Benjamin Riley

New York

Managing Editor at The New Criterion

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Articles

‘The Manifesto House’ Review: Living the Architect’s Dream

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Benjamin Riley

The critic Paul Goldberger, voicing a sentiment many know intuitively to be true but have perhaps never articulated, described architecture as “the only art that we have no choice but to engage with.” You can avoid museums, concert halls and screens big and little, but buildings, like the poor, will always be with us. And so it follows that to understand buildings, it can be useful to understand the thought processes behind them.
‘The Maverick’s Museum’ Review: Albert Barnes and the Art of Collecting

Mar 14, 2025 | wsj.com | Benjamin Riley

Ezra Pound described the scientist turned art collector Albert Barnes (1872-1951) as “at war with mankind.” After making a fortune in pharmaceuticals, Barnes developed eccentric ideas about the nature of fine art, which led to a life of conflict with establishment figures as he built a semipublic collection, the Barnes Foundation.
‘London’ Review: Reading Britain in Buildings

Aug 9, 2024 | wsj.com | Benjamin Riley

To the poet Shelley, “Hell is a city much like London— / a populous and smoky city.” To the late-Victorian industrialist and statesman Joseph Chamberlain, London was the proud “clearing-house of the world.” Both were referring to the city’s commercial character, though Shelley the Romantic and Chamberlain the manufacturer had very different views of its merit.
Week in review | The New Criterion

Jun 14, 2024 | newcriterion.com | James Panero |Gary Saul Morson |Benjamin Riley |Victor Davis Hanson

Recent stories of note: “Dreamers and Plagiarists”Jacob Howland, TabletPick your poison: a world in which each person believes that he alone understands things for what they are, or one in which everybody has succumbed to oceanic feeling at the cost of individuality and ambition? These prophetic possibilities are presented by Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Polish author Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz respectively.
Week in review | The New Criterion

Jun 7, 2024 | newcriterion.com | Benjamin Riley |Gary Saul Morson |James Panero |Victor Davis Hanson

“‘D-Day: Freedom from Above’ Review: Soldiers’ Airborne Stories”Mark Yost, The Wall Street JournalOf the 16.4 million Americans who fought in World War II, only about a hundred thousand remain with us. The poignancy of this fact is brought into sharper relief on such occasions as yesterday, the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, and by exhibitions such as the National Museum of the U.S. Army’s “D-Day: Freedom from Above,” reviewed here by The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Yost.
Bath’s Royal Crescent Cuts a Majestic Swath

Apr 5, 2024 | wsj.com | Benjamin Riley

“Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?” Catherine Morland asks in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” (1817). And who indeed could ever be tired of the Royal Crescent (completed 1775), John Wood the Younger’s stately composition of attached townhouses that towers over the small, tidy city in the west of England?
Under the Tuscan spell, by Benjamin Riley

Mar 20, 2024 | newcriterion.com | Benjamin Riley

An aged, nearly blind man of letters living off a legacy from his eccentric now-dead wife and subsisting mostly on a diet of eggs. His two homosexual amanuenses. A rackety young English woman eking out an existence in Rome. A grand, decaying house hard by the Ligurian Sea owned by a half-American marchesa. It sounds like the setup for an Elizabeth Bowen novel, or perhaps one by Ronald Firbank.
Exhibition note | The New Criterion

Jan 24, 2024 | newcriterion.com | Benjamin Riley

While most visitors see gallery 690 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—“The Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery”—as a mere corridor, there is art on the walls, too. Here the Department of Drawings and Prints has assembled a mélange of British pictures that collectively tell no grand story, save for a happy one about the breadth and depth of the Met’s holdings and the ability of its curators to secure quality works of art, whether by gift or purchase.
National & international, by Ben Riley

Nov 15, 2023 | newcriterion.com | Benjamin Riley

Was there ever a better encapsulation of the shortcomings of modern architecture than the one Ian Nairn formulated in 1964, a conspectus brought on by, of all things, a consideration of the Penguin Pool at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo? Modern architecture is hamstrung by self-consciousness and strangled by intellectual inhibitions. It is always what people ought to want, and too often what they had better want or else; almost never what they really want.