Salon.com > Edward M. Gomez

“Musharraf has much to answer for”

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:30:00 +0000

Tragedy. Chaos. Shock.

Those words -- and premonitions of more dangerous uncertainty to come -- have turned up routinely in the first wave of overseas news media reports and commentaries focusing on yesterday's gun-and-bomb assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, an army-garrison city just south of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, in the northeastern part of the country. The attack reportedly killed up to 30 other people.

Her "unbelievable and stunning" death, notes an editorial in the News, a Pakistani daily, "throws ... the painfully excruciating march of the country towards a democratic polity, the carefully crafted plan for a peaceful transfer of power to an elected leadership and the reluctant strategy of an authoritarian regime to yield to the will of the people up into turbulent smoke and bloody dust."

Time to buy a Warhol

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:18:00 +0000

Thanks, in large part, to George W. Bush's no-end-in-sight war spending, the once-mighty dollar is tanking, a development that recently prompted a senior People's Bank of China official to note that the greenback is "losing its status as the world currency." Meanwhile, U.S. real estate values are reeling from the subprime mortgage crisis. The British pound, stronger than ever, now costs American tourists two dollars a pop. Even Jay-Z is letting his audience know he knows where the money is -- the money that matters. In his latest video, "Blue Magic," the rapper cruises through the Big Apple flashing wads of crisp, sexy, colorful euros.

It's time to buy a Warhol.

Is “Samson and Delilah” a fake?

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:45:00 +0000

There are few things the art world loves more than the whiff of scandal -- except, of course, a genuine, full-blown scandal. The bigger the money, the reputations of the power players and institutions, or the assumptions and authority of the art history that are involved, the better.

Now, as London's august National Gallery, home to one of the world's great collections of European art, trots out more than 100 drawings and paintings by the 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens in a blockbuster survey, "Rubens: A Master in the Making" (on view through Jan. 15), a long-standing controversy surrounding one of the highlights of the show has resurfaced. At issue: the authenticity of "Samson and Delilah," the celebrated painting from around 1609-10 that depicts the Old Testament hero Samson in the lap of the lover who betrayed him. The work was made for Nicolaas Rockox, a well-known city-government official in Antwerp, Belgium, just after Rubens returned to that city after eight years in Italy.