After a string of Scandinavian crime novels (Jar City, The Pyramid, Nemesis) I’m reading Arthur Conan Doyle, and what a relief it is from the futility and gloom of those other books. Every chapter in Jar City opens with a description of pounding rains. Kurt Wallander, the misanthropic detective-hero of Pyramid, selects dinner by standing over a menu, closing his eyes, and ordering whatever his finger lands on first. Even if the detectives in these novels solve something, they resolve nothing. The conclusion just clears the floor for fresh tragedy.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t always solve his cases, but each of his case histories offers the conventional narrative pleasures of beginning, middle and end. While grouped together now as novels, the stories were first published individually and can be read randomly, one at a time. The narrative structure in each is clear but complex. We hear the detective’s sidekick Watson as he recounts the story a client told them, then the story Holmes offered in explanation, and, finally, the story that revealed itself afterwards. Holmes’ explanations, while often masterful, are just as often incorrect or incomplete. While the mythology of Sherlock Homes is one of observation, examination and deduction, the mystery in question is typically fuelled by raw emotion. My favorite is a simple one, The Yellow Face, about an unsettling figure hovering in the window of a neighbor's house. Holmes shows little interest in the evidence (a death certificate, a house, a portrait) and arrives at the wrong conclusion. It matters little, however, when we find out that what’s at the heart of the matter is a deception one person carried out in order to protect another. In the end it’s not a mystery; it’s a love story.

December 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Since its expansion in 2004 MoMA has come to feel more like an international departures lounge than a museum, with dull acoustics, not-bright-enough lighting, and escalators that funnel you from level to level without showing you where you’re headed. But the hangar-like central atrium offers surprising perspectives and respite, even when there’s no artwork there. Right now there’s an installation by artist Martha Rosler called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, which is exactly that. The atrium’s floor and walls are packed with used goods for sale. There are signs and banners, a cash register, and stanchions to herd visitors in and out.

We all know that a museum is not a church, that art is big business, and that almost all museums rely on corporate sponsorship. There’s nothing philosophically dispiriting about having a garage sale inside the museum; that’s not so different than the big gift shop near the entrance. But there’s something physically dispiriting about seeing the atrium, a special place within the city, this singular void, clogged with worn clothes and tchotchkes. Whatever Rosler’s intention is (according to the wall text it's "creating a lively space for exchange"), the event falls flat. Rosler might be striking down ideas about high, low culture and the pricelessness of art, but she’s doing it through shopping, and I would like to keep the museum for art. I fought my way through thick crowds along Fifth Avenue to get to MoMA, brushing back tourists who were toting shopping bags on each arm and gawking at holiday lights. The commercialism on the street was robust, but it was easier to take than the garage sale inside the museum.

December 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At an astonishing lecture at the Institute for Classical Architecture last week, historian Nancy Steinhardt traced the influence of the École des beaux-arts through Chinese architecture. To illustrate how marginally Chinese traditional architecture was positioned within the canon, she showed the frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s 1924 book The History of Architecture, a drawing called “The Tree of Architecture." Embedded in this diagram are some not-so-certain notions that still have purchase today: that ancient Greece is the primary origin, that Asia is a minor source, that contemporary American and European forms are the highest expression, and that the Middle East, South America, and Africa beyond Egypt don’t exist.

Though the interpretation is single-minded (progress is symmetrical and vertical) and the representation is kitschy (robed figures posed beneath the branches embody virtues of Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Society and History), it’s hard to resist the charms of this illustration. The tree and figures are rendered naturalistically but composed melodramatically, like scenes in Puvis de Chavannes. What tree in real life is shaped like this, with a dense, high crown and strangely criss-crossing lower branches? More deeply, there’s something touching about Fletcher's desire to fit a subject as expansive and as complex as the world history of architecture in a single diagram. In middle school I had an English teacher who taught us how to diagram a sentence graphically, to draw a horizontal, fallen-tree structure and set each word on its own limb. It gave immense satisfaction to tease language into its most basic components like this, but at the same time it was always understood that any sentence, once uttered, surpassed its spindly diagram. As he was imagining "The Tree of Architecture,” Fletcher might have felt something similar.

November 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The last time I was in Paris I stopped at Tati to pick up an Eiffel Tower charm to bring back, ironically, as a souvenir. I came back instead with a delicate filigree ornament of an open hand, of which I knew nothing except that it was “eastern” and that it carried some sort of blessing. I wore it on those days when I felt the need to be protected with forces greater than normal, and felt protected.

It wasn’t until I read Dare Me by Megan Abbott, a crime story set in the emotionally-charged world of high school cheerleading, that I learned that it was a hamsa. The amulet is resonant in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. Depending on one’s beliefs, the flat palm depicted is that of Fatima daughter of Mohammed, Miriam sister of Moses, of Mary mother of God. The charm has been secularized and popularized in friendship bracelets exchanged by teenage girls. It’s often paired with a small, round glass bead that represents the evil eye, which the hamsa can ward off. In Dare Me a hamsa friendship bracelet becomes a crucial plot point when it’s gifted by a cheerleader to her coach and then spotted by that girl’s best friend, who acts out. The design of most hamsas – sort of symmetrical but not really, sort of naturalistic but not really, sometimes up and sometimes down – lends itself to inspired graphic design. My own charm is smaller than a penny and astonishingly thin, with equal parts gold and open space so that it feels like a scrap of lace. It’s hard to find an expression of this icon that isn’t lovely. Even the clumsiest ones convey its essential goodness.

November 28, 2012 by Nalina Moses