Review: The Broad Is an Old-Fashioned Museum for a New Gilded Age
Works by Takashi Murakami on display at the Broad museum in Los Angeles, which opens on Sept. 20.Credit.Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Sept. 12, 2015
LOS ANGELES Traditional art museums are some of the most conservative and controlling institutions on earth. They are built as vaults to preserve the past, and as monuments to edited histories. In the Gilded Age America of a century or so ago, many new museums were also monuments to private collectors Henry Clay Frick, J. P. Morgan, Isabella Stewart Gardner who strove to shape and fix an image that history would have of them, as enlightened power brokers of their day and benefactors to the future.
Is Greed Good?
‘Can the Evil Inclination be ‘very good’?” asked the sages of the Midrash on Genesis, some time around 300 B.C.E. “That would be extraordinary!” Their conclusion is extraordinary indeed: Yes, man’s natural desire for material wealth and vainglory are “very good,” for “were it not for the Evil Inclination no man would build a house, nor take a wife, nor beget children, nor engage in business.”
Thus, does a remarkable rabbinic discourse on the nature of humanity, wealth creation, and progress anticipate Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman’s new book,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by nearly two millennia. Friedman’s richly detailed work of intellectual history traces modern economic thought to its religious roots, focusing on the belief that laissez-faire economic policy benefits all society by allowing individuals freely to pursue wealth. In doing so, he reexamines the question taken up by the rabbis of the Midrash, centuries of Chr
Project MUSE - Sweet Land of Liberty jhu.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jhu.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
summary
Theodore Kallman illuminates the brief life of a Christian socialist community founded by four men a minister, an editor, a professor, and an engineer on a worn-out cotton plantation just outside Columbus, Georgia, in 1896. Inspired by primitive Christianity, postmillennial optimism, and American democracy, its courageous, yet naïve, members labored for over four years to achieve their goal, the “Kingdom of God” on earth.
Radical by some perspectives, they were emulating two great traditions: the apostolic Christianity of the followers of Christ and the Puritan desire to found a “city upon the hill.” Kallman explains how Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and the anarchism of Leo Tolstoy took root in west-central Georgia and attracted worldwide attention, including that of Tolstoy and Jane Addams.