Portraits of the Artist as Politician,the Politician as Artist: Commemorating the Disraeli Phenomenon

This article examines the reception of Benjamin Disraeli as a bestselling novelist and respectable elder statesman as reflected in obituaries and biographical sketches appearing in the wake of his death in 1881. It starts out by tracing Disraeli’s entry into the popular imagination during his lifetime before focusing on the intersections of literary and political fame in late nineteenth-century commemorations. Disraeli’s posthumous media reception reveals that his deft migration between the literary and the political fields as closely interconnected arenas of self-fashioning crucially influenced his position as one of the most eminent figures in Victorian public life. It will be shown, however, that the narrative of the duality of Disraeli’s public acclaim is complicated by the celebrifying impact of his lifelong position as a social, ethnic, and intellectual outsider who transgressed Victorian norms and categories. In its attempt to unpick the multiple layers of Disraeli’s Victorian pre-eminence from the angle of Celebrity Studies, this article illuminates the tension between processes of self-fashioning and media appropriation that informs the production and consumption of fame and celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain and beyond. It thus participates in an ongoing scholarly conversation about the cultural history of fame and celebrity, presenting Disraeli as a type of media celebrity whose public profile was fashioned from a variety of dynamically interacting and mutually sustaining manifestations of fame.     

Yexei Xerab:Dedicated Lama,Accomglished Artist

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The Artist and Space

Abstract

For fifteen years from 1962–1977, scores of artists have walked among the launch pads, conversed with astronauts, space scientists and technicians, taken make-believe rides to the Moon in a simulator, were as close as safety allowed to the space launches, and waited for weeks in mid-ocean aboard an aircraft carrier for the return of the Moon explorers. The author directed this unique art program for almost all the time it was in existence and here reviews its philosophy, the interrelationships between engineers and artists, the difficulties that arose and the rewards which accrued.     

清代宫廷工艺美术设计大师刘源及其作品

刘源,字伴阮,河南祥符（今河南开封）人。徙辽阳,隶汉军旗籍。清康熙初年,官刑部主事,供奉内廷,监督芜湖、九江两关,技巧绝伦。刘源“性聪慧纤巧,迥异常人。其字怪僻,自言融会诸家,独成一绝,殊有别致。     

The Artist as Nation-Builder: William Butler Yeats and Chaim Nachman Bialik

Abstract. The poets William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) were among the builders of their respective Irish and Jewish national cultures. Their lives and careers were in limited ways remarkably alike and throw light on the dynamics of cultural nationalism. Each emerged in an historical watershed, leading to the establishment of an Irish state in 1921 and a Jewish state in 1948. Though their circumstances, styles, receptions and fates differed, each represented a profound moral vision in an age of declining faith, expressed his people's sense of victimisation and exposed their weaknesses as he saw them. Each saw his culture as being humanist and universal, not narrowly nationalistic. Each identified with his nation for reasons that were in part intensely and disturbingly personal. Each found a poetic voice in a rich heritage of ethnic myth, legend and symbol but was conscious of tension between the need for self-expression and national demands. It is argued that the creative powers of both Yeats and Bialik were set free by the national movements of which they were a part, and that the national struggle for self-determination was, in effect, mirrored on the private scale by the poet striving for artistic freedom and originality.