Whenever I have to drag my abstract paintings around, I find myself longing to be a poet. (Ever hear of a poets throwing out their lower backs from carrying around books of poems?) Then I remind myself that at least I’m not a sculptor. Whatever problems abstract painters face -- physically, in having to move around heavy, but fragile, flat rectangles, and intellectually, in finding a way to make abstract paintings that move anyone other than art worldies -- pale in comparison to what abstract sculptors face. In this post and the next, I’ll discuss contemporary abstract sculpture -- the yin, you might say, to the yang of abstract painting.

The painter Ad Reinhardt once remarked caustically that sculpture is that thing you bump into when you step back to look at a painting. (We painters can be an arrogant bunch, that’s for sure.) Centuries earlier, in his brazen and frequently silly attempt...

Fancy that. The World Health Organization ranks our health-care system No. 37 among the nations of the world. Guess who’s ranked first. The French! Yup. The silly, ridiculous French are ranked No.  1!  How can that be? We're the USA! Aren't we always No. 1? Alas, watch this video and find out for yourself.

Heck, we all know this video can’t be true. Statistics lie, right? Especially those drummed up by the whacko United Nations. We all know that the French, who are so very effete and fussy that they all speak French, couldn’t possibly be ranked No. 1 in anything.

The French, who refuse to permit factory farms, or raise animals in the all-American, hormone-fattened and antibiotic-stuffed way, or be fooled by tomatoes that taste like cardboard, or live off of supersized meals, or value money above everything else, or do all the other things we Americans do to make ourselves so very, very...

Western civilization reaches its nadir at 3:32 p.m. tomorrow. And there’s nothing you can do about it. According to “America’s most reliable news source,” The Onion, scientists and other intellectuals say that all cultural indicators point to an imminent bottoming out of everything that is true, brilliant and beautiful in Western culture.

But wait. In various scholarly enclaves across the country, resistance -- however futile -- continues. One of the brightest faint hopes has just come beaming out from the University of Texas at Austin. There, the husband-and-wife team, Professors Thomas and Lorraine Pangle, have managed to create what amounts to a great-books curriculum within their massive state university. The program, which opened this fall, and which Professor Pangle compares to Yale’s Directed Studies program and Columbia’s core curriculum, is sponsored by the newly created

If you loathe modern art, but want to give it one more try, see the Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition of Vasily Kandinsky’s paintings. (The exhibition opened this past Friday and runs through January 13.) The museum owns a gazillion Kandinskys, but only occasionally mounts a full-fledged exhibition like this one. Nearly a hundred of his paintings, including many from European museums, are currently hanging on the slowly spiraling walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great building.

Kandinsky, one of the founders of abstract painting (the two others are Mondrian and Malevich), didn’t so much invent abstraction as discover it. On his own account, he walked into his studio one day and saw a beautiful painting, leaning against a wall, that he’d never seen before. With a start, he realized it was his own landscape, haphazardly lying on its side. In a stunning epiphany, he knew he no longer...

I asked my husband, Peter Plagens, a painter and writer, to sit down for an interview with me. Peter had been the staff art critic for Newsweek Magazine for fifteen years. Currently, he’s writing a book on the artist Bruce Nauman. He also continues to write articles about art for such publications as Newsweek and Art in America. Last Saturday he went to see a bunch of Chelsea galleries in New York.

What took you to the galleries on Saturday?

Duty. I have to do a periodic round of the galleries -- to see what’s going on.

You say you did 60 galleries? Wow!

Yes, although in some of them I beat a hasty retreat.

So you do this a lot?

Less than I should -- maybe once every couple of months.

You willing to give me an overview of what you saw?

Sure. Things are kind of bright and deliberately tacky and bouncy, as opposed to minimal, thought out, and reserved. It’s postmodernism in full flower -- where...

Reading Zephyr Teachout’s dire warning in her article in this morning’s Washington Post (it appeared in Slate earlier in the week) that online education will eventually take over almost all of higher education if we don’t do something about it -- now -- I couldn’t help but remember my experience visiting the IBM pavilion at the World’s Fair in Flushing, NY, in 1964. Ms. Teachout, associate professor of law at Fordham, is knowledgeable, and clearly worried about the future of higher education. She’s also very smart. Nevertheless, she would do well to remember that predictions about where human beings are headed are inherently problematic.

In 1964, I was a young girl longing to see Michelangelo’s Pieta (sorry, I can't figure out how to insert accents in this blog), which had been shipped with great fanfare from the Vatican to Flushing for the World's Fair. I got to see it -- bathed in...

I like to start classes off by making sure my students check their college e-mail accounts and Blackboard, both of which I require them to use. To do this, I ask them to e-mail me the dates of one of seven historical events that I post on Blackboard. What a brilliant moment for higher education if high-school teachers made all students everywhere learn the dates of the following seven events (most of which my students don’t know):

The Fall of Rome
The Fall of Constantinople
The publication of The Prince
The ratification of the United States Constitution
The Civil War
World War I
World War II

In my ideal world, high-school students would internalize these dates. They would start memorizing them in 9th grade, not even knowing what they meant. By the time graduation came along, they’d know the dates the way they know the dates of their own birthday and the birthdays of their family members. It...

In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman offered an insightful, clear and sharply critical analysis of why so many economists missed the boat that carried the prediction of last year’s economic collapse, along with its concomitant recession. I am always grateful to Krugman for writing about economics in a way that the rest of us who are not economists are able to understand. (A general rule that applies to almost all fields is that brilliant people who aren’t out to prove their brilliance write about difficult subjects in a way that helps, instead of hinders, readers.) His conclusion was that the field of economics will have to back off from relying on “elegant” theories, with their accompanying complicated and pure mathematical models, and return to something “messier” -- economics that takes account of the irrational, unpredictable side of human beings.

If the field of...

“Research show this,” people say, followed a few years later by, “Research shows that.” Does anyone have a mind any more—one that works without research? I admit that my own mind, to its fault, is more Platonic than Aristotelian. Forever searching for order, or drawing connections that seem to generate order, even where none exists, my mind does not fit very well in the modern world. Still, I prefer it to the mind of a person who can’t think without being propped up by the words, “research shows that.”

Most educated people are convinced that only science offers truth, which has led to a condition of pervasive “science envy.” You see this especially in the soft sciences, but you also find it in the humanities. People try to turn endeavors that are naturally fraught with uncertainty into sure things, busily deceiving themselves that they “know” this or that.

Perhaps this is why I like to...

It would be good for the blood pressure of everyone involved in criticizing education—state legislators, education policy professionals, professors, school administrators, parents—to take a deep breath. Put aside the statistics, the studies, the anecdotes, and take a look at the big picture.

Here’s what Edith Hamilton had to say about education, in The Echo of Greece (1957), one of her many trenchant books on the subject of the ancient Greeks: 

"If people feel that things are going from bad to worse and look at the new generation to see if they can be trusted to take charge among such dangers, they invariably conclude that they cannot and that these irresponsible young people have not been trained properly. Then the cry goes up, 'What is wrong with our education?' and many answers are always forthcoming."

Note the droll and ironic, “and many answers are always forthcoming.” Perhaps...