Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons

Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Susan Sontag and author of a new book on the Dutch Old Masters, joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation ranging from Vermeer’s forgeries and Rembrandt’s productivity, through Dutch tolerance and the paradox of Geert Wilders, to Brazilian modernism, Clarice Lispector, and the mentorship of V.S. Naipaul.

Key ideas

1. Fame creates a ‘perfume’ that makes art hard to see clearly. Moser argues a masterpiece’s reputation — the crowds, the provenance, the rarity — primes viewers to feel awe before they have actually looked; he traces the idea to the wartime forger Han van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers sold as originals and now look obviously bad once the aura is stripped away.
2. Dutch art was built for houses, not museums. Moser reads the boredom of walking through room after room of Golden Age painting as a category error: these were domestic objects meant to be lived with a handful at a time, not works engineered for the sustained attention of a full retrospective.
3. Brazilian modernism substituted architectural ambition for social change. Moser’s account of Brasilia — and of Oscar Niemeyer’s discovery that radical modern design could clothe an authoritarian, unequal state — reads Brazil’s mid-century architectural confidence as compensation for a deeper national inferiority complex and an incapacity for incremental reform.
4. Susan Sontag’s defining subject was her own failure to see — and she knew it. Moser, her Pulitzer-winning biographer, argues her deepest work, On Photography and Against Interpretation, grew from a lifelong deficit in visual and interpersonal perception that she tried, and largely failed, to correct through sheer intellectual effort.
5. Reading now clusters around a shrinking set of superstar names. Moser and Cowen agree that a ‘big brand’ dynamic — Shakespeare, Austen, and Tolkien read more; the vast mid-list, including much of Sontag’s own work, read less — mirrors the collapse of independent retail into chains, a pattern Moser sees repeating across culture generally.

Content

Vermeer’s aura and Han van Meegeren’s forgeries

Moser opens on Vermeer’s Catholicism — a conversion from a Protestant family, visible in his weakest paintings, such as the overwrought Allegory of the Catholic Faith in the Met. He distinguishes this from The Art of Painting, which he does not read as nostalgically Catholic despite its map of the pre-partition Netherlands, and argues Vermeer’s best work succeeds precisely through indirection and suggestion rather than the ‘overwrought symbolism’ of the allegorical pieces.

Only 35 Vermeers survive: he died at 43 with eleven or twelve children, and most of his output was bought by a single neighbour. Moser notes that almost every Dutch Golden Age painter except Rembrandt and Jan Steen was, in effect, ‘rediscovered’ later, because Dutch churches — stripped of art by Reformation-era iconoclasm — offered no public setting, so paintings simply vanished into private houses until museums existed to recover them.

Having attended the 2023 Amsterdam Vermeer retrospective three times, Moser describes seeing, for the first time, the full arc of Vermeer’s career: a break roughly halfway through, from large allegorical and mythological formats to the small, intimate scenes — Girl with a Pearl Earring, the window-lit domestic interiors — now regarded as characteristically ‘Vermeer’. That unexplained gap invited the forger Han van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers, designed to fill the missing transition, were convincing enough during and after the Second World War to fund fifteen country estates and more than fifty houses in central Amsterdam. Seen today, Moser says, the forgeries look obviously wrong — which leads him to a broader claim about reputation: familiarity with a legendary name, like lifelong familiarity with the recited Quran for a pious Muslim, primes the viewer to perceive beauty that may or may not be intrinsically there. ‘You’re prepared to see something by this legend and this name, and it makes it very hard to actually see it,’ he says of a genuine Vermeer; stripped of that ‘perfume’, a fake becomes obviously ridiculous.

Rembrandt, the print market, and Dutch art’s domestic scale

Rembrandt’s productivity, Moser argues, owed partly to longevity — he died at 63, a full generation past Vermeer’s 43 — and partly to temperament: an ‘obsessive creator, a kind of volcano’ who, by Moser’s account, effectively died at his easel, poor and largely forgotten by the end of his life.

On the Rembrandt print market, Moser observes a split at recent Old Masters auctions: the very top lots sell for three or four times their estimate, while roughly half of paintings on offer go unsold, even as unrelated contemporary works fetch tens of millions. He attributes this to the decline of the ‘amateur’ in the old French sense — the connoisseur who collects out of scholarship and love rather than status — and notes that prints and drawings, ‘the ultimate nerd thing in the art world’, lack the ‘wall power’ of a painting that commands a room at a glance; a work worth truly understanding, in his account, increasingly requires the kind of specialist training that fewer buyers now have.

This connects to a wider claim about scale: Dutch paintings, Moser argues, were made for houses with ten or fifteen works hung together, not for the twenty consecutive rooms of a modern museum retrospective, which numbs even a sympathetic viewer. Some painters reward this treatment better than others — he defends Jaan van Ruisdael while conceding Jan van Goyen is less essential — and some, like Rembrandt’s onetime friend and rival Jan Lievens, curdle from charming to ‘gross’ under overexposure, a pattern Moser compares to people who are ‘fun to meet for dinner once’ but not everyone you would want to marry.

Dutch design, Mondrian, and an unbroken visual culture

Challenged on why Dutch art supposedly grows boring after the Golden Age, Moser pushes back: eighteenth-century Dutch interiors remain, in his view, genuinely beautiful, if less ‘heroic’ than the seventeenth century’s, and Dutch visual and design excellence — down to an over-engineered $400 coffee pot — persists into the present. The nineteenth century produced Van Gogh; the twentieth, Mondrian, De Stijl, and the architect Gerrit Rietveld. Post-war Dutch painting, Moser concedes, is comparatively weak, but Dutch photography remains strong.

On Mondrian specifically, Moser notes the odd effect of international museum labelling — ‘Dutch-born American painter’, since Mondrian died in New York and now hangs alongside Rothko and Picasso in a newly diversified MoMA — which obscures how specifically the style grew out of Utrecht, where Moser lives. He recommends the Kunstmuseum in The Hague (formerly the Gemeentemuseum) for its holdings of early, figurative Mondrians, which trace the full arc from expressionism through cubism into pure abstraction: ‘It’s like an art history textbook that you can actually see.‘

Dutch language, tolerance, and the paradox of Geert Wilders

Moser attributes the difficulty of reading older Dutch fiction to the language itself: unlike English, where Henry James and Edith Wharton remain transparent despite their age, Dutch has undergone enough spelling and vocabulary change that even literate adults have come to believe, wrongly, that pre-war Dutch books are unreadable — Dutch high schools have effectively stopped assigning anything written before the Second World War. He recommends his partner Arthur Japin, the novelist Harry Mulisch, and above all Amsterdam Stories by the pseudonymous Nescio, a slim, hundred-page book he calls one of the best he has ever read.

Asked to reconcile the Netherlands’ reputation for drug and sex-work tolerance with Geert Wilders topping the 2023 election, Moser reframes the premise: Wilders won only around sixteen or seventeen per cent of the vote, meaning roughly five in six Dutch voters did not back him, and Dutch ‘tolerance’ has always been closer to pragmatic regulation — comparable to how easy it already is to find drugs or sex work in Washington, DC — than to genuine libertinism. The more alarming current development, in his account, is that a saturated American cocaine market is pushing supply through the port of Rotterdam, with rising violence pushing the Netherlands toward what some now call a ‘narco state’. He locates the country’s genuine seventeenth-century achievement in comparative religious tolerance — while noting it was never absolute: this was a country where denying the Trinity could still get you beheaded, just less often than elsewhere.

Brasilia, Brazilian modernism, and de-industrialisation

On whether Brasilia works as a city, Moser is sceptical: a ‘diplomatic island’ behind a scrubby, purely notional ‘green belt’, geographically segregated from the poverty visible everywhere in Rio, and — he cites the critic Robert Hughes — a city whose admirers have typically never been there. Cowen offers himself as a counterexample, having visited twice for the modernist architecture; Moser, who found the city’s emptiness dull after a week (comparing it to the enforced boredom of colonial life recorded in Dutch East Indies novels), presses him on why anyone would go twice. The contrast with Indonesia is instructive to Moser: the Dutch left no lasting linguistic imprint there, whereas Brazil, formally independent far longer, still feels more thoroughly colonised because Portuguese language and culture never really departed — Indonesia, in his account, is better understood as a colony of Java than of the Netherlands.

Pressed on why architectural modernism took such deep root in Brazil, Moser draws on his own short Portuguese-language book, Autoimperialismo: a nineteenth-century Brazilian intellectual inferiority complex created a desperate wish to appear modern to the world, and architecture — Oscar Niemeyer above all — offered a way to project a new national identity without the harder work of changing underlying social structures. His central critique of Brasilia is that its radical modern design coexisted comfortably with, and effectively disguised, an authoritarian and deeply unequal state — ‘that was Niemeyer’s big discovery.’ He connects this to present-day de-industrialisation: manufacturing has fallen, by his account, from roughly a third to a tenth of Brazilian GDP as the country abandoned mid-century import substitution for cheaper foreign production, a shift he reads as a driver of the same rising extremism visible elsewhere. Asked for an underrated Brazilian city, he names Recife and neighbouring Olinda in the northeast over the more conventionally recommended south.

Appreciating Clarice Lispector and the limits of literary taste

Asked how he would sell a newcomer on Clarice Lispector, Moser declines to make a case at all: read The Hour of the Star — her last novel, eighty pages, an hour’s reading, and the first Lispector book he read as a student — and let the reaction be whatever it is. His illustrative comparison is a notorious, extremely powerful Canadian sex toy that either produced overwhelming ecstasy or, mistuned by a fraction, nothing at all: some art operates on a ‘frequency’ that transforms one reader and leaves another completely cold, and no amount of persuasion changes which reader you are. Moser notes that many Brazilians feel genuinely troubled by their own failure to connect with Lispector, given her status as a national and international icon — an anxiety he likens to not ‘getting’ Shakespeare.

Susan Sontag on seeing, images, and an uncertain legacy

Asked to explain his own line that 'Susan Sontag's best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see’ — the subject, in his account, of both On Photography and Against Interpretation — Moser connects it to his own admitted visual limitations, a running theme of The Upside-Down World. He argues Sontag’s deepest insight was ultimately into her own perceptual failure, especially in her personal relationships, which she recognised and tried, largely without success, to correct through force of intellect. Her enduring diagnosis of images — that we are flooded with representations we do not know how to process — predates by fifty years today’s arguments about AI and disinformation; Moser highlights her recurring word ‘hygiene’, and the idea of mental hygiene as a way of cleaning ‘the rusty pipes in your brain’.

On whether Sontag will simply be forgotten, as the theatre figure Antonin Artaud — whom she spent seven years anthologising — largely has been, Moser resists a flat answer. His own Sontag biography, though widely reviewed and prize-winning, sold to a narrow, intensely committed readership rather than broadly; he calls her legacy ‘spiny’ and ‘cactus-y’, demanding real effort from the reader. He likens the narrowing of general readership to the consolidation of retail into a handful of chains — a few ‘superstar’ names (Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien) read more even as overall and diverse reading falls — while insisting that reading Sontag in full, difficult as it is, has made him, in his own estimate, considerably less stupid. Asked why Camille Paglia never became ‘the next Sontag’, Moser argues it was partly deliberate: Paglia stayed in the academy, believing contact with actual students guarded against the ‘aristocratic excesses’ Sontag embodied, even as Paglia herself combined sharp critiques of celebrity culture with excesses of her own — illustrated by a callously dismissive 1990s remark about Sinéad O’Connor that reads very differently after O’Connor’s own later, tragic life.

V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship and Houston’s missing intellectual culture

Moser describes V.S. Naipaul as the most consequential, near-paternal figure in his intellectual life — the reason, he says, he became a writer at all — and one whose influence was so overwhelming that Moser had to stop reading him in order to find his own voice. He returned to Naipaul only after winning his own Pulitzer Prize, expecting the usual disappointment of revisiting an adolescent enthusiasm, and instead found the work ‘even better than I remembered’. He is warmest on the early novels — Miguel Street, A Way in the World, In a Free State, A House for Mr Biswas — and on the late, underrated The Masque of Africa; he and Cowen are more ambivalent about A Turn in the South and A Million Mutinies Now, whose optimism about Indian social mobility Moser thinks understated the country’s later drift toward authoritarianism. Asked about Paul Theroux’s memoir of the friendship, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Moser calls it ‘100 percent accurate… and yet, totally wrong’ — every unflattering episode true by the letter, yet missing the private kindness Moser experienced himself, including an afternoon Naipaul spent patiently, and fruitlessly, trying to explain cricket to him. He believes Naipaul, now widely ‘cancelled’ and little read by younger readers, will nonetheless endure through his Caribbean and Indian work.

Closing on his own origins, Moser describes Houston as a business-first city — ‘the business of Houston is business’ — where the professional imagination of the adults around him ran narrowly to law or medicine and culture felt like an imported phenomenon, despite his own literary household (his mother ran two bookshops). His mother refused to fund his college education if he stayed in Texas. Moser suspects cities imprint a durable character early that rarely changes, and doubts he could sustain a writing life in Houston today despite the city’s subsequent growth and diversity. He ends by noting he is now studying Serbo-Croatian — split, since the country’s breakup, into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin — a legacy of years researching Sontag’s life in the Balkans, expecting it will eventually prove useful the way his accidental undergraduate Portuguese reshaped his entire career, unlike his still-unused college Swedish.

See also

• Benjamin Moser — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• The Upside-Down World — Moser’s book on the Dutch Old Masters, the occasion for the episode
• Susan Sontag · Clarice Lispector — the two writers whose biographies Moser has written, discussed at length