A 2019 study found that “in the collections of eighteen major US art museums, 87 percent of artworks were by men, and 85 percent by white artists.” There’s a lot to be mad about, but London-based art historian Hessel nimbly pivots that energy into a constructive, revelatory project. Prominent 19th-century art critic John Ruskin once proclaimed, “the woman’s intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision,” and traces of this misguided and malignant sentiment can still be found over a century later in art institutions around the world. It’s a stinging, and entirely well-founded, rebuke of a political strain that shows no signs of disappearing.Ī powerful synthesis of recent world history that should disabuse readers of any notion of American exceptionalism.Īn indispensable primer on the history of art, with an exclusive focus on women. emerges as “a country that killed hundreds of thousands of people through our own unique blend of incompetence and irrationality,” no model for anyone.
As for the pandemic and Trump’s failings there, the U.S. The author clearly shows that fear and self-censorship work in the U.S. Even in the surveillance state of China, this holds true, at least for ethnic Chinese-and, notes the author, Trump is said to have approved of Xi’s program of concentration camps for dissident Uighurs. “Perhaps this was how fascists got away with it through history…there’s enough normal life out there for people to grab on to,” Rhodes writes. “In Singapore,” writes Rhodes, who traveled the world to write this book, “a senior government official told me casually over drinks that Asia had moved on from America-speaking as if this gleaming capitalist construction had almost been seamlessly handed off to the Chinese.” Meanwhile, other global leaders behaved like Trump-notably Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who was once an anti-communist liberal but found more opportunities to exercise power as a nationalist, quietly suppressing opposition while keeping the beer flowing. With that diminution, other nations rose: Putin’s Russia, but especially Xi Jinping’s China. “To be an American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the world,” he writes.
“In the span of just thirty years, this assumption would come crashing down,” he adds, undermined by the very thing that had heralded greatness: a robust capitalism that produced global inequality, undermined the working class, and encouraged official corruption. The assumption that America was somehow different from the rest of the world was an article of faith in his childhood, writes Rhodes. A former Obama administration adviser examines the slow fall from grace that led to Trump.
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