration of objects […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Beth Lipman, Still Life

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Kiki Smith, image of "Pee Body," as photographed at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis

Urine, glass beads, poetry

May 5, 2015 by William Eaton

Discussion of Kiki Smith’s wax sculpture of a naked woman who has peed; streams of yellow glass beads spread on the floor behind her. The genius of the sculpture–Pee Body–is in the beads. ) This work likely was conceived as feminist art. The present essay also invokes a core idea of Surrealism: artists make visible the unconscious.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, Ezra Pound, feminism, Fogg Museum, Kiki Smith, poetry, sculpture, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth

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ZETEO

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

Author Archives: William Eaton

In Kant’s Wood

Outdoor Celebration at the Whitney

How does the good become good?

What’s Holding Digital News Back?

Haring and Koons–At a Crossroad

Renoir, Love

Almost Pure Pleasures

Beth Lipman, Artist of Glass

Urine, glass beads, poetry