Category Archives: Art

Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gerome

May 5, 2024 – 2:24 am

“He vows to endure to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword.” Petronius (Satyricon, 117)

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HERMAPHRODITE by Peter Nolan Smith

February 8, 2024 – 12:27 pm

Back in the early 1980s the construction of IM Pei’s pyramid blocked access to the Louvre Museum, leaving the ancient palace of the Bourbon kings mostly to art historians and a few wandering tourists, however I regularly wandered the museum’s desolate corridors to admire its vast collection. At that time I was employed as the Bains-Douches’ […]

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Better Than The Louvre

February 8, 2024 – 6:08 am

Helmut Newton – Genuis

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An Artist’s Fast Fingers

November 21, 2023 – 11:26 pm

My boss Manny started selling jewelry on Canal Street in 1954. He says that he didn’t sell his first diamond until a year later. “Back then all diamonds were white. We didn’t know any better and better still neither did the Gs.” Manny’s speech is colored by hundreds of diamond selling terms interspersed with Yiddish. […]

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Goodbye Columbus Day

October 11, 2023 – 5:23 am

Before the arrival of Christo Columbo in 1492, the New World was filled with empires, confederations, republics, city-states, and tribal lands. These diverse peoples represented a broad scattering of cultures. The population of the two connected continents has been estimated by modern historians to be approximately twenty-five million people from the Bering Straits to the […]

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