Reader's Digest: December 14, 2024

The latest issue of the NYRB is terrific: a lot of politics and a lot of art, the former too bleak to go into here, the latter full of things I didn’t know and was intrigued to learn.

On painting: Susan Tallman wrote about the art historian Svetlana Alpers, whose work I’ve never read. She made me think I should. Alpers is an expert on the Dutch Renaissance , where she upended old assumptions, both about individual paintings and about painting, as such. For instance, Breugel’s The Wedding Dance “was long read by art historians as a homily on lower-class dissipation.”

The problem, Svetlana Alpers observed more than fifty years ago, is that none of Bruegel’s hundred or so revelers actually look very debauched. … As a means of deterrence, it seems about as effective as showing a TikTok of jolly pot-smoking college students to a DARE class.

Tallman writes with equal verve about Alpers’ big ideas. “The paralyzing wee-hours panic that haunts the art professions is the thought that maybe, after …