Sebastian Smee
Iwas excited to see the publication this year of Peter Schjeldahl’s Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, £18.95). Schjeldahl’s is not typical New Yorker prose: he has a distinctive, highly refined voice, at once condensed and probing. One doesn’t need to agree with him always (I don’t) to acknowledge that he is currently the best writer on art in the English language. A younger New Yorker writer, Alex Ross, deserves special praise for his history of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Fourth Estate, £20). The first chapter, which opens with a description of the 1906 production in Graz of Strauss’s Salome, with Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and possibly even Hitler in attendance, is a triumph. Finally, a book of perfume criticism called Perfumes: The Guide (Profile Books, £20), by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Like Ross and Schjeldahl, these authors seduce you, with superb prose, into believing that fine discriminations matter, even in areas you may not previously have cared about.
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