Eminent Americans

Stella Tsantekidou begins her essay "I too am an unfuckable hate nerd" with the kind of inside-outside two-step that characterizes much of the writing on The Human Carbohydrate, her very compelling Substack newsletter. She's at a party in London talking to another writer. The topic is a recent piece they've both read on the phenomenon of the "unfuckable hate nerd," that very 21st century type who populates the nether regions of the internet, marinating in resentment and fury and impotence, taking out his unquenchable hate on the women of the world, particularly those with the gall to think they have opinions worth considering. Stella writes:My issue with that article is that it misses how many women feel like unfuckable hate nerds too. [The other writer] looked at me unconvinced, as people often do when I try to explain to them my affinity for incels and other basement dwelling online weirdos. Coming out of my mouth it sounds like I am fishing for compliments, trying to get my audience to state the obvious. How could I be an unfuckable hate nerd?Then the sexy hammer drops. A photo of Stella:She's hot, in other words. How could this very attractive, apparently well connected woman feel a connection to these terrible, and terribly unattractive, men? The answer, as in much of Stella's writing, is that she's been on both sides of the glass. Born and raised in a small city in Greece, in unremarkable middle class circumstances, she moved to London for college with no connections and no organic insight into the hierarchies and mores that structured British society. Now she's part of the elite political class in the UK, moving back and forth between jobs in government and the advocacy world, with a regular gig doing TV political commentary on the side.In 2024, she's quite good looking and socially successful. As a kid, though, she was a bona fide reject, greasy and awkward and the victim of rather relentless bullying by her classmates. And not weak-ass American-style bullying, but hardcore second world haven't gotten the memo that we don't do that kind of thing anymore bullying. "When I say I was bullied," she writes, "I mean that for six years, on a daily basis, I was reminded that if my peers could exterminate me like a cockroach cornered with an aerosol, they would. ... The boys would push me down the stairs, throw my rucksack out the window, spit on me, call me names no self-respecting heterosexual teenage girl could ever bear to hear directed at her from the lips of boys without contemplating suicide or at least complete voluntary social isolation. ... the only attention I was receiving from boys was to be reminded of how repulsive they all found me. They regularly wondered out loud why I didn’t kill myself."Stella knows what it's like, in other words, to stew with hate for both oneself and others, to wish the worst things in the world upon others who seem to have more fortune while also desperately seeking and wanting their approval and affection. She knows what it feels like to feel ugly and powerless. "In my heart," she writes, "there is always an unfuckable hate nerd. This is the part of me that takes intense, nostalgic pleasure every time I sense as much as an atom of bullying energy coming my way. It feeds my inner unfuckable hate nerd who is still struggling to accept her new position on the food chain."The final turn in her essay is back toward the fact of her current life in possession of young female attractiveness and what she can see, in no small part thank to the benefit of her early struggles, are its dangers and the relatively short half life of its power. Stells and I talk about these issues; the broad arc of her academic and professional journey from Greece to the U.K. to the U.S. (where she worked on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign) and back to the U.K.; reactionary feminism; and the complex legacy of her parents, among many other things. It's a great conversation.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Our text for today’s episode is “John Thompson, b. 1941,” a short eulogy essay by the writer Kiese Laymon in which he reflects on the special affection that not just he but also his “aunts, mother and grandmother” felt for Thompson and his Georgetown basketball team when Laymon was growing up. The coach was more than just a winning coach; he was an avatar of Black America, and a symbol of Black excellence and paternal strength and solidity. Laymon writes:From a distance, I saw Thompson as representative, our imaginary coach who was once a decorated player, who backed up Bill Russell for the champion Boston Celtics. That decorated player who backed up Bill Russell was once a scared Black child, like every Black child I’d met in the universe, just longing to have a fair shot at gracefully winning and graciously losing.…Thompson’s national championship and his subsequent loss in 1985 made real for me the representative possibilities and consequences of publicly winning and losing in America while Black. Though Thompson was our imaginary coach, in this eerie way we were his real team. If Thompson lost, and Georgetown lost, it felt as if my race lost. Even at 9 I knew there should have been more Black coaches in all the sports I watched since nearly all the best players were Black. I knew that there was nothing as joyful as publicly beating white Americans in anything simply because white Americans were allowed to play, cheat, coach, referee, own and win whether they actually showed up or not. My guests on the show today are Laymon himself, professor of English and creative writing at Rice University and author of, among other books, the essay collection  How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, the novel Long Division, and the memoir Heavy; and Jason Sokol, professor at history the university of New Hampshire and author of, among other books, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights and The Heavens Might Crack The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Two personal notes about this episode: Jason is my oldest friend on the planet. We went to pre-school together and have been close friends since. And Jason and Kiese were friends at Oberlin College, where they played basketball together and talked ideas, history, race, and the rest. As you’ll hear on the episode, they haven’t spoken since they graduated, so this is a bit of a reunion.The audio clip at the beginning is from the song “Georgetown Press,” by Wale.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List* The Lure of Divorce, by Emily Gould* Goulded Cages, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy* The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad, by Elizabeth Weil* Can polyamory save this marriage? by Phoebe Maltz BovyMy guest on today’s episode, which is part of my ongoing double secret probationary special series on the state of the discourse late winter/early spring 2024, is New York born, Toronto-based writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy.I reached out to Phoebe after reading her short post on Substack about the recent big, long, splashy essay by Emily Gould about Gould’s descent into bipolar-induced mania, her separation from her husband (writer Keith Gessen), their eventual hard-won reconciliation, and the complex ways in which her feminist analyses of the problems in their marriage were much less useful and clarifying than they initially seemed.Phoebe writes:Gould … steeps herself in the men-are-bastards literature of the past years/decades, and concludes, “This was not quite the way I felt.”I cannot emphasize enough, having read many such items for researching-straight-women purposes, what a tremendous break this is from business as usual. Because if you’re a 40ish straight or straightish woman, you’re meant to feel one thing.Gould tries to funnel her angst-and-then-some into the expected feminist narrative, but is stymied by her realizations that she’s done a lot of bad things, and that her husband, too, is a person. She looks at the facts on the ground and isn’t able to blame the patriarchy for her own messy blend of mental illness and bad choices.Phoebe and I talk about Gould and Gessen, the unglamorous realities of the writing life, how much cultural capital is worth compared to actual capital, and Phoebe’s review of the recent polyamory memoir by Molly Roden Winter.Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the author of The Perils of “Privilege” (2017). She is a senior editor at the Canadian Jewish News, a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, author of the Substack newsletter Close-reading the Reruns, columnist for the Globe and Mail, and writer for various other publications of note.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List:* “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin), 2 (Lionel Trilling), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr), by Damon Linker.* “Philosophy and the Far Right”—Part 1 and Part 2* “Conservatism and Skepticism”—Part 1 and Part 2My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias occasionally punch it out for the title in an underground fight club built in the tunnels under the charred timbers of the former headquarters of the New Republic). Damon is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Notes from the Middle Ground newsletters on Substack, is a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and is the author of two books, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders.I asked Damon on the show to discuss his recent series of essays on three of the seminal thinkers of post-war liberalism, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. We also got into his conflicted feelings about the philosopher Leo Strauss and the movement—Straussianism—that he birthed.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading list:* Windex Ain’t Scared: Here’s Our Statement on Israel/Palestine, by Jeff Maurer* Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell, by The Onion* Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake, by The Onion* American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie, by The OnionMy guests on the podcast today are Jeff Maurer, author of “Windex Ain’t Scared,” and my brother Mark Oppenheimer, who selected the text to be the subject of this installment of my special series on the state of the discourse.Jeff Maurer served honorably in the federal government for eight years until his standup comedy career led him to being hired as a writer on John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, where Jeff worked for six years, and he is now the author of the Substack newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, which is hilarious and smart. Mark is a writer and podcaster based in New Haven, Connecticut, author of many books, most recently Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and The Soul of a Neighborhood, also brilliant and hilarious. He's hard at work on a biography of Judy Blume; is the host of The Syllabus, a podcast about campus politics; and Substacks at Oppenheimer.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List:* The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms, by Ross Barkan* Notes Toward a New Romanticism, by Ted Gioia* The Invisible College: Modern British Literature, by John Pistelli* The Three Segments of American Culture, by Ross Barkan* Major Arcana: Preface, by John PistelliMy guests on the show today are writers Ross Barkan and John Pistelli, and they’re here to help me launch something new on the podcast, which is a series of shorter episodes that are dedicated to taking stock of the state of the intellectual discourse. I don’t have a grand schema for what means. I’ve just been reaching out to a bunch of interesting people, some of them prior guests on the podcast, and asking them to “pick one idea, writer, cultural encounter, or text that you think has been significant in the past year or so.”My only other criterion is that I’ve asked folks to try to avoid going too directly at the culture wars topics that suck up so much energy in the discourse right now. Those topics are important, of course, and no doubt we’ll touch on many of them in the course of things, including in today’s episode, but I didn’t want to start there.John proposed today’s texts, which are two connected essays that suggest that we may be entering, if not necessarily a new romantic age, then at least a period in which certain romantic tendencies swirl more forcefully than they have in a long time. One is Ross’s December 2023 essay in the Guardian, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange romantic backlash to the tech era looms.” The other is “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” a Substack essay by cultural critic Ted Gioia.I’d add to this mix some of the writing that John has been doing on his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss; some of Ross’s work on his Substack, Political Currents; and maybe also some of the modern British literature lectures that John has been beaming out via his substack to his paid subscribers, of whom I’m one.Ross Barkan is the author of three books, including the novel The Night Burns Bright. He's a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and his reporting and essays have appeared in a wide array of publications, including New York Magazine, The Nation, and the Guardian. He teaches journalism and writing at NYU. John Pistelli has written four novels, as well as short fiction, poetry and criticism for venues as diverse as Rain Taxi, The Millions, Tablet, and The Spectator. At his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, he publishes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture, serializes his latest novel, and offers independent literature courses, including on the writers of the Romantic era.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading List:* Oh, Mr Hitchens! by Laura Kipnis* The Journalist and the Editor, by Laura Kipnis* Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe, Laura Kipnis* My Title IX Inquisition, by Laura Kipnis* Christopher Hitchens' last years: Islam, the Iraq war and how a man of the left found his moment by breaking with the left, by Daniel OppenheimerMy guest on the show today is Laura Kipnis. Laura is a cultural critic and essayist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of, among other books, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; How to Become A Scandal; Against Love: A Polemic; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability; and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America–have been translated into fifteen languages. Her latest book, just out this past year, is Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis.I’ve admired Laura’s writing for many years, but the specific reason I was prompted to invite her on the show today were two essays of very recent vintage. One was a review, for Bookforum, of the last book by Janet Malcolm, which was published after her death. And a short essay for Critical Quarterly on Christopher Hitchens that had the lovely title, “Oh, Mr. Hitchens!”These essays resonated with me both on their own terms and because Janet Malcolm and Christopher Hitchens were—are—profoundly important to me. In very different ways I think they provided templates of what kind of things I might want to do as a writer. I also just loved reading them, and think my understanding of the world has been shaped by them. And Laura kind of got them. The Hitchens piece, in particular, captured something about the man that I’ve seen captured by no one else. Take this passage, for instance, in which Laura is recounting an evening when she was drinking with Hitchens, before he was scheduled to give a talk at Northwestern. They get on the subject of Bill Clinton:Something about Bill Clinton's sex life seemed to derange him. He was off the rails on the subject, literally sputtering. I tried to put it to him that he seemed, well, overinvested. It seemed way too personal, somehow off. What was it about Bill Clinton that had this unhinging effect on him? (I was kind of drunk at that point myself.) I suppose I expected him to at least pretend to ponder the question, devote maybe a few seconds to a show of self-examination. Anyone would. Not him. He was barricaded against anything I could say, also against the ‘what is this “about” for you’ sort of conversation that drunk people are known to have, which is one of the fun things about drinking, Something obdurate and hardened switched on instead. Thinking was not what was taking place, just pre-rehearsed lines and a lot of outrage.This is exceptional writing. It’s also very perceptive about Hitchens in a way that sidesteps so many of the posthumous takes on Hitchens, which tend to divide far too cleanly between those who like or dislike his late politics. The problem with late Hitchens wasn’t that his politics changed, but that his thinking got more rigid and therefore writing got worse.Laura and I talk about Hitch, Malcolm, her own backstory as a writer, and more.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of the podcast, I talk to Blake Smith and Gary Kornblau about the 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s seminal 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Blake is currently a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as the author a great (which is to say, very flattering) review of my 2021 book on Hickey, and he was a stalwart participant in the Substack “book club” I organized on the new edition of Dragon. Gary is faculty at the ArtCenter College of Design. More pertinently, he was Dave’s great editor, having plucked him out of obscurity to write for art Issues, the small LA-based journal that Gary founded and edited. He was the one who gave Dave just the right amount of rein to do his best work, and also the one who conceptualized and edited both Invisible Dragon and Dave’s subsequent book Air Guitar. The episode covers a lot of ground, including the impact of the original version of the book, the reasons why Gary decided to put out a 30th anniversary edition, and Gary’s decision to use the opportunity to try to “queer” Dave. It’s a blast. I hope you listen. I also wanted to take the opportunity to run the below excerpt from my book on Dave. It covers the background to the writing and reception of Invisible Dragon, and is, IMO, a mighty fine piece of writing in its own right. Hope you enjoy.On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that it was cancelling Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, its scheduled exhibition of photographs by the celebrated American photographer, who had died of AIDS in March. The Corcoran’s primary motive in cancelling was fear.Only a few months before, a long-simmering debate about the role of the federal government in funding the arts had boiled over in response to Piss Christ, a photograph of a small icon of Jesus on the cross floating in a vitrine of urine. Its creator, Andres Serrano, had received a small chunk of a larger grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the offending photograph had been included in a touring exhibition that was also funded by federal money. During that tour, the photograph caught the eye of the American Family Association, a conservative Chris­tian advocacy group dedicated to fighting what it saw as anti-Christian values in entertainment and the arts. They rang the alarm.Soon after, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato called out Piss Christ from the floor of the Senate. He tore up a reproduction of the photo and denounced it as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who would soon lead the charge against Mapplethorpe, added: “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. . . . Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord.” Patrick Trueman, president of the American Family Association, testified to Congress that governmental support of work like Piss Christ would make it less likely that prosecutors would pursue or win cases against child pornographers.The ensuing congressional battle, over funding for the NEA, became the first in a series of broader cultural and political battles that would come to be known, in retrospect, as the “culture wars” of the 1990s. These battles would range not just over sex and politics in the arts, but also over issues like gays in the military, federal funding for abor­tion, and control over history and social studies curricula in the public schools. It was “a war for the soul of America,” as Pat Buchanan framed it at the 1992 Republican Party convention, a contest over whether the nation would continue to secularize and liberalize or would return to a more conservative social equilibrium.The full contours of the conflict weren’t immediately evident in the aftermath of the Serrano affair, but it was very clear, right away, that the Mapplethorpe exhibit was another grenade ready to go off. Its orga­nizers at the University of Pennsylvania had received NEA money, and the Corcoran Gallery, walking distance from the White House, was too visible an institution to slide by the notice of people like Helms and D’Amato. So the Corcoran begged off, hoping to shield themselves from the shrapnel and avoid giving conservatives another opportunity to question the value of federal funding for the arts.Instead, they got fragged by all sides. By fellow curators and museum administrators, who believed the Corcoran’s appeasement would only encourage more aggression from haters of contemporary art. By civil lib­ertarians, who saw the Corcoran’s actions as an example of how expres­sive speech was being chilled by the culture war rhetoric of the right. By a major donor, a friend of Mapplethorpe, who angrily withdrew a promised bequest to the museum of millions of dollars. And, of course, by the conservatives they had been hoping to appease, who accurately recognized the blasphemy in Mapplethorpe’s federally funded portraits of sodomites doing naughty things to each other and themselves.Piss Christ had been useful to the conservative cultural cause as an example of how homosexual artists were taking taxpayer money to spit on the values that decent Americans held dear, but it wasn’t ideal. How blasphemed could a good Christian really feel, after all, by an image of Jesus as reverential as what Serrano had in fact made? His Christ was bathed in glowing red-orange-yellow light, the image scored by dots and lines of tiny bubbles that come off almost like traces of exhumation, as if the whole thing has been recently, lovingly removed from the reliquary in which it’s been preserved for thousands of years.“I think if the Vatican is smart,” Serrano later said, “someday they’ll collect my work. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.”Mapplethorpe’s pictures, though, were something else entirely, a real cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity. Where Serrano was mostly using new means to say some very old things about the mystery of the incarnation and the corporeality of Christ, Mapplethorpe was using orthodox pictorial techniques to bring to light a world of pleasure, pain, male-male sex, bondage, power, trust, desire, control, violation, submission, love, and self-love that had been ban­ished to the dark alleyways, boudoirs, bathhouses, and rest stops of the West since the decline of Athens. And he was doing so masterfully, in the language of fine art, in the high houses of American culture.There was Lou, for instance, which could have been a photograph of a detail from an ancient bronze of Poseidon except that the detail in question is of Poseidon’s muscled arm holding his cock firmly in one hand while the pinky finger of his other hand probes its hole. In Helmut and Brooks, a fist disappearing up an anus plays like an academic exercise in shape and shadow. And in the now iconic Self-Portrait, Mapplethorpe has the handle of a bullwhip up his own rectum, his balls dangling in shadow beneath, his legs sheathed in leather chaps, his eyes staring back over his shoulder at the camera with a gaze so full of intelligence and vitality that it almost steals the show from the bullwhip.In response to these kinds of beautiful provocations, the outrage, which had been largely performative vis-à-vis Serrano, became rather genuine, and the whole thing escalated. By July, a month after the exhibition at the Corcoran had been cancelled, Congress was debating whether to eliminate entirely the $171 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. By October, a compromise was reached. The NEA and its sister fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, would get their usual rounds of funding, minus a symbolic $45,000 for the cost of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe grants. They would be pro­hibited, however, from using the monies to support work that was too gay, too creepy in depicting children, or just too kinky. Exceptions were made for art that violated these taboos but had “serious literary, artis­tic, political, or scientific value.” But the point had been made, and the enforcement mechanism, in any case, wasn’t really the articulated rules. It was the threat of more hay-making from the right and, ultimately, the implied promise that if NEA-supported institutions kept sticking their noses (or fists) where they didn’t belong then it wouldn’t be too long before there wouldn’t be any NEA left.A few months later, in April 1990, the Contemporary Arts Cen­ter in Cincinnati, Ohio, took up the Mapplethorpe baton by opening their own exhibition of The Perfect Moment. Hoping to head off trouble, they segregated the most scandalous of the photos in a side room, with appropriate signage to warn off the young and the delicate. They also filed a motion in county court asking that the photographs be preemp­tively designated as not obscene. But the motion was denied, and the separate room proved insufficient buffer. When the exhibit opened to the public, on April 7, its attendees included members of a grand jury that had been impaneled by Hamilton County prosecutors to indict the museum and its director for violating Ohio obscenity law. Of the more than 150 images in the exhibit, seven were selected out by the grand jury for being obscene. Five depicted men engaged in homoerotic and/ or sado-masochistic acts, and two were of naked children.The trial that followed was symbolically thick. Motions were filed that forced the judge to rule on fundamental questions about the mean­ing and political status of art. Art critics and curators were called in to witness, before the largely working-class members of the jury, to the artistic merit of Mapplethorpe’s photography. The indictment read like an update of the Scopes trial, captioned by Larry Flynt, in which “the peace and dignity of the State of Ohio” was being ravaged by bands of cavorting homosexuals.The jury issued its verdict in October 1990, acquitting the museum and its director. It was a victory for the forces of high art and free expres­sion, but a complicated one. The exhibition could go on. And Map­plethorpe’s photographs—indeed, the most outrageous of them—had been designated as art by the State of Ohio and by a group of decent, law-abiding, presumably-not-gay-sex-having American citizens. But the cost had been high. Museums and galleries everywhere had been warned, and not all of them would be as willing as the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati to risk indictment and the threat of defunding for the sake of showing dangerous art.Perhaps most significantly, the National Endowment for the Arts, and its new director, announced a shift in funding priorities in order to take the institution out of the crossfire of the culture wars. Less and less of their money, it was decided, would go to individual artists and exhibitions, and more of it would go to support arts enrichment—to schools, outreach programs, arts camps, and educational campaigns. Mapplethorpe and Serrano were out. Sesame Street was in.For Dave Hickey, a critic and ex-gallery owner, it was, finally, all too much. Not the opportunism of the Hamilton County sheriff and his allies. Not the predictable huffing from the bow-tied brigades, who took to the pages of their tweedy magazines to bellyache, as always, about what a precipitous decline there had been in cultural standards since the 1960s ruined everything. Not even the rednecking of the senator from North Carolina was the problem for Hickey.Each of these parties was performing its assigned role in the passion play of American cultural politics. Narrow-minded prosecutors would always try to run dirty pictures out of town. New Criterion-ites would avert their eyes from new art. Senators from North Carolina would dem­agogue about queers from New York City. You could be angry at having to contend with these actors, but you couldn’t genuinely feel betrayed. You knew where they stood from the get-go, and half the joy of art, and of the artistic life, lay in trying to figure out how to shock, outwit, or seduce them.The betrayal, for Hickey, came from his colleagues, from the crit­ics, curators, gallerists, professors, and arts administrators with whom he had been uneasily mixing since the late 1960s when he dropped out of his doctoral program in linguistics to open an art gallery in Austin, Texas. They had been handed a rare opportunity to represent for all that was queer and decadent and artsy-fartsy in American life, to make the case that this—beautiful pictures of men seeing what it felt like to shove things up their asses—wasn’t the worst of America but the best of it. And they had whiffed.“The American art community, at the apogee of its power and privi­lege, chose to play the ravaged virgin,” wrote Hickey, “to fling itself pros­trate across the front pages of America and fairly dare the fascist heel to crush its outraged innocence. . . . [H]ardly anyone considered for a moment what an incredible rhetorical triumph the entire affair signi­fied. A single artist with a single group of images had somehow managed to overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystifica­tion that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threaten those in actual power with the celebration of margin­ality. It was a fine moment, I thought . . . and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in.”The Corcoran had been bad enough, throwing in the towel before an opponent had even stepped into the ring. But far worse, for Hickey, were the ones who had shown up to fight but had misread the aesthet­ical-political map so badly that they had gone to the wrong arena. The fight, he believed, should have been over whether it was okay or not in our culture to make beautiful the behaviors that Mapplethorpe had made beautiful. The fight should have been over what Mapplethorpe had done with his art. Instead, the public got bromides about free expression and puritanical lectures about the civilizing function of arts in society. Worst of all, in Hickey’s eyes, was how quickly the art experts ran away from the rawness of Mapplethorpe’s work, characterizing him as though he were a philosopher of aesthetics, rather than an artist, as though he chose and framed his subjects for the sake of what they allowed him to say, propositionally, about the nature of light and beauty and other such things.“Mapplethorpe uses the medium of photography to translate flowers, stamens, stares, limbs, as well as erect sexual organs, into objet d’art,” wrote curator Janet Kardon in her catalogue essay for the exhibition. “Dramatic lighting and precise composition democratically pulverize their diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements.””When it came to it on the witness stand in Cincinnati, even the folks who had curated the exhibition, who surely knew that Mapplethorpe would bring the people in precisely because he was so titillating—Look at the dicks! Hey, even the flowers look like dicks!—couldn’t allow them­selves even a flicker of a leer. So Hickey called them out.In a series of four essays written between 1989 and 1993, which were assembled into the sixty-four-page volume The Invisible Dragon, he launched a lacerating critique of American art critical and art historical practice. It was so unexpected, and so potent, that by the time he was done, his own intervention—a slim, impossibly cool, small-batch edi­tion from Art issues Press—would be as transformative in the art critical realm as Mapplethorpe’s photographs had been in the photographic.The Invisible Dragon began with a story. It wasn’t necessarily a true story, but it was a good one. So good, in fact, that it has conditioned and, in significant ways, distorted perceptions of Hickey ever since.“I was drifting, daydreaming really,” wrote Hickey, “through the wan­ing moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s Happening Now,’ drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘The Issue of the Nine­ties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, ‘Beauty,’ and then, more firmly, ‘The issue of the nineties will be beauty’—a total improvisatory goof—an off-the-wall, jump-start, free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic; wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don’t know, but the total, uncompre­hending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate cre­dence for me.”Hickey, an experienced provocateur, had been expecting some kind of pushback. (Beauty?! That old thing? The issue of the ’90s? You gotta be kidding me.) When he got none, he was intrigued. His fellow panelists hadn’t jumped in to tussle. The moderator didn’t seem ruffled. No one from the audience harangued him after he stepped down from the dais. Rather than setting off sparks, he had soft-shoed into a vacuum, which meant he had misjudged something, and in that misjudgment, he sensed, there lay potential. (“I was overcome by this strange Holme­sian elation. The game was afoot.”) He began interrogating friends and colleagues, students and faculty, critics and curators for their thoughts on beauty and its role in the production, assessment, and consump­tion of art. What he got back, again and again, was a simple and rather befuddling response: When asked about beauty, everyone talked about money. “Beauty” was the surface glitz that sold pictures in the bourgeois art market to people who lacked an appreciation for the deeper qualities of good art. It was a branding scheme of capitalism and the province of schmoozy art dealers, rich people, and high-end corporate lobby deco­rators. Artists themselves, and critics and scholars, were more properly concerned with other qualities: truth, meaning, discourse, language, ideology, form, justice. There were high-brow versions of this argument in journals like Art Forum and October, and there were less sophisticated versions, but the angle of incidence was the same.Hickey was stunned. Not by the content of such an argument— he knew his Marx and was familiar with left cultural criticism more broadly—but by the completeness of its triumph. He hadn’t realized the extent, almost total, to which beauty had been vanquished from the sphere of discursive concern.“I had assumed,” he wrote, “that from the beginning of the sixteenth century until just last week artists had been persistently and effectively employing the rough vernacular of pleasure and beauty to interrogate our totalizing concepts ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’; and now this was over? Evidently. At any rate, its critical vocabulary seemed to have evap­orated overnight, and I found myself muttering detective questions like: Who wins? Who loses?”The quest to reconstruct what had happened to beauty soon evolved for Hickey into a more fundamental effort to understand what even he meant by the term. What was he defending? What was he trying to res­cue or redeem? The critical vocabulary and community he had assumed were there, perhaps fighting a rearguard battle but still yet on the field, had winked out of existence without even a good-bye note. It was left to him, in the absence of anyone else, to reconstitute its concepts and arguments, restock its supply chain and armament.So he did, and he called it The Invisible Dragon. The issue, he wrote, is not beauty but the beautiful. The beautiful is the visual language through which art excites interest and pleasure and attention in an observer. It is a form of rhetoric, a quiver of rhetorical maneuvers. Artists enchant us through their beautiful assemblages of color, shape, effects, reference, and imagery, as a writer ensnares us with words and sentences and para­graphs, as a dancer enthralls us with legs and leaps, as a rock star cap­tures us with hips and lips and voice. The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.Beauty, in this equation, is the sum of the charge that an artist, deploy­ing the language of the beautiful, can generate. It is a spark that begins in the intelligence and insight of the artist, is instantiated into material being by her command of the techniques of the beautiful, and is crystal­lized in the world by its capacity to elicit passion and loyalty and detes­tation in its beholders, to rally around itself constituencies and against itself enemies. Like all arks and arenas of human value, beauty is his­torically grounded but also historically contingent. In the Renaissance, where The Invisible Dragon begins its modern history of beauty, masters like Caravaggio were negotiating and reconstructing the relations among the Church, God, man, and society. They were deploying the tools of the beautiful to hook into and renovate primarily theological systems of meaning and human relation. In a liberal, pluralistic, commerce-driven democracy like America, the primary terrain on which beauty was medi­ated, and in some respects generated, was the art market.To dismiss beauty as just another lubricant of modern capitalism, then, was to miss the point in a succession of catastrophic ways. It was to mistake the last part of that equation, the creation and negotiation of value on and through the art market, for the entirety of it. It was to mistake the exchange of art for other currencies of value, which was a human activity that preceded and would persist after capitalism, for capitalism. It was to believe that the buying and selling of art in modern art markets was a problem at all, when, in fact, it was the only available solution in our given historical configuration of forces. And it was to radically underestimate the capacity of beauty to destabilize and reorder precisely the relations of politics, economy, and culture that its vulgar critics believed it was propping up.Beauty had consequences. Beautiful images could change the world. In America, risking money or status for the sake of what you found beautiful—by buying or selling that which you found beautiful or by arguing about which objects should be bought or sold on account of their beauty—was a way of risking yourself for the sake of the vision of the good life you would like to see realized.The good guys in Hickey’s story were those who put themselves on the line for objects that deployed the beautiful in ways they found per­suasive and pleasure-inducing. They were the artists themselves, whose livelihoods depended on participation in the art market, who risked poverty, rejection, incomprehension, and obscurity if their work wasn’t beautiful enough to attract buyers. They were the dealers, who risked their money and reputation for objects they wagered were beautiful enough to bring them more money and status. They were the buyers, who risked money and ridicule in the hopes of acquiring more status and pleasure. They were the critics, like Hickey, who risked their rep­utations and careers on behalf of the art that struck them as beautiful and on behalf of the artists whose idiosyncratic visions they found per­suasive or undeniable. And finally they were the fans, who desperately wanted to see that which they loved loved by others and to exist in com­munity with their fellow enthusiasts. The good guys were the ones who cared a lot, and specifically.The villains were the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and fund­ing institutions that had claimed for themselves almost total control of the assignment and negotiation of value to art, severing art’s ties to the messy democratic marketplace, which was the proper incubator of artis­tic value in a free society. The blob cared a lot, too, but about the wrong things.“I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally,” wrote Hickey, “as the ‘therapeutic institution.’”In the great mystery of the disappeared beauty, the whodunnit that fueled The Invisible Dragon, it turned out that it was the therapeutic institution that dunnit. It had squirted so many trillions of gallons of obfuscating ink into the ocean over so many decades that beauty, and the delicate social ecosystems that fostered its coalescence, could barely aspirate. Why the therapeutic institution did this, for Hickey, was simple. Power. Control. Fear of freedom and pleasure and undisciplined feeling. It was the eternally recurring revenge of the dour old Patriarch who had been haunting our dreams since we came up from the desert with his schemas of logic, strength, autonomy, and abstraction, asserting control against the wiles and seductions of the feminine and her emanations of care, vulnerability, delicacy, dependence, joy, and decoration. It was the expression of God’s anger in the Garden of Eden when Eve and Adam defied Him to bite from the juicy apple of knowledge and freedom.In one of the most extraordinary passages in the book, Hickey turned Michel Foucault, a favorite of the blob, back on the blob. It was Fou­cault, he wrote, who drew back the curtain on the hidden authoritarian impulse at work in so many of the modern institutions of social order, particularly those systems most committed to the tending of our souls. Such systems weren’t content with establishing regimes of dominance and submission that were merely or primarily external. Appearances canbe too deceiving. Too much wildness can course beneath the facade of compliance. It was inner consent, cultivated therapeutically through the benevolent grooming of the institutions, that mattered. Thus the disciplined intensity with which the therapeutic institution had fought its multi-generational war to crowd out and delegitimize the market, where appearance was almost everything and where desire, which is too unpredictably correlated with virtue, was so operative.“For nearly 70 years, during the adolescence of modernity, profes­sors, curators, and academicians could only wring their hands and weep at the spectacle of an exploding culture in the sway of painters, dealers, critics, shopkeepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, and American expatriates. Jews abounded, as did homosexuals, bisex­uals, Bolsheviks, and women in sensible shoes. Vulgar people in manu­facture and trade who knew naught but romance and real estate bought sticky Impressionist landscapes and swooning pre-Raphaelite bimbos from guys with monocles who, in their spare time, were shipping the treasures of European civilization across the Atlantic to railroad barons. And most disturbingly for those who felt they ought to be in control— or that someone should be—‘beauties’ proliferated, each finding an audience, each bearing its own little rhetorical load of psycho-political permission.”After getting knocked back on their heels so thoroughly, wrote Hickey, the bureaucrats began to get their act together around 1920. They have been expanding and entrenching their hegemony ever since, developing the ideologies, building the institutions, and corralling the funding to effectively counter, control, and homogenize all the unruly little beauties. There had been setbacks to their campaign along the way, most notably in the 1960s, but the trend line was clear.In this dialectic, Mapplethorpe proves an interesting and illustra­tive figure. He was so brilliant in making his world beautiful that the therapeutic institution had no choice but to gather him in, to celebrate him in order to neutralize him, to pulverize his diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements. But it turned out that he was too quicksilver a talent to be so easily caged, and the blob was overconfident in its capacity to domesticate him. It/they missed something with Map­plethorpe and made the mistake of exposing him to the senator from North Carolina and the prosecutor from Hamilton County, who saw through the scrim of institutional mediation. All the therapeutic testi­mony that followed, in the case of Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, wasn’t really about defending Mapplethorpe or fending off conservative tyranny. It was about reasserting the blob’s hegemony. In truth, Senator Helms and the therapeutic institution were destabilized by complemen­tary aspects of the same thing, which was pleasure and desire rendered beautiful and specific.“It was not that men were making it then,” wrote Hickey, “but that Robert was ‘making it beautiful.’ More precisely, he was appropriating a Baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution.”Confronted by this beautiful provocation, the conservative and art establishments, whatever they thought they were doing, were, in fact, collaborating to put Mapplethorpe back in his place. The ostensible tri­umph of one side was the secret triumph for both. It was beauty that lost. The Invisible Dragon was a howl of frustration at this outcome. It was also a guerrilla whistle. Not so fast . . .Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. 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Reading list:* A personal and stirring guide to the great Dutch painters, by Sebastian Smee* Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters, by Benjamin Moser* How Gayness Changed During My Lifetime, by Benjamin Moser* Enemies of Promise, by Cyril ConnollyMy guest on the podcast today is Benjamin Moser, who was born in Houston but has lived for the past twenty plus years in Utrecht in the Netherlands, a city he describes as the Brooklyn to Amsterdam’s Manhattan, close by but different vibe. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. His subsequent book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His new book is The Upside Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, which is about his personal encounters, while living the last two decades in Utrecht, with the great painters of the Dutch golden age, folks like Vermeer and Rembrandt but also a host of other, lesser known but still quite extraordinary painters of that era from the late 16th century to the late 17th century. I framed the challenge of my conversation with Ben as having to simultaneously accomplish two objectives that are in tension: to pay serious attention to his book, which is primarily about a rather distant past, while also honoring the ethos of my podcast, which is about the present and recent present. And we needed to do it in a real way, not a phony “the great painters of the past still breathe vibrantly in the present” sort of way.I think we pulled it off, with flying colors, but I suppose that you, the listeners, will be the ultimate judge of that. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Cedric Johnson, a political science and Black studies professor, critiques the significant influence of Ta-Nehisi Coates in contemporary racial discourse. They discuss the intersection of race and class, examining how Black Lives Matter reflects a broader neoliberal agenda. Johnson shares insights from his book, focusing on the historical disconnect between wealthier Black advocates and working-class communities. The conversation delves into the need for nuanced policing reform, the impact of deindustrialization, and the potential of innovative public works projects to drive lasting change.