Sublime and Ridiculous

Or rather ridiculous and sublime, respectively. Two articles in New York magazine of January 24-31. Jeff Sharlet reports on the increase in popularity of New Age healing in the metroplis since 9/11. One such healer is Bhakti Sondra Shaye, described as an adept member of the Great White Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Light. She says that she earns more money today as a healer than she did during the early 1990s as a corporate attorney. According to the article, she believes that New York is a New Age spiritual center because it is not afraid to interlink the worlds of spirituality and money. I'll bet.

In the Arts section, Mark Stevens reviews the exhibition "Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography," which runs through April 2 at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. For the exhibition, artists Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari have collected a range of proletarian portraits of the Arab world. Instead of directly challenging the view of Arabs put forward in the Western media, they have chosen to present imagery that emanates from within Arab society itself. Retrieving the pictures from the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, a huge archive of predominantly commercial photographs taken during the 20th century in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, the pair provide an insider's view that successfully complicates and enriches the Arab character.