ART: Ancient and Modern

Bill Ratliff of Hoover, an internationalist and a music critic, discusses his likes and dislikes. He does not himself to be kidnapped by modern fashions, and I agree with him on these points:

"I remember decades ago being overwhelmed by the intricacies in the score of Schoenberg's 12-tone wind quintet, which to this day I have never been able to listen to all the way through. No one has to agree with me, though to judge by the speed the vast majority of the people in the Louvre passed those paintings most do. At least I did not jog past them like the battalion of Japanese tourists that almost flattened me on its way to the Mona Lisa. [I find it greatly overrated.RH]. You may be somewhat reassured to know that after visiting Gernika in August with a Basque friend, I went to the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid to see (among other things) "Guernica" by your good friend Picasso, which I still find enormously inflated in physical size and reputation. What can be said of the trash that takes up most of the top floor of the Picasso museum in Barcelona (nothing but vaginas, at least when I was last there almost two years ago) except that the artist in his senility had a one track mind. The Barcelona museum did have an excellent, nuanced reproduction of Picasso's brilliant "Don Quixote," however, which I now have on my dining room wall where I still marvel at it daily. [I am sitting under statuettes of my ancestor, Don Quixote. RH]

Finally, I don't find the term "conservative" very useful any more since so many of us who were once pegged as "conservatives" now often find ourselves agreeing less with some former colleagues, particularly but not only on foreign policy issues, than with some of the former Berkeley and Stanford radicals we literally battled on the steps of the Hoover Tower in the late-1960s. Such is the wonder of change over time and moving beyond stereotypes.

My comment: I plan to run a series of postings on the Hoover Institution, past, present and future. Would Bill please send us a description of what happened on the steps of the Hoover Tower in the late 60s? Thanks,Bill.

Ronald Hilton - 10/18/01