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Last week we took a first look at the September 19 issue of the New York Times Magazine to see the peculiar spin given there to the history of Christianity's relations with Islam. That issue is the fourth of six special "Millennium Issues" to be published this year. Introducing the issue, the editors remark,

much of what the world knows about the last 1,000 years it has learned from artists. Visual artists have always been intentional chroniclers. They have also been unintentional historians, showing us through their art the intimate details of life long ago. The goal of this special issue ... is to give history back to artists. We asked an array of recognized artists from around the world to reimagine milestone moments of the past millennium. Taken together, their works form a modern time line, a way of seeing distant history through new eyes.

The subject is history, then, but a revisionist history—seen "through new eyes." And so the subject is also ourselves, our culture, our sense of where we are at this juncture.

This isn't just another magazine. It is an elaborately—and expensively—prepared manifesto from the nation's most influential newspaper. What is it that the people at the New York Times are telling us?

To get the answer, you don't need to read between the lines. Each work of art contributed by the assembled "array of recognized artists from around the world" is accompanied by a text that explains the image on the page. Imagine an excruciatingly intrusive museum guide who takes it upon himself to "explain" every painting, every sculpture to you. Bad enough that he won't shut up, but on top of that it's clear that he fears you are none too bright. (Here we see the logical extension of the practice now widespread in galleries displaying contemporary art, where the work of art comes with the artist's own explanation.)

Even sans commentary, the import of most of the art works is pretty clear. Consider for example Catherine Chalmers's "Hello, Columbus." Three smallish photographs form a vertical series on the page. In the first, several cockroaches are clambering on and around a tomato. In the second frame, the insides of the tomato have been exposed a bit by the busy cockroaches. In the third frame, much of the tomato is gone, and what remains is a mushy pulp swarming with cockroaches. Turn the page, thinking perhaps to find another work of art, and you encounter a striking two-page spread—the centerfold of this whole issue, as it were—showing the ravaged tomato and the voracious roaches in extreme close-up. Oh yes, and one more detail: the cockroaches are painted white with red crosses (as in the Cross, the sign of Jesus) on their backs.

In case you fail to get the message, the guide is right at your shoulder to explain:

These works by Catherine Chalmers depict one of the shock troops of the European invasion, the cockroach, fastening upon the bounty of the New World, represented by the tomato. [Get it now, dummy?] The insect shown in these photographs, painted with an image that festooned Columbus's sails, did so well in its new home that it is now called the American cockroach.

"An image that festooned Columbus's sails": that coyness is a nice touch, isn't it?

This sweeping vision of the last millennium is not limited to America, or to the West. I was interested to see that two of the images in this "modern time line" center on China and its relations with the West. (I have been fascinated by China and its culture since I was a child, in part because my grandmother was a missionary there; my mother spent her girlhood in Shanghai.) One image, by Doug and Mike Starn, depicts the transmission of knowledge from China to the West. ("At the dawn of the millennium, China was centuries ahead of the West in science and technology," the commentary begins.) A second image, by the photographer David LaChapelle, comes later in the issue. This one is headed "The Drug Wars: Imperialism had everything to do with the price of tea in China."

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November (Web-only) 1999, Vol. 43