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J.W. Waterhouse’s “Echo and Narcissus” (1903, oil on canvas). Courtesy Walker Art Gallery. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection not because he has an inflated sense of self but because he has no strong, healthy core identity. These days, he is too much with us.

The 2024 presidential election and the irrational cult of narcissism

October 31, 2024

These days, everyone is making closing arguments — Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump, comedian Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as if we the people were we, the jury, which I suppose we are. I might as well make one as well.

Mug shot from O.J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Time magazine would be criticized for darkening the photograph when it ran on the cover, underscoring a trial that proved to be less about domestic violence and more about race in the United States.

O.J.Simpson's 'Appointment in Samarra'

April 11, 2024

When I think of O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday, April 10 of prostate cancer at age 76 in Las Vegas, I think of the short story '“Appointment in Samarra,” often retold in novels. The protagonist encounters the figure of Death, and to elude the dreaded specter, runs off to Samarra, only to find Death waiting there at the place where they were destined to meet. You cannot escape fate — or the consequences of your actions, no matter what else you do in life. Such is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of karma.

M. Elizabeth Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania Dec. 8 after a disastrous performance at a Congressional hearing in which she failed to denounce anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews in relation to protests on her campus. As of Dec. 10, this photograph of Magill, who had only been in the post a year and a half, was still up on the university’s website.

Low tide for higher ed

December 10, 2023

My maternal grandmother had a phrase we could apply to Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth, the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) respectively, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the now-resigned president of the University of Pennsylvania — “book-smart and life-dumb.”

Allison Zuckerman’s “Woman at Her Toilette” (2017, acrylic and inkjet on canvas) is part of “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism” (Tuesday, Oct. 10, through Jan. 20 at Lehman College Art Gallery). *Courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery.*

A gaze of their own: women rethinking art history

September 28, 2023

In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.

A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.

“Barbie” star Margot Robbie at the June 30 pink carpet premiere of the film in Sydney, Australia. *Photograph by* *Eva Rinaldi.*

To live and die in L..A. -- Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie'

August 10, 2023

“Barbie” — the billion-dollar blockbuster that has fashion and interior designers thinking pink and movie theaters seeing green (as in dollars) — is a rather deceptive movie. It starts out as a kind of beach blanket battle-of-the-sexes rom-com that quickly builds into a poignant dramedy of what it means not to be a woman or a man but human.

Domingo Germán, seen here in 2019, pitched a perfect game for the New York Yankees on June 28. *Photograph by* *Keith Allison.*

The Supreme Court, Domingo Germán and the perfect imperfection of life

July 1, 2023

The Supreme Court made what critics would describe as some imperfect decisions in the week that New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán pitched a perfect game. While the two would seem unrelated, they both tell us a great deal about the unfairness and seeming randomness of life.

A scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” —“Madeleine” at the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point, right before she jumps into San Francisco Bay.

'Vertigo' and the idea of the other

June 4, 2023

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” has reached what The Washington Post called in its reappraisal ‘Medicare age,’which got me thinking about my favorite movie — one that regularly appears on lists for the greatest, or one of the greatest, films to date. But is it, as The Post suggests, a story for our #MeToo times or rather a more complex tale of the human desire to project onto others our own dreams, fears and desires?

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