Good morning. Here’s a nice roundup of how the coronavirus is affecting the art world: “While the Louvre Museum is indefinitely closed, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers is one of 60 artworks from London’s National Gallery that will wait in quarantine as many of Japan’s museums remain shuttered.”

The London Book Fair has been cancelled: “Reed Exhibitions announced on Wednesday that the escalation of the illness meant the fair, scheduled to run from 10 to 12 March, would be called off. Around 25,000 publishers, authors and agents from around the world had been due to attend the event, where deals for the hottest new books are struck.”

Are humanities professors overselling the humanities? Charlie Tyson thinks so: “Hardly a week goes by when I do not encounter a piece of writing or listen to a talk that affirms in moralized tones and to desperate ears the supreme importance of our imperiled academic work. Insisting defensively on our own momentousness has become a tic, especially when we are talking to one another. This stream of self-administered consolation might be called ‘reassurance lit’ — an optimistic complement to its justifiably angry sister genre, quit-lit. Reassurance lit is having a distorting effect on our research and teaching, our morale, and our beliefs about how intellectuals can contribute to the common good. One recent essay in The Chronicle, for example, justly objects to characterizations of undergraduate humanities education as laudably ‘useless.’ On the contrary, the author insists, the habits of mind inculcated by a rigorous humanities education have great practical bearing in a world dominated by global commerce. But the view of humanistic study that this well-intentioned piece goes on to advance is equally implausible. In a sharp, one-sentence paragraph, the author slaps down a declaration: ‘There is no functioning, stable, globalized world of the future without the humanities.’ Pause a moment. The claim is not that the world would be better with well-funded and intellectually serious humanities programs than without them. The claim is that the world’s very survival depends on the activities of a hundred thousand or so harried professors.”

Dennis Anderson writes about Tim Murphy’s posthumous book on hunting: “Timothy Murphy was born in Hibbing. The son of literate parents who regaled their children at dinner and other times with Robert Burns’ verses, and Shakespeare’s, Murphy as a boy skipped a grade forward, was an Eagle Scout, graduated president of his senior class in Moorhead and journeyed east, to college at Yale. By then he also bore a guide’s credentials as a bird hunter. His father, Vincent, had first taken him afield at age 7, and by his early teens he and Jim, his younger brother, were foot-walking marsh edges and brushy fence lines near Fargo and Moorhead, hunting pheasants. For armament they shouldered double-barrels their dad had purchased for them, choices both favored throughout their shooting lives.” (HT: John Wilson)

Henrietta Moore reviews an angry book on world hunger: “Peru is the world’s largest producer of quinoa, which has been cultivated in the Andean region for over seven thousand years. But its recent adoption as a health food has meant that its price in Peru has more than tripled. It’s now too expensive for farmers to eat, so they have turned to less expensive and less nutritious foods. As prices have risen, the pressure on the land has built. Intensive production of such crops undermines biodiversity and soil quality. The operations of the global food system have destabilising effects. Demand for avocados is outstripping supply. In Mexico, avocados are becoming the new blood diamonds, igniting conflict and kindling cartel rivalry. This puts strain on the land: protected woodlands are being cut down to raise production. Child labour, meanwhile, is increasingly used to cut costs. The manufacture of biofuels, itself a response to climate change, requires the taking of land that could be used to grow food. Inevitably, those who suffer most are the poor, and they are already hungry . . . But Caparrós doesn’t have time for bleeding hearts. He reserves much of his anger for humanitarianism, liberal concern and academics who spend their time emphasising the complexity of the situation. Saying that our food systems are in crisis does not move the debate along at all and changes nothing.”

Kyle Smith praises the “transcendent magic” of Pixar’s Onward: “Onward is . . . one of the very best Pixar has made, full of comedy with a purpose and pointedly metaphorical action. As with other Pixar offerings, its best feature is in its world-building rather than its characteristically frantic climax, but its foundation of ideas is sublime. Onward gazes into the deepest sources of our collective psyche in anno domini 2020 and cries out movingly against the decadence of our age.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Adrian Chen writes about Hideo Kojima’s bizarre but captivating video games:

“Death Stranding, the newest video game from the developer Hideo Kojima, was introduced to the world in the summer of 2016 on a stage at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the gaming industry’s annual trade-show extravaganza. The event was what the industry calls a press conference, but this particular spectacle more closely resembled the scene in “King Kong” when the beast is displayed to the public in a Broadway theater. A live orchestra struck up a blaring John Williams-style score as the curtain lifted to reveal a sloping stage, at the very top of which stood Kojima, a slight Japanese man with swooping black hair and glasses. The floor began to light up underneath him, panes of light flying in from left and right to create a sort of light bridge, which he bounded down to shake a Sony executive’s hand. Then he stood at center stage, beaming, to deafening applause.

“Kojima proceeded to play perhaps the strangest three and a half minutes of video ever to grace the E3 stage. Keep in mind that this is a venue where cybernetic dinosaurs and giant-felling samurai are par for the course. The video opened with a William Blake poem, the first lines of ‘Auguries of Innocence,’ then cut to a close-up of highly realistic computer-generated sand. The camera floated over the sand, revealing a jumble of dead crabs. Handprints appeared in the sand and then filled up, inexplicably, with black goop. The handprints led to a naked man lying on the beach, his left wrist locked in glowing handcuffs. A black cord connected the man to what appeared to be a tiny infant, lying next to him on the sand. The man rose to his hands and knees and crawled over to the baby and picked it up and cradled it in his hands, bringing it to his chest, and his face was revealed and it was … Norman Reedus from ‘The Walking Dead’? And he was weeping hysterically?

“There was no hint as to the story, the gameplay or even the genre of the game. It was all mood and symbol and Norman Reedus’s shiny posterior. It was more like something you’d see at MoMA than at E3. But the crowd went wild.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Melk Abbey

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