WHEN A RETROSPECTIVE as significant as Croatian artist Sanja Iveković’s “Sweet Violence” doesn’t travel at all, a comprehensive catalogue becomes all the more important. Fortunately, this eponymous summary of the show—which New York’s MoMA featured this past winter—delivers the crucial political and cultural background behind Iveković’s work. The lead essay, by the show’s curator, Roxana Marcoci, details Iveković’s native art scene before, during, and after Croatia’s post-Communist transition, providing context for the ideas and stories that inform the past four decades of the artist’s

IN THE TWENTY-TWO YEARS between the day the 1923 Kanto earthquake razed Tokyo and the months in which American bombers demolished it anew, modernity arrived in Japan. Ushered in by the creeping popularity of Western fashions, the rise of mass communication and transit, and the Europeanizing of urban public life, the “brittle years” of the early 1930s marked an uneasy encounter between Japanese traditionalism and Western cosmopolitanism, and nowhere did the attendant anxieties play out more than in the modan garu—Japan’s “modern girl.” The equivalent of the ’20s-era flapper, modan garus dressed

ALTHOUGH SCULPTED FROM PLASTIC instead of marble, mass-produced, and typically equipped with both arms, store-window mannequins share an aesthetic as well as a sociological lineage with the Venus de Milo. Depictions of feminine beauty whose aspect and proportion proffer benchmark ideals have been around a long time—no doubt many Athenian women in 100 BC compared themselves with Alexandros of Antioch’s handiwork, as do contemporary Americans with the shiny simulacra draped in the latest styles. Still, shopwindow dummies are hardly built for the ages; their machined uniformity highlights by

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the

Writing in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Marx predicted that the gulf between the newly rich and the miserable urban poor, made much worse by the Industrial Revolution, would continue to widen indefinitely. This ever greater disparity, he thought, would ultimately undermine capitalism. Marx turned out to be wrong. Income inequality in Britain (and, from what we can tell, elsewhere in Europe too) began to narrow after the 1860s, and inequality in wealth peaked by the time of World War I. In America, inequality in both incomes and wealth began to lessen after the 1920s. The rich continued

"Children know normal better than anyone," says Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford's luminous and utterly forlorn new novel, and certainly Dell when he was a child knew far better than most what a normal life, especially a normal American life, is likely to turn out to be. The opening sentences of the book, which are bound to go straight into the collective literary memory, tell us what he, and we, are in for: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike's prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike's professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: "to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring