Happy Tuesday, everyone. Did you know that Hunter Biden is living in a 2,000-square-foot, $12,000-a-month house in the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive, painting? Adam Popescu writes about his visit to Biden’s studio in The New York Times: “Hunter Biden was not certain what the world might say of his new pursuit, but he maintained he was serious. He said he had made a lot of mistakes in his life — he has spoken openly about his history of drug addiction — but becoming an artist, he said, wasn’t an impulsive decision. Painting ‘is literally keeping me sane,’ he said. ‘For years I wouldn’t call myself an artist. Now I feel comfortable saying it.’ . . . ‘See that red barn?’ He pointed at a farmhouse perched on the next mountain top — it belongs to the artist David Hockney, he said — then focused on four red-tailed hawks rising on pockets of hot air, a technique called thermal soaring. ‘Look at that,’ he said, craning his neck. ‘I see them every day. I love watching them.’”

Was El Greco a proto-modern or an Old Master? Benjamin Riley reviews a new show of the painter’s work: “Looking at paintings such as the Met’s Vision of Saint John, also known as the Opening of the Fifth Seal (c.1608-14), it’s easy to see El Greco as a proto-modern . . . Further evidence of El Greco’s precocious ‘modernism’ is supplied by his ‘View of Toledo’ (c.1598-99), which also comes to Chicago from the Met. Its abstraction of landscape and arguably deliberate misuse of perspective has something of the dark rural surrealism of Paul Nash (1889-1946). Robert Byron, writing in the Burlington Magazine in 1929 (before he took the road to Oxiana and reinvented travel writing), judged View of Toledo, with its ‘astonishing resemblance and affinity with the landscapes of Cézanne’, as the painting ‘in which more nearly than anything else, [El Greco] approaches the impressionist founders of modern art’. But Byron’s association of El Greco and Cézanne is merely a small concession to the Roger Fry doctrine. Byron’s point was to suggest that El Greco’s work originated in the recent Byzantine tradition into which he was born: ‘it is plain that all El Greco’s most individual characteristics, which have so puzzled and dismayed his critics, derive directly from the art of his ancestors.’”

The noun phrase “artificial intelligence” is an oxymoron. Mark Halpern explains: “The amazing feats achieved by computers demonstrate our progress in coming up with algorithms that make the computer do valuable things for us. The computer itself, though, does nothing more than it ever did, which is to do whatever we know how to order it to do.”

Speaking of AI, Charles T. Rubin reviews Adrienne Mayor’s disappointing book on the ancients and technology: “Mayor notes, but hardly lingers to investigate, that in the mythic record there is frequently a link between robot-like beings (or other innovations) and tyrants. Shouldn’t this strike us as odd, given that in the modern world successful technical innovations seem more associated with the free world than with tyranny? And yet at the same time not so odd, given how much we worry about authoritarian or totalitarian regimes seeking political advantage by proceeding in “irresponsible” ways with, for example, weapons of mass destruction, potentially dangerous biotechnologies, or electronic surveillance.”

Will Wiles reviews a history of stonemasonry in England that doubles as a history of England itself: “There are few reading pleasures that compare with a passionate expert describing their work, and Ziminski stands proudly in this field. He is a mason working in the West Country, repairing and restoring prehistoric tombs, stone circles, Roman fragments and Christian churches, all the time trying to adopt the techniques used by the builders of these places. This has allowed him to construct an fascinating and idiosyncratic picture of English history. He travels by bicycle and boat and his mind wanders as he works, conjuring up with remarkable deftness disappeared English worlds and the ordinary people who lived in them. Envisaging the lives of forgotten builders – why they made the choices they did, how they lived, where they went – naturally entails a good deal of supposition, imagination and ‘must have beens’. But Ziminski’s speculations carry unusual authority, as he takes himself to the same places as them, performing the same tasks with the same tools and materials and facing the same problems.”

Essay of the Day:

However deadly the coronavirus may turn out to be, it will be nothing like the flu pandemic of 1918:

“We have just commemorated the centenary of the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, which lasted only a few months but claimed 50 million to 100 million lives worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States. That pandemic remains a benchmark, and many commentators have rushed to compare it to the current coronavirus outbreak. What’s most striking about these comparisons, though, is not the similarities between the two episodes, but the distance that medicine has traveled in the intervening century. Whatever happens next, it won’t be a second 1918.

“That year, as pandemic influenza ravaged communities as diverse as California and Kolkata, no one knew what was killing them. Theories abounded. Some suggested it was a misalignment of the planets. (That’s what gave us the name influenza, from the Italian word for ‘influence.’) Others believed the cause was tainted Russian oats, or volcanic eruptions. Microbiologists focused on a bacterium they had discovered decades earlier in the lungs of influenza victims, and called it Bacillus influenza. But they had merely recognized a bacterium that invades lungs already weakened from influenza. Not until 1933 did two British scientists demonstrate that the cause must be a new class of disease, which today we call viruses. Finally, in 1940, the newly invented electron microscope took a picture of the influenza virus, and for the first time in history we could not only name, but also see, the culprit.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Münster

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