The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia By Roger Kimball (St. Augustine’s Press, 347 pages, $35) WILLIAM GIRALDI’S recent thrashing of Alix Ohlin’s first two novels in the New York Times caused more than a…

There is a difference between propaganda and political art. Both attempt to influence viewers or readers to take some sort of action — whether it is to support this leader, protest that one, take up arms, or lay them down…

Is art better than gold? Or is it fool’s gold?   We’re all lying Cretans. Robert Hughes, on the other hand, was brutally honest about himself and others: “The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such…

Following his defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy in May, President-Elect of France, François Hollande, reiterated his promise to raise the marginal tax rate to 75% on individuals making over a million Euros. While the tax has yet to be voted into…

Dana Gioia’s fourth book of poems is out–his first in eleven years. Gioia was head of the National Endowment of the Arts under President George W. Bush, and one of those rare poets who, à la Wallace Stevens, was an…

Last week, the word in the art and literary world was transgression. This week, it’s technology. Following the success of The Waste Land app, Faber and Touch Press have put together an app for Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I’ll buy it just…

Art is transgressive, we’re told, but not all transgressions are equal. For example, write a book of poems called Babyf—er, and you’ll be rewarded with The Heimrad Bäcker Prize for Experimental Literature in German. Review more books by men than…

What is it with poets and capitalism? The two, it seems, are like oil and water. At the end of last year, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew their respective books from consideration for the T.S. Eliot Prize because the…