Sam Ben-Meir, PhD is an adjunct professor at Mercy College. His current research focuses on environmental ethics and animal studies. sam@alonben-meir.com
By Sam Ben-Meir Over 2 million Ukrainians have now become refugees – each one a part of the largest dispersal of Europeans across the continent in decades. Over 1,000 villages and towns are without water, electricity and heat, while medical supplies are rapidly dwindling – swelling a humanitarian crisis that is rapidly growing worse by […]
For Ukraine, the Time is Now Read More »
International, Opinion, Sam Ben-Meir, USA
By Sam Ben-Meir NEW YORK — Currently on view at the Currier Museum, Philip Guston’s mural “Pulpwood Logging” (1941) is right beside its original partner, Musa McKim’s “Wildlife in the White Mountains” (1941). Both 14-foot murals were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) — a federal program created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat
Philip Guston and Musa McKim at the Currier Museum Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-MeirTitian: Women, Myth & Power at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum consists of only six paintings, yet this one-room exhibition feels more like a six-course banquet. So overwhelming, immense and entrancing are the monumental canvases that upon entering the room one must literally catch one’s breath. Titian, greatest of the Venetian Renaissance masters, referred to these paintings, commissioned by King Philip II of Spain, as poesie (poems) and each depicts a different scene from stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Poems in Paint: Titian at the Gardner Museum Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-MeirTo date, nearly two hundred million Americans – just over 60 percent of the population – have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Recent reports indicate that unvaccinated adults are more than three times as likely to lean Republican. In other words, for every unvaccinated Democrat there are roughly three unvaccinated Republicans. An important question then not only for bioethicists but for all of us is whether there exists a moral obligation to vaccinate. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Autonomy and the Moral Obligation to Get Vaccinated Read More »
Lifestyles, Sam Ben-Meir, Science, Medicine, & Education, USAIs it not extraordinary that in a country that claims to be as enlightened and advanced as ours that the combined wealth of three individuals – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett – should exceed the total wealth of the bottom half of Americans? One has to return to the days of the pharaohs of Egypt to find a parallel to the extreme wealth inequality that we see in in America today. Such stark inequality, and the ever-growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few will only intensify if we continue as we have for the past 40 years. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
OpEd: U.S. Should Put Caps on Income Read More »
Business & Finance, Sam Ben-Meir, USA
By Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D NEW YORK — What are the aesthetic, sensuous, and expressive possibilities inherent in clay as a material substance in all its physicality? How is it possible that ceramics can restore, or rather reconfigure and remake our relationship to the natural world? These are among the fundamental questions posed by “Shapes from
Beyond Functionality: Modern and Contemporary Ceramics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir, USAThe Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting an exhibition devoted to an in-depth review of Paul Cézanne’s drawings. If there is any criticism to be made of this extraordinary show, it is that it is frankly overwhelming: with roughly 280 pencil, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors (and even a handful of oil paintings), there is so much to take in that two or three visits to the exhibition may be required to do it justice. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Motion, Violence are Elements of MMA’s Cézanne Exhibit Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir, USAI am always surprised and rather dismayed whenever I hear my fellows disparage the vocal production of our avian cousins. Do you not know, I want to say, that many birds – from the nightingale to the song sparrow – are consummate musicians? The Lyrebird, that clears a patch of forest floor, prepares his stage on which to sing and dance. Is this not an artist, in the most complete sense? Birdsong is indeed music, a spontaneous expression of how a particular bird experiences and feels the world. So much so that some birds have been known to sing with such intensity and passion that their little hearts have burst in the very e ecstasy of the transport – as if their poor frames could not contain the overwhelming spiritual force of the music. [Sam Ben-Meir]
Short Story: ‘The Conductor’ Read More »
Jewish Fiction, Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir
Once upon a time there was a fly – by all outward appearances an ordinary and inconspicuous housefly. But this fly was quite unlike its fellows, unlike any fly that has ever been or is ever likely to be again. For this fly was in love, and not with another fly let me hasten to add. This fly was in love – in love, I say – with a man. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Short Story: The Fly Read More »
Jewish Fiction, Sam Ben-Meir
The pandemic, which has taken over three million lives and continues to ravage parts of the world; the rise of Trumpism, culminating in the January 6th attack on the Capitol; the degradation of the environment and the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change; these things, and others, have served to alert many of us that the comfort we take in the notion that what has always been the case one’s whole life will always remain the case is nothing more than a pleasant fiction. Several centuries ago, a Scottish philosopher made a similar observation, and notably took it quite a bit further. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
The Lasting Significance of David Hume Read More »
Sam Ben-Meir, Science, Medicine, & Education
Since at least 2014, Mural (1943) has been on perpetual tour. So much has already been said about this large painting – books are devoted solely to the analysis of Jackson Pollock’s first great masterpiece. What else can possibly be said? In fact, there will always be new things to say. As with any work of genius, it exceeds every interpretation. Mural is generally regarded as a transitional work – between the mythological, Jungian abstractions and the later drip paintings which would secure Pollock’s world fame.
‘Mural’ Came From Deep in Pollock’s Unconscious Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir
This is a moment to revisit and reflect on the work of Russian-born artist, Symeon Shimin. During his life, Shimin illustrated over 50 children’s books, including two that he authored himself; his masterpiece, however – influenced in part by ‘Los Tres Grandes’ – was the mural painting, “Contemporary Justice and the Child” (1936), located on the third floor of the Department of Justice, where it still stands today. [Sam Ben-Meir]
Symeon Shimin’s Humanistic Art Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir, USAPerhaps what is most startling about the etchings of Francisco Goya, presently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the artist’s intensity of focus, his obsession with understanding the nature of human evil. Goya was a child of the Enlightenment, and he knew what it was to see humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the paragon of animals, the embodiment of reason, “in form and understanding how like a god?” as Hamlet would say. Yet this same creature, the light of reason in the world, was capable of the most barbaric cruelty. In one series after another Goya’s etchings attempt to grasp the universality of evil, to see it as an essentially human problem to be understood in terms of our capacity for moral choice. Evil is universally human, for Goya – a propensity in human beings that is at once basic and inextinguishable. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Francisco Goya at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-MeirVida Americana is an exhilarating, expansive and immensely satisfying exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum. Like a great and varied feast, this is a show that one must take one’s time to fully appreciate and digest; an exhibition that includes photography, film, sculpture, charcoal sketches, colored pencil and graphite, watercolors, lithographs and oil paintings, from the easel to the epic in scale. Not only are the greatest Mexican artists of the twentieth century represented here – including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (‘Los Tres Grandes’) – but also many of the notable American artists who they had a profound influence on, such as Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, Marion Greenwood and Charles White, among others. [Sam Ben-Meir, Ph.D]
Art as Liberation: The Mexican Muralists at the Whitney Museum Read More »
Music and Visual Arts, Sam Ben-Meir