The cultural image of the male artist has perhaps evaded a proper examination: Who would conduct one? For this caricature is so intertwined with the public understanding and consumption of art that the two can perhaps never be separated. The male artist, in our image of him, does everything we are told not to do: He is violent and selfish. He neglects or betrays his friends and family. He smokes, drinks, scandalizes, indulges his lusts and in every way bites the hand that feeds him, all to be unmasked at the end as a peerless genius. Equally, he does the things we are least able or least willing to do: to work without expectation of a reward, to dispense with material comfort and to maintain an absolute indifference to what other people think of him. For he is the intimate associate of beauty and the world’s truth, dispenser of that rare substance — art — by which we are capable of feeling our lives to be elevated.
Is there a female equivalent to this image? Does the woman artist feel herself to be interchangeable with the film character, with his lusts and his genius and his rage? For it seems to me, watching such a film, that the age-old question of what it is to be her goes unasked once more. It may even be that each time the synthesizing of art with masculine behaviors is casually reinforced, we know less about the woman artist than we did before. Her existence entails a far more stringent set of justifications. In the history of visual art, her appearance is the rarest of exceptions to the male rule. But of any woman creator an explanation is required of whether, or how, she dispensed with her femininity and its limitations, with her female biological destiny; of where — so to speak — she buried the body. That same body, in Western art, is contested: It has been condensed into the propulsive eroticism of the artistic impulse; it has fueled and fed the search for beauty and its domination by artistic form. In the story of art, woman attains the status of pure object. What does her subjectivity even look like? Did the female artists who emerged in the modern era — Joan Mitchell, Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin — navigate the styles of male cultural power by imitating them or by living at their margins? Today, when a woman artist sets out to create, who is she?
But about the time that the internet started to become a force in our lives, “spoiler alerts” became common, fueled by people seeking entertainment coverage online, as a way for writers and fans to warn away people who wanted to experience a movie or TV show without knowing what would happen. As readers and watchers, we want to be able to control our experience of our entertainment. And so spoilerphobia has grown. Now, the threat of spoilers is used as de facto opening weekend box-office boosters: Recently, the Russo brothers somewhat arbitrarily declared a “spoiler ban” on Avengers: Endgame until the Monday after release — a surefire way to ensure people who don’t want the movie spoiled will make an effort to see it before then.
And yet while I warn readers when I’m going to “spoil” the movie, usually in order to be able to analyze it or make a good argument, I prefer just the opposite. I love spoilers. I seek them out.
This is not a story about the private equity vampires ruining this specific company. It is about the implications of the fact that Splinter was not allowed to live, and Deadspin is not allowed to be political. Rude media, for lack of a better term, is dying.
In the end, then, we should trust science when it is pursued as a collective enterprise, subject to standards recognized by the practitioners, and when the standards are derived from reliable results. Properly conducted research conscientiously uses techniques of observation and experimentation that have generated recognizably stable successes, and analyzes the results using methods that have been shown to work. Since the seventeenth century, to different extents in different fields, domains of research have acquired a rich corpus of such methods and techniques. That corpus is transmitted to young investigators in their training. It guides their subsequent research, and it supplies the standards against which their activities should be measured. As they pursue their particular projects, their mentors, colleagues, and rivals hold them to those standards.
And so the collection of solved problems grows. Physicists become able to make extraordinarily precise predictions about the behavior of elusive particles, chemists develop new techniques for reliably synthesizing compounds, biologists read and even modify the genomes of organisms, and atmospheric scientists predict with considerable accuracy how increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases will affect the frequency and intensity of various types of extreme events. Successes of these kinds are sometimes translated into products that affect our daily lives: computers and lasers and new drugs and robots—and frozen peas. When the reliability of those results is readily apparent—as in the examples with which I began: the safety of some GMOs, the importance of vaccination, the great age of the earth, and the reality of climate change, caused by human activities—withholding trust is out of place.
A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold.
For all its complexity in origin and concept, The Deep is an elegantly concise and simple novel. Yetu's plight is an essential, emotionally fraught conflict between duty and sacrifice, between tradition and progress, between the individual and the common good, and between vengeance and forgiveness.
I will never think of this in the same way,
watching the woman in her daily brown skirt
throw her own body against the fence
and try to climb.