In which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy educations.

E-Mail Donald
Demographer, recovering sociologist, and arts buff

E-Mail Fenster
College administrator and arts buff

E-Mail Francis
Architectural historian and arts buff

E-Mail Friedrich
Entrepreneur and arts buff
E-Mail Michael
Media flunky and arts buff


We assume it's OK to quote emailers by name.







Try Advanced Search


  1. Destination Pasadena
  2. A Cream-Pie for Rembrandt's Face?
  3. LACMA Report
  4. Elaborate Interiors, Vegas Style
  5. And Then There's the Huntington
  6. Las Vegas High-Rising
  7. Over-Theorized Design
  8. The Role of the Art Museum is ...?
  9. A Gehry Encore En-Corpse
  10. Vanished Buildings Seen


CultureBlogs
Sasha Castel
AC Douglas
Out of Lascaux
The Ambler
PhilosoBlog
Modern Art Notes
Cranky Professor
Mike Snider on Poetry
Silliman on Poetry
Felix Salmon
Gregdotorg
BookSlut
Polly Frost
Polly and Ray's Forum
Cronaca
Plep
Stumbling Tongue
Brian's Culture Blog
Banana Oil
Scourge of Modernism
Visible Darkness
Seablogger
Thomas Hobbs
Blog Lodge
Leibman Theory
Goliard Dream
Third Level Digression
Here Inside
My Stupid Dog
W.J. Duquette


Politics, Education, and Economics Blogs
Andrew Sullivan
The Corner at National Review
Steve Sailer
Samizdata
Junius
Joanne Jacobs
CalPundit
Natalie Solent
A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside
Rational Parenting
Public Interest.co.uk
Colby Cosh
View from the Right
Pejman Pundit
Spleenville
God of the Machine
One Good Turn
CinderellaBloggerfella
Liberty Log
Daily Pundit
InstaPundit
MindFloss
Catallaxy Files
Greatest Jeneration
Glenn Frazier
Jane Galt
Jim Miller
Limbic Nutrition
Innocents Abroad
Chicago Boyz
James Lileks
Cybrarian at Large
Hello Bloggy!
Setting the World to Rights
Travelling Shoes


Miscellaneous
Redwood Dragon
IMAO
The Invisible Hand
ScrappleFace
Daze Reader
Lynn Sislo
The Fat Guy
Jon Walz

Links


Our Last 50 Referrers







Art, Architecture, the Econ of Art



Saturday, January 16, 2010


Destination Pasadena
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- If your scene is hyper, with-it Los Angeles or New York City, "little old lady" style Pasadena, California might not fit your tastes. The town has been a genteel island in the Southern California frenzy since the San Gabriel Mountains were raised, or something like that. Consider the college scene. No ultra-lefty Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and that ilk. No jock-focused USC vibes. Just good ol' nose-to-the-computer Cal Tech in this neck of the former lemon and orange groves. And of course the Old Money. Or archeological evidence thereof, the subject of this post. If you are an architecture buff, those remains might well be worth a Pasadena visit. Speaking of visit, one architectural gem that can be toured is the Gamble House, the winter get-away-from-Cincinnati residence of Gambles of Proctor & Gamble fame. The house is now jointly owned by the University of Southern California and the City of Pasadena; the house web site is here. Gamble House We took the one-hour overview tour, but more detailed tours are also available to suit intensity of specialization of interest (there's one for woodworkers, for instance). The Gamble House is one of the finest achievements of famed Arts & Crafts architects Green and Green. Many years ago I was in Pasadena for a Rose Bowl game where the University of Washington was playing. On our way from the Rose Parade route to the bowl, we must have passed by the Gamble House (still in Gamble hands then). It failed to register, perhaps because its architecture was not fashionable and probably ignored by my architecture history professor. A block or two farther down the hill to the Arroyo Seco, a house partly hidden by vegetation caught my eye. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright house. One from his Imperial Hotel (Tokyo) - cement-block (Callifornia) period. Millard House I immediately recognized it as the Millard House. Earlier this week I tracked it down again, not having seen it in 50 years (literally!). It's still there, the grounds even more overgrown. One of the staff up at the Gamble House said that the Millard was still privately owned, but was up for sale for a lot of money. Its fate will be determined. In the meanwhile, if you have the address (645 Prospect Crescent) and a street map showing Pasadena, you can inspect it from its street address side just off Prospect Boulevard (up close, but not so interesting) or from the other end of the property through a wire fence on Rosemont Avenue. Not many towns besides Pasadena can boast such residential architecture treasures in such proximity, though Oak Park, Illinois comes to mind. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 16, 2010 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, January 13, 2010


A Cream-Pie for Rembrandt's Face?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This article in the Los Angeles Times (7 January, page D8) informs us that there's an art blog that spoofs paintings by posting alternative captions. It's called That is Priceless, and a link is here. Writer David Ng reports: [The blog] was launched in November by L.A.-based television comedy writer and producer Steve Melcher. Once a day, Melcher spotlights a well-known work of art -- usually a painting -- and gives it an alternate title. ... Since November, Melcher has clocked in about one post per day. He said he chooses works that tell a clear story: "I don't do too much abstract or Impressionist art because readers will have to stop to figure out what the painting is showing. I love Dutch art -- they always have silly things going on in their paintings." The writer said he often tries to tie a painting to recent news, a holiday or a pop culture event. I think it's a cute concept. But I didn't find the revised captions near the top of the stack as of this morning especially side-splitting. Of course, Melcher is a TV writer and I'm totally unplugged from the current scene thereabouts, so my reaction might be because I'm out of touch. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 13, 2010 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, January 11, 2010


LACMA Report
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Still in the Los Angeles area, still hitting museums. Saturday, we visited the Getty Villa, a modern version of what was in Pompeii, containing examples of ancient art. It's literally a long stone's throw from where we're staying. Problem is, it takes me a real effort to pay much attention to art from Greco-Roman times. The likely reason is that I'm most interested in arts that I can actually do, and sculpture (which is mostly what survived) is something I did little of. Today I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). With a director committed to modernism as well as the new building housing the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, it's not a place to see much pre-20th century painting. Actually, LACMA does have a number of good non-modernist works, but they're not emphasized. For example, their European Art collection is on the third floor of the Ahmanson Building (but the gallery's closed for renovation) and the modernist stuff is on the 2nd floor plaza entry level. Non-modernist American art is also on a third floor, that in the Art of the Americas Building; the main floor is reserved for special exhibits -- something about Persian rugs, currently, I think. This means you have to work harder to view traditional art than modernist art. The American Art galleries were open and I was able to check things out. There were nice examples of arts 'n' crafts furniture, a few California Impressionist paintings and an obligatory John Singer Sargent portrait. Also I spied a small portrait by Whistler and one by George Bellows that looks as if it might have been done by Robert Henri (no surprise) plus a mother-and-child by Mary Cassatt. What was a pleasant surprise was a large portrait of his wife by John White Alexander (see image below). The painting looks a lot nicer than this reproduction. It's painted thinly -- almost zero impasto -- though much of it is slightly sketchy with obvious brushwork providing a "painterly" effect without heaviness or drama. The plaza level galleries in Ahmanson have plenty of works by modernists of the 1910-1960 era, something useful for students interesting in seeing painting and sculpture by well-known hands. Having pounded on modernism and PoMo plenty on this bytes & pixels station, I'll spare you my reaction to what I saw in these galleries and at the Broad. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 11, 2010 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, January 8, 2010


Elaborate Interiors, Vegas Style
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Important public interior spaces of yore (think railroad stations, opera houses, 1920s movie theaters, large libraries, museums, and so forth) were grand both in size and decor. The advent of modernism along with the decline in the number of skilled craftsmen who could create the architectural details resulted in the current situation where ornamentation is very costly to produce. One place where elaborately ornamented buildings are built is Las Vegas, where billion dollar construction budgets permit it. Not all hotel-casinos go fancy, but several built over the last ten or 15 years offer visual feasts. Below are some photos of Las Vegas interiors I took in November. New York, New York As a warm-up, here's what can happen in a strongly "themed" casino -- in this case, a purported New York City street. Paris Okay, one more before we get to architectural detail and interior decoration. The Paris casino tries to a create Parisian atmosphere. MGM Grand Some shopping and restaurant areas in the MGM Grand are starkly modernist. But part was designed to evoke elaborate movies houses of the past as can be seen here. Bellagio Parts of the Bellagio are done in Italian galleria style. Caesar's Palace Just inside the Vegas Strip entrance to the shops area is this view, if you choose to look up. Venetian And if you look up here and there in the Venetian, you might spy more than a few ceiling paintings such as this one. This Venetian hallway leads from the casino floor to the hotel lobby ... ... here. Palazzo The new Palazzo is attached to the Venetian. Here is one of the entry areas. The dark, twisty object by the statuary is some seasonal decoration. This is the gallery in Palazzo's shopping area. Wynn Steve Wynn created the Bellagio and then went on to build the hotel-casino he modestly named after himself. Perhaps that's why there is a touch of galleria in the main shopping section. This is just beyond the shopping. Outside is a pool and (not seen here) a waterfall, inside are escalators and a bar on the lower floor. Encore On the same grounds as the Wynn is Wynn's latest -- the Encore. Shown is a hallway near shops. Note the butterfly theme found over much of the public areas. A bit of Encore interior decoration to close our show. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 8, 2010 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, January 4, 2010


And Then There's the Huntington
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As promised, blogging has been a bit light lately because we're house-sitting in the Los Angeles area -- a little patch of Los Angeles County that intrudes between Pacific Palisades and the Malibu city limits. We're pretty well situated for seeing a number of interesting places, but there's no avoiding taking to the freeways to travel to sites deemed worth the hassle. Yesterday, it was Long Beach and the Queen Mary ocean liner which has been docked there for more than 40 years. Today we ventured to the Pasadena-San Marino area and the Huntington Library. As that Wikipedia link indicates, besides a research library crammed with rare books and related items, there are gardens and three art museum buildings. The link to the art is here; drill down for information on the collections. Although I had heard of the Huntington (and was even reminded of it in a comment to one of my posts here), I never had a clear picture of what it is. Therefore, I was amazed at what I found in the buildings devoted to European and American art. For instance there were scads (a term of precision measurement, I assure you) of portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds including an iconic Dr Samuel Johnson, and darn near as many by Thomas Gainsborough, including his famous "Blue Boy." Not to mention other portraits by Thomas Lawrence, John Singer Sargent (including a fabulous, flashy one of Pauline Astor), George Romney, William Hogarth, Henry Raeburn (a personal favorite), Cecilia Beaux, Robert Henri and George Bellows. Interior decoration fans might like seeing displays of furnishings from a Green & Green house, Frank Lloyd Wright furniture, patterns by William Morris' shop and stained glass windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones. Why wasn't I as familiar with the Huntington as I should have been? No doubt it has to do with the fact that late-18th and early 19th century British portrait painting hasn't been a hot art topic for a long time. I'm pretty sure I saw Blue Boy in my college art history class, but the instructor was in a big rush to go on to Turner, Ryder and the French Impressionists. Too bad for me. I should have experienced the Huntington years ago. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 4, 2010 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, December 29, 2009


Las Vegas High-Rising
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- CityCenter from across Bellagio pool The huge Las Vegas project CenterCity began opening a few days after I left town in late November. (My timing is always bad: the Wynn and Palazzo hotel-casinos also opened not long after previous visits.) But David Littlejohn, a west coast Wall Street Journal stringer was there in its early days and reported his reactions here. Unfortunately for me, Littlejohn's architectural tastes and mine aren't in synch. For example, he liked the Rem Koolhaas Seattle Public Library main branch building, a structure I consider a disaster in nearly every respect. One feature of CityCenter is that a group of starchitects was hired to do design duties, presumably in the high hope that the result would be a triumphal jewel in the crown of American artistic civilization. Unfortunately, I found CenterCity (or what I could see of it from outside construction barriers) to be a resounding modernist/postmodern banality, hardly in keeping with the wild, showy Las Vegas spirit. Below are a few of my snapshots. Claes Oldenburg giant eraser in its wrappings This is the third eraser I've stumbled across: one was encountered in Seattle, another on the Mall in Washington, DC. Note the passenger train car in the background, part of an inter-casino line. Since I couldn't enter the project, I'm not sure what this building is. But it's mostly an example of the "honest" modernism I was lectured about in my architectural history class in college. What you see is essentially a rectangular shaft, slightly beveled near the top, with a modest cap. The "decoration" or visual interest is provided by endlessly repeated balcony bands. I do not know what starchitect was responsible for this aesthetic marvel. Paris casino and hotel Up the street is this example of the "dishonest" architecture I was taught to despise. In Vegas one has to suffer from this sort of stuff. If Frank Gehry were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave at the though of such architecture. Veer Towers by Helmut Jahn That Jahn team sure must be a bunch of wild and craaazy guys! Man, do they have the LV spirit. Formula: start with a rectangular shaft (see above), toss in some cantilevering and surface color changes, and you have postmodernism for the Strip, right? Sadly, I probably won't be back to Vegas until next fall, so my evaluation of CityCenter interiors will have to wait. And perhaps by then the reaction of the Las Vegas-going public to CenterCity will have become more clear. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 29, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Saturday, December 19, 2009


Over-Theorized Design
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the more interesting studies of automotive styling is this 1988 book by C. Edson Armi. One chapter dealt with an interview with a stylist whose name was not familiar to me -- Bill Porter of General Motors. Apparently Poster is respected in his industry. He was responsible for the early 1970s Pontiac Firebird and the 1985 Buick Electra and was involved in other designs during his career. A fairly recent article dealing in part with Porter is here. Unfinished rendering by Bill Porter Below is material from the book. In his search for a unique direction derived from an American tradition, Porter developed [General Motors styling Vice President Harley] Earl's orthographic and highlight system to create a new system of "power bulges" based on conic sections. He was searching for "fullness that is muscular" .... Porter sought to expand Harley Earl's curvilinear vocabulary in complicated new directions. [This for the Firebird, in contrast to the prevailing Bill Mitchell hard-edge styling formula for GM cars.] [p. 95] Porter created his own dynamic movement by implying a single monocoque shell but by varying the conic sections infinitely. This play-off he describes as "unity-yet-difference" between the upper and lower body sections. On the one hand, "the curvature of the very leading edge of the roof just above the windshield, if continued forward, would not flow down to become the windshield surface but would arc out over it, forming an imaginary bubble that would reconnect with the cowl surface." On the other hand, the "bubble" suggests independent variation within itself: "The curved cone" of the roof " gets wider and wider as it goes back, until it curves down and passes alongside the rear window, where it flattens way out until it curves down to fuse with the lower. Think of it sort of as a thin shell that, while structural, is like a cape unfurling. It is as if the cape were held by the front edge and unfurls to the rear, imparting a subliminal sense of something having been affected by motion." Porter also speaks about stretching the monocoque into the lower by means of barely perceptively changing curved sections that he extended through the front and rear fenders. He intended for the radii changes to be simultaneously subtle and repetition -- to be as much felt as understood ... [pp. 95-6] Car designers are almost always car crazy, in a positive sense, but very few who reach the top have any awareness of the other arts. Not only is Porter aware of the history of modern design and of the place of cars in it, but he also talks about his designs with the vocabulary usually reserved for painting, sculpture, and architecture. Porter earned a degree in painting from the University of Louisville.... [p. 255] He searches for added visual complexity, having discovered during the sixties "a richer vocabulary' based on subtly changing conic sections. Especially important to him are the aesthetics of... posted by Donald at December 19, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, December 18, 2009


The Role of the Art Museum is ...?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- What is an art museum for? The potential answers to that question can be framed in terms of, among other things, comprehensiveness and specialization. The notion behind being comprehensive is that the museum should serve its home area by providing examples of many kinds of art from many places and eras. From this, the public in general and art students in particular can view a large variety of works of art in person, rather than vicariously via photographic images of the original objects. For example, such images never quite convey the nature of brushwork in paintings; it's very helpful to see the original painting if one wishes a good understanding of it. Specialization is a concept bearing a twinge of elitism, snobbery and competitive triumphalism. (These can be good things, despite their bad reputation in common usage. It depends on the circumstances.) The result for a museum taking this path is that it can claim a "world-class collection of Ming Dynasty vases," "the largest assemblage of paintings by Vermeer" or some other bragging right. A prime example of a specialized museum is New York's Museum of Modern Art. Buffalo's Albert-Knox Art Gallery has been in the news because it is deaccessioning parts of its collection to raise money to buy contemporary art. I think this is okay, but only where there are plenty of other decent art museums nearby. This is the case in New York, London, Paris and even smaller places such as San Francisco. If yours is the main museum in town, I'm not so sure it's wise to specialize. Consider the Honolulu Academy of Arts, housed in a fine old building designed by noted architect Bertram Goodhue. Honolulu was a pretty small place until 30 or 40 years ago. There is an art museum operated by the state, but not a lot else. Plus, the Academy has art classes as part of its program. The result is that the Academy displays a small, but pretty comprehensive assortment of paintings. As best I can tell, none of the Western ones fall into the Masterpiece category. But they do offer the student and the interested viewer a useful spectrum of original works. When I visited the museum earlier this month, I noted paintings by the following artists: Raeburn, Thomas Lawrence, Romney, Boucher, Gauguin, Bonnard, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Redon, Delacroix, Courbet, Pissarro, Monet, Picasso and Braque. There were others, but I failed to jot down their names -- there might have been a Modigliani, for instance. A small museum doing a nice job. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 18, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments





Tuesday, December 8, 2009


A Gehry Encore En-Corpse
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's in Las Vegas. I drove past it a couple of weeks ago. And what is it? Architect Frank Gehry's latest, an institute dealing with brain disease; more info here, and a wordless take by John Massengale here. There's one thing about the structure that makes me curious: what will the interior be like once it opens for business. Gehry, in my judgment has become the sorry victim of his apparent compulsion to be "creative" at all costs. This architect needs help or, failing that, instant retirement before he does more visual damage. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 8, 2009 | perma-link | (18) comments





Sunday, December 6, 2009


Vanished Buildings Seen
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There are a few benefits of getting older, but not all that many. One can be a pretty good degree of savoir-faire in the literal sense of knowing how to function in the world; it's the obverse of being a teenager. Another is the bragging rights (such as they are) of saying that one has seen certain sights that are impossible for younger folk to view. I was having coffee yesterday with a 2Blowhards commenter and we yakked about Japan. Afterward, it popped into my head that I should have mentioned having seen a certain building during my hikes around Tokyo many years ago. Expanding on that, herewith are three important buildings I've viewed that haven't existed for more than 40 years. Gallery Pennsylvania Station - New York - waiting room A Pennsylvania Station remains, but it's what was left after the above-ground part of the original building was scraped off. I was there in the early 1960s when it was a lot dingier than the early photo above indicates. As a result, at the time I didn't appreciate it as much as I suppose I should have. That's how things go sometimes. Singer Building - New York Little known today, the Singer Building was, briefly, the tallest building in the world. It had an odd, bulged top that was distinctive, if not exactly distinguished. Again, I saw it during its final years and it simply struck me as being old and funny looking. Now I wonder how it might look had it been preserved and restored to a bright, shiny state. Imperial Hotel - Tokyo - by Frank Lloyd Wright This famous Wright building definitely attracted my attention and I tried to walk through it whenever I was in its neighborhood -- across the street from MacArthur's former Dai-Ichi headquarters and across the moat from the Imperial Palace where Hirohito hung his hat. I felt its loss far more than the other two. Even in this age of historical preservation, some architecturally important buildings don't survive. Readers are welcome to chime in about missing ones that they've witnessed. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 6, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments





Tuesday, November 17, 2009


Satisfying Painting at Pebble Beach
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A little while ago I wrote about what I called "satisfying paintings" -- works that were nicely done and that are a pleasure to view. And a few years ago I wrote about Pebble Beach and posted the following photo of the lounge at The Lodge at Pebble Beach (which overlooks the famous 18th hole). Lounge, The Lodge at Pebble Beach Note the painting on the back wall. It's one of several in the Lodge. The artist is Jerry Van Megert (b. 1938). I haven't found much about him other than he was originally from Oregon and does portraits as well as California coastal scenes such as those on display at Pebble Beach. Here is a slightly cropped photo of the painting noted above. The original is quite large, but my photo for once conveys a pretty good sense of it. I'd like to show more works by Van Megert, but information about him on the Web is sparse indeed, if my Google and Bing searches are any guide. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 17, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, November 16, 2009


Neiman's Interior Space
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- My gut reaction is that modernist architecture is often ill at ease with grand spaces. Sure, it's easy to whip out t-square, triangle or architectural design software and simply specify a space for contractors and workers to actualize. The tricky bit, so far as modernists go, is humanizing such spaces. That requires making use of (ugh!!) decorative elements. One solution is to combine modernism with explicitly classical details. Consider the restaurant and entrance atrium of Neiman Marcus' store by Union Square in San Francisco. Here are photos I took a few weeks ago: Restaurant level Looking down at entrance by Union Square The site of Neiman Marcus for many years was the location of the City of Paris store that eventually became cited as an architectural landmark (details here). After City of Paris closed, Neiman Marcus razed the structure and replaced it with the present building. The centerpiece of the City of Paris was a dome with a glass image of a sailing ship, and this was restored and incorporated in the corner of the new building facing Union Square. It can be seen in the top photo, above. As the lower photo indicates, classical details are included at various levels of the atrium. Although I remember seeing the City of Paris building, I can't recall having been in it. So I have no opinion regarding whether or not it should have been preserved. The Neiman Marcus building is blah on the outside and okay-retail-space inside. Except for the Union Square corner shown above. That bit I like a lot. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 16, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, November 12, 2009


Sacred Art Rumblings
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- 2Blowhards friend Nikos Salingaros alerts me that there has been issued "an appeal for the Catholic Church to return to human and spiritual values in its art and architecture. If it works it will be a revolution, since the Catholic Church is a big sponsor of the Arts. It might also shake up the nihilistic cult that now controls the Arts." An article describing the situation is here. And a website Nikos linked to in his email is here. Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to meet with artists on 21 November, and the appeal was issued with that meeting in mind. I'm not familiar with the current state of sacred art, but gather from Nikos' email that it might have slid into the postmodernism we see daily in venues from art galleries to magazine illustrations. At any rate, I'm not sure what to make of this given that we are more than a week away from the meeting and Benedict either will or won't heed the appeal. And should he heed it, there is a question of whether he will heed some or all of the points it makes. Should Benedict decide to become involved with the matter of sacred art, I suspect there will be a large outcry from many corners of the art community. And given the recent history of hostility to the Roman Catholic Church by news media, I further suspect that coverage of the Pope's actions will be pretty negative. So we shall see what 21 November brings: nothing, a media firestorm, or "something completely different" as the Monty Python troupe would put it. As for me, I think the Church has every right to do what it wishes regarding its art even though the process might prove to be a public relations problem. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 12, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, October 30, 2009


American "Orientalism"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I noted in some previous posts that I visited the Guggenheim Gallery of Western Art, part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming in September. It's an impressive complex in what is considered the eastern gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Its Web site is here, and an article about its recent re-installation is here (caution: this page might take a while to appear). No surprise, what ties all the paintings and sculptures together thematically is the West -- that generally dry part of America extending from about the 100th meridian west to the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. Subject matter is landscapes, explorers, white settlers, the U.S. Cavalry, cowboys and other subjects. A major subject of Western artists from Montana to Arizona is American Indians. Below is a painting in the Guggenheim's collection. "Contemporary Sioux Indian" by James Bama - 1978 I wrote about Bama here. He was a Brooklyn kid who had good success as a commercial illustrator in New York. In the 1960s he pulled up stakes and went to the Cody area where he transformed himself into a Western artist. (Some illustrators made similar transformations when the market for magazine illustration dried up; others moved to portraiture and other fine arts areas.) Recently it suddenly dawned on me that the fascination American Indians hold for some American artists is similar to that of Orientalism for Europeans. As this Wikipedia entry demonstrates, the term "Orientalism" has different meanings to different observers. For our purposes, I'll restrict it to the label applied to a painting genre popular in the 19th century and a while beyond. From Napoleon's invasion of Egypt until the French gained control of Morocco, Europe became increasingly involved in affairs of North Africa and the Near East, ultimately controlling all that territory save post-Great War Turkey. In the wake of diplomats, businessmen, gunboats, European pashas and colonial administrators came artists who painted scenes of souks, harems, oases and whatever else struck their fancies. For example, a major artist who devoted a large share of his output to Orientalist subjects was Jean-Léon Gérôme. Some people become greatly fascinated with other cultures, though usually not to the point where they "go native." Gérôme and his friends would happily scoot off to Algiers or Egypt for months at a time but always returned to the comforts and pleasures of Paris. One reason they fixed on North Africa and the Near East was because those areas were indeed near. China was out there and so were India and Japan. A few European painters traveled to those countries in search of exotic subject-matter; but the exotica of the Orientalists was closer at hand. Given this, I'll hypothesize that American artists attracted to different cultures don't need to undergo the hassle and expense of flying off to Bali, Bhutan or Bangkok to find exotic subjects. All they need do is move to Great Falls, Cody, Taos, Sedona and similar places to paint the... posted by Donald at October 30, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, October 24, 2009


Action! ... Camera! ... Paint!!!
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I bought a copy of this book hot off the press due to my curiosity about how artists go about their trade. That artists have been using cameras as a working tool since the days of the French Impressionists (think Degas) is no longer much of a secret. Commercial illustrators were no exception, probably being the most intensive users because of the need to economize on model's fees and meet deadlines. Norman Rockwell did use models for the first 20 or so years of his career but then eased over to using photographic references and even projectors as tracing aids. He seems to have thought this shameful at first ("Real artists don't do such things! You have sinned!!"), but eventually became a skilled and enthusiastic photographic director. (He would plan his painting, locate appropriate costumes and props, carefully recruit models from around town and then supervise the posing. In almost every case, however, another man would actually snap the pictures.) Rockwell went to such pains because his artistic nature was that he could paint well only what was before him. Apparently he even found it difficult to make a major color change from what a model was wearing. Perhaps for this reason all of his thousands of reference photos were in black and white, not color. Due to a fire that destroyed his Vermont studio, most of the early photos are gone. It would have been interesting to see how his transition from live models to photos evolved. By the time the book is able to pick up the matter, Rockwell took (as the auteur) lots of photos of bits of the final painting and used the ones that best suited his needs. In other words, if a scene had more than one character, he might have separate photos of the models and even detailed photos of faces, hand poses, and so forth. In later years he sometimes would have complete scenes photographed. The charm and intrigue of the book is its juxtaposition of reference photos and final paintings or reproductions of Saturday Evening Post covers (probably in cases where the original art was lost). The book was created in conjunction with an exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 24, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, October 20, 2009


N.C. Wyeth: A Close-Up View
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Have you ever had the opportunity to examine original illustration art by N.C. Wyeth, one of the most famous American illustrators of the early 20th century? You probably have that opportunity if you live in the Philadelphia-Wilmington region because Wilmington's Delaware Art Museum and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania have examples of his paintings. For those who haven't seen a Wyeth "up close and personal," it can kinda sorta be done on this here Internet thingy! The Buffalo Bill Historical Center in far-off Cody, Wyoming devotes a wing to the Guggenheim Gallery of Western Art which has a few N.C. Wyeth items in its collection. Better yet, the museum's web site allows viewers to examine paintings in detail. Of course it's not the same thing as seeing a painting in person, but the results aren't bad at all, as I can attest -- having visited the museum recently. Here is a circa-1911 Wyeth painting of men encountering a bear; it later was art for a Remington Arms advertisement. Click on the link and wait for a few seconds, as the image will take a little while to build. Once it's in place you can enlarge it considerably and move the image frame around to suit your interest. If you're curious about Wyeth's work from his prime years (roughly 1905-1920, in my opinion), you can zoom in close enough to view small areas of color. And, like me, you will probably notice that areas that generally appear "warm" (reds, oranges, yellows, etc.) have bits of "cool" (blues, violets, blue-greens) colors visible. The reverse is true for cool areas. Also check out the brushwork on the foreground hunter's boots. This can be a real educational opportunity for those who are interested in the craft of painting. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 20, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, October 12, 2009


WSJ Reviews Industrial Design Books
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I entered college as an Industrial Design major (later switching to Commercial Art), but don't follow the field especially closely. Its exciting days of legitimacy-seeking and eventual acceptance are long past. Even so, I was interested when I spied "The Shape of Things to Come," a book review article by David A. Price in the 9 October edition of The Wall Street Journal (a link is here). Price covers three books dealing with industrial design and product innovation. The first is by Tim Brown (the CEO of the IDEO firm) with the title "Change by Design". Among Price's comments are: Mr. Brown also argues for companies to become more designer-like by increasing their use of prototypes to test ideas. Prototypes, even quick-and-dirty ones, shed light on how a concept will meet real-world needs. He recounts IDEO going so far as to mock-up an entire hotel lobby and guest suite to help Marriott ponder the needs of extended-stay business travelers. Mr. Brown argues even more emphatically for the close observation of users in their natural habitats. Traditional market-research tools—focus groups, surveys -- rarely produce breakthrough findings, he claims. IDEO and others follow users around -- making video recordings of them as they go about their routines, recording conversations with them—to build an understanding of what they really need. Hate to mention it, but these practices are nearly as old as the industrial design hills. I happen to be re-reading industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss' classic book "Designing for People" (first published in 1955) and he deals with these very topics of prototyping and field research in chapters three and four. The second book reviewed is by Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design (yes, that's "frog design" -- all lower case) whose book is "A Fine Line". The frog design firm is perhaps best known for its work for Apple and its design perfectionist leader Steve Jobs. Price dismisses much of the book as self-promotion, but allows that: Eventually, though, Mr. Esslinger sets out some provocative ideas. He thinks electronics products like mobile phones, cameras and medical sensors should have modular, open architectures -- like the cards that plug into desktop personal computers -- allowing customers to pick the sub-assemblies they need. Agreed, that is an interesting idea. My cell phone and digital camera each have scads of features I'll never use, a factor in complicating their operation. The third review deals with Roberto Verganti's "Design-Driven Innovation" . Roberto Verganti holds that product development should be grounded not in the data of survey-takers or the observations of anthropologists but in the judgment of executives. "We have experienced years of hype about user-centered design," he says. But breakthrough innovations, in Mr. Verganti's view, do not represent what customers knew they wanted. Rather, the most profitable innovations are those that create a radically new meaning for a product. ... Mr. Verganti suggests that companies form relationships with "interpreters" -- individuals and organizations looking at settings similar to the one... posted by Donald at October 12, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, October 9, 2009


Scraping Sky or Scraping Bottom?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's time for me to start picking up the architectural slack now that Michael is a part-time blogger. Therefore, I give you Jean Nouvel -- please! Nouvel is is a French architect who has been awarded the Pritzker Prize (in 2008). Last year it was announced that he would be architect for an Eiffel Tower sized skyscraper in Paris' close-by La Défense district. Then there's a proposed 75-story (or maybe 82 or even 85 story -- read here) building he's designing to fit just west of New York's Museum of Modern Art (a favorable article about the project is here, another take is here.) Apparently, enough people have reacted in horror that the City Planning Commission voted to chop 200 feet off its top. I like tall buildings, if they're done right -- as was often the case in the 1920s and early 30s. I don't know enough about the proposed Midtown spire to form a strong opinion, but its neighborhood already has plenty of tall buildings of questionable aesthetic quality, so what's wrong with dumping yet another into the mix? Actually, my main reservation is that it might be a little too close for comfort to the old RCA Building in Radio City (I love using those archaic names!). The proposed Paris skyscraper strikes me as being a huge mistake. The city already has the despised Tour Montparnasse. Existing La Défense high-rises are not terribly obtrusive, but something about as tall as the Eiffel Tower would be as unsightly as the Montparnasse structure. I haven't heard if the Paris building is still set for construction; when I was in town in May, I saw no sign of it. Better-informed readers are encouraged to bring us up to date in Comments. Your opinions on both projects as well as about the issue of tall buildings in general are also welcome. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 9, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, October 1, 2009


Satisfying Paintings
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not all paintings need be Significant or Provocative, Disturbing, Edgy or other criteria of Importance that might come to mind. As the title of this piece suggests, paintings might be satisfying -- and I see nothing intrinsically wrong with that role. Given their content, still life paintings have an opportunity to be satisfying (however, objects portrayed might conform to the overtly Provocative-Disturbing-Edgy categories noted above). Even more likely to result in soothing, satisfying results are landscape paintings. I'm not a huge landscape fan, but I've been noticing that contemporary artists are cranking out works that I would be tempted to buy (if I had the money) and hang on my wall. Overpass (print) - Marc Bohne Above is an image of a commercial print taken from a painting by Marc Bohne. It seems that his studio is about four miles from where I live, in a converted elementary school where my mother once taught. As it happens, I've never met Bohne, whose web site is here. The above image does no justice even to the poster, let alone the painting. Some objects appear to be painted in a hard-edge style but in fact are a little fuzzy and painterly; you'll just have to track down a full-sized version to discover what I'm talking about. I discovered the print in the waiting area of the eye clinic I go to. Admittedly, waiting for 15 or 20 minutes after your appointment time to be called in for your examination can put your mind in semi-suspended animation, a dreamy state. Nevertheless, the print never fails to fascinate me. The version I see has the caption at the bottom as well as border areas of the image cropped off (the sky cropping improves the result, I think). The coloring is realistic as are details such as the partly-submerged furrows in the foreground -- something common in the fall here in western Washington. The composition is strong, yet intriguing. Much of it converges towards a focal point, yet there is no special focal object -- just a dark clump of trees. Arques-la-Bataille - John Henry Twachtman - 1885 In some respect, it reminds me of the Twachtman painting above, which hangs (well, it did the last time I was there) in the Metropolitan Museum or Art in New York. Although it doesn't show well in the reproduction, this painting has (for Twachtman) a strong composition using horizontals and slants. In those respects, Bohne's painting echoes it. Another artist whose work I've noticed recently is Romona Youngquist whose paintings can be found in an Eastside gallery hereabouts and elsewhere. Her page on the gallery's site is here; scroll to the bottom for biographical information. Below are example paintings also shown in the above link. The titles are ho-hum, but the works themselves are -- guess what? -- satisfying when seen in person. Sweet Summertime Endless Summer Changing Season What I find a little bit interesting is the similarity of results... posted by Donald at October 1, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments





Monday, September 28, 2009


Sixth Avenue, Remembered
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Aging cusses such as me won't be around forever. That's why I like to post How It Was articles here from time to time. Just for the record, understand. [Clears throat, fiddles with notes, casually leans on lectern] Today's subject is New York City's Sixth Avenue, alias Avenue of the Americas (you can read about the name business along with other info here). As this Wikipedia entry indicates, Sixth Avenue was the site of an elevated railroad from the late 1870s to the late 1930s, when it was replaced by a subway line. Sorry to report that I wasn't around during the "El" era, so I can't categorically assert that the street level was a typical "almost dead" retail zone found below elevated lines. But it probably was. When I first saw it in the mid 1950s, the classiest frontage was that of the Radio City Music Hall on the backside of Rockefeller Center. There might have been one or two other theaters nearby, fronting on side streets. In 1962 I was stationed in the Army just outside the city and got into town almost every weekend from late January till mid May. By that time, Sixth Avenue was entering its great transformation phase. The new Time-Life building (the second in a continuing series of Time structures) across Sixth from Rockefeller Center had been completed. At the time, much was made of the claim that it was really part of the Center. Technically (or legally) that might have been so. But to me, at least, it was not part of the center in the sense of its location and its architecture. Time-Life Building - completed 1959 So far as I can tell, the main link of Time-Life to earlier phases of Rockefeller Center is the use of gray stone facing that can be seen in the photo above. But the large window areas and spandrels effectively removed it from the character of the Center's earlier buildings that had narrower windows/spandrels and a touch of Art Deco trim. The rest of Sixth Avenue from 42nd Street to near 57th was in that state of suspended animation found where properties are being or have been assembled for major developments -- in this case, for massive skyscrapers. Shop leases were running out and tenants were beginning to vacate. Maintenance and repairs to existing low-rise masonry buildings were kept to an absolute minimum in anticipation of razing. Aside from Time-Life and the Music Hall, Sixth Avenue was a dreary, ratty zone. I remember that I seldom tarried there when walking west from glitzy Fifth Avenue to the Times Square area bright lights, and ditto when heading east. What many current Manhattanites and visitors probably don't realize is how low-rise Midtown was in the mid 1950s. There were few really tall buildings along Sixth and the Times Square area as well. Park Avenue was lined by moderate-sized masonry-clad buildings, the exceptions being the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and the shiny new... posted by Donald at September 28, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Sunday, September 27, 2009


Are Sculptors Long-Lived?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Inspired by the self-glorification of certain political personages in Washington, D.C. and some of the manifestations of adoration undertaken by followers, I've been doing some reading about art in 20th century totalitarian countries. A book I just finished is Peter Adam's 1992 Art of the Third Reich. His chapter on German sculptors active in the 1930s caught my attention because of the life-dates he cited for them and a few others whose work influenced them. They are listed below with the approximate age at death in square brackets. (Ages at death are based on subtracting the birth year from the death year. That means some of the cases are overstated by one year. I did this for consistency because I wasn't sure I could easily track down life dates for all the Germans. In any event, the picture presented isn't seriously affected by my shortcut.) Georg Kolbe (1877-1947) [70] Karl Albiker (1878-1961) [83] Arno Breker (1900-1991) [91] Josef Thorak (1889-1952) [63] Adolf Wamper (1901-1977) [76] Kurt Schmid-Elmen (1901-1968) [67] Rudolf Belling (1886-1972) [86] Ernst Barlach (1876-1938) [62] Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919) [38] Fritz Klimsch (1870-1960) [90] Richard Scheibe (1879-1964) [85] Josef Wackerie (1880-1959) [79] Bernhard Bleeker (1881-1968) [87] Arnold Waldschmidt (1873-1958) [85] To spice things up, I'll add a few sculptors whose names are familiar to me: Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) [77] Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) [83] Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) [81] Lorado Taft (1860-1936) [76] Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) [59] Paul Manship (1885-1966) [81] Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) [81] Alexander Calder (1898-1976) [78] Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) [65] Seven of the 14 German sculptors lived 80 or more years and so did four of the other nine. The only sculptor following the Caravaggio, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh pattern of dying before age 40 was Lehmbruck. What we have here is nothing more than a factoid, something true so far as it goes. A thorough study of the longevity of sculptors would be grist for, say, a Masters thesis. For example, a universe of sculptors would have to be defined in some measurable way. A basis age would have to be selected so that comparisons with populations at large using mechanisms such as life tables could be made. And so forth. Just for fun, I'll draw a few "conclusions" from the flimsy data shown above. Sculpting didn't seem to be a life-threatening occupation in late-19th century and early-mid 20th century Germany. You'd think that with all the dust, sharp tools, hot metal and the rest of the studio scene, that sculptors could cop an early disability retirement. But apparently not. The non-German group seems to have a somewhat more normal mortality pattern, though the proportion living to 80 is nearly as great. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 27, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, September 22, 2009


Bernie Fuchs, RIP
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Bernie Fuchs, one of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century, has died at age 76. I wrote about him here. The Washington Post obituary is here. But if you have time to click on only one link, please click here to read what David Apatoff has to say. Apatoff knew Bernie and was present as Fuchs lay dying. Below are two examples of Fuchs' early commercial art. His style evolved away from what you see. Today, these examples probably don't seem exceptional. But when they first appeared, just like the original Star Wars movie, they seemed sensational. I know, because I was was commercial art major in college at the time. Gallo wine advertisement Story illustration When someone like Bernie Fuchs appears on the scene, it makes one believe there's such a thing as genius. Later, Donald UPDATE: For a reaction from a commercial artist who was too young to have experienced Fuchs' initial impact, here are remarks by Leif Peng.... posted by Donald at September 22, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, September 15, 2009


Illustration Art in the Middle of Nowhere
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm drafting this in Rapid City, South Dakota. Yesterday we checked out the Badlands and, of course, visited world-famous Wall Drug in the town of Wall which is located near the main western entrance to Badlands National Park. Wall Drug is basically a tourist attraction these days, but originated as a tiny drug store in a small town in the early years of the Great Depression. After a few years of struggle, the druggist and his wife came up the the idea of posting road signs offering free ice water for parched travelers. Business improved immediately. After World War 2, their son aggressively expanded the facility to include food service and sales of all sorts of apparel, trinkets of all kinds and food. Today a visitor still gets his free water and can buy a cup of coffee for five cents! Wall Drug is now a block long and thronged with travelers and stuffed with things to buy. I think it's kinda neat, in its oddball way. Something I didn't notice that last time I was there (in the mid-1970s) was a collection of Western (cowboy and Indian) paintings. It's spread through the various dining areas and includes works by famous illustrators along with paintings by genre specialists and a number of items that seem rather amateurish at first glance. There might be more to the latter than meets the eye -- biographical info about the artist or perhaps some historical significance in the painting's creation. For illustration fans, I noticed original illustration artwork by the following artists, among others: N.C. Wyeth, Harvey Dunn (a South Dakota native son), James Avati, George Rozen (pulp covers) and Harold von Schmidt. Ah, the serendipity of travel! Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 15, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, September 8, 2009


Painter of the Indistinct
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few months ago while I was visiting Paris' Musée d'Orsay I noted a few paintings that were drastically different from any of the rest. A glance at the information plaques revealed that they were by Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), whose Wikipedia entry is here. Self-portrait, c.1893 Carrière was born near Paris and raised in Alsace, but left before that area was lost to Germany (he served in the Franco-Prussian war and was taken prisoner, a further war-related humiliation). His art training included the École des Beaux-Arts and study under Alexandre Cabanel. His career began to take hold in the mid-1880s, by which time his subject matter had narrowed to portraiture and domestic scenes, his palette to a very narrow color range and his technique to a generally indistinct effect probably created in part by using a cloth to rub paint off areas of the canvas . One biographical source suggested that the result was so distinctively personal that other painters were hesitant to pursue his lead. Carrière is generally regarded as a Symbolist perhaps because his declarations regarding his art have a misty, spiritual cast. My take, however, is that he was at best a borderline Symbolist; his Symbolism was more atmospheric than actually symbolic. Below is a sampling of his work I found on the Web. Gallery L'enfant malade (The Sick Child) - 1885 Paul Verlaine - 1891 Madame Caerrière Alphonse Daudet and his Daughter Femme en toilette de bal (Woman Preparing for a Ball) The Mothers - 1900 I'm not sure Carrière's paintings can be taken in large doses, though that can be said for many artists. Certainly the works of his that I saw in the Orsay were striking as well as intriguing. If I were filthy rich, I wouldn't mind having a not-so-misty one on a nearby wall. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 8, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Monday, September 7, 2009


Whatever Happened to Casein Paints?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Way, way back -- so many years ago the thought scares me -- I was a college student majoring in commercial art. As I ranted here and elsewhere, I didn't learn much in art school. This was because I wasn't taught much; students to too great a degree were expected to discover things on their own -- not an efficient way to learn a trade. Once I reached my Junior year I began taking courses dealing with my major. For a reason I cannot remember, our color work was usually done on illustration board using casein paints. Huh? you ask. What in the world are casein paints? The Wikipedia entry is here. Other links containing useful background information are here and here. Casein paints are a kind of tempera whose medium is milk-based. As the links indicate, the paints have a distinct sweetish smell and dry to a matte finish. You probably haven't seen them in art supply stores for quite a while (if at all), and neither have I. Because I haven't noticed them, I assumed that no one was making them any more. But the next-to-last link indicates otherwise. I recall that I wasn't terribly fond of caseins, but used them because everyone else did. For one thing, the drying paint tended to curl thinner grades of illustration board. And after I painted large, flat areas, the dried result was often blotchy. Thanks to our general lack of instruction about painting of any kind, it's possible that I never figured out how to properly utilize caseins. I suppose I could give them another try, but I don't think I want to spend the time or money. If I ever do decide to fiddle around with opaque water-based paints, I think I'm most likely to give gouache a whirl. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 7, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, September 4, 2009


Pole Dancing
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is this Bob Fosse-worthy performance by Australian pole dancer Felix Cane art? Dance? Soft-core porn? Sport? My take: I don't care. I love it, it's amazing, and that's all that really matters to me. Sure is fun to think about the above questions, though. Bonus links: Many more intoxicating performances on video at Felix Cane's website. A "Will porn ever be considered to be art"? yakfest here at 2Blowhards. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 4, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments




Visual Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * I do love looking through a good artist's sketchbook. (Click on "Sketchbooks.") * An inspiring and impressive collection of iPhone photographs by Flickr members. * iPhone Lomography. * Here's one story I wish I'd been asked to report. * Russian illustrator Evegeny Parfenov does very winning variations on that Soviet-heroism look of the 1920s. * Great big jellyfish. * Here's one of the more effective visual illusions I've ever been dazzled and mystified by. (Link thanks to Bryan) * MBlowhard Rewind: An introduction to the wonderful Canadian artist David Milne. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 4, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, August 10, 2009


Terence Cuneo, Literal Artistic Icon
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Continuing the discussion of English illustrators specializing in transportation and military art (I wrote about Frank Wootton here), let's consider Terence Cuneo (1907-1996) whose work was so beloved in some circles that ... Princess Royal unveiling statue of Terence Cuneo in Waterloo Station Cuneo's drawing was more accurate than that of Wootton, but he sometimes got more hard-edge detailing into his paintings than suits my taste. Below are examples of his work beginning with a couple of train paintings -- the genre that led to his Waterloo Station statue. Gallery "Flying Scotsman" Steam engine emerging from shop I think it's a shop and not a train shed, but I might be mistaken. Both paintings avoid the excessive hard detailing I mentioned above. Sir Edward Heath Cuneo also painted portraits. I wonder who selected that blue suit -- the artist or Ted Heath himself. "First Air Post" Like Wootton, Cuneo did airplane illustrations. This depicts final preparations for the initial air mail flight by the RAF from England to the continent in 1918. "The Defense of Calais, 1940" Another Cuneo subject was combat scenes. This shows the British army's Queen Victoria Rifles fighting off German attacks on the Channel port that eventually fell just prior to the Dunkirk evacuations. An account is here. "The Snipe Action" (detail) This is a combat scene probably from the North Africa campaign, 1940-43. The quality of the reproduction isn't good, but offers some idea as to Cuneo's skillful, economical brushwork. "Bentleys at Le Mans, 1929" If Wootton could paint Bentleys (see link above), then Cuneo also could and did. The subject is the Bentley triumphant effort at Le Mans in 1929 where the marque claimed the first four places; race results are here. Cuneo and Wootton were contemporaries and in some respects competitors in that there was a fair amount of overlap in their subject matter. Wootton is best known for his airplanes and Cuneo (in Britain, at least) for his trains. From my standpoint, Cuneo is the better all-rounder thanks to his more accurate drawing, though both created very good paintings that made enjoyable viewing for fans of their genre. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 10, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, August 3, 2009


Frank Wootton: Getting It Almost Right
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This obituary in The Independent contains a line asserting that Frank Wootton (1911-98) "has been called 'probably the finest aviation artist of all time' for his depiction of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and beyond." I'm not sure I concur with that claim even though I've enjoyed Wootton's work since I was high school age or even a bit younger. I have fond memories of leafing through his books "How to Draw 'Planes" and "How to Draw Cars" at the public library. His instructions were pretty skimpy, but the meat of these publications was in the reproductions of his drawings, as we shall see below. I even stumbled on a display of his paintings at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. many years ago. That was long before I renewed my interest in art, so I didn't get as much out of seeing them as I would today. Wootton clearly received solid training in painting, especially having to do with the effects of light, shade and color. What he sometimes lacked was draftsmanship. This is particularly true for his aviation paintings: some aircraft are not correctly proportioned. The Battle of Britain For example, in the painting above, the fighters on the left don't quite look right. My guess is that the wingspan is too great. So some of the time he got things wrong, and other times got them right. I'm supposing that he freehanded planes, striving for effects rather than correct proportions and perspective. Wootton was essentially a commercial illustrator who created artwork for advertising while having a parallel career painting commissioned scenes for the Royal Air Force and organizations with a strong interest in British aviation. He painted landscapes and animals for his own enjoyment. I'm presenting his work here because he was a decent and very popular artist in genres I like. Below are some examples. Gallery Captions are descriptive and not the actual ones. Typhoons at Falaise Gap This is an imaginary scene of retreating German army units being attacked by British fighter-bombers in the aftermath of the Allied invasion of northern France in 1944. Wootton does a nice job of depicting German tanks and other equipment. Douglas Bader bailing out Bader is famous because, even though he lost parts of both legs in a pre-war flying accident, he returned to active duty in World War 2, claiming 22 combat victories. Unfortunately, he was eventually shot down, as the painting shows. But (fortunately) he survived and (unfortunately) spent the rest of the war save a few weeks at the end as a prisoner. Car at train station This drawing is from Wootton's book "How to Draw Cars." It's basically a sketch, an impression of masses defined by light and shade. Very nice. Car poster --> Bentleys Here's an illustration of Bentleys at an old car meet. Because it's necessarily more finished, I find it less satisfying than the train station sketch above. Even though... posted by Donald at August 3, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Sunday, August 2, 2009


My Beemer's Bewildering Cockpit
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some views of the options that my rental Beemer's steering wheel and stalks present: What an excess of bewildering-icon riches, eh? I suspect that somewhere in that thicket of clickers is a button that will take care of paying my electricity bill, and another that will set my DVR to record "American Idol." But which is which? Hey: Of the pictured absurdly-illegible icons, which is your favorite? I'm still trying to choose between (top pic) the "P" that appears to be shouting and (bottom pic) the sorta-clock that seems to be stuck at 11:30. Needless to say: After three weeks of using the car, I'm still iffy where basic turn-signaling and windshield-wiping go. My fault? Or BMW's? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 2, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments





Tuesday, July 21, 2009


Impressionist Rule-Breakers
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There's the saying "Rules are made to be broken." It neglects to mention that it might be helpful to keep consequences in mind when considering breaking a rule. In painting, consequences can be hard to pin down. Breaking a painting rule might mean -- depending upon which rule it is -- (1) the result will be ugly or odd and the work won't sell, (2) the painting's surface might crack or flake as it ages, or (3) it will be hailed as a courageous, innovative masterpiece. In most cases, painting rules are bent, not broken, and the result isn't especially noticeable. These tend to be cases where the artist isn't paying total attention to what he's doing. But there are times when they are consciously broken if the artist seeks an effect he especially desires. Below are featured two well-known Impressionist paintings containing a violation or two of composition rules. My guess is that the artists weren't paying as much attention to composition as they might have. But it doesn't seem to matter because both paintings are very popular despite technical quibbles. "Girls With a Watering Can" - Auguste Renoir, 1876 Information about this painting can be found here. What's wrong with it? First, the girl is facing to our right and is also centered to the right; compare the distance from a point midway between her eyes to the right and left edges. According to a composition rule, she ought to have been placed left of center so that she would be facing a wider area of canvas. It's a question of visual balance. Given that imbalance, Renoir might have helped matters by placing a tall, narrow object of some sort at the right edge so as to block the passage of a viewer's eyes as they follow the gaze of the subject off-canvas. That would be the schoolbook solution anyway, though there really isn't much room for such a visual barrier. But Renoir helped retrieve things by placing a patch of flowering plants below and to our left of the girl. This creates an upper-right to lower-left diagonal from her head to the flowers, thus restraining eye movement to the right. Axes of the lawn edges to the right of her enhance this diagonal force. "Poppies Near Argenteuil" - Claude Monet, 1873 The Musée d'Orsay web page on this painting is here; it contains only data of various kinds. I might mention that there seems to be no settled English version of the title. One potential problem is that Monet divided the scene into two nearly equal areas, the sky and the ground. (Even splits are not recommended, though Caillebotte once famously got away with it.) The ground area is slightly dominant and the dark trees along the hilltop reduce the sky area some and help the balance. And then there's that odd, oddly-placed tree with the round ball of leaves jutting above the rest and into the sky. Did Monet add... posted by Donald at July 21, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, July 17, 2009


Seattle Squeeze: New Urban Living
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As is the case in some other parts of the country, Washington state has put considerable effort into legislating and regulating urban growth. In Seattle, zoning revisions for certain areas allow as many as four housing units to replace a single unit. Last Sunday, the Seattle Times' magazine "Pacific Northwest" dealt with the matter. A link to the article is here. I won't extract from the text, simply noting that its treatment was reasonably fair. My main interest is presenting some of the photos from the piece for your evaluation. (The Times describes the writer and photographer as follows: "William Dietrich is a former Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.") The article deals with, among other things, problems faced by architects working on new high-density single-family and townhouse housing. Presumably the examples I show below are considered to be some of the better fruit of the enforcement of higher density standards. Gallery Judkins Park house of David Sarti A detached dwelling in what seems to have been a back yard. Urban Canyon project - street view Urban Canyon project - court view Urban Canyon project - view from on top Boulders project - court view Boulders project - interior The house I grew up in was on a lot with perhaps a 70 foot frontage and 120 feet of depth. Where I live now is situated on a pie-shaped lot that probably has less acreage, but still plenty of elbow room. I lived nearly 30 years in a house on a third of an acre lot in Olympia, Washington. About nine years were spent in apartments, mostly of the garden variety. Then there were nearly three years in Army barracks. So I'm prejudiced in favor of traditional quasi-suburban housing. That means I wouldn't be hot to move into any of the units illustrated above unless circumstanced dictated it. Mind you, they aren't seriously bad, aside from that former-backyard house -- though I hate the newly-pervasive "industrial" exteriors I see on the Urban Canyon units. I guess my main problem is that these squeezed-in dwelling are neither fish nor fowl, as they say. They're not sensible detached housing. Nor are they honest row or courtyard-facing housing. They're an odd breed of "pretend" housing struggling against the dictates of our betters -- politicians and planners. I am sure many of you will disagree in Comments. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 17, 2009 | perma-link | (14) comments





Wednesday, July 15, 2009


Ben Aronson's Representational Abstractions
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I wrote here about Ken Auster, who paints mostly cityscapes and restaurant and bar scenes. I like his work (with a few reservations), but there's another artist who also does cityscapes that I like even better. I should add that I haven't seen his paintings in person, instead relying on magazines and the Web. That artist is Ben Aronson (b. 1958) who offers this statement about himself on his website. Please read what he has to say before viewing the sampling of paintings below. Gallery La Marais - 2006 This shows a Paris neighborhood that didn't get Haussmann-ized. What I like isn't so much the ambiance, but instead Aronson's treatment of light on the cars. Many of his paintings include cars with the top-lighting afforded by city streets enclosed by high-rise buildings. Paris Morning, Left Bank - 2007 More Paris, more cars; catnip to a Paris-lovin' car lovin' guy like me. Bay Bridge 1 Now to San Francisco, a city depicted in the Gallery section of the posting on Auster. Compare. While both artists treat detail in a sketchy manner, Aronson's paintings tend to have starker value contrasts and stronger composition. Urban Reflections - 2008 And if you haven't caught on yet, all the Aronson paintings shown here have essentially square formats. Gustav Klimt did the same when painting landscapes. Closed Ramp, West Side Highway - 1997 Oops, here's one that isn't square. It was done a decade earlier than the rest, so perhaps Aronson hadn't settled into his dimensional groove. Note the strong, almost abstract design. Oceanside - 2008 Aronson does people, too. Again the design is strong and, if certain details were omitted, would become an abstract painting. This point is more obvious if you squint or look at it from a distance. The Secret - 2008 Not all of his work is done outdoors. Seems that Aronson can do portraits too, if he sets his mind to it. Nighthawks - 2008 The takeoff on Edward Hopper's famous 1942 painting of a nearly-deserted downtown diner was intentional. Aronson's twisteroo was to place the subjects in a fancy contemporary bar, another overlap with Auster, even down to including a painting behind the bar.. So far, I like what I see in Aronson's work. I notice that he's represented by a San Francisco gallery, so I'll make an effort to stop by when I'm in town later this year to find out if his originals are as appealing as the reproductions suggest. Aronson shows us a way in which lessons from modernist experiments can be used in the creation of paintings that are more representational than not. No resorting to contemporary modernist irony or other in-your-face tricks, either. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 15, 2009 | perma-link | (19) comments





Monday, July 13, 2009


We Need the Arts: A Sob Story
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It says in that panel over at the left that we Blowhards are arts buffs. But as best I can tell, "buff" doesn't translate into art über alles (yes, I know the German word is "kunst"). That's true for me, anyway. Art is nice, there's plenty of it out there and human nature being what it is, it won't disappear even though individual arts might have their ups and downs. Given my warped little philosophy, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that my teeth grind themselves into dust when I encounter people making art out to be more important than it should be while whining that ever more resources must!! be devoted to propping up one favored enterprise or another. What set off this tirade was an article I read in today's editorial page of the Seattle Times, an opinion piece from the 9 July Los Angeles Times by Ben Donenberg, "the founding artistic director of Shakespeare Festival/LA and a member of the National Council on the Arts." The link is to the LA Times site. As usual, I offer some excerpts: [I] recently sent an article to a local philanthropic leader about the importance of helping arts organizations during the recession. I thought he might draw inspiration from it, but that was too optimistic. "I don't need inspiration," he quickly responded. "We aren't supporting the arts; we're supporting essentials." ... Why should we care? Because experiencing and creating art is a crucial part of developing young people who can understand the world's complexity and tackle its problems with a full range of tools. He goes on to mention a project "working with a group of inner-city youths at an overnight community arts camp in the local mountains." They were to create a presentation "inspired by" A Midsummer Night's Dream and the idea was to have them experience a real woods at night. They were urged to explore a variety of artistic responses to the experience. Some wrote poetry; some danced in celebration of nightfall; others sang songs about the moon. One 17-year-old girl was particularly affected by the experience.... As she struggled to find poetry, she shifted her gaze and her flashlight beam between pages of a Shakespeare play and her notebook, filled with words she had carefully crafted. We struggled with her, rejoicing in her awakening even as we felt her pain at realizing that people with more money than she could know nighttime in a very different way. That night in the forest put new colors on the young woman's palette. ... Here's some advice for anyone who has to decide what is "essential" when making philanthropic funding decisions. Some summer night, take time out to look at the sky from someplace really dark. Then try to express -- visually or in words -- what the experience was like. I suspect you'll come to understand why art is essential. Let's see ... a hint of racialism ("inner-city"), sexual politics (the subject... posted by Donald at July 13, 2009 | perma-link | (47) comments





Thursday, July 9, 2009


Ken Auster of the Kute Kaptions
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ken Auster (b. 1949) is another contemporary painter I'm featuring while taking a break from the 1870-1910 crowd I've been tending to deal with. Auster was and presumably still is a surfer dude, an activity that led to spending years working for Hawaii's Crazy Shirtz company. Ken Auster - 2004 Auster credits his experience in t-shirt design and printing technology for helping his maturity as a painter. Nothing like a little focus and discipline to wipe away that faux creativity, right? At any rate, he eventually set t-shirts aside to settle on the Southern California coast pursuing a career as a fine arts painter and teacher. His Web site is here. An article with some biographical information is here. One of Auster's quirks (from Crazy Shirtz days?) is giving his paintings wry titles. Below is a set that's fairly representative, though the titles aren't quite into the Auster "zone." Check out his Web site or Google Images for more paintings and titles. Gallery Primary Transportation Auster has painted many urban landscapes. This looks like lower Market Street in San Francisco. Guardian II A New York Fifth Avenue scene with the Empire State Building in the background. Island Fever San Francisco's Powell Street with people waiting for a cable car. Counter Culture Auster does people and interiors as well. Last Call Here is a bar scene, a favorite subject for Auster. Knockout Auster painted a number of scenes featuring famous bars with famous paintings in the background. The background painting here is George Bellows' "Dempsey and Firpo" of 1924, the original in New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Artist Robert Bissett's favorable take on Auster can be found here. Me? I see his paintings from time to time in Carmel-by-the-Sea and find them a noticeable notch above the average for realist-oriented galleries in that artsy town. My only complaint, and it's really in terms of my own taste, is that his work is just a tad too sketchy. But if I had scads of money I'd consider buying one of his smaller works. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 9, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, July 8, 2009


What Might Representational Painters Paint?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not long ago I wrote about Casey Baugh, a young artist with great skills who, early in his career, has concentrated on painting attractive young women. In reply to a comment, I commented: I am in general agreement that subject matter is a problem for realists (as it is for any artist not dealing in pure abstraction). That's why I hemmed and hawed about Baugh's need for maturity, my implicit thought was that perhaps in the future he could do better than simply creating well-crafted pinups. Until well into the 19th century a painter was basically an illustrator if he wasn't doing portraits, landscapes or still-lifes. So there were templates for acceptable subjects -- from history, religion, mythology, travel incidents and so forth. Today, even representational fine-artists shy away from such subjects, perhaps to their ultimate cost. Exceptions: certain painters doing war genre or events from car races that appeal to a limited clientele. More recently, I posted on another artist, Euan Uglow, prompting a comment from Friedrich von Blowhard, who observed: I still maintain the biggest obstacle to a broad-based revival of traditional art is that mere skill in representation is not enough to get us there; this view ignores the very large amount of theoretical armature that traditional (i.e., Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic) art possessed that has been discarded or taken over by the Modern-Postmodern camp. For example, "representational" artists of the present have abandoned history painting, especially religious history painting displayed in churches (the very core from which all forms of traditional art grew), which has migrated largely into politicized conceptual art and installation art today. I suspect something like the full glories of Renaissance and Baroque painting are only possible if either (1) contemporary realists re-embrace religion or religious history as a serious subject for their paintings or (2) contemporary realists find some other source of serious content that will allow them to make serious statements that communicate to the broader population. Since few representational artists seem to be taking either route #1 or route #2 seriously, the representational revival is all to likely to remain locked in its current ghetto. Fun, but not destined for greatness. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that commissions for representational easel or mural paintings of historical, religious or mythological events are rare. Elite thinking in the USA holds war to be evil (unless someone on their side wants to fight one), so that rules out battle scenes. Nationalism is also a no-no, so depictions of other historical scenes of the sort common before the 20th century are also likely to be scarce. That same elitist group isn't especially keen on religion (unless perhaps one worships Gaia), so cathedral and church building isn't the growth industry it was in, say, the 14th century and the production of religious paintings follows suit. This suggests that any return to the subjects common from the Renaissance to the Great War will have to... posted by Donald at July 8, 2009 | perma-link | (17) comments





Monday, July 6, 2009


French Style Brushwork
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tour de France season returns. For a few years I followed it pretty closely. Closely by my standards, I should add; most of the time I pay attention only to who the ultimate winner is. I followed it "closely" when I happened to be touring France myself during the first part of July and wanted to make sure my route and the Tour's route didn't intersect within a couple of days of each other. I mention the Tour de France because of its logo that I was seeing on t-shirts and baseball caps when I was in the country a month or so ago. Here it is: Tour de France logo Thanks to my art background I flatter myself thinking I can "read" shapes, patterns, symbols and their ilk. But I must confess that it took me weeks to realize that the TdF logo is more than words. There's a sketchy image of a bicyclist embedded amongst the lettering. The "o" in Tour and the yellow circle represent bicycle wheels, the "r" in the same word is the cyclist's body and the dot above the yellow circle is his head. Get it? Perhaps one reason I didn't get it was the brushy quality of the lettering which I associate with France. Being hopeless on doing lettering of any kind (a major reason why I decided not to become a commercial artist), I admire even the guys who letter signs in supermarkets announcing the price of carrots. And the free brush style used in the logo is a lot easier than having to mimic an actual typeface, though still beyond my limited ability. In fact, it's very close to drawing. Moreover, there's a loose, brushy illustration style that also strikes me as being French in spirit even if a French artist wasn't responsible. Let's take a look. Gallery Macintosh "Picasso" poster - ca.1984 This is the Apple Macintosh computer marketing image created 25 years ago when it was launched. Some Web sites call the object shown above Macintosh's "Picasso poster." I can't remember if Apple used the same term. But Picasso himself was long dead and someone else created the brushy, sketchy image. I half recall that the artist was indeed French, but don't remember the name. Any Mac mavens to the rescue? Macintosh floppy disk The image wasn't only a poster. That might have been an afterthought because the image adorned Macintosh packaging and other Mac-related stuff including the label on the floppy disk shown above. Macintosh Selling Guide cover The Mac guidebook cover above didn't have the entire drawing of the computer but instead featured a design using just the mouse and its cord. British Vogue cover - December, 1934 Such brushwork was nothing new. Half a century before the Macintosh illustration and graphics we find this December, 1934 British Vogue cover. Vogue cover art - February, 1935 - by Eric An example from a few months later is this American Vogue cover... posted by Donald at July 6, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments





Sunday, July 5, 2009


Euan Uglow, Painstaking Painter
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of weeks ago I noticed this book at the local college book store. For the paltry $125 price I could glean the life's work of an English painter I'd never heard of. Of course that made me curious. Even his name -- Euan Uglow (1932-2000) -- promotes head-scratching. Okay, the first name seems to be an alternative spelling of "Ewan." But the last name? I'm not at all sure how it's pronounced, partly because it doesn't look British. Might it be Russian "Ooo-glov?" Or an anglicized "You-glow?" Perhaps one of our readers from the Ancestral Isles might chip in to help this befuddled Yank.* Regardless, Uglow rates a Wikipedia biography that can be found here. It seems he was greatly influenced by his training to create spare paintings of meticulously measured subjects. This measurement was so important that tick marks are left on some of the completed works. One result of this taking of pains was a small lifetime production of paintings; he taught art to help earn a living. According to the Wikipedia article, interest in Uglow has been increasing. Not all that interest is favorable, as this Guardian review indicates. It's from the 8 July 2003 issue, written by Adrian Searle. The page is slow to build and might disappear some day, so I excerpted some of the most pointed bits: He was a figurative painter of what has been called the School of London, and his reputation was built on hard-won images, on relentless looking and describing. His art was founded on empirical measurements, on constant revisions, on a technique that was anything but flashy. His paintings bore the imprint of his repeated returns to the minutiae of observation. ... Uglow was a student at the Slade of William Coldstream, whose own life paintings had about them a chilling air of self-denial, and Uglow went on to develop Coldstream's approach through his own years of teaching in the same art-college life room. To me, it always smelled like a death room; every year a new crop of belated Euston Road painters would emerge from it, their pallid painted figures nicked with little registration points and tiny painted crosses, like so many torture victims, done-over in shades of umber and grey. A style like any other, this was and is a look masquerading as a moral quest. About it all hangs an air of futility, and a sense of something murdered.... Uglow's own paintings are, on the other hand, often colourful, but it feels like studio colour rather than the uncontrollable colour and light of the world. His blues are always the same blue, the reds and pinks invariably mixed from the same base hues, whether he is painting skin, the studio floor tiles or the decorated facade of a church in Cypress. Not that Uglow ever used much paint in any case. Like so much else in his art, touch is suppressed and pleasure is deferred. In the end,... posted by Donald at July 5, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, July 1, 2009


Bubbles, McMansions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * What role did the ventromedial prefrontal cortex play in causing the current economic crisis? * Have Americans fallen out of love with McMansions? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 1, 2009 | perma-link | (30) comments





Tuesday, June 30, 2009


Instructions for Drawing What Doesn't Exist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- If you wanna draw or paint faeries -- what you read about in childrens' stories -- then here is a book for you. How about wizards, witches and warlocks? Check here. Or here if you need dragon-drawing help. On the other hand, if a commission for a portrayal of goblins, orcs and "other dark creatures" flies over the transom, then you might want to get a copy of this book. As nearly as I can tell (you might disagree), there are no such things as faeries, witches, warlocks, dragons, goblins and orcs. So painting them plein-air or posed in the studio might prove frustrating. Thank goodness those books exist and can come to the rescue. What I find interesting is that there is enough agreement about the appearance of non-existent creatures that such instruction books are possible. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 30, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Sunday, June 28, 2009


Casey Baugh: A Really New Realist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, I'm aware that I've been tending to write about artists active 50-150 years ago and largely ignoring artists who are alive and painting or who departed fairly recently. As a corrective, I'll do some postings about painters whose work I see in magazines such as American Artist, American Art Collector and Art of the West. The downside is that I've seen little or none of their work in person and mostly rely on reproductions in those magazines or on the Web. That's because their paintings are mostly in the artists' studios, private collections or art galleries rather than in major museums. (Note to self: compile a list of artists and their main galleries and take it along on future trips to California, Arizona and New Mexico. Galleries here in the Seattle area mostly skew modernist.) The subject of the present post is Casey Baugh, a guy still in his twenties who has impressive technical skills. His Web site is here. An article about him containing useful background material is here. Below are examples of his work. All show women, but he sometimes paints men; dig through his site to find examples. Gallery Ambiance Interesting use of cool light on the subject's hair and body planes. I find the treatment of the oriental rug impressive: compare to the rug in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Blue Earring Kate Red Scarf This is a demonstration painting. A report on the demonstration is here. Most demonstration paintings I'm familiar with tend to have an unfinished look that's understandable, given the circumstances of their creation. Baugh brought the subject's face to a considerable degree of finish. This also shows that he doesn't painstakingly copy photos -- or doesn't need to, anyway. This guy's skill seems to be for real. Nonchalant As well as any, this illustrates Baugh's practice of creating smooth faces while leaving backgrounds and clothing treatment looser, more "painterly." Shades of Yellow Erubescent I think it's safe to conclude that Baugh can create knockout babes. But he's young enough that it's hard to tell how his work might evolve. For instance, he might simply become another Pino, who I wrote about here, an artist of high ability who tends to crank out similar works year after year to make a good living. As I've stated more than once, artists need to make livings just like the rest of us, so I don't get very bothered when I see similarity across works: one often has little choice but to paint what sells. If an artist is fortunate enough to attain a good income stream, I think it might be nice if he'd once in a while, on his off-hours, try something different. Many artists probably do just that, except those "private" paintings usually don't get seen in public. So we have no way of telling whether Pino and Baugh are beavering away on new styles, themes or whatever they might potentially be up to.... posted by Donald at June 28, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments





Wednesday, June 24, 2009


Textures of French Buildings
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A favorite sport hereabouts is bashing modernist architecture, which we do for reasons that make good sense to us, at least. Much of that glass 'n' reinforced concrete 'n' metal cladding strikes us as pretty sterile and not people-friendly. Aside from one brief jab, the focus of this posting is on an alternative: buildings and townscapes with lots of visual interest due in part to materials and ornamentation that creates a textured surface -- usually with a partly random pattern or effect. The following photos were taken on my recent visit to France. For starters, this is the ground floor lobby of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the museum devoted to art since 1900 or thereabouts. It's large, and the smooth, concrete floor sets the tone. Does it give anyone a warm, fuzzy, welcoming feeling? And this is part of the exterior. Perhaps having been inspired by a shirt emerging inside-out from a clothes dryer, we see here the architectural concept of placing much of the "mechanical" bits on the exterior. The result is textural in its way, so I give Renzo Piano credit for trying even though I loathe the thing. Since we're in Paris, let's check out the area above one of the entry door sets of the Notre Dame cathedral. Note the decoration on the indentation from the outer wall to the entry door plane as well as the relief sculpturing above the doors. It contrasts the plain wall, so that surfaces play off one another. This transition zone could have been simplified, but I'm not sure if that would have been better than what we see in the photo. This building on the rue de Rennes always intrigues me thanks to its odd, Art-Nouveau tower on one corner. The little balconies by the windows and other details provide surfaces that keep the eye interested, but not overwhelmed. Here's another big-city building, this in Lyon. It has a "flatiron" plan and is more ornate that the rue de Rennes structure. The bold, horizontal extrusions help clarify the structure and to some degree offset the ornamentation. I don't consider this great architecture, but it's interesting and doesn't bother me so I can't condemn it either. Elsewhere in Lyon is its opera house, shown here. It has been renovated and that shows. At least it contrasts modernist and traditional architecture in one convenient package. However, surface texturing is light in both cases. Dropping a notch in city size, this is Rouen and its famous Gros-Horloge or clock. Yes, it's interesting. But check out the surface materials of the buildings shown in the picture. The one on the left has half-timbering and the next one seems to have wooden shingles. At the right is cut stone with the seams emphasized. The clock tower itself has a smooth, stone surface that contrasts the ornamented clock and its setting. The clock tower in Aix-en-Provence's old town district. Aside from the very top, it lacks ornamentation. Yet... posted by Donald at June 24, 2009 | perma-link | (15) comments





Monday, June 22, 2009


Apatoff on Artists "Selling Out"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- David Apatoff over at his Illustration Art blog posted some interesting thoughts on artists "selling out" to commerce. You should read the whole thing here. But I can't resist his discussion of Claude Monet, who refused to sell out during hard times early in his career. Instead, he begged and borrowed relentlessly. Eventually, as Apatoff notes: Because he couldn't afford medical care for his family, his wife Camille suffered through a long illness with tuberculosis before dying painfully at the age of 32. Some say she died of pelvic cancer, but others say she died of a botched abortion because she and Monet could not afford to have a third child. Don't think Monet's artistic dedication was compromised by Camille's tragic death; he told a friend that he was interested in the way Camille's face changed color after she died, so he recorded the change in a painting ... Now that's what I call principle. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 22, 2009 | perma-link | (21) comments





Saturday, June 20, 2009


Artist Post Link List (Donald) - 2
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here is a link-index of my posts about artists as of mid-June, 2009. It updates a list posted early this year. Please let me know of any errors or omissions. Anglada-Camarasa, Hermen Bama, James Bastien-Lepage, Jules Beaux, Cecilia Bischoff, Franz Boldini, Giovanni Casas, Ramon Chéret, Jules Curtis, David (England) Detaille, Édouard Dewing, Thomas Wilmer Edelfelt, Albert Frazetta, Frank Foujita Fuchs, Bernie Gajoum, Kal Gallén, Axel Goldbeck, Walter Dean Grün, Jules-Alexandre Herter, Albert Henry, George & Hornel. E.A. Hohlwein, Ludwig Kline, Franz Lambert, George de Laszlo, Philip Alexius Leffel, David Levitan, Isaak Leyendecker, J.C. Macchiaioli (Italian group) Malczewski, Jacek Mathews, Arthur de Neuville, Alphonse Pino Putz, Leo Schjerfbeck, Helene Serov, Valentin Situ, Mian Sloan, John Sloan, John (update) Solomon, Solomon J. Stuck, Fanz von Thayer, Abbot Handerson Thompson, Tom Tiepolo, Giavanni Battista Vettriano, Jack Vrubel, Mikhail Zorn, Anders This list will be updated from time to time. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 20, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, June 18, 2009


Architecture and Urbanism Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * New England architect Katie Hutchison conveys an awful lot in one simple sentence when she writes, "To me, residential architecture extends beyond the built structures of our homes to the spaces around, in between, and within sight of them." Now that's the kind of architecture theory I respect and resonate to. Her blogposting is a lovely, short appreciation of a very moving space. Fun to see that Katie is now selling prints and notecards of her photographs. She shows the same love of natural materials and processes, simple and direct experience, and the varieties and qualities of light and color in her photographs that she shows in her building-design work and her blogging. * Large office towers -- that's "skyscrapers" to you civilians -- are doing as poorly in the recession as McMansions are. * Nicola Linza explains beautifully why he's committed to architectural classicism. * What a mess. * Time's Richard Lacayo offers a well-done visual tour through Renzo Piano's new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. Lacayo is impressed, and for all I know the place works well. But to me Piano's structure looks like a genteel version of a 1960s airplane terminal. Here's a talk with Piano. * Has the building frenzy in Dubai finally come to an end? (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin) * Nathan Origer takes a walk through his beloved hometown and wonders why so many of the newer buildings are so awful. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 18, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments




Detaille was Detailed, de Neuville was Better
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- During my scamper around Paris last month I visited the Musée de l'Armée in the Invalides complex (the Wikipedia entry is here, but is skimpy and somewhat off-topic). The late-19th century display section included a number of works by noted military artist Jean-Batiste-Édouard Detaille (1848-1912) who had a hand in the establishment of the museum's collection; he'd collected a good deal of militaria as reference material for his genre. More information about him can be found here (extremely brief) and here (a little longer, but still sketchy). Among the paintings were impressive fragments from a panorama painted by Detaille and Alphonse de Neuville (1835-85). Notes (in French) about part of this work are here and, with an illustration intact in PDF format, here. Two snapshots I took are below. (The color is way too orange; I need to shop for a camera that does indoor non-flash photography better than my little three-year-old Nikon.) And here is a fragment of the same panorama that I found on the Web. The artists painted two panoramas during 1881-83: the 16 August 1870 battle at Rezonville and the 30 November 1870 battle at Champigny during the siege of Paris. The fragments shown above are from the Rezonville work. More on the panoramas can be found here and here. What impressed me was the "painterly" quality -- simplified, bold brushwork combined with color selection yielding a satisfying image when seen a ways away, important items for murals and panoramas. Some of this can be seen in my close-ups above, though the original art is much better. Detaille was the lead artist on the projects, so I assumed his style dominated the cooperative effort. But after doing a little research, I'm not so sure. Let's look at some evidence. Gallery: Detaille As the pun in the title of this piece and similar comments elsewhere indicate, Detaille is noted more for his precision and attention to detail than to other artistic qualities. Nevertheless, while much of his work is indeed "tight," some is more "free." This shows Napoleon in 1806. It's an example of Detaille's tighter painting style where details of uniforms and equipment predominate. La Salue aux Blessée (Saluting the Wounded) is less tight, probably because the figures are so relatively small that detail became much less important than atmosphere. "Charge at Mosbronn" is an action scene, one of many Detaille painted. Again, thanks to its subject matter, it too can serve as a basis for comparison with Neuville's work shown below. Gallery: de Neuville Titled "Attaque d'une maison barricadée à Vellersexel," we see a free, nearly sketch-like impression of a skirmish's aftermath. Compare the buildings here with those in the Detaille painting immediately above. "La cimetière de Saint-Privat" is an example of Neuville's work that seems more tightly done. But that might be due to its scale: the Musée d'Orsay's web site contains comments on it and his work here along with close-ups of fragments that indicate painterly rather... posted by Donald at June 18, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, June 16, 2009


Courbet, Seen Darkly
Donald PIttenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Maybe I was just seeing things. Or maybe not. No doubt many of you have seen reproductions such as the one below of Gustave Courbet's The Artist's Studio. When I visited Paris' Musée d'Orsay a few weeks ago I didn't see all that much of it. That's because it was so darkened -- seemingly darker than the reproductions I'm familiar with including the one above -- that it surprised me. According to this blog (scroll down), the painting was refurbished and reinstalled last fall; their photo of the reinstallation is below. Yes, this recent photo suggests that the painting isn't as dark as it seemed when I saw it eight months later. But for what it's worth, other nearby Courbets struck me as being pretty dark, too. Ditto a Rousseau. So am I wrong? Was the lighting for the painting bad? Is my eyesight failing? Or was the painting always a rather dark affair? Perhaps it originally was brighter and, as often happens, its varnish yellowed it. If so, then why didn't the museum strip off the varnish to restore the original colors? Or were there technical reasons they couldn't? I'm clueless, so I hope a few mavens and recent Orsay visitors will hop into Comments and help me out on the facts and assuage the disappointment I felt that day even if the conclusion is that I have lousy vision. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 16, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, June 13, 2009


Cherettes -- Postered, Painted and Pasteled
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- For the past century or thereabouts, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has been the Parisian poster artist most remembered by the public at large and most art followers as well. Poster art fans won't deny Lautrec's place in that field any more than they would that of Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. But they'll likely make the point that they guy who really invented the modern poster was Jules Chéret (1836-1932). He's the tall fellow in the doctored photo above (the original was monochrome, of course, but someone tipped in a color rendition of the Chéret poster in the original, and that's what seems to be at the top of Google image searches). The little man is you-know-who. The Wikipedia biography of Chéret is here. Another site you might want to visit is here. As the linked biographical material indicates, Chéret's posters featured lively girls who became popularly known as "Cherettes". If you happen to view a large number of Cherette posters (and Chéret turned out hundreds of them), they become somewhat monotonous. But that's often the case of you see a collection of any artist's work in a gallery, museum or book. Artists have this strange tendency to create lots of what sells, after all. Besides, posters and paintings are usually intended to be seen in isolation and not as part of a collection. Another consideration about Chéret is that, while advances in lithographic technology made his posters possible in the first place, the results seem crude by today's standards. So just how good might his poster art have been absent technological limitations? Really good. I discovered that while visiting the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nice (its title sometimes includes the words "Jules Chéret" following the main name). Its web site is here; only the French sub-link seems to work, and no works are shown. It seems that Chéret did a lot of pastel work that included studies for posters, and these can be found amongst the displays in a room the museum devotes to him. Also included are some oils and pastel portraits. Not a lot of this can be found on the Web, but I snitched a few to illustrate what I just mentioned. Gallery Let's start with a poster to set the stage and get you in the proper mood. It's for the Folies Bergère featuring one of its stars and not an anonymous Cherette. This is a poster version of a work titled "La Musique" ... ... and this is a pastel version, probably a study for the former. In person it has depth and a vibrancy the poster lacks -- though this distinction isn't so easy to make when viewing digital images as you are now. Yes, it features a Cherette. Here is another pastel. It doesn't seem to be a poster study, but I might be wrong about that. Here is a pastel portrait of Arlette Dorgère (1904). My museum book on Chéret indicates that she "inspira pleusiers... posted by Donald at June 13, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, June 11, 2009


A Searle Semi-Sighting
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Readers "of a certain age" might well recall the art of British cartoonist/illustrator/writer Ronald Searle (1920-). He was especially prolific during the 1950s and 60s. Influential, too: cartoonists active today have borrowed his way of exaggerating facial and body features. He is perhaps best known as the creator of the St. Trinian's School books that became the subject of comedy films. The girls in that school were nasty, but not nearly as bad as the Japanese guards Searle had to deal with after Singapore surrendered and he and fellow soldiers were shipped north to work on River Kwai type projects. I was a big fan of his and was both startled and pleased to notice the framed, autographed print in the lobby of our Paris hotel (the Fleury, wonderfully situated about halfway between the boul' Miche and the rue Bonaparte on the Left Bank). Searle has lived in the South of France since 1961 and apparently likes the Fleury when he's in Paris. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 11, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, June 10, 2009


Visual Arts Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Anarchist and novelist Stewart Home -- I liked his crazy book "Blow Job" -- wonders how long London's Tate Museum (CORRECTION: thanks to dearieme for pointing out that I should have written "London's Tate Modern Museum") is going to last. Funny line: "The art world is part and parcel of the financial world. When high finance catches a cold, local art scenes react as if they’ve got the plague." * "Della Robbia blue" is one of those terms you'll hear in and around the visual arts. Learn a lot about the Renaissance-era, terra-cotta-sculpture-making Della Robbia dynasty in this good article by Roderick Conway Morris. (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin) * Jonathan Glancey praises the Starship Enterprise as a piece of visual design. * Hard not to love a collection of amazing photos of animals. * All in a day's work for a mountain goat. (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin) * David Pogue takes part in one of those Improv Everywhere events. * 78 photography mistakes you should try to avoid making. A very droll -- and useful -- visual posting. * MBlowhard Rewind: I mused briefly about symmetry and beauty. Best, Michael UPDATE: Roissy reacts to a D.C. art show.... posted by Michael at June 10, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments




Stained Glass Windows, Old and New
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm afraid I seldom pay much attention to stained glass windows in cathedrals and churches. But I did when we stepped into the Église Saint-Séverin located in Paris' Latin Quarter. As this Wikipedia entry indicates, the church has traditional windows along with some new ones created by Jean René Bazaine (1904-2001) who, according to the link, did a good deal of work of that kind. One of his Saint-Séverin windows (in an image I grabbed off the Web) is shown below. Since I don't feel qualified to evaluate Bazaine's windows on their own terms, I'll simply mention that they struck me as bland and washed-out looking compared to the traditional windows in the same setting. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 10, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, June 2, 2009


A Shrewdly Managed Painting Competition
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in April, James Gurney posted about the French Prix de Rome competition, the winner of which gained a good deal of prestige along with a scholarship to study art in Rome. You should read the whole thing if the subject interests you (it's well-illustrated). Here are some excerpts to provide the gist: To enter the Prix de Rome competition, you had to qualify by winning the concours d’esquisse, where students composed a painted sketch based on a theme provided by the professors. If you made it this far, you had already been sifted out of a large bunch of aspirants. Then you went on to a captive sketch competition called the the concours de dessin, or ‘en loges,’ (the loge was an area of cubicles, illustrated above.) The finalists were ranked and then sequestered into the little stalls. They were all assigned the same surprise theme, usually from Greek or Roman history, mythology, or the Bible. They were given twelve hours to complete an outline drawing. They could not leave their cubicles, nor could they talk to anyone. (I assume they were given some bread, water, and a chamber pot.) ... When they finished the session, the professor signed and stamped their entry. ... Then the students each were given 72 days to complete their paintings, using the full benefit of models, costumes, and props. But they could not deviate in any significant way from their sketches. ... Success in this competition required the ability to draw figures and compositions from memory and imagination. It also required a familiarity with hundreds of possible stories from the standard myths and biblical texts. What I find interesting is the psychology underlying the competition, assuming that it was a conscious part of the way it was set up. Lots and lots of us are prone to dither and dally when having to commit to something important. We'll keep coming up with ideas -- some bad, some good, some excellent -- but none of them perfect. Thus the process could go on endlessly, barring deadlines. The competition described above had seriously short deadlines and related rules that forced even the most indecisive young artists to come up with one idea and then work out its execution rather than churning and stewing and yielding no result at all. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 2, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, June 1, 2009


Matt and Derb
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here, Big Hollywood's Matt Patterson talked to me about conservatives and the arts. Today Matt explores the same topic with John Derbyshire. Best, Michael UPDATE: TownHall's Ned Rice profiles Big Hollywood's Andrew Breitbart.... posted by Michael at June 1, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, May 28, 2009


Response to Chris
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- My recent treatise about architecture and shadows elicited a few comments from Chris White. Among his points: The park vs. "public space" images [in the posting] make their case as much or more through the choice of camera angles, time of day, weather and temperature variables as by any intrinsic virtues or defects in the spaces themselves. A few responses. Why would I, in a short blogposting, make an effort to undermine my own point? Earth to whoever may be reading this: What we at 2Blowhards often try to offer isn't the "fair and balanced objective truth" but a counterbalance to the conventional wisdom. The conventional architecture-and-urbanism press loves experimental, fashionable, stylish "excitement." I try by contrast to point out the wonders of traditional architecture-and-urbanism. Besides, fair and objective has been done already. From the '60s through the '80s, the sociologist William H. Whyte (together with many research assistants) observed, photographed, filmed, and noted down how real people in real situations make use of public spaces. In 1988, he pulled his work and speculations together in a great book called "City: Rediscovering the Center." It isn't just an interesting and substantial work, it's a joy to read. Whyte was a civilized, sophisticated, and urbane guy with a subtle sense of humor and an amusing way with words. Whyte was a major cultural figure, as far as I'm concerned. Read up on him here. So let's get real. What does common experience tell us? On a sparkling day, walking through a traditional park, is it really hard to snap photos like this one -- or this one? And aren't we all familiar with deserted and off-putting empty spaces? This scene didn't take a lot of effort on my part to notice and snap: Nor did this one: One easy lesson to take from this: Modernism (and its stylistic descendants) can be reasonably conceived-of as "the defiance of common experience." Modernism: Endless experiments based in theory and speculation, very few of which work out. Tradition: Practices based in experience that almost always succeed. Another lesson: If public space is to serve any useful purpose it shouldn't be dealt with as "empty space." It needs to be crafted and created as a positive thing in its own right. But Chris' point continued to irk me. Maybe he was right. How much had I rigged the visuals in my blogposting? Thinking about his challenge while puttering around the SoHo Apple Store the other day, I found myself devising a way to achieve "objectivity" in a minimal-effort way. On my way home I'd be passing through three markedly different public spaces. The first would be stark and high-modernist -- the open space at the base of a couple of concrete apartment towers. The next would be modernist but flossier -- a space that's half a courtyard, half a park and that has been decorated with planters and trees. The third would be Washington Square, a traditional Greenwich Village park.... posted by Michael at May 28, 2009 | perma-link | (33) comments




So Long, Saturn
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Maybe the title of this piece is premature. General Government Motors hasn't officially pulled the plug on its Saturn brand, but might by the time you read this (I'm drafting this posting 15 May). As a car-mad kid I used to draw imaginary automobiles (still do, matter of fact). Pre-high school, I concocted brand names for some of these doodling projects. I recall that, for sports cars, I came up with the name "Siena" which I got by looking at a map of Italy -- Italian sports cars being hot stuff even in the days when Detroit ruled the automobile world. Another imaginary brand was "Saturn" which I selected because the planet of the same name was really cool looking: awesome, even. Many years later, along came Roger Smith who, as GM Chairman and CEO made it his mission to shake up the corporation. As the Wikipedia link above indicates, many of his initiatives worked out poorly, to say the least. One project was a new, innovative small car called the Saturn. The link lays out the history of the brand, so read it for the details; I'll toss in my own take here. My dim memory is that the Saturn was supposed to be something pretty special. Rather than being a GM division, it originally was a semi-separate company that had its own deal with the UAW union as well as a specially-built factory in Tennessee, far from the automobile-intensive Detroit area labor market. The idea was to start with a clean sheet of paper and meld the best of American and Japanese practices. The company had its own dealer network where prices were set by Saturn and there would be none of the horse-trading hassle unpopular with many prospective car buyers. This last point was actually a nice move from a public relations standpoint; I know of a few buyers who considered it key in their decision to buy a Saturn. On the other hand, trade-ins opened the door for horse-trading practices, so I wonder what the buyer experience was under that circumstance. The hype regarding the car itself was less that that for Ford's famously unsuccessful Edsel, but it was enough that I was curious as to whether GM could actually exceed Japanese cars by a noticeable margin. Saturn prototype, 1984, Roger Smith at the left. The first-series Saturn of the 1990s Neither the prototype nor the initial production version impressed me, though they were better than other GM small cars such as the Chevy Cavalier. I test-drove one once, back in the mid 90s, and was even less impressed. In those days, most small cars equipped with automatic transmissions were underpowered, the little motors having to rev away while trying to push transmission fluid to the point where the car would actually move decently. The Saturn was no exception, yet it needed to be exceptional. In recent years Saturn was melded back into GM. The current crop of cars and... posted by Michael at May 28, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, May 22, 2009


Cars 70 Years Ago: Not So Big
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not long ago James Lileks (his site is here) posted the photo of a Minneapolis building shown below. His interest was in the building's history, mine is different. As the banners indicate, the photo seems to have been taken in 1939. A couple of cars near the center of the photo seem to be 1939 models: the rest are older, as one would expect. Now look at the people near the cars, because they provide scale. Note how short and narrow the cars are. They are typical of the 1930s. Luxury cars such as Packards and Cadillacs were larger (longer, for the most part, but not much wider). By 1970, American cars were quite large, the growth trend having begun to develop seriously when the first redesigned postwar models appeared in 1947-49. I remember that advertisements crowed about six-passenger seating. But even so, a while back I was startled when viewing a parked 1950 Buick Special to notice that it seem narrower than I remembered them. Nowadays, cars come in a larger variety of sizes and types and comparable street scenes should reflect that. Later, Donald... posted by Michael at May 22, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, May 16, 2009


Big Brother Bucky
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Terry Teachout, inspired by an exhibit about Buckminster Fuller, penned this article for this weekend's Wall Street Journal. As usual, I'll excerpt it in case it disappears from the WSJ site. Was modernism totalitarian? That's coming at it a bit high, but it's true that more than a few top-tier modernists were also one-size-fits-all system-mongers who thought the world would be improved if it were rebuilt from top to bottom -- so long as they got to draw up the plans. Just as Arnold Schoenberg wanted to scrap traditional harmony in favor of his 12-tone system of musical composition, so did Le Corbusier long to demolish the heart of Paris and turn it into an ultraefficient "machine for living" dominated by cookie-cutter high-rise apartment towers. So what if the rest of the world liked things the way they were? Send in the bulldozers anyway! It isn't that these artists were especially bloodthirsty. While some would gladly have sent their opponents to the nearest guillotine, most operated on the rosy-colored assumption that sweet reason would be sufficient in and of itself to usher in a kinder, gentler millennium. I always read that it was the house that would be turned into a "machine for living" but perhaps Corbu someplace or other extended that idea to the city as a whole; it isn't a long stretch to say the same thing about cities. Knowledgeable comments are welcome to set me, Terry, or both of us straight. That aside, modernism was never a cute, fuzzy little way of ordering the world: it was demanding. Later on [after the 1930s] he [Fuller] expanded his vision [from houses, cars, etc.] to encompass city planning on the widest possible scale, going so far as to envision placing a climate-controlled geodesic dome over the whole of Manhattan. If such schemes bring Frank Lloyd Wright to mind, there's a good reason: Fuller was a Wright-like figure, a high-octane utopian who believed in the life-enhancing potential of modern technology. The difference was that Fuller lacked Wright's ruthless determination. He was either incapable of or uninterested in following through on his ideas -- and he was, unlike Wright, the opposite of an aesthete. The Dymaxion Car and Dymaxion House are logical, even elegant, but not truly beautiful, and the closer you look at them, the less attractive they seem. On the other hand, Fuller's ambitions extended far beyond the creation of beautiful cars and houses. Not until the '60s did he find his footing as a public figure, and when he did it was not as a designer but a seer, a prophet of change who believed that "utopia is possible now." ... Not only did Buckminster Fuller think big, but he was sure that the only way to fix the world was by fixing every corner of it simultaneously. "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole... posted by Donald at May 16, 2009 | perma-link | (24) comments





Thursday, May 14, 2009


Oldest, Firstest, Fake
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * What to make of the world's oldest sculpture? * Was this Michelangelo's first painting? * Is Nefertiti a fake? (Link thanks to Charlton Griffin) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 14, 2009 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, May 8, 2009


Architecture and Shadows
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another in a series of postings designed to wake a few websurfers up to elements in the experience of the built environment that are simple, important, and too-often-overlooked. Listen up, America, goddammit. Today: light and shadows. And a fast comparison to kick us off. First, traditional brick and stone: Next, mid-20th century modernism (the UN building, in fact): Ignoring many of the worthwhile observations that could be made about this juxtaposition, for today I want to ask: What's the main difference between the above images in terms of light and shadow? Obvious answer: Traditional architecture-and-urbanism offers loads more in the way of light/shadow delight than modernist architecture-and-urbanism does. Another comparison. First up, some modest tenement apartment buildings: Look at the variety of shapes made here by the light and the shadow. Take note of the way the light and shadows emphasize mass -- those buildings feel solid. Don't let your eyes be shy about taking the ironwork -- the fire escapes -- into account. Those rungs, diagonals, slats, and verticals add a dimension that isn't to be ignored. They remind us not just of the sun but also (because they change so markedly as the day goes by) of the passage of time. You might say that, given the density, touch, and complexity of detail and texture, this view looks and feels like a painting. Now, a brand-new apartment building in the current wobbly / off-kilter mode recently erected just a few blocks away: What's the experience of light-and-shadow here? Not to be coy, let me suggest that the easiest answer is: "None whatsoever." I get "gleam," I register "glassy," and I certainly pick up on "swoopiness." What I don't get is any of this: solid, deep, substantial, calm, organic, complex. The whole structure in fact looks like it was extruded direct from a plastics factory. Or maybe it's a screencap taken off your computer's screensaver. But don't some modernist (and modernist-derived) buildings at least try to take the light-and-shadow thing into account? Sure -- not many, not often, but still. So what's the result? Let's take a look. Mid-20th century modernism: Hyper-recent: There's certainly some contrasts going on here between light and dark. No arguing about that. But what's the effect? What I mainly pick up from these attempts isn't "the human touch," it's "geometrical abstraction." In fact, let me go a little further with that reaction: What I really pick up is "rabid, monomaniacal devotion to geometrical abstraction at all costs." Human? Only if your idea of "human" is Arnold in the first "Terminator" movie. A reminder of something we can all recognize as human: Check out the patterns of light and shadow in that modest row of houses, and let the implications, suggestions, and meanings of those patterns ricochet around your brain a bit. Shelter ... The human touch ... Organic matter ... Evolved, near-biological shapes and forms ... A quick revisit with the values the architectural establishment prefers: The word... posted by Michael at May 8, 2009 | perma-link | (36) comments





Monday, May 4, 2009


Painter's Blasts from a Century Past
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Recently James ("Dinotopia") Gurney posted on British painter Solomon Joseph Solomon (1860-1927 -- Wikipedia link here). Two of Solomon's better paintings are shown below. Ajax and Cassandra - 1886 St. George - c.1906 Diploma Work for membership in the Royal Academy: accepted 1906. Gurney mentions that Solomon's 1910 book about drawing and painting can now be downloaded from this link. (If you encounter problems, an alternative is mentioned in comments to Gurney's posting.) Of course I printed out much the book and popped it into a ring binder for ready reference. At least one illustration seems to have been missing from the copy that was duplicated, but such losses are not too serious. Here are some excerpts that caught my fancy. Charming (if a bit hard to follow sometimes) is his Victorian way with words. Apparently some aspects of painting haven't changed in character in the century since Solomon wrote By the system of apprenticeship that obtained during the Renaissance and in those now regretted days when the decorative arts flourished in Europe, the knowledge of our craft was handed on from master to pupil. Those valuable traditions are to-day but a faded memory; but such is the spirit of the age, that even did the unbroken chain of tradition reach back to the fifteenth century, when oil-painting first came into general use, its sanction would probably be questioned and its teaching neglected. [Page 66] Moreover, Teachers have been too superior, perhaps too uncertain themselves about their craft, to do aught but teach and criticise aesthetically, and have left the student to shift for himself and learn his trade as best he might. [Page 67] This was my experience in the late 1950s. I didn't realize that the rot had started at least 50 years earlier. As for paintings themselves, probably in reaction to the advent of Modernism, he wrote: Let us now inquire into the effect resulting from our oft-recurring exhibitions of painting, and see how they influence the painter. So many of the qualities considered essential by our masters are sacrificed for effect. An obtrusive coarseness is now preferred to the velvety surface of the Dutch masters. Scene painting, effective enough on the stage, and perhaps telling on the great walls of out exhibitions, is taking the place of precious workmanship; and, worst of all, these exhibitions engender a never-ending restlessness and love of change. Anything with which to astonish the native! Fashions in painting come and disappear like Paris hats, so that last year's methods are as out of date as the headgear that went with them. Many bids for fame are made by men who, having nothing to say, invent a new language to say it in, and hope that their jargon may be mistaken for originality, as it not infrequently is by the immature critic and the modish amateur. There is no end to the possibilities of what is known as imagination -- that is, the power to make... posted by Donald at May 4, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments




Jane on Film
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A little Jane Jacobs to kick off the week: I wrote appreciations of the great Jane Jacobs back here and here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 4, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, April 29, 2009


Obama in Popular Culture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Has there been a political figure since JFK who has had Pres. Obama's impact on pop culture iconography? Che, maybe? In New York City, Obama's face sometimes seems to be everywhere. You can buy a Warholesque framed portrait from an art gallery: Or you can keep it real, man, and make your Obama purchases on the street: Feeling a little sour? Freshen your breath with an Obamamint: My favorite recent Obama appearance, though, was on the over of a New Age/Yoga giveaway magazine. New Life editor Mark Becker said this in his editor's note: I want to thank my dear friend Peter Max for creating and donating his portrait of President Obama, who I affectionately call Om-Bama, to adorn our cover ... We are living in very exciting time since we finally have a president who realizes what is broken and is willing to go out on a limb and step up to the plate to make these changes to create the America that our forefathers dreamed of. "Om-baba" -- talk about hopeful! Meanwhile, back in the real world, Pres. Obama seems to be carrying on as you'd expect any well-connected, know-it-all, Ivy Keynesian to behave. Here's how financial blogger Doug Henwood -- a lefty who favors nationalizing banks, so don't look at me that way -- evaluates Obama's performance: So far, the Obama administration’s notion of change, when it comes to this bailout, is to replace the Goldman Sachs alum at the top of the Tarp apparatus with a Merrill Lynch alum. Wow, that’s change we can all believe in, eh? Henwood is always worth a read, I find. While I can't get on board with the solutions he favors, his criticisms and observations often strike me as smart and informed. What does Obama represent to some people? Best, Michael UPDATE: A good passage from anti-globalist lefty Naomi Klein: Wall Street funded Obama’s campaign. They funded his Inauguration. They paid huge speaking and consulting fees to some of his closest advisers. What I am calling corruption is better understood as “crony capitalism.†It’s the systematic trading of favors between corporate and political elites to secure wealth and power. And the truth is, most of the time the trading of favors doesn’t even need to be explicit. It’s more that this corporate-political nexus creates an impenetrable culture in Washington, so the hedge-fund managers and bank CEOs are the ones who are in the ears of the Washington policy makers — they are their constituency, their community, the ones saying whether or not a given policy will work. And, of course, the problem is that the voices of regular people are left out.... posted by Michael at April 29, 2009 | perma-link | (32) comments





Sunday, April 26, 2009


Visual Arts Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Best to think of Picasso as a comic artist? * Tweets and Status Updates become works of visual art. * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote an intro to David Milne, a lyrical, quirky and underknown Canadian painter. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 26, 2009 | perma-link | (0)
Vote for the Prince
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Prince of Wales: A beneficial or a malign influence on architecture? Go here and vote. I think he's been a wonderful force myself. It's been 25 years since he made his crack about how a certain modernist proposal for London struck him as resembling "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend," and he's done a good and persistent job of keeping up the pressure ever since. I also liked "A Vision of Britain," his book in praise of traditional architecture, very much. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 26, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, April 21, 2009


Yet More on Art, Porn, Erotica, etc
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I left a comment responding to Peter L. Winkler and Shouting Thomas a few postings ago that I was half-pleased with, so I've dolled it up a bit and am promoting it to its own posting here. Ah, the power of the blog-owner ... The general theme of the discussion was "Will porn ever be accepted as art?" Peter thinks that porn is too function-oriented a thing ever to be considered art. Shouting Thomas volunteered some observations and questions about sex's role not just in art but in reproduction. Peter L.W. -- People don't go to action movies who aren't in the mood for excitement. They don't eat a steak if they aren't in the mood for meat. They don't go to Lincoln Center if they aren't in the mood for a "culture-with-a-capital-C" experience. Wanting a culture/media/whatever artifact that'll suit and/or enhance your mood seems ... I dunno, sensible, likely, unremarkable, and commonplace. So what's different about wanting a culture experience that'll enhance and/or suit a nice erotic buzz? More generally, I think that part of what's happening these days where culture goes is that a certain kind of familiar expectation is being upended. It used to be that we reached out towards the arts, and that we assumed that this was normal and good. The arts were central and eternal; we individuals were transient moths circling the everlasting flame. These days, it's more about using the arts to suit ourselves. Don't listen to what you should listen to: instead, why not create a playlist or Bookmarks collection that suits you? The person and his/her preferences and whims are becoming central, while the art-things are starting to seem come-and-go. BTW, I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that it seems to be happening. If we are indeed entering a universe that's far more "suit yourself" than the old media universe was, that helps explain why porn is becoming more accepted: It's primary among the arts-that-get-used. And if we're comfy with the idea that the arts should suit us and our moods, then many objections to thinking of porn as just another artform dissolve. Incidentally, I'm a little puzzled by people who consider porn and erotica to be nothing but masturbation aids. Does no one else enjoy leafing thru erotic/sexy images, vids, and stories 1) out of curiosity, 2) just for the pleasant dreamy high of it? ST -- I'm all for connecting the arts to the basic urges, and I certainly think that if/when we don't the arts quickly become irrelevant. But this is a cultureblog, not a reproductionblog. Culture after all isn't about bare survival; it's largely a matter of taking basic needs and urges and whipping up artifacts and experiences based on them that have beyond-functional aspects and qualities. Hunger and nutrition, for instance: We could probably survive on dogfood and mulch. But we'd have no "cuisine." Hearing and sound: we could just listen to nature and grunt, but we'd... posted by Michael at April 21, 2009 | perma-link | (58) comments





Monday, April 20, 2009


Prewar Shanghai Architecture
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I've never been to Shanghai and I can't get there. Neither can you. I'm thinking of the Shanghai that ended with the Japanese occupations of 1937 (the Chinese city) and 1941 (the International Settlement and the French Concession). It was a heady mix of transplanted Europe and America plus native China, legal and illegal commerce, an island of modernism in a traditionalist sea. Having spent the better part of year in Asia -- here, actually -- I've seen my share of ox carts, rice paddies, thatch-roofed villages and old, gaudily-painted temples. That Asia is fast-disappearing: except for the temples, perhaps. So do see it if it interests you and you haven't yet done so. Moreover, I'm not strongly interested in seeing the new Asia either. Okay, if someone dropped a seriously cheap tour in my lap, I'd consider going. It's not high on my travel priorities, that's all. But the Shanghai of 1925-35, that would be different. I'm not obsessed with it -- just curious enough to read about it once every few years and wish I had a time machine available so that I might drop by for a few days now and then. A few years ago I read a history of Shanghai for the period 1842-1949 (the year it fell to the Communists) by Stella Dong. An entertaining book, though some Amazon commenters thought it too breezy and sensationalized. My reservation was that Dong (who grew up here in Seattle) relied exclusively on sources available in English. (I lied, actually -- one source is in French, but you get the idea.) A day or two ago I stumbled across a book titled Shanghai Style by Lynn Pan, a Shanghai native who has spent considerable time in Europe and other parts of Asia. Its subtitle is "Art and Design Between the Wars," specifically, 1920-39. Thus far I've looked at the illustrations and read the chapter on architecture and interior decoration. Other chapters deal with painting, books and magazines, comics and cartoons, and advertising. Her thesis is that Shanghai was unique in having a large number of non-colonialist foreigners mixed with a local population largely comprised of immigrants from elsewhere in China who, by that condition, tended to be more receptive to foreign and Modernist ways than most other Chinese. I had fun looking at Shanghai versions of the kinds of European and American cultural artifacts covered in the chapters noted above. Architecture was a bit different because the architects who designed most of the large commercial buildings were European. Chinese architects trained in Europe and in American universities such as Dear Old Penn were also active. Below are examples of Shanghai architecture of that era. And remember that in those days high-rise building were fairly rare outside the United States. Gallery This is The Bund, the commercial heart of Shanghai along the Whangpu River as seen in 1935 or 1936. Most of it was part of the eight-by-two mile International Settlement, though... posted by Donald at April 20, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, April 10, 2009


Little Architecture History Lessons
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm often dismayed by the lack of familiarity many educated Americans have with their country's architectural history. Because they're familiar with the two Franks -- Gehry and Lloyd Wright -- they think that they've got it covered. Hey, America: Architecture-and-urbanism is as big, wild, and wonderful a field as American music. It's seething with geniuses and talents, as well as fab, sexy, and instructive stories about money, ego, and power. Go for it. Side benefit: Once you get the hang of the basics, what we architecture-and-urbanism buffs like to call "the built environment" becomes comprehensible and eloquent. Why, the entire world is an art exhibit! Paul Goldberger writes an excellent introduction to the Chicago Beaux Arts (think Paris-style) titan Daniel Burnham, who gave us New York's iconic Flatiron Building as well as Washington D.C.'s glorious Union Station. Here's a posting from me about Addison Mizner, a larger-than-life fantasist / designer / entrepreneur who popularized the Mediterranean Revival, one of America's most lasting and crowd-pleasing styles. Best, Michael UPDATE: So how is the recession affecting America's love affair with the exurbs? Interesting Fact for the Day: "While an average of 19 new malls per year were built in the United States during the 1990s, not a single new mall has been built in the last two years."... posted by Michael at April 10, 2009 | perma-link | (9) comments





Wednesday, April 8, 2009


Architecture Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * John Massengale gives a mixed review to the Yankees' new stadium. A video tour can be watched here. * Steve Sailer is sensibly funny and disparaging about an expensive new L.A. high school. Many commenters make witty jokes too. The good show left me wondering about something I've wondered about before: Given how much mockery of conventional politics the web has set loose, why aren't we seeing more populist mockery of bad, pretentious architecture? My sad hunch: Most Americans barely register their physical surroundings, at least once outside their own homes. * MBlowhard Rewind: I mused about the roles of utility and evolution in the development of the arts. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 8, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments





Monday, April 6, 2009


Otis Shepard, Who Didn't Gum Things Up
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- When I was in high school and college I'd sometimes go to the Seattle Public Library and thumb through copies of the Art Directors Club Annuals from the 1930s, a truly interesting era for illustration and graphic design. Most of the artists and layout designers were classically trained (at least compared to today's standards) and trying to cope with pressures such as the effect of the Great Depression on advertising, the advent of Modernism in painting and graphic design, as well as the usual work atmosphere of their trade. I remain fond of what they accomplished and find the award-winning material in the 1930s annuals generally more satisfying than most of today's print advertising winners in current annuals. One artist whose work I enjoyed was Otis Shepard (1893 or 94 - 1969). Shepard is best known for his posters for Wrigley's chewing gum; he served as a Wrigley art director and artist 1932-1963. Other than the information above, I could find little about him on the Internet aside from here. Apparently Shepard was from California and it isn't clear whether he was able to work from there or spent time at Wrigley's Chicago headquarters. Below are examples of Shepard's work. Gallery These are examples of billboards and other poster work for Wrigley chewing gum. The Wrigley family owned Santa Catalina Island (off the California coast south of Los Angeles), so Shepard got to do some promotion work for it when not doing chewing gum advertising. Oh, and the Wrigleys also owned the Chicago Cubs baseball team, so Shepard produced work for it as well, including this program cover and some other items shown on the link above. Shepard had a nice, clean style of airbrushing as well as a good feeling for simple, poster-style design. It's happy, not dark or edgy, and I think that's a nice thing. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 6, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, March 27, 2009


Art Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Was the high art of the 1960s the beginning of the end of all good things cultural? * Charles Moore has some funny jokes and smart ideas about how modernism has reduced itself to absurdity. * Jeff Weiner reviews Andrew Wyeth's nudes. * Yahmdallah passes along a funny poem/cartoon that sums up a lot in very few words. * The English painter David Hockney has decided that the computer is now up to the demands of serious drawing and painting. Here's some of the work that he has produced with Photoshop recently. * New York Artist Jorge Colombo has been making images on his iPhone. To my eyes, they almost look like little Hockneys. * Here's an interesting get-to-know-you video about the painter Thornton Willis. I'm curious to hear what watching it makes the realism-vs-abstraction crowd think. * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote an introduction to the supertalented American painter John La Farge (1835-1910). In his own time, La Farge was huge. These days he has almost been forgotten. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 27, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, March 26, 2009


Automobile Art by Reuters
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Foreign-made cars began to appear on my radar during the early 1950s -- the odd MG TC here and Jaguar XK-120 there. Along with Volkswagens. By the time I was in high school, VWs were no longer startling sights on Seattle streets and there was a dealership not very far from home. I used to be a big-time automobile brochure gatherer and still have in my possession lots of sales lit from that era. Sadly, I can't seem to find my VW brochures with those really nice illustrations by Berndt Reuters (1901-1958). Those illustrations were nice artistically though they distorted reality a little (for more on this, see my post here). And for more on Reuters, look here. This page has a link called "gallery" that sends you to a lot of Reuters' car advertisement illustrations for non-VW brands such as Opel. Reuters seems to have used watercolor and airbrush. His work reminds me of that by master poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein, who I wrote about here. Here are examples of Reuters' work. Gallery Above are VW illustrations of the sort I remember. During World War 2 Reuters was doing work for car companies, but the subject matter was a little different. Below are some inter-war illustrations for publication covers. Finally, one more Volkswagen brochure spread. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 26, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, March 25, 2009


Bill Kauffman on Arts Subsidies
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Radical reactionary Bill Kauffman is against governmental arts subsidies -- for the good of the arts. I'm with him on that. Look at it this way: If you support the NEA, don't you need to convince us that American culture has been better since the NEA began than it was in the pre-NEA era? In other words, don't you need to argue that the NEA has actually accomplished something worthwhile? Quick reminder: Without any help from the NEA, the U.S. somehow came up with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Julia Morgan, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, James Thurber, Dashiell Hammett, Mad magazine, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Howard Hawks, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Teagarden, John Philip Sousa, Chuck Berry, Bugs Bunny, Ma Rainey, Stephen Foster, Jackie Wilson, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Cass Gilbert, Bessie Smith, Ruth Draper, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Thanks to the NEA's efforts, we can brag of ... Any takers? Start reading our week-long interview with Bill Kauffman here and here. Bill and some fellow class-act cranks (Caleb Stegall, Russell Arben Fox, others) are now blogging here. Bonus links: Bill Kauffman writes a beautiful short appreciation of the eco-anarchist, novelist, essayist, and legend Edward Abbey. I'm a huge Edward Abbey fan myself. Start with "Desert Solitaire." I enjoyed Stewart Lundy's musings about art, conservatism, and grace. Allan Carlson, one of Kauffman's conspirators at Front Porch Republic, has written a solid essay about Wilhelm Ropke, my favorite economist. Read it here. Back here I wrote about what a glorious mess American culture is. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 25, 2009 | perma-link | (66) comments





Monday, March 23, 2009


Alla Prima Alla Time
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I can't remember when I consecutively bought two books that were different aside from their title. Until now. They are: Both are of the ever-expanding torrent of how-to-paint books. The first is by Al Gury, chairman of the painting department of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It's fairly recent. He treats alla prima (the Italian term for producing a painting in one session) to mean wet-into-wet oil paintings that are completed in a very few sessions if one won't do. Included is an interesting list of color palettes assumed to have been used by a number of Masters over the years. Another feature I liked was the step-by-step demonstrations. Gury has a decent style (I pretty much ignore step-by-steps by artists whose work doesn't appeal to me) and his demonstrations are well illustrated. That is, there are enough stages shown that the reader has a pretty good idea of what was going on. Yes, there are videos available that show the entire painting process, but they can be pricey if the artist is well known. My verdict: worth the money if you buy it at the Amazon price. I would have grabbed the Schmid book a long time ago but, out of ignorance, thought it was out of print and that prices of used copies were high. Well, that's the impression Amazon's site gave me. It turns out that Schmid has been self-publishing his book for years and new copies are available via his web site and that of his publishing company. I bought the paperback version for around $50. Schmid says that he almost always produces a painting in one session, but his book has next to nothing in the way of step-by-step demonstrations; almost all the illustrations are of completed works. On the other hand, there is a lot of text that gives the reader a pretty good idea how Schmid approached painting a dozen or so years ago when he wrote the book. This means that his book is more useful to jouneyman artists -- those with some experience -- than the usual how-to fare. What makes the book useful to the likes of me is that Schmid (in my opinion) is a top-notch painter and I like what he produces. Any information from a painter I respect I consider highly useful. As an aside, in many places he mentions the names of John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn and Joaquin Sorolla as well as some of the Masters. Those make for a good crowd of heroes or models; I like where Schmid is coming from. Apparently he has a new book on landscape painting in the works. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 23, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Sunday, March 22, 2009


Cherie, Nude
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- She's no Carla Bruni, god knows, but when she was 22 Tony Blair's wife Cherie posed nude for the painter Euan Uglow. (Friedrich von Blowhard and I are both fans of Uglow's work, for what that's worth. See some of his paintings here.) The Independent talks to some other Brits who have posed in the buff for painters and photographers. Bonus link: Do men and women take different photographs? My own small observation is that women are far, far more likely than men are to take photos of themselves. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 22, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, March 16, 2009


Pulp: Original and Recycled
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The 1920s and, especially, the 30s were the heyday of pulp magazines, the term "pulp" referring to the rough, cheap grade of paper they were printed on. Michael is the lit major of the Blowhards crew, and I'll defer to him regarding the written content of the pulps. Instead, I'll deal with their cover art which has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years. My personal experience with pulps was nil, other than seeing them on news stands when I was a kid in the late 1940s. By the time I was old enough to get away with buying my own magazines (other than comic books) and bringing them into the home of my (probably) watchful parents, pulps were well on the way out. My favorite genre at the time was science-fiction, and sci-fi magazines by then (early-mid 1950s) had mostly graduated from pulp to digest format. The thing to remember about pulps is that they were cheap. The pulp paper was cheap. The writers weren't paid well compared to fees for contributors to "slick" magazines (so-called because they were printed on a better grade of slick-feeling paper) such as Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. Cover artists weren't paid very well either, though the covers were printed in color on semi-slick stock. Since almost everything about them was cheap, the pulps, like movies, did well providing inexpensive entertainment during the Depression years. They provided employment for several classes of illustrators: (1) those on the professional skids, (2) artists content to be full-time pulp artists, and (3) young artists needing both income and experience on their way up the ladder to glory in the slicks. Examples of the latter include Tom Lovell, Norman Saunders and Everett Raymond Kinstler -- the latter eventually becoming a well-known portrait artist. As far as I'm concerned, cover art for pulps was often pretty bad (though some better examples are shown below). In many cases, this was because the artist was a journeyman hack, incapable of doing top-notch work. Other artists did hack work because they were new at the game and using the experience to improve their skills, as I noted above. Perhaps the main reason why pulp cover art wasn't especially refined was because pulp editors and art directors (if there were any -- often the editor dealt with art as well as with words) didn't want refinement. What they wanted was eyeballs, and the way to attract the attention of people scanning magazine shelves of news stands was dramatic scenes and bright colors. As a matter of fact, cover artists were often ordered to include areas of bright red because it was thought to be a good attention-getter. Another important factor had to do with the low pay; artists couldn't afford to spend much time on refinement if they expected to make any kind of living painting pulp covers. That was then. Today in place of pulps we have paperback book covers and covers of... posted by Donald at March 16, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, March 13, 2009


Some Hyper-General Digressions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some recent discussions at this blog -- especially here and here -- have left me musing over some scattered and more-abstract-than-usual topics. No idea if the following reflections cohere into anything -- but why should they, eh? And maybe they'll prove useful to a few visitors, if only in a provoking-further-thought kind of way. At 2Blowhards we promote a lot of things. At the most specific level, we each have artists, entertainers, thinkers, and bloggers whose work we enjoy and want to call attention to. On a slightly more general level, we each have a bunch of gripes that we enjoy airing and points that we enjoy putting forward. Donald, for instance, would like to see the part of the world that appreciates visuals pay more respect to popular visual artists. Friedrich wonders why more isn't made of the political and economic matrices that art and culture arise from. My own preference is to peddle a Vedanta-ish "It's all culture, and tastes often change dramatically over time, so why get over-obsessed with judging and ranking? What's your personal reaction? What's your personal thought?" thing. But our overarching point here isn't to push any particular artist, thinker, topic, or point of view. It's to promote a better, richer, and more freewheeling cultural conversation than we're often offered by the usual institutions and outlets. Does the art (or book, or architecture, or music, or movie, or design ...) press overfocus on a handful of hot trends and chic names? Do the various art establishments deliver naive, fun-free, and narrow accounts of culture and art? We do our modest and amateur best to 1) point out how restricted the usual conversations are, and 2) offer examples of different, more spirited, and (we hope) more rewarding ways of talking about these things. I'm usually wary of speaking for my co-bloggers, but in this case I think it's safe: What we share here isn't a devotion to any particular artist, school, or point of view. It's to a conviction that the experience of art and culture is its own payoff. After all, if you don't find your life enriched by an engagement with the arts, why would you bother involving yourself at all? It isn't as though deepening your culture-knowledge, awakening your culture-responsiveness, or sharpening your culture-sensibilites is going to ensure you a secure retirement or win you more attractive lovers. In fact, for most people an involvement in the arts isn't going to deliver practical payoffs of any sort. What does "expertise in the arts" mean anyway? Can it be measured? How? If not, then what are we really talking about? Art isn't math, engineering, or science, after all. The changeable, vaporous stuff -- the cloud of tastes, quirks, preferences, and opinions that we all inhabit and that we bring to bear on all our culture-experiences -- is inescapable. The culture-adventure either enriches your life or it doesn't. (If it doesn't, that's cool, no harm done -- we'll... posted by Michael at March 13, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments




Slow Drying Acrylics: More Testing
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Recently I posted that to speed up my painting self-teaching progress, I was temporarily (probably) switching from water-soluble oils paints to a slow-drying line of acrylic paints from Golden. I posted the result of an early attempt. I'm still painting human faces ('cause it's pretty obvious when you get things wrong -- we know faces better than any other subject). And I'm reaching the point where I'll zoom back and include more of the body and perhaps add a little background. The acrylics have definitely improved productivity. I can complete a painting of a head in three days or so. But I'm encountering the acrylic color-shift problem. After couple of days of drying, the colors will have turned darker. This means one has to paint things a little lighter than what is desired and hope that the picture will darken just enough to yield the intended effect. Not good, which is why I'll probably return to oils after a while. I might add that I'm using regular acrylics along with the slower-drying variety. Sometimes this is when I already have a seldom-used color in a regular acrylic and wish to save money by not buying a slow-dry duplicate. Other times, I need to paint a small passage that I want to dry quickly, so using the fast-dry alternative is useful. Below are two more recent paintings. The surface is cheap, rather rough canvas board which isn't the best for portrait-type work. The photos are by my little digital camera using natural light. The results are not as good as the actual paintings. Colors are off, and the texture of the canvas board is more apparent than what one sees when viewing in person. At least they offer a rough idea as to how things are going. Both paintings used photo references, but are not slavish copies; I used photos mostly to get the facial lighting patterns and then altered the images as I saw fit. The top painting was done first. The subjects are actually the same actress and two photos were used. The reference photo for the lower picture was from a clothing catalog. I have quite a ways to go, but at least I'm cranking out stuff that's better than what I did when in art school those many years ago. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 13, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, March 11, 2009


About the Subject: Bouguereau vs. Currin
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Speakers and writers of English, unlike those of German, tend to opt for shorter, simpler words or labels. (I set aside academicians and bureaucrats. But then, I'm not sure what they write is really English anyway.) Consider that field of painting called "Abstract." Yes, it's often pinned down more tightly by the term "Abstract Expressionism" if the reference is to a school of painting centered in New York City 1945-1960 or thereabouts. As often happens, the labels that stick aren't always the best descriptions. The word "abstract" in one sense is a relative term, not an absolute. And it matters what is being "abstracted" and to what degree. A better term -- the one used by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s -- is Non-Objective Art. A long, not-in-keeping-with-English moniker, to be sure. What it translates to is "art with no object" or "art depicting nothing recognizable." All the rest of painting, therefore, depicts something that can be construed as one or more objects. These objects can be what exist or have existed in the world of experience, imaginary objects as in the case of some Surrealist painters or painters of Science-Fiction books covers, or objects from experience that have been distorted, but not unrecognizably so. And that's one of the things that can make an artist's fortune or get him in trouble with art critics or usually both, depending on the timing. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau for instance. There is little debate on whether or not he was an extraordinarily skilled painter: he was. Highly successful in his lifetime, his reputation suffered greatly after his death. In part this was due to the Modernist revolution sweeping all non-Modernist art under the critical rug. Otherwise, it was Bouguereau's subject-matter. Sentimental subjects or subjects treated in a sentimental fashion were popular in the late 1800s and are thought icky today by those who consider themselves artistically sophisticated. But that's what he mostly painted. Among the kinds of Bouguereau subjects were children. Most were girls and many were waifs. Below are a few examples. Bouguereau is the big favorite of the folks at the Art Renewal Center, and I wish them well in their effort to restore his reputation. The guy did an amazing job of painting human flesh. And the background work in some of his late painting has, in contrast, lots of visible brushwork. Alas, I must have spent too much of my life in the second half of the 20th century, so I don't care much for his subject-matter even though I greatly respect his talent. John Currin is a currently active artist who was trained in what I'll call a classical manner and who could paint serious subjects well if he so chose. Instead, perhaps in an effort to build a reputation and avoid the starving artist role, his subjects are outrageous. They run the gamut from the pornographic (if you're curious, go to Google, type in his name and then... posted by Donald at March 11, 2009 | perma-link | (21) comments





Sunday, March 8, 2009


Frank Frazetta, Colorist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The era of mass-circulation magazines filled with illustration art was essentially over by the late 1960s. These days at Barnes & Noble, I see books of compilations of current illustration that contain mostly cartoonish, odd, ironic Postmodern-style graphics bearing little relationship to the work of the giants of illustration active 1890-1960. But people are funny -- perverse, actually. There is still a sizable market for well-executed, (largely) naturalistic commercial illustration. That market is represented by, among others, book covers, comic books, graphic novels (long-format, single-story perfect-bound comic books) and computer games. And speaking of computers, much of this art is done using computerized tools rather than traditional media. Those traditional media ruled during the period from 1960-65 until around the end of the century. Perhaps the leading illustrator during this era was Frank Frazetta, who I mentioned in passing here. Biographical information on Frazetta can be found here and here. Frazetta had little formal art training. What he got was during his schoolboy years; everything else he picked up from mentors or on his own. The first part of his career was in the field of comics, both book and newspaper (for a number of years he ghosted Al Capp's popular Li'l Abner strip). Such work was in the form of inking over penciled drawings with (for Sunday papers and comic books) flat-color fill-ins. After a falling-out with Capp, Frazetta scrambled for a few years until he began to make a mark painting covers for fantasy, science-fiction and superhero paperback books, comic books and, later, movie posters. He quickly became successful to the point that he is revered by a large body of fans. I suspect that most of those fans and others viewing his work focus on Frazetta's subjects. These include monsters, muscle-bound heroes and villains, and barely-clothed babes with bodies that don't quit. Those babes, by the way, have pretty much the same kind of caricatured face -- extra-rounded forehead and tiny nose -- that seems (to me) to be based on Frazetta's wife. I consider this constricted depiction of females to be Frazetta's main failing; more variety would have been better. But the subject of this post is not so much the content of his paintings, but his painterly skill and use of color -- subtleties one wouldn't expect given Frazetta's lack of formal training and a presumed lack of sophistication of his audience of paperback book buyers. I think that a good deal of Frazetta's appeal is subliminal. Yes, people probably mostly focus on the subjects and how they are drawn. But I contend that it's the color and brushwork embodied in the finished product that makes the fantastic subjects seem unexpectedly real -- even though it probably isn't noticed by most viewers. Let's take a look at some of Frazetta's art that I grabbed off the web. Gallery This violent character is typical Frazetta. But don't focus on the helmet, ax and so forth. Instead, look at the rocks... posted by Donald at March 8, 2009 | perma-link | (16) comments





Friday, March 6, 2009


Donald's Fave Abstract Expressionist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Although I believe that Modernism in painting was an interesting experiment that has continued far longer than it should have and that the Abstract Expressionism school of 1945-1960 New York was an artistic dead end, I don't dislike it all. This might surprise some readers, given the usual content of my painting postings. My main objection to Modernism is the elitist tendency of many its supporters over the years to heap scorn on traditional painting. I, like the beloved Chairman Mao, believe in letting many flowers bloom, and I don't like being told (as I was when in college) that only Modernism counts. So just how much Modernist painting do I like? Not much of it, truth be told. Though I do have affection for the works of Franz Kline (1910-1962) who died at far too young an age (ten days short of his 52nd birthday). What do I like about Kline's paintings? Their boldness and strong composition; I'm not that much into subtlety. As with all artists, some works are better than others; below are some of the nicer Klines. Gallery Franz Kline New York, N.Y. - 1953 Orange Outline - 1955 Buttress - 1956 I might post on other Modernists from time to time. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 6, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Sunday, March 1, 2009


The Craft of Putz
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I wrote about an exhibit on the Munich Secession at Seattle's Frye Art Museum and followed up with a posting about the most famous secessionist, Franz von Stuck. The most impressive works at the exhibit, so far as I was concerned, were by a Tyrolian named Leo Putz (1869-1940). Biographical information on Putz can be found here. Many of Putz's most important works are in the Unterberger Collection (the Web site is in German), which is perhaps why he is not well known in America. Here are examples of Putz's paintings. Gallery Friedliche Tage (Calm Day) - 1902 This is one of the earliest of Putz's paintings that I could locate on the Web. Waldesruhe (Peaceful Woods or perhaps Tranquility in the Forest) - 1925 And this is the latest. What interest me are those he painted approximately 1904-14 -- some of which are shown below. Dame in Blau (Woman in Blue) - 1908 (Detail) This can serve as introduction to Putz's "classic" phase, wherein he made heavy use of flat, often square-tipped brushes yielding a faceted look to the resulting painting. Lisl Im Herbslichen Garten (In an Autumn Garden) - 1908 Am Ufer (On the Bank) - 1909 This was one of Putz's paintings on display in Seattle. It is large and impressive, appearing brighter and fresher than the reproduction suggests. It was a prize winner at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Sommerträume (Summer Dreams) - 1907 This was also on display in Seattle. Again, a large painting displaying much skill with the seldom-seen technique. Apologies for the small illustration (which doesn't do the original any justice), but it was the best I could locate. --> Looking at the images posted above, I feel frustration that they don't offer much of a clue as to how the paintings actually appear. For example, the final two exhibit a fascinating lesson in color selection and brushwork on the faces, especially. Putz's brushstrokes did not result in color patches akin to cutting and pasting bits of colored paper. The paint is applied thickly so that the marks of the bristles often show. Moreover, the brush pressure on the stokes is not always uniform; a stroke might start hard and thick while ending in a somewhat feathered manner. Nor are the strokes aligned the same way (as can be seen in some of Cézanne's work). Instead, their orientation varies in such a way that the solidity and form of the subject is mimicked. Finally, brushstrokes in other parts of the painting than the subject are applied more conventionally. Putz's style wasn't created in an artistic vacuum, of course; he latched onto existing concepts and executed them extremely well. I won't go into all the possible influences, only citing Wilhelm Trübner (1851-1917) as one. One way of considering the style is as follows: Portrait painters such as Carolus-Durand and his student Sargent strove to see the head of a subject as a structure to... posted by Donald at March 1, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments




Visits with the New Urbanism
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of calm and rewarding visits with recent New Urbanist projects: John Massengale strolls through Princeton's new Whitman College (designed by the brilliant Dmitri Porphyrios and funded by eBay's Meg Whitman); Laurence Aurbach takes a look at three award-winning European New-Urb neighborhoods. For contrast, take a look at Kevin Buchanan's roundup of Fort Worth's worst buildings. Those mostly-Modernist monstrosities are the kind of thing architects are all-too-prone to create. Fun to read James Kunstler slamming the SPLC's chic nightmare of a new headquarters too. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 1, 2009 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, February 26, 2009


Outline Style, 1890-1940
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Above is a detail from a Frank Brangwyn mural titled "Dancers" from around 1895. Brangwyn (1867-1956) was a prolific, largely self-taught artist whose popularity peaked in the early decades of the 20th century. Book on Frank Brangwyn that can be ordered via Amazon's United Kingdom site. Although he was productive in several media, Brangwyn is perhaps best remembered for his mural work, which was influential. One characteristic of his mural style was the use of outlines, a tactic to give the paintings more visual punch at the distances from which they were expected to be viewed. This is in contrast to traditional representational easel painting, where outlining is subdued if present or is absent altogether. Outlines were also evident in contemporaneous posters. On the wall facing my desk are two posters by Alphonse Mucha that I bought at the Mucha Museum in Prague a few years ago and had framed. In both cases Mucha relied on outlining as well as color and modeling for depicting his subjects. Below are more examples of outline style. Gallery By Dean Cornwell Cornwell (1892-1960) was one of the top illustrators in America during his career. He also painted a number of murals, including some in New York's Warwick hotel and the Los Angeles Public Library. (At the latter link, scroll down to find the Cornwell reference. Click on the thumbnails to see the full images. Note that the outlining is almost entirely in light-medium blue.) The illustration above is not from a mural, but shows the influence of Brangwyn, with whom Cornwell apprenticed and whose studio he rented while working on large murals. Illustrations by Dan Sayre Groesbeck Dan Sayre Groesbeck (1879-1950), another essentially self-taught artist, spent the first part of his career as a commercial artist and the last part providing film visualizations to Cecil B. DeMille. He also painted murals, in particular a set of murals for the ... Santa Barbara County Courthouse This section shows the building of the mission at Santa Barbara. River Bend No. 4 - 1938 Fall Landscape - 1923 The above paintings are by Iowa artist Melvin Cone (1891-1965) and typify a popular painting style of the 1920s and 30s, characterized by outlining and toned-down colors. I'm not sure who did this illustration. It looks like something Cornwell might have done, but the Properties info on the initial grab indicates Andrew Loomis (the treatment of the woman's face is suggestive of the latter). In any case, it's another instance of outlining (mostly in the foreground). Outlining interests me. Puzzles me, too. What puzzles me is the outline color selection logic used by artists practicing this style. It puzzles me because I can't quite come up with a consistent practice. At one extreme are the L.A. Public Library murals by Cornwell that featured blue outlines. Then there is the Brangwyn mural at the top of this posting, which is typical of what puzzles me. Starting at the top (I'm looking at a... posted by Donald at February 26, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments





Wednesday, February 25, 2009


More on Porn and Art
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I still have a bad cold, but I've now got a quarter of my brain back, and I've caught up with the comments on my "Is Porn the New Rock 'n' Roll?" posting. So I'm going to venture a few musings and responses ... Let's at least admit that the "porn and art" topic can kick off a lively discussion. The comparison of porn to drugs strikes me as a good one. On the other hand, it's not as though rock music hasn't had its drug side, in several senses. Clearly some people use rock as a drug, if only an anesthetic. Clearly a lot of people have used rock to enhance sex. Clearly rock can addle the brain. Clearly for many people rock is addictive ... But has any of that prevented the culture generally from deciding that rock is an art form? Which opens up a topic I'm surprised we haven't made more of, which is: Part of the "art" thing isn't so much what the artwork is per se, let alone what its intention is. Part of it is the use we make of it. If a guy jerks off to Nabokov's "Ada," then he has used "Ada" as pornography. If a woman loves shall we say soothing her loneliness by watching Kevin Costner movies, then she's using mainstream Hollywood movies as pornography. Though these two particular people may be nothing but outliers, how about this: What if the culture generally decides to take "Ada" as porn? (Some critics have in fact deemed it porn.) Then it's porn, right? On the other hand, as soon as someone starts to take stuff that's routinely categorized as porn and considers it from an aesthetic point of view, interesting non-porny things can start to arise from the experience. You might wind up with, say, Bettie Page. In other words, how an individual or a culture chooses to take a given work is a big factor in how that work is considered. Once upon a time no one took burlesque performances as art. Now some people do. The first time I went to a pro ballet performance, my first reaction was "Woohoo, it's porn for the high-class set!" Yet ballet is about as high-art as culture can be. And before you dismiss my reaction, let me cite the respected ex-ballerina and ballet writer Toni Bentley on my behalf. For her, ballet both is sex and is about sex. Balanchine was turning himself on. Audiences are getting high. The splayed thighs, the ecstatic expressions, and the hefty baskets are a big part of what that art form is selling. Hey, Toni Bentley has not only written beautifully about strippers, Balanchine, and ballet -- check out some of her freelance pieces here -- she's written a wonderful arty-porny memoir of erotic awakening. (Look closely and you'll see my real name mentioned in the Acknowledgments.) I'm being a little presumptuous, but I think it's fair to say that... posted by Michael at February 25, 2009 | perma-link | (45) comments





Monday, February 23, 2009


Donald's Art Bookmarks
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Michael is the ace linker in these here parts, but I won't let that stop me from tossing in a link-post now and then -- especially right now. The theme for this exercise is the bookmarks tab on my web browser. It's a pretty lean 'n' mean drop-menu because I hate computer clutter. So I have only a few art-related bookmarks at present, a few of them in the experimental stage. Given that there must be somewhere between a bazillion and a gazillion web sites devoted to visual arts, I make no claim that mine is definitive. Rather, they mostly relate to a couple of my interests -- illustration and traditional painting. I'm reluctant to have a lot of such sites bookmarked. I gave one reason above; another is that I spend more time on the computer than I really ought to, and need to restrain temptation. If you want to build or expand upon your own bookmark collection, try these and then take a look at what's on their blogrolls and then the blogrolls of sites mentioned, ad infinitum. Here goes: * Illustration Art is David Apatoff's fine blog on, well, illustration -- though he sometimes strays into other art-related topics. He doesn't post daily, so I check in once a week or so to see what's new. * 100 Years of Illustration by veteran illustrator Paul Giambarba gets additions every so often, so I drop by once every couple of weeks to see if he has posted anything. His older posts are well worth looking at if you haven't visited his site before. * Today's Inspiration, is by Leif Peng, an illustrator in the Hamilton, Ontario vicinity. As the title implies, Peng somehow manages to provide a torrent of posts about (mostly) classical illustration at the rate of four or five items per week. * Another prolific site is Gurney Journey by "Dinotopia" creator James Gurney. He covers a wider range of art-related subjects than illustration, providing a good deal of information I find useful. Gurney posts on an almost-daily basis. * Art and Influence is another useful web site by a practicing artist, this being Armand Cabrera. Cabrera has a good knowledge of art history, so if you like the artist profiles I post from time to time, you might well enjoy Cabrera's site. He also offers instructional tips and other grist for art amateurs. Posting is generally Monday-Friday, though he does take breaks from time to time. * Lines and Colors by Charley Parker ranks high on frequency and interest. As is the case with the sites already mentioned, one has the potential for sinking hour after hour into reading previous posts. Parker more than the others is hip to computer-based illustration, so I found his posts on that field instructive, naïf that I am. I also have bookmarked a few sites containing reproductions of paintings; I might cover those another time. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 23, 2009 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, February 21, 2009


Stuck on Evil
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- That "Stuck" in the title is actually pronounced something like "ztook" or "shtook" (these might work if you're an English speaker). It's the last name of noted Munich artist Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) who acquired the "von" in 1905. I recently posted about a Munich Secession show now playing in Seattle. Therein, I threatened to post articles about some of the artists whose paintings I viewed, and now I'm about to make good on it. As you can see, first up is Franz von Stuck, one of the key players in the Secession. Links with information about him are here and here. The Wikipedia link notes that Stuck, besides rattling Establishment cages, was a commercial artist, portrait painter and art teacher. Among those studying under him were better-known (than Stuck, these days) artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. The painting that launched Stuck into fame and a fairly good fortune in Munich was the painting shown below: Sin - 1893 It's murky looking (a trait of many Munich paintings of that day), though the temptress (Eve?) is easy to spot. You might have to pay a bit more attention to make out the serpent. Needless to say, in 1893 Catholic Munich, the painting caused a sensation. But not so much of a sensation that Stuck was sent packing; as I noted, it was a career-maker. It seems that he painted about a dozen versions of it over the years, or so says the exhibit catalog. One is in the Villa Stuck and another is in Seattle's Frye Art Museum collection, where it seems to be almost always on view. Gallery Franz Stuck and His Wife in His Studio - 1902 Guardian of Paradise - 1889 Lucifer - 1889-90 Pallas Athena - 1898 This was painted the same year as Gustav Klimt's painting of the same title. Tulla Durieux as Circe - c.1913 Along with Edgar Degas, Alphonse Mucha and some other painters of his era, Stuck made use of photography when painting. The painting of Duriex is a very close copy of a reference photo to be found on page 40 of the catalog for a 2006 exhibit in Trent, Italy. (Title: Franz von Stuck: Lucifero moderno; text entirely in Italian.) Spring Love - 1917 In the last decade of his career, Stuck was painting in a mural style -- outlines and flatter modeling. There are two example in the Frye that I'm aware of, and neither is mural size, however. Villa Stuck exterior Villa Stuck interior More images of Stuck's work can be found here. The Frye has several of his paintings, but I'm not sure if any other American museum has even that many. The best place for the "Stuck experience" is the Villa Stuck itself. I was there three years ago and found it worth the mile or so walk from the vicinity of Munich's subway system. I'm not sure that Stuck was a great painter; but I do... posted by Donald at February 21, 2009 | perma-link | (7) comments




Visual Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Flickr fanatic Jovike is one inspired, and unconventional, Flickr poster. Don't miss his collection of photographs of book jackets. * Scenes from the Morgue does a great job of sharing old movie ads and trash-culture trinkets. * Lava lamps for a new generation. * This isn't your wholesome neighborhood Soap Box Derby. * A history of the photobooth. (Link thanks to visitor Julie.) * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote an introduction to a Canadian artist whose work I love, David Milne. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 21, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, February 20, 2009


Is Porn the New Rock 'n' Roll?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Gallery owner, artist, activist, porn performer and porn producer Madison Young answers 20 questions. Reading the q&a with Madison reminded me of a notion that I've been playing with recently. It's this: Perhaps porn is the new rock 'n' roll. I have a cold today so I'm not going to try to build my usual devastatingly-convincing case. (Small joke.) Still, some comparisons are striking. If you object to my notion because you feel that porn by definition isn't an art form ... Well, it certainly took a while for rock to be recognized by mainstream society as one. Definitions sometimes change. If you cavil because you think porn is too base or animalistic ... Well, rock was experienced by mainstream society for quite a while as little but a shapeless eruption of primitive energy. Then our view of what art can offer changed. Here's my basic reasoning. Porn has been around forever. What has changed in fairly-recent years is that 1) it has become omnipresent, 2) younger generations take its easy availability for granted, 3) a not-insignificant number of artily-inclined and talented kids (Dave Naz, Natascha Merritt, Eon McKoi, Blaise Christie, Joanna Angel) have chosen to embrace porn as their favored form of self-expression, 4) digital technology has provided tools to make porn on your own terms, as well as a way to distribute your creations. In other words, perhaps the only reason that porn hasn't been acknowledged as a significant new art development is because we aren't yet in the habit of seeing it as such. Were there loads of people in 1954 who realized that rock was a big, culture-transforming deal? So, my hunch: Perhaps 50 years from now, people looking back on our time -- in the unlikely event that anyone should take a break from mobile Facebooking -- will decide that Madison Young, the folks behind IShotMyself and BeautifulAgony, and Peter Acworth (the entrepreneur and mind behind Kink.com) were the culture-shifting art stars of 2009. Unlikely, perhaps. But can you guarantee me that this won't happen? And a quick reminder: jazz wasn't initially seen as one of America's most glorious contributions to world culture. For decades movies were considered to be a low-rent novelty. Almost no one following movies in the '60s and '70s forsaw that the exploitation movies of the era would have the continuing influence and impact that they've proven to have. Given all this: Which of today's artists and performers would you deem likely to be remembered in 2059? A quick attempt to head off one potential dismissive response at the pass: I'm not venturing my "porn may be the rock 'n' roll of our era" notion because I like porn, or because I feel it's a good thing, or a bad thing, or because I have a political or cultural agenda. I'm not agitating on behalf of porn. My only purpose in this posting is to take note of a little of what surrounds us, culturally... posted by Michael at February 20, 2009 | perma-link | (89) comments





Monday, February 16, 2009


Is MAYA Extinct?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- No, no. That "MAYA" in the title doesn't refer to the former Indian empire in Mexico/Central America. It stands for the phrase "most advanced, yet acceptable" -- a credo of famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy. And it has almost everything to do with Modernism. The early growth of the industrial design profession in America coincided with (1) the Great Depression of the 1930s and (2) the triumph of Modernism with reference to this country's cultural elite. About 1930, new skyscraper designs were sloughing off Art Deco ornamental motifs. In fact, ornamentation of all sorts was rapidly being abandoned as the theories of European architect-intellectuals such as Corbusier entranced even the best of American architects. For example, Raymond Hood quickly moved from Radio City style to International Style for his McGraw-Hill Building. The construction industry was hit hard by the Depression. Ditto manufacturers. But changing the appearance of most products is less costly than erecting a skyscraper. So while architects suffered, the new, self-proclaimed breed of industrial designers did well during the 30s because manufacturers were desperate to increase the appeal of their product lines and would spend money to make, at the minimum, cosmetic changes if not complete redesigns. Consumer products in the late 1920s tended to be superficially ornamented, in many respects design holdovers from Victorian days. Industrial designers could easily strip off that ornament and, if things worked out well, re-engineer products for greater production efficiency. The stated goal was "functionality" in both engineering and appearance. With respect to appearance, the notion was advanced that there was some sort of Platonic Ideal form for each kind of product and that the industrial designer would strive to actualize it. This ideal form was, of course, Modernist; shapes were simple and ornament absent. Actually, a tiny bit of ornamentation might be permitted provided that it too was highly simplified and "in character" with the design as a whole -- hence fluting and speed stripes found in "streamlined" Thirties' industrially designed products. Bumps on this road to rational perfection were caused by customer resistance to Modernist designs. However, as best I can tell, such resistance wasn't strong, though it did vary by type of product. For example, many housewives preferred traditional shapes and decorative patterns for dining china to Modernist alternatives while thinking nothing of buying a streamlined-looking toaster. In some cases, Loewy had an ideal in mind but understood that potential customers (and perhaps his client) weren't ready to buy the ideal version. So he instead proposed designs that would take the product's appearance part of the way to the ideal and this would condition shoppers for further changes in the direction Loewy wanted to lead them. I recently posted about the evolution of automobile fender lines at General Motors during the late 30s and 1940s. This was what Loewy meant by MAYA evolution. But the MAYA concept began to lose relevance. That's because the "most advanced" part of the saying actually implied "most... posted by Donald at February 16, 2009 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, February 11, 2009


Test Drive: Slow-Drying Acrylics
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I whimpered and whined about my frustrations when trying to paint using acrylics here. My gripe was that acrylic paints dried too fast, at least for slow-working me. In Comments, co-blogger Friedrich von Blowhard mentioned (among other things): I've painted extensively with acrylics, far more than with oils. For me, they work best when you work very quickly, mostly achieving gradations by painting wet into wet or using drybrush effects. It's a good medium for sketching, particularly outdoors. Some practice will get you going in that direction. The problem with acrylics is mostly their lack of, for want of a better term, luminism. That is to say, to really see an finished acrylic painting it needs to be very well lit. In a dim room, acrylics lose all color intensity and can get quite murky. Oils seem to require much less intense illumination to give up their visual effects, especially bright color. More information can be found in this Wikipedia entry. Help might be on the way for frustrated painters such as me. The folks at Golden have introduced a line of slow-drying acrylic paints. They call the line "Open" (heaven knows why), and information on it can be found here. I presently paint using water-soluble oils. That's because I don't have to deal with messy, smelly solvents. The main disadvantage of this type of oil paint is that drying is slow, sometimes on the order of weeks. The result is that I sometimes have to set a painting aside before, say, doing details; I'm afraid I'll smear the existing paint. The slow-drying feature is also a disadvantage when traveling. Again, there is a risk of smearing. Slow-drying acrylics might be useful in circumstances where I'd like the painting to dry overnight yet still be able to "work" it for more than the 20 or so minutes conventional acrylics allow. Golden claims that their Open line allows working for a couple of hours or even more, which seems like a reasonable time. So I took a gamble and bought nine tubes of the stuff -- a palette range sufficient for experimentation. I should mention that I took up painting because I wondered how good at it I might become if I worked at the craft. Long-time readers might recall that I've been complaining about my poor college art training as far back as my guest blogging days. Most artists and art teachers insist that the only way to reach one's potential is to paint, paint and paint some more. Alas, I haven't done well by that criterion. Over the last four years I've attempted perhaps two dozen paintings. That's because (1) I have a life to lead, (2) much of my creative time is spent blogging, and (3) oil paint dries too slowly for a project to hold focus. (Yes, I could paint alla prima in oils, but I'm not that good yet; maybe later.) For what it's worth, below is a painting I... posted by Donald at February 11, 2009 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, February 9, 2009


Secession in Seattle
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- One war the French won had to do with art history. French Impressionism triumphed and most contemporary European art fell into relative obscurity, an injustice Your Faithful Blogger has been attempting to rectify for nearly four years. One of the casualties of the French Kulturschlacht was the reputation of Munich as a leading center of art and art training. These days only cognoscenti seem to be aware that, in the mid-to-late 1800s, young artists flocked there almost as readily as they did to Paris. Perhaps the best known American painter who trained in Munich was William Merritt Chase. Near the end of the 19th century Germanic art centers became secession-happy. Probably the best-known is the Vienna Secession, this due in part to the latter day fame of one of its instigators, Gustav Klimt. There also was a Berlin Secession. But the original secession occurred in Munich more than five years before Vienna and Berlin officially got into the act. (Yes, there were a number of artistic rebellions in the 19th century. But use of the term "secession" seems to be largely a Germanic phenomenon.) Exhibits of Munich art from the secession era are rare. However, one was held last fall at Munich's Villa Stuck -- an appropriate setting because a major secession sparkplug was Franz von Stuck himself. I have visited the Villa Stuck and recommend it to any art fan visiting the city. A modified version of that exhibit is showing in the United States until 12 April, 2009. Also appropriately, it is housed in Seattle's Frye Art Museum whose "founding collection" is largely comprised of Munich-originated paintings from around the turn of the 20th century (along with a couple of Bouguereaus and other art of the period). Below is an example from the Frye. "Head of a Woman" - Hugo, Freiherr von Habermann (1849-1929) The Seattle version lacks some of the paintings in the Villa Stuck show, but includes items from the Frye collection. Here, the exhibit is titled "The Munich Secession and America". I enjoyed the exhibit greatly and learned about some interesting painters I had been ignorant of; I'll write about some of them in the coming weeks. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 9, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments




Molly C.
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Artist and performer Molly Crabapple is looking a little like Natalie Portman (only stacked) on the cover of Constellation magazine. I'm proud to say that Molly got her start as a writer here at 2Blowhards. Check out her Confessions of a Naked Model: here, here, here, here. Here's Molly's website. Check out Molly's baby, the burlesque-inspired downtown phenomenon called Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 9, 2009 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, February 6, 2009


Art of the Pickup
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Given that I'm about the last blogger in the world to notice a trend, with hesitation I present the following: "Realist" painting, as practiced a century and longer ago, was a genre featuring what was contemporary. No Greek gods, historical scenes, allegories or paintings with religious subject matter. Okay were scenes of washerwomen or peasants returning from a hard day in the fields. That was then. What might a Realist depict nowadays? Why not pickup trucks. At any rate, that's what I've been noticing lately in strolls through galleries in the Santa Barbara area. Examples are below.. By Davis Jensen This is far from Jensen's most impressive work: I can't find it on the Web. Even his website doesn't show his best stuff: lush California farm landscapes with an incidental truck here or there. "Goin' to Town" - Jon Francis Francis is another artist who likes putting a pickup truck into a scene. His Web page is here. Again, most of what I consider his best paintings featuring trucks are not on the Internet. For what it's worth, here are two more. "Red Truck" - Jon Francis "Autumn Truck" - Jon Francis What follows is not a pickup. But I liked seeing it in the gallery nevertheless: "1940 Fun" - Jon Francis This isn't the "Cisco Kid California" of the 1800s, but the California I might have experienced as a boy had I been born there (as Francis was: he's a near-contemporary). You might have noticed that none of the trucks shown is new. They're from the 1950s or before, though all seem to be depicted as they might be seen today (the red truck excepted, perhaps). Must be that brand new trucks lack character. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 6, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, February 5, 2009


A Potential Defect of Abstract Painting
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not long ago I wrote about painter David Leffel and a book compiled from notes taken from his classes. When I was in Santa Monica last week I dropped by the Hennessey & Ingalls book store, a source of great temptation. One of the temptations I succumbed to was this book by him. As with the first one, a Zen-like overtone intrudes, though thus far I'm finding it worth the $85 it cost. One of Leffel's remarks struck me because of its obviousness and the fact that its point had never occurred to me. In reference to an artist evolving over his career, he said (page 130): How do abstract painters know when they are getting better ??? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 5, 2009 | perma-link | (28) comments





Saturday, January 17, 2009


Evo Bio Books
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A quick posting to let visitors know about two terrific new evo-bio books. In "The Art Instinct," philosopher Denis Dutton (of Arts & Letters Daily fame) tries to bridge the gap between biology and aesthetics. As a comprehensive evo-bio account of the arts, it's a heroic and (I hope) conversation-shifting work. Since it's also a book that nails many of the basics down in a way that the culture-world has been in bad need of for several decades now, I'm pleased to see that "The Art Instinct" is selling well and receiving numerous respectful reviews. Hey, the time may finally be right -- finally! -- for a sensibly down-to-earth yet sophisticated discussion of the nature of the arts. My favorite reviews of the book so far have been by John Derbyshire and Jonah Lehrer. The book's website is here. In "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution," Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending cheerily take on one of the most potentially explosive of all evo-bio topics: the fact of recent human evolution. So ... What if human evolution didn't stop 40,000 years ago? What if our social forms have placed evolutionarily significant pressures on us? What if the differences between population groups run far deeper than mere skin color? And what on earth might have been the cause of the cultural explosion that resulted in cave paintings and elaborate ritual burials? It's a mischievous, daring, and informative book that makes canny use of history, biology, and anthropology, and that teaches a lot about the way genes and alleles go about their business. It's also an exciting reading experience. Following the authors' minds as they reason their way (using vervey English and vivid imagery) through what's known now to explore possibilities and implications delivers a real buzz. I had many moments when I found myself thinking, "So maybe this is what being supersmart is like!" Fun. The book hasn't yet been released, but you can place a pre-order here. The book's very generous website is here. By the way: I notice that Cochran and Harpending created their book's website on the Squarespace platform. I'm a huge fan of Squarespace myself, and recommend it enthusiastically. If you want to build a website but would prefer not to devote your life to HTML, CSS, and/or Dreamweaver, Squarespace may be just what you're looking for. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 17, 2009 | perma-link | (8) comments





Saturday, January 10, 2009


Exploring Modernism: The Tribune Tower Contest
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It can be interesting to look at examples of technology or aesthetics during the early stages of change. Lots of ideas are explored. Alternative configurations are tried out. Eventually the most appropriate solutions appear, the result being minor variations around that ideal until a large shift (especially in technology) occurs. I discussed the evolution of airliner design in this context here. In architecture, the emergence of Modernist design crossed paths with the American invention, the skyscraper. A fascinating example is the 1922 design competition for the Chicago Tribune (newspaper) tower. The Wikipedia entry for the building is here and a book about the competition (which I have not examined) is here. Many entries were simply odd, including one having the building shaped like a statue of an Indian (sorry, I can't locate a photo, though surely a copy is on the Web somewhere). Others were attempts to apply historical architectural styles to the structure. A few instances made use of Modernist concepts such as emphasis on structure and elimination of ornament. Below are some of the entries. Gallery Jens Fredrick Larson Here the architect grafts a design from a non-so-tall historical structural style onto a skyscraper format. The sensible base-column-capital formula is used, but I don't think it works here. Adolf Loos Modernist Loos submitted a literal takeoff on the columnar form. Given the amount of effort submission designs required for this competition, I have to assume that he was serious -- though the result certainly makes one wonder. Bernard Bijvoet and Johannes Duiker This is one of the few purely Modernist entries. The drawing shows an interesting juxtaposition of the vertical (the solid corner elements) and the more typical (of the time) Modernist horizontal motif emphasizing floors. The intended structure might be reinforced concrete. If so, the resulting building probably would not have aged gracefully had it been built. Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer Gropius was head of the famed Bauhaus School at the time of the competition, so it is little wonder that his version also is Modernist. The vertical-horizontal business is less contrasted than in the Bijvoet-Duiker design. The dominant pattern is individual office windows; a few horizontal extrusions are added apparently to provide some visual interest. It strikes me a a loft building writ large. Eliel Saarinen Saarinen (the Finnish architect and father of the better-known Eero Saarinen) submitted a design that many observers at the time believed should have been the winner; pictures of renderings of this unbuilt structure can be found in many books about the history of architecture. Gothic motifs were used to produce a handsome design that served as inspiration for a number of 1920s skyscrapers that were actually built. For that reason, it seems a bit bland or ordinary in retrospect. I do like it, as I do most other designs by Saarinen (Eliel) who I consider a better designer than Saarinen (Eero). John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood This was the winning design. It's... posted by Donald at January 10, 2009 | perma-link | (6) comments





Monday, January 5, 2009


George Lambert: Anglo-Australian Painter
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- If possible, I write about artists whose work I've seen in person rather than in reproduction. That doesn't apply for George Washington Thomas Lambert (1873-1930), born in St. Petersburg of an American father and English mother, raised in Australia, studied art in Paris, spent much of his career (1902-21) in London and finally returned to Australia. One reason why I haven't knowingly seen his paintings is because much of his work is in Australia. I fact, I'd never heard of him until I bought this book, the catalog for a show at the National Gallery of Australia. Wikipedia, a source I usually use to link for biographical information is sketchy on Lambert, as you can see here. There is a book about him and his son and grandson who attained notoriety in other fields (see links towards the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for more information about them). For now, this link will have to do. Here are examples of his work. Gallery Self-Portrait - 1907 The Red Shawl (Olave Cunningham Graham) - 1913 The White Glove - 1921 Helen de Vere Beauclerk King Edward VII - 1910 Newcastle Sybil Walker in a Red and Gold Dress - 1905 Important People - 1914 Miss Alison Preston and John Parker on Mearbeck Moor - 1909 The Sonnet - c.1907 A few thoughts, keeping in mind that this is based on seeing reproductions and not originals. Given that most of the paintings shown above were done around a century ago, I find it interesting that they tend to be quirky from a psychological standpoint. They are almost the respectful society portraits and allegorical scenes one would expect of Edwardian era -- but not quite. Nor are they "edgy" in the 21st century postmodern sense -- yet there's a hint of it in some of the poses and settings. Lambert's style is crisp, but not fussy. For what it's worth, I'm not normally much fond of "hard edge" realism. But his work doesn't fall into that category; rather, it's "painterly" -- one can see the brush strokes, particularly in the backgrounds. A rule of thumb many painters follow is to slightly blur and strip details from most of a painting's surface, leaving sharper edges and details for a focus point. This is similar to how we see things; a small area is in sharp focus and the rest isn't quite. But note that Lambert reverses this formula in a couple of the works displayed here. Sybil Walker's face and the face of the woman to the right in The Sonnet (probably Australian painter Thea Proctor) seem smoother and perhaps a little more blurred than the rest of the surface. This contrast of sorts would be a reverse-means of focusing attention. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 5, 2009 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, December 31, 2008


Architecture, Insane and Sane
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The New Statesman publishes a ringing and defiant defence of Le Corbusier, in my book one of the most destructive and pernicious artists of all time. The writer, Jonathan Meades, can't resist accusing those who dislike Le Corbusier of being "tectonically blind anti-modernists"; "one wonders whether they had eyes to put out in the first place." Note the usual modernist strategy at play here: If you dislike what I like, it can only because you don't get it -- because, in other words, you're an idiot. The possibility that a person may "get it" yet dislike it anyway can never entertained; it's a simple item of modernist faith that "getting it" must equal "loving it." And does anyone have any idea what the hell Meades could mean by "tectonically blind"? An antidote to the madness is this terrific, if too short, P2P interview with architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros about "peer-to-peer urbanism." For a comprehensive interview with Nikos, scroll to the top of this blog's page, click on "Interviews," and help yourself to a mind-blowing five-parter. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 31, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments





Sunday, December 28, 2008


Insider Paintball: Anders Zorn's Palette
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This post is intended for practicing or wannabe painters who are at the point where they're thinking deeply about color usage. Other readers are always welcome, of course. Often mentioned in the same breath with John Singer Sargent are the Spaniard Joaquin Sorolla, who I wrote about here and the Swede Anders Zorn (1860-1920), who I dealt with briefly here. A 12-part Web-based biography of Zorn can be found here. In brief, Zorn was a highly regarded portrait artist, one of his subjects being President Grover Cleveland. Besides portraits, he painted country scenes and an extensive series of nude Swedish girls who would be far too buxom to land fashion model jobs were they alive today. Zorn etched and sculpted, but is best known as a painter. He began in watercolors (usually painting opaquely) and later switched to oils. Self-portrait - 1896 Note the palette Zorn is holding in this self-portrait. It seems to have only four colors, whereas most artists' palettes have a dozen or more placed around the edges. As best I can tell, those colors are white, yellow ochre, cadmium red light and black. Four colors: that's all -- and this set is often referred to as the Zorn Palette. According to one source (which, to my shame, I lost because I failed to write it down before I decided to write a post on this subject), Zorn would use other reds and yellows if he wanted to change the tone or mood of a painting from what yellow ochre and cadmium red light offer. Such an alternative might be alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow light. I haven't yet experimented with a Zorn Palette, but this painter did, and had difficulty. Even though Zorn himself showed four colors in his self-portrait, he probably used more when the occasion demanded. For example, this article states that a person associated with a Swedish museum devoted to Zorn asserted that Zorn also used cobalt blue because more than 30 tubes of it were found among his possessions after he died. The source further stated that Zorn often painted water, which is difficult to do without blue -- one of the three primary pigment colors along with red and yellow. (Green, normally a mixture of yellow and blue could be obtained from the Zorn Palette by mixing yellow with black. A blue could be obtained by mixing black with white, though some blacks are probably more suitable for this than others.) There is no consensus in how-to books for painting regarding palettes. At least one I have favors having black, white and a warm and cool version of each of the three primaries. Other books acknowledge that, in theory, all colors can be mixed from the primaries (plus white and black to lighten or darken) -- but the chemistry of paint ingredients makes this impossible in practice. Therefore, one should use a variety of colors because this can get you closer to the colors you... posted by Donald at December 28, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, December 17, 2008


Choosing a How-To-Paint Book -- 2
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As long-time readers might recall, I majored in Commercial Art in college. Required courses included drawing, oil painting and watercolor -- the same ones regular art majors had to take. Actual instruction was almost non-existent, the students simply dabbed away and occasionally the instructor would offer a criticism. I never did practice art professionally, so when I retired I thought it might be interesting to take up oil painting just to get some idea as to how good I might have become if I had had better guidance. My schedule is too erratic and my income too reduced to sign up for studio classes at local schools that offer traditional training. I simply buy how-to books from time to time and do some dabbing when I find the time and inclination. In this post I mentioned that I prefer to buy how-to's by artists whose styles I like. My example was David Curtis who lives in England. Another artist with books and a nice (from my perspective) style is David A. Leffel. Internet-based biographical information is pretty thin. Some sources have him born in 1931, others say 1934; from circumstantial evidence, I'm inclined to accept the latter. He's from New York City, taught at the Art Students League, worked as a painter in the city for many years and now lives just outside Taos, New Mexico. This is the book I have. It contains a foreword by Leffel, but is really a compilation of class notes by the book's author, Linda Cateura. A few years ago, Leffel himself came out with a book, but it's pricey and I do not have a copy. Cateura's book is a mix of practical tips and philosophical musings. At first, I found the latter something of a turn-off. But a recent re-reading was much more useful; maybe I've made enough progress that Leffel's thoughts and instruction make better sense to me. If his work interests you and you're thinking about getting the book, there are plenty of readers' comments on Amazon that might help give you a more rounded picture; click on the first book link above. Below are some examples of Leffel's work that I found on the Web. They aren't necessarily his best, but indicate his style (influenced by Rembrandt and Chardin, among others). The book has plenty of good illustrations. Gallery David Leffel Millenium Portrait Apparently in homage to Rembrandt. Nude in White Chemise Harvey Peaches and Yellow Finches Of Rembrandt and Pushman Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 17, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, December 16, 2008


Alexander
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tricycle's Katy Butler speaks with the architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, a hero of mine. It's a fascinating interview. Though I'm convinced that his recent four-volume mega-opus "The Nature of Order" is -- despite the fact that its apparent subject is architecture -- the great spiritual autobiography of our age, I've never seen Alexander speak so openly about religious matters. FWIW, I buy the wholeness / void / unfolding model entirely, and not because I'm making any willful effort in the direction of "belief," but because that's just what life has always seemed like to me. Related: Enjoy an eye-opening 2Blowhards interview with Nikos Salingaros, an associate of Christopher Alexander's and a major thinker about architecture in his own right: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five. Nikos' website is here, and is well worth exploring. The best place to start for those curious to try an Alexander book is, IMHO, with this one. Expensive, yes, but well worth the price. How often do you read a book that really turns your head around? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 16, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, December 10, 2008


Over-analyzing Art
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few days ago I decided to take in a lecture at the Seattle Art Museum. The subject was their current exhibit of paintings of women by Edward Hopper. (A link to that exhibit is here.) The exhibit is small-scale (around ten paintings) in part because most major Hoppers were part of a major exhibition of his work that started in Boston, went to Washington and concluded in Chicago, where I happened to catch it just before it ended. The raison d'être for the Seattle show is Hopper's famous "Chop Suey" which has been designated to eventually become part of the museum's collection (the current owner is Barney Ebsworth). It was part of the traveling exhibition mentioned above and therefore unavailable for display at the museum until now. Chop Suey - 1929 More information on Hopper can be found here; scroll down to view "Nighthawks," perhaps his most famous painting. The lecture I attended was given by the show's curator and based largely on the catalog text she wrote. I don't think I'll bother to buy the catalog, even if its price is reduced after the exhibit closes. One reason is that reproductions of several of the paintings "bleed across the gutter" (to toss in printing jargon). That is, they occupy parts of adjoining pages, and this makes it almost impossible for a viewer to properly see the artwork. Shame! shame! shame!! Another reason I probably won't buy the catalog is the text. Assuming it closely follows the lecture material, the following points will be found: Hopper was a very shy guy, greatly influenced by a Victorian upbringing which held that "nice" women could only appear in public in certain well-defined circumstances. Due his shyness, he was something of a voyeur. He liked restaurants, where he could anonymously observe other people and perhaps sketch. She (the curator) made a big deal about the anonymity of New York automats, the setting of one of the paintings. There was a long discussion about women and how they gradually became able to eat alone in restaurants and go other places unaccompanied without comment. Somehow this ties into Hopper's shyness, Victorianism and the creation of his paintings of women in restaurant settings. This is pretty watery beer compared to other commentaries about artists and their paintings, where politically-correct conjecture is heaped on painters who worked centuries ago and never gave a thought about racism, sexism, imperialism and all those other isms so beloved of current academicians. I consider analyzing a painting in any time frame other than the one where it was created as being unfair both to the artist and the reader (an important exception being the placement of artists and work in the context of the history of art). Even though I'm as interested in gossipy details of a painter's life as the next person, psychology too is best avoided in analyses of paintings unless the artist was seriously abnormal and the abnormality is clearly reflected... posted by Donald at December 10, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Monday, December 8, 2008


Contemporary Art: A Bursting Bubble?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Prospect magazine in the UK has an article titled "A second tulip mania" concerning prices and sales of contemporary art (tip from Arts & Letters Daily). The writers use economist Charles Kindleberger's classic analysis of speculation bubbles as a template for looking at that sector of the art market. You might want to read the entire article, but below are some out-takes in case the link goes bad. The bubble in contemporary art is about to pop. It has exhibited all the classic features of the South Sea bubble of 1720 or the tulip madness of the 1630s. It has been the bubble of bubbles—balancing precariously on top of other now-burst bubbles in credit, housing and commodities—and inflating more dramatically than all of them. While British house prices took six years to double at the start of this century, contemporary art managed it in just one, 2006-07. (Over the same period, old masters went up by just 7.6 per cent and British 17th to 19th century watercolours actually lost value.) ... The Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6m (1999-2008); work by the American artist Richard Prince went up 60 to 80 times (2003-2008). The German painter Anselm Reyle was unknown in 2003; you could have picked up one of his stripe paintings for €14,000. Now he has a studio with 60 assistants turning them out for about €200,000 each. ... But this bubble is now deflating. Sotheby's share price has lost three quarters of its value over the past year, sinking from its peak of $57 in October 2007 to $9 in early November—close to its 1980s low of $8. The latest round of contemporary art auctions in London has gone badly. ... The way [that helped get the bubble started] was led by people like Charles Saatchi and the Miami property magnates, the Rubells. Saatchi laid down a blueprint in the late 1990s that others have tried to copy—he bought the work of young artists, established a museum in which to display it or lent it to public museums, and used the media interest that such shows attracted (by virtue of the outlandish works involved and the association of celebrities) to sell on part of the collection at auction at greatly inflated prices. Some of the proceeds would then be reinvested in the work of other new discoveries. Saatchi's famous 1997 show, "Sensation," demonstrated that this "specullecting" was a great way to make a splash as an arbiter of taste. ... Contemporary art turned out to be an ideal vehicle for speculative euphoria. The market is almost entirely free from state interference. Governments have had little interest in regulating the trinkets and playthings of the super-rich. Art works are a uniquely portable and confidential form of wealth. Whereas all property purchases have to be publicly registered, buying art is a private activity. And unlike old masters, which are often linked by history to specific... posted by Donald at December 8, 2008 | perma-link | (24) comments





Sunday, December 7, 2008


Name Changed, Guilty Protected
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I noticed the following announcement in the latest issue of the University of Washington alumni magazine: Effective Jan 1, the UW College of Architecture and Urban Planning will be renamed College of Built Environments [bold in original]. The Board of Regents approved the name change on Sept. 18. Dean Daniel S. Friedman says that the college is increasingly focused on sustainable practices and environmental quality, and that the new name is a way of making that official. "'College of Built Environments' better reflects our core responsibility to 21st century challenges -- urbanization, climate change and livable communities," Friedman says. Urban planning was always highly political. But now architecture has completed its transformation from art to politics -- at the University of Washington, in any event. "Hey Joe, what's your son up to these days?" "Well, he graduated from the U-Dub last spring and now he's a Built Environmentalist." One more reason to ignore the UWs pleas for monetary contributions from alumni. (State sales taxes provide core funding in any case.) Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 7, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, December 3, 2008


Artist Post Link List (Donald) - 1
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few months ago, Mary Scriver emailed me with the request that I compile a list of posts I wrote featuring artists. I finally got around to it. This is a link-index of my posts about artists as of early December, 2008. Please let me know of any errors or omissions. Anglada-Camarasa, Hermen Bama, James Bastien-Lepage, Jules Beaux, Cecilia Bischoff, Franz Boldini, Giovanni Casas, Ramon Curtis, David (England) Dewing, Thomas Wilmer Edelfelt, Albert Foujita Fuchs, Bernie Gajoum, Kal Gallén, Axel Goldbeck, Walter Dean Grün, Jules-Alexandre Herter, Albert Henry, George & Hornel. E.A. Hohlwein, Ludwig de Laszlo, Philip Alexius Levitan, Isaak Leyendecker, J.C. Macchiaioli (Italian group) Malczewski, Jacek Mathews, Arthur Pino Schjerfbeck, Helene Serov, Valentin Situ, Mian Sloan, John Sloan, John (update) Thayer, Abbot Handerson Thompson, Tom Tiepolo, Giavanni Battista Vettriano, Jack Vrubel, Mikhail This list will be updated from time to time. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 3, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Tuesday, December 2, 2008


Not Learning from Las Vegas
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This post is about architecture and Las Vegas. It's long (thanx to lotsa pix), so if neither topic is your cuppa, you have my permission to skip it. The title of this post is a takeoff from the well-known book Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. I never read it, but it's my understanding that they contended that the Vegas architecture of the time (circa 1970) was people-oriented whereas conventional Modernist architecture wasn't so much so. After my previous visit to Las Vegas I wrote this post about the huge project called CityCenter on the Strip that is being developed by our dear friends at MGM Mirage. I just returned from Vegas, and the present post can be taken as a "progress" report. The photos are mine -- uncropped, not Photoshopped: rock-hard reality, if I say so myself. For general information on CityCenter, click here. Their "vision statement" is here and information about the stellar (starchitect) team that was assembled to do the designing is here. Recent financing news of CityCenter was in this Las Vegas Review-Journal (8 October 2008) article. Key paragraph: In a statement, the company said it had secured a $1.8 billion senior bank credit facility, which matures in April 2013. The facility is expected to be increased to $3 billion as additional commitments are received. MGM Mirage Chief Financial Officer Dan D'Arrigo said CityCenter, which has a budget of $9.2 billion, has received additional signed commitment letters totaling more than $500 million. As you can see, the cost of the project is both huge and not yet fully funded. CityCenter and some large condominium projects are paying the price of the intrinsically risky mix of long lead-times and business cycles; coming on-line during a downturn means a diminished revenue stream. Gallery We start with some views of the Strip as we love/tolerate/hate it now. Some of the honky-tonk of the 1970 period the Venturis wrote about remains. Changes since then include the construction of huge casinos-cum-hotels-cum-shopping malls designed around various themes ranging from Venice to King Arthur. Yup, we're on the Vegas Strip all right. Seems to be a Harley kind of place, that Strip. For kids, there's the M&M store. And the Coca-Cola store. The Fashion Show mall is on the Strip. Inside, it's conventional, but the part facing the Strip isn't. (The foreground is part of the Wynn complex.) More style clutter. That familiar-looking campanile is part of the Venetian. Another themed complex is the Paris with its half-scale Eiffel Tower. This view of the Strip was taken from the grounds of the Mirage. Let's turn to CityCenter as it was Thanksgiving week. Note especially how large the building are as well as their architectural characteristics. This is a hotel-condo structure as seen from the Bellagio, to the north of CityCenter. It will shade the Bellagio's swimming pool area part of the day; perhaps not a bad thing in Las Vegas' summer. The... posted by Donald at December 2, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments





Wednesday, November 26, 2008


DVD Journal: "Who Gets to Call It Art?"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Geldzahler, painted by Alice Neal Peter Rosen's 2006 documentary "Who Gets to Call It Art?" tells the story of NYC artworld taste-maker / power-broker / connoisseur Henry Geldzahler. A buddy of Warhol and Hockney -- and, yes, since you may have been wondering, most definitely Ivy, Jewish, and gay -- Geldzahler was curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum in the 1960s, and he played a major role in getting a ponderous NYC art establishment to embrace the whimsies and playfulness of Pop Art. A happy networker and politically very astute, Geldzahler was an outsized version of a not-uncommon NYC type: the gayguy who lives for his taste and his friends, and whose personality is as much a work of art as any actual artist's creation. The film? Well, it's more of an art-thing in its own right than I generally like docs to be. But -- if you don't mind the pretentiousness and can forgive some huge gaps in information and exposition -- it's there to be enjoyed as a fact-based evocation of an epic time in American art. All that said ... The inbred-ness of the NYC artworld, eh? What I mainly came away from the DVD musing about was this: Isn't it funny how someone like Geldzahler could make a huge reputation for himself as a savvy, open, daring and refined bad boy by getting the artworld to accept Pop Art? What's so impressive about that? To me, getting the fine arts world to accept a new kind of fine art is like getting the French cooking world to accept a new kind of cream sauce, or the fashion world to embrace a new trend in necklaces. It's some kind of achievement, I guess. But perhaps the people who find it a hyper-impressive one are also people who take life inside the Charmed Circle a little too seriously. Meanwhile (and please heed a grumpiness alert here) it isn't at all uncommon for civilians -- people like, say, the inhabitants of this blog and many of its visitors -- to gab happily and un-self-consciously about book jackets, suburbia, cars, movies, fine art, ads, magazine design, skateboard photography, and thongs. It's all visual culture, folks. As for which culture-things from our era will last: Well, Time will tell, and will then probably change its mind. And -- since we won't be there to enjoy its verdict anyway -- why over-stress the question? No disrespect meant to Geldzahler, who was certainly an impressive phenomenon of some kind. Still: Who really deserves the rep as the more open-minded, free-thinking, visually-aware-and-responsive creature: the guy whose twinkling eyes and mind inflicted a little snuggly mischief on the inner circles of the self-declared art world? Or the interested and enthusiastic civilian whose brains and senses are open to a far wider visual-culture field? Here's Paul Goldberger's good obit of Henry Geldzahler, who died in 1994 at 59 years old. Fast-Forwarding Score: A tenth of the movie. The... posted by Michael at November 26, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments




Visual Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * iPhone cubism. * FvBlowhard turned up a rewarding visual blog by a Virginia artist named Duane Keiser. Duane uses his blog to show off an appealing project that he's in the midst of: making a thousand very small paintings. I find Duane's art and blog very civilizing and enriching. I can see and feel his interest in what he sees and how to get it down, and I love the way he applies himself to his micro-paintings with calm focus and purpose. * Cultural Offering is a big fan of album-cover art. * Meet Shawn Kenney, an insightful realist who also seems interested in casting spells and evoking moods. * James Morrison's sensational Caustic Cover Critic blog is devoted to the appreciation of book-jacket design. This interview with designer Geoff Grandfield is a special treat. * Bonus Points: If Donald's gorgeous posting on Canadian giant Tom Thompson left you with a yen to explore a little more Canadian art, why not give FvBlowhard's Group of Seven epic and my appreciation of David Milne a try? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 26, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, November 25, 2008


Tom Thompson of Canada
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Last month, in this post about Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada I mentioned that I visited it beause I wanted to see paintings by the Group of Seven. They, and some associated artists, are well known in Canada but all but invisible "south of the line." Not entirely invisible, because I've spotted copies of this book at some of the better museum stores here in the States. I first became aware of them two or three years ago when browsing bookstores in Victoria, BC. The Group of Seven was an association of artists who painted scenes of the wilds of the Canadian Shield; the Wikipedia entry can be found here. The artist who sparkplugged the Seven was Tom Thompson, who never was part of the group because he died before the founding. In 1917 he set out in a canoe while in the wilderness and a week later his body was found. The consensus is that he drowned accidently. But as is the case regarding deaths of many famous people, there is a conspiracy theory holding that he was done in. Tom Thompson Regardless, in his short -- approximately five-year -- career in fine arts, he produced a number of impressive paintings. His large ones are bright and energetic, features that are ill-conveyed by reproductions in books. So to appreciate Thompson, by all means go to Ottawa and the National Gallery to view some of his best work. Thompson paintings can be found elsewhere in Canada, if Ottawa isn't convenient for you. Below are examples of Thompson's paintings. Gallery Northern River In the Northland Decorative Landscape Birches - 1915 Jack Pine - 1916 Birch Grove - 1915-16 The Pool Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 25, 2008 | perma-link | (14) comments





Saturday, November 22, 2008


Re-Enacting: A Report from the Field
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the many oddball American cultural activities I know nothing about is "re-enacting" -- the world of guys who dress up in period outfits and recreate Civil War battles. So when Bill S. - one of my oldest and best friends -- emailed me that he'd taken part in a re-enactment, I bugged him to let me reprint his note here on the blog. I'm pleased that he agreed. Here's a link to some video of the event Bill took part in. Here's some more officially-endorsed re-enactment footage: And here's Bill's account of his adventure: A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited her brother and sister-in-law in Maryland. My wife’s brother has been a Civil War re-enactor for a while now, and he finally got me to join him for the battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Crazy stuff. 4,000 re-enactors on an actual battleground fighting it out. We drove down to Cedar Creek while the girls treated themselves to a shop-a-thon. We arrived around nightfall. Seeing hundreds of tents and campfires in that beautiful valley, I felt like I had come unstuck in time (to quote Uncle Kurt Vonnegut). I really had no idea what I was getting into but my brother-in-law has been doing this for 20 years so knew exactly what to expect. We slept (barely) in 38 degree weather in an open-ended Civil War pup tent with two wool blankets each. I got about an hour of sleep fearing frostbite on my toes, but it certainly gets you into the experience. (And you and I thought some of those old Boy Scout winter campouts were rough!) The next morning it was drills. Each division has a captain who calls, literally, the shots. Ours was from the PA regiment. He totally looked Civil War, complete with overgrown moustache. He trained us during the day. I learned how to march, stack weapons, shoot a muzzle-loading musket, and skirmish. The captains train the troops to reenact the battles in a historically accurate manner. They may tell you, "we need to take some casualties," if that's what happened in the actual battle. The battle started at 3:00 that afternoon -- historically accurate. It was off the hook. I felt like I was living the first 15 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.†You can't imagine the period rush you get when you see 2,000 Confederates coming at you over a hill with muskets blazing. The Confederates are evidently still pissed about losing the Civil War, as three minutes into the battle they went off the historic script and kept coming at us. Quite the thrill to have two ranks/lines of Confederate soldiers blasting their muskets at you from 50 feet away. The guns we re-enactors used are historic replications of Civil War muzzle-loaders. To fire, you tear off -- with your teeth if you're a mensch -- a gunpowder packet half the size of a cigarette and pour it directly... posted by Michael at November 22, 2008 | perma-link | (23) comments





Monday, November 17, 2008


Controversial J.C. Leyendecker
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The latest addition to my art bookcase is this book about famed illustrator J.C. (Joseph Christian) Leyendecker (1874-1951), creator of the Arrow Collar/Arrow Shirt man and more Saturday Evening Post covers than Norman Rockwell. Both the book and Leyendecker are controversial. Leyendecker was almost surely (evidence is circumstantial, but strong) a closet homosexual who lived with Charles Beach, the main model for the Arrow advertisements (that's him in the book cover illustration, above). In this autobiographical book, his fellow New Rochelle resident Norman Rockwell devotes Chapter 9 to Leyendecker's odd living arrangement that included his brother, illustrator F.X. Leyendecker who died of dissipation in 1924, and never-married sister Mary who left the mansion shortly after F.X.'s death. Eventually Beach gained control of most household affairs, turning an already shy Joe Leyendecker into a recluse. As for the book, one Amazon reviewer felt that the narrative contained too much material about Leyendecker's sexual orientation and its implications. I agree. Perhaps Leyendecker material is lacking, so they had to pad the book with speculation and possibly exaggerated claims about homosexual subtexts in his art. My reaction was that this material was overly pro-homosexual. On the other hand, one Amazon reviewer characterized it as homophobic. Whatever. I would have loved more information regarding how he constructed his paintings. The authors, active in the illustration art gallery scene, could have contributed their views or else might have brought in professional illustrators to assess some of Leyendecker's finished works and studies. But that's just me; I'm interested in how stuff gets done. A possibly more serious problem is that the book contains some images that are not Leyendecker's. The double-spread on pages 98-99 has been cited in Amazon reviews and a painted sketch of a man's head on page 75 has been called into question, probably legitimately. On the plus side, the book has plenty of examples of Leyendecker's work. My main quibble here is that the authors tended to full-page too many New Year's magazine cover illustrations featuring baby 1934 or whatever. One or two would have been fine, but I wanted to see other subjects in full page rather than thumbnail format (many pages are of small images of magazine covers). My conclusion is that the book is worth buying, but only at the Amazon price, not the list price. More Internet information on Leyendecker includes this page by Bill Plante and David Apatoff's fascinating presentation of Leyendecker studies here (scroll down to June 17, 2007). Here are a few examples of Leyendecker's work for those of you who aren't familiar with it. Gallery Study of drum major - no date Arrow advertisement - 1930 Couple descending staircase - 1932 Matters of overt/covert homosexual symbolism aside, just how should an artist portray men in advertising? (I used the word "artist" in the illustrator/Leyendecker sense, but the issue is the same when selecting photography models.) A typical semi-slobby guy isn't likely to enhance a product's image, in most... posted by Donald at November 17, 2008 | perma-link | (14) comments





Tuesday, November 11, 2008


Over? Under? Sideways? Down?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Funny how all those cartoons and jokes about abstract art ("My kid coulda done it," etc) seem to come true, isn't it? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 11, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, November 7, 2008


Art Recession Datapoint
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was chatting up the owner of a Santa Barbara area art gallery this afternoon and turned up the following tidbit regarding one of the effects of the latest recession. It seems that some customers are trying to bypass galleries by dealing directly with the artists. Buyers would save most or all of the markup and artists would get as much or more than they would have otherwise. (This assumes no change in the gallery-market value of the art. Changes in that and auction prices are a subject for another day.) Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 7, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Tuesday, November 4, 2008


Architecture Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * How do Americans really feel about the small towns they claim to revere? * Giles found Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building" to be a life-changing work. A lot of people have reacted that way to Alexander's books. * The Ottawa Citizen visits with Sarah "Not So Big House" Susanka. Michael Blowhard heartily endorses Susanka's helpful and beautiful books and websites, which are very much in the Christopher Alexander tradition, and which offer tons of useful ideas and tips. * Roger Scruton blogs! Sort of. But still! If you didn't know: Scruton isn't just a philosopher, he's one of the most substantial and provocative writers about architecture around. * Are English towns and cities designed more for men than they are for women? Englishwomen's main complaint: not enough public loos. (Link thanks to Dave Lull.) * MBlowhard Rewind: Our federal government used to commission and create beautiful buildings. Why does it now sponsor such awful and repellant work? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 4, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, October 30, 2008


Please Explain: Cezanne
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I decided to start a short series about famous artists whose paintings I don't "get." The concept is for you, our Valued Readers, to step in (in Comments) and set poor, thick-headed me straight regarding the featured artist. Here's the deal: I know that the artist is famous and was to a greater or lesser degree influential in his own time and for at least a while thereafter. However, this fame and influence is mostly in the context of the history of Modernism and Modernist painting. At the extreme, the artist is venerated because he is seen as an evolutionary link in Modernism's progression to abstraction and beyond; he is an interesting fossil such as creatures emerged from the seas eons ago that were transforming fins into feet. But what about the art itself, absent its historical context? Seen in isolation from that context, is it really any good? In general, I don't think it's great. I actually find little appeal at all and scratch my head, wondering what all the fuss is about. Why am I wrong? The first artist is Paul Cézanne. He was an outsider in more than one respect for much of his career. Fame and veneration came fairly late in life, though some artists such as Camille Pissarro recognized value in what he was attempting fairly early on. This was despite the fact (in my judgment) that Cézanne was never better than a mediocre draftsman (in my skill league, in other words). Moreover, I find the struggle he shared with other artists to "honor" the flatness of the surface of the canvas to be an odd diversion akin to attempting to square the circle. Hey, gang, if you want to paint things flat, that's fine; so is attempting to create a feeling of depth. No big deal either way, I say. Here are some representative Cézanne paintings. Gallery The Card Players - 1890-92 One of his better-known paintings. I assume that getting the men right was one of his lesser priorities in this effort. Still Life with Apples and Oranges - 1900 I think Cézanne's best paintings were still lifes. I don't have a title or date for this one, but it's clearly one of the many landscapes he painted in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence where he spent much of his life. Okay, have at me. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 30, 2008 | perma-link | (14) comments





Sunday, October 26, 2008


Save the Embassy?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It seems that the days of the American Embassy in London are numbered. One article I read mentioned that some people would like to see the building preserved. It was designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1960, not long before the architect's death. His major works include the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, the giant riverfront arch in St. Louis, the main terminal building at Dulles airport near Washington and the former TWA terminal at New York's JFK airport. See the link for more information. Deciding which buildings deserve preservation is a tricky business. For instance, 50 years ago many people, myself included, would have been happy to see all those old-fashioned brick office and warehouse buildings from the 1885-1905 period fall under the wrecker's ball. Today, such structures are treasured. So one should be cautious when advocating that certain buildings be destroyed. I have given the matter regarding the London embassy some thought. And I say it deserves to be smashed into the tiniest possible dust particles. The building is ugly. It utterly destroyed the ambiance of Grosvenor Square and should be replaced with buildings compatible with existing structures. It is not one of Saarinen's best designs (I'm fond of the TWA terminal, myself). So it should go. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 26, 2008 | perma-link | (21) comments





Thursday, October 16, 2008


Architecture and Happiness: Goleta Pier
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Maybe what you remember from your recent visit to Europe or Chicago is the great buildings listed in the tourist guide. Or are you remembering postcards and photographs of them instead? ... But maybe what you remember with the most pleasure from your visit -- what you can still feel deep in your very own cells; what you really took away, for your very own self -- is the pleasure of breakfast at an out-of-the-way cafe, or the view down an unnamed alley, or leaning over a bridge and watching a river go by, or just enjoying the comfort of your hotel room's bed for a long lazy morning. Those are architectural experiences of worth too. Why aren't they recognized and discussed as such? A good architectural question: Why did you enjoy a long lazy morning in one hotel room and not in another? Architecture in the usual unique-masterpiece-torn- from-its-context sense involves too much self-consciousness, too much learning. It's unnatural, and it often doesn't correspond to our actual experiences of places. Architecture came into focus for me when I woke up to the fact that there was no reason to limit my interest to masterpieces and geniuses, let alone to buildings ripped from their context. Instead, I could let myself take in the entire built environment. Like that, parks, streets, the spaces between buildings, farms, trees, lawns, barns, and towns opened up to me as "architecture" too. I've been a happy (instead of a frustrated) fan ever since, with my eyes open nearly all the time to where I am and to what's around me. In fact, I often get so absorbed by the spaces between the masterpieces that I overlook the masterpieces. Between you and me, I don't generally find this to be any big loss. Which bring me to the no-masterpiece-but-still-wonderful structure I want to show off today: Goleta Pier, sometimes known as More's Landing, a pier off a beach about 10 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara, California, near Isla Vista. Let me take you on a quick tour, showing off some of the pier's virtues. For starters: The Pier interacts well with its environment: It punctuates the bay, and brings out its natural qualities, the way spices used well don't cover up a dish's major ingredients but instead complement them and show them off. Imagine this bay and beach without Goleta Pier. It'd be a lovely place still, but perhaps somewhat less defined and less memorable. The pier works -- it has "interest" -- not just from one distance and from one point of view. It's interesting and engaging from numerous angles, and from numerous points of view. Open secret: A common failing of modernist buildings is that, while they can have a lot of visual impact, they often have their full effect only when seen from one or two specific places. They aren't engineered for the use of 3D people, each of whom has his own purposes. Instead,... posted by Michael at October 16, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Sunday, October 12, 2008


Safdie Designs a Gallery
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently wrote about Ottawa and Moshe Safdie. Now I'll combine the two by discussing his National Gallery of Canada building in Ottawa. To set the scene, here are the photos I took of it. Gallery This is the National Gallery as seen from near the Parliament building (to get some orientation, see the pictures in the first link, above). The following two pictures are interior views of the long, glazed wall and the glazed tower on the corner of the structure. This is what that glazed wall looks like from the inside. As you see, it's actually a gallery of sorts, the left side being windows with a view of Parliament Hill. The floor is a long ramp leading up to the glass tower and the first art galleries floor. This is the interior of the glass tower as seen from the upper art gallery floor. A coffee shop dining area is on the first level. And there is a fine view of Parliament Hill to savor. The National Gallery opened 1988 to a positive review by Paul Goldberger of The New York Times. My opinion is that the southern exterior, the one shown in the photo, holds the most interest; the rest of the building that I saw (I didn't walk around it, so might have missed a few things) is rather bland and nothing special. The best thing Safdie did was realize that, in many respects, the view from the building is almost as important as the view of the building. Hence the sloping-ramp gallery and glazed tower. These are two structural instances where Modernism can work well, though I can imagine some traditionally-based solutions that might work about as well. I wasn't happy with the layout of the main gallery wing. That might have had to do with the fact that we had a time budget of around an hour and I especially wanted to see the museum's display of Tom Thompson and Group of Seven artists. The trouble is, that particular display was diagonally opposite the glazed tower area entry to the galleries so, map in hand, I had to work my way around lots of less important stuff to get where I wanted to go. The layout is basically a racetrack pattern with two large galleries in the middle and a limited number of cross-paths. I would have preferred more entry points than the ones from the tower corner. The layout is simply too constrictive, too controlled. I recognize that there is probably no ideal museum layout, though my gut feeling is that a central entry with a set of branching-out points (perhaps along with peripheral race-tracks) might be better than alternatives. My take is that Safdie made visitor circulation subservient to his ramp-and-tower concept. All of which is not to say that it's a botched job. The museum is okay. The nice views are counterbalanced by a flawed circulation design. The exterior could easily be improved, but... posted by Donald at October 12, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, October 11, 2008


Ottawa Isn't Rome
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Rome -- Imperial and Renaissance -- seems to have been on the minds of architects and planners of Washington, D.C. and many state capitals in the United States. Domes, columns, pilasters and other Classical details abound. Ottawa, Canada's capital, took a different architectural route. Perhaps it was a slackening interest in classically-inspired styles such as Greek Revival and growing interest in Romanesque and Gothic styles (probably thanks to London's rebuilt Parliament). At any rate, Parliament Hill is utterly different from Washington's Mall. The above link offers a useful historical overview, so I'll sketch only some points needed to set the scene for my photos below. Ottawa was designated Canada's capital in 1859, some eight years before the British North America Act of 1867 created what essentially is modern Canada (as opposed to colonial Canada). Among the factors for Ottawa's selection was that it was comparatively safe from attacks by the United States. That's because Ottawa is situated at the point where the Rideau Canal reaches the Ottawa River. The canal was completed in 1832 to preserve Canadian logistical connections in the event of yet another U.S. invasion. (Water-borne communications -- key, before railroads -- between Toronto and Montréal had been along the St. Lawrence River, a stretch of which borders on the United States.) The canal is about 125 miles long, 12 of which had to be dug and the rest being existing waterways. Once completed, boats and barges from Toronto could exit Lake Ontario at Kingston, take the canal to Ottawa and then head downstream on the Ottawa River, reaching the St. Lawrence just upstream from Montréal, totally avoiding the U.S. border. Topographically, Ottawa has Parliament Hill which forms a bluff overlooking the Ottawa River. Across the river is Gatineau, Québec which is part of the capital area. The east end of Parliament Hill drops off to the Rideau Canal near where it joins the river. On the other side of the canal is the Rideau area which offers the points from where I took some of the photos. Gallery Sighting down Wellington Street. Don't see any marble or columns. A comparatively recent addition to the Parliament Hill complex is the Supreme Court building. The white façade is out of character, but the roof isn't. Here is the centerpiece of the hill -- the Parliament Building. And this is a view of its backside taken from the Rideau area. The building in the foreground with the tapered roof is the library, which escaped the fire that destroyed the previous parliament structure. Same viewpoint, less zoom. The light colored building on the left is the Hotel Laurier, one of Canada's great railroad hotels. It was built by the Grand Trunk Railway which was later merged into the Canadian National. The light structure at water level is the first lock of the Rideau Canal. The Laurier as seen, seriously wide-angled, from across Rideau Street. The Rideau Canal as seen from the bridge to the left... posted by Donald at October 11, 2008 | perma-link | (16) comments





Tuesday, October 7, 2008


How Does One Paint a Martian Princess?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs created many more characters than the Ape Man and Jane. Over the years, I've probably read more of the John Carter of Mars series than Tarzan books. Burroughs invented the supposed local name for the planet, "Barsoom," and some sources refer to the series by that name. In brief, John Carter gets wafted off to Mars while in a sort of dream-state while lying helpless in a cave in the desert southwest. Being pretty heroic to begin with, he is able to exploit his Earth-based strength in the weaker Martian gravity to perform seriously heroic feats while the entranced reader hurriedly flips the pages. Most or all of the Mars books are in the public domain. For instance, you can click here for the on-line Project Gutenberg release of A Princess of Mars, the first in the series. In that book, Carter encounters the beautiful Dejah Thoris, princess of one of Mars' kingdoms, who he eventually marries. Okay. Assume that a new edition of the book is on the way. Cover art is needed. Lots of strange, dangerous Martian creatures. A sword-wielding hero. A gorgeous princess. A different planet. What should the cover artist do? As it happened, most or all of the above elements have been included by just about every cover artist hired for the Mars series. Some examples are below. Gallery By Frank Schoonover - 1917 Schoonover, a top-notch illustrator, was trained by Howard Pyle in the early years of the last century. The scene looks vaguely Greco-Persian aside from what appear to be pistols on Carter's belt. Although he did advertising illustration and book covers such as the one shown, Schoonover's specialty was North Woods type scenes, this based on travels he made north of the Great Lakes around the time he left Pyle's school. Barsoom is far from the world of trappers and the RCMP -- and it shows, in this early cover. By Robert Abbett - c. 1970 I suppose this was intended to be dramatic. But c'mon -- the princess seems bored or distracted rather than terrified or even concerned about the outcome of John Carter's fight. A recent Penguin edition A recent Townsend Press edition In both cases, I wasn't able to find artist information. The Penguin cover seems more skillfully done. Like the Abbett illustration, we have a struggle going on, but Dejah Thoris clearly is not really part of that scene, even factoring in her shackles. The Townsend illustration doesn't show that she is the most beautiful creature on Mars; she hardly seems worth fighting for. Oh well, enough farm team stuff. On to the goodies. Frank Frazetta - c.1970 Frazetta practically owns the fantasy art franchise even though he has been retired for several years. Dejah Thoris and John Carter come off appropriately iconic. And if Carter's duel is already over ... well, who really cares; I'm too busy checking out Dejah. I bought this circa 1963 book... posted by Donald at October 7, 2008 | perma-link | (19) comments




Habitat 67 Today
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- On our recent trip to Canada we allotted two full days for Montreal. Since Nancy had never been there, I largely let her determine what we would visit. Had we spent another day or two in town, a site I might have gotten around to seeing would have been Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67, built in conjunction with Expo 67, Montreal's world's fair of 1967. Or maybe not: it would depend on if I could be free to wander around it above ground level. As it was, the closest I got to it was the edge of the old town Montreal where I snapped the following picture. About all it proves is that Habitat still exists. For more on Habitat '67, the Wikipedia entry is here. A web page with lots of photos, some links and other information is here. Habitat '67 was the subject of a lot of attention when it was built. I know it intrigued me because my take was that it featured orthodox modernism in the form of rectangular modules that were combined in what appeared to be an organic manner. Lazy me, I haven't followed up on the fate of Habitat nor have I paid much attention to Safdie's later career (I will write a post on his Ottawa National Gallery soon, however). No doubt Habitat inspired other architects to try out some of Safdie's concepts. Even so, I haven't noticed many (or any) Habitats were I live or travel. Can any readers bring me and the rest of us up to speed? How is the original Habitat doing? Since it's not a publicly subsidized and operated project, presumably residents chose to move there and would be predisposed to like it -- but do they, once the novelty has worn off? And how well does the place function? For instance, is it easy for residents to haul groceries or new pieces of furniture up to their apartments? Why havn't we seen lot of Habitat-like structures? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 7, 2008 | perma-link | (11) comments





Monday, October 6, 2008


Stores With Art Books
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Now that I'm retired, my book-buying budget has taken a serious hit. Good thing I scarfed a bunch of art books while I was still working. That combination of having built up a pretty good library and having to watch my pennies doesn't mean I don't keep browsing. It means that I'm better at resisting a diminishing amount of temptation. Nowadays my problem is that the really nice, interesting art books are often pretty expensive -- in the $65-$100+ range when I start to get the cold shakes around $55. Leaving aside the Internet, finding decent art books in stores can be chancy. I've probably mentioned several times that even big-box stores such as Barnes & Noble vary considerably in their wares. An ordinary B&N might only have one or two shelf sections devoted to a combination of art crit, art history, painter biographies, how-to books and perhaps some photography titles. But B&Ns near college campuses or upscale neighborhoods can have much larger art sections. Perhaps the largest arts-related bookstore I've encountered is Hennessy & Ingalls in Santa Monica. Aside from there, museum stores at major art museums usually offer good selections. You can get a discount if you are a museum member, and they can have sales from time to time. On my recent trip to the Northeast and Canada I managed to duck into some museum stores. Here's what I found. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts had a very nice store, meaning that the selection was plentiful. I walked out with a not very costly book about British Impressionism. On the other hand, the Museé National des Beaux-Arts du Québec shop was small and had few books of any kind. The Museé des Beaux-Arts de Montréal was much better. Plenty of books. And a large share of them in French -- a nice thing if you want to learn more about not-so-famous-but-good French artists. I shagged two books about Maurice Denis. Also good was the shop at Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada. I bought small books about Tom Thompson and Clarence Gagnon. We also visited the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario which sports two small Rembrandts and some Group of Seven works. But the shop was small and there were few books. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 6, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, October 4, 2008


Canadian Spaces
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Today I'd like to toss out for your inspection two places I recently photographed in Canada. The only connection I'll make is that I liked one site and hated the other. Of course, you are free to make comparisons and contrasts. Here is some grist for such activity. The first site is Montreal's Olympic Park, built for the 1976 games. It's still used for sports events, but traffic has to be less than even a couple of years ago before the Expos baseball team decamped to Washington, D.C. One Olympic structure has been converted into a kind of wintergarden containing nature displays; it's now called the Biodome. The architetcure on the site is a sort of non-retro postmodernist -- there's lots of reinforced concrete, but the signature buildings are sculptural rather than geometric. The other site is the new (opened 2004) Fallsview Casino Resort in Niagara Falls. It's privately owned and managed, but the province of Ontario gets a cut of the profits. Las Vegas abandoned the gambling factory casino style about 20 years ago for semi-traditional architecture and lots of flash to wow the tourists and players. The Fallsview budget was probably less than that of the Bellagio, but the designers gave it a good try. Here are some photos. Gallery Olympic Park -- Montreal Perhaps the best-known structures in Olympic Park are the Biodome (left), the Olympic Stadium (hidden) and its tower (right) that supports its roof. A funicular car takes passengers to the top of the tower where there is an observation room. Looking down at the Biodome from the observation station. Another ground-level view of the Biodome. Its grounds are basically a large paved surface interrupted by those potted trees and the flag area. Looking towards the left we can see ... In principle, large crowds need to be accommodated on occasion, but these spaces are sterile. Fallsview Casino Resort -- Niagara Falls, Ontario Here is a view of the part of the exterior facing the falls. Near the street entrance is this sculpture evoking electrical power generation related to the falls, a heritage of the casino site. Those circular objects near the base aren't car tires; they do turn, representing dynamos driven by water turbines. At the top are cables representing power lines. Another view of the court near the sculpture. These design evokes late 19th century industrial Art Nouveau. This was taken just inside the hotel entrance indicated to the right of the previous photo. The theme shifts towards the classical. View of the shopping arcade. Note the dark band of Louis Sullivan-like Art Nouveau reliefs above the windows. The interior of the rounded atrium shown in the first photo. This is at the shops level; escalators towards the left-center lead down to a food court level and the exit to the falls viewing terrace. My verdict: given a choice, I'd much prefer to hang out at the casino (I don't gamble). And your take? (Comments on changing... posted by Donald at October 4, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Thursday, October 2, 2008


Art Book Pictures Are Fine, But ...
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I have a lot of books about art -- painting and illustration, actually. The quality of the reproductions in the newer ones is a lot better than it was for the old books. Even if the printer was in a back alley someplace in Ceylon, the quality seems pretty good. (Yes, I know the place is now called Sri Lanka or some such moniker. But my choice of place-names happens to be whimsical with a tendency to favor the names I learned when young. Bombay, anyone? Burma? Chungking? Peking or maybe Beiping? However, I much prefer St. Petersburg to Leningrad -- but hey! St. Pete came first, right?) Anyway, before I distracted myself I was about to make the point that I rely heavily on the color reproductions for understanding the works and to form judgments. That's because I have little choice. Seattle's far more big-time than it was when I was growing up, but its art museums aren't yet first-rate. So to experience lots of top-notch painting, I need to travel to Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington or major European cities. Those of you living in the BosWash corridor really have it lucky if you're art fans. When traveling, I prefer strolling city streets to museum-going. But if I have the time and there's a major museum handy, I'll step in and check out the galleries that interest me. On my recent visit to Boston, I finally made it to the Museum of Fine Arts. It's undergoing expansion, so I don't know how representative the displays were. My main goal was to see what they had in the way of John Singer Sargent's work, and I had a few other items in mind. Among the hangings were: Gallery Isabella and the Pot of Basil -- John White Alexander, 1897 This was one of those "other" paintings. I'm pleased that it was on view and not in storage. Promise of Spring -- Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1890 Boston was the first city we visited on a 16-day trip, and traveling tends to give me a memory-wipe. I definitely saw a Tadema, and I'm almost sure this was the one. A small painting, and not one of his best. Still, Bravo! to the MFA for displaying an artist whose works were laughed at 50 years ago. A Caprioti -- John Singer Sargent, 1878 I didn't have to travel all the way to Boston to see this one: a near-duplicate is in a Seattle collection and was on display recently at the Seattle Art Museum. This is one of a series of paintings Sargent made on a visit to Capri. Mrs Fiske Warren and Daughter Rachel -- John Singer Sargent, 1903 One of Sargent's later society paintings. It's a little high-key for my taste, but I was fascinated by his brushwork on the clothing. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit -- John Singer Sargent, 1882 In recent years, art critics and commentators have allowed themselves to get... posted by Donald at October 2, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Tuesday, September 30, 2008


A False Future Glimpsed
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Towards the end of my high school career I'd often hop a bus for downtown after school and get off near the Seattle Public Library's main branch, an old, gray Carnegie donation. Then I'd spend an hour or so browsing the art, architecture and some other sections before walking the two blocks to my father's office to hitch a ride home with him. Most of the architecture books I studied dealt with Modernism, and I had totally bought into its ideology/religion at that time. Maybe one reason I did so was because hardly any significant Modernist structures had been built in Seattle by the mid-1950s, so I had no idea of the visual damage they would cause. The International Style (the Museum of Modern Art's name for it) buildings I saw were in the form of drawings, models and photos in books and architecture magazines. They looked clean and exciting. Particularly seductive was the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Here is one of his proposals from around 1920. This sort of thing would give my college architectural history professor heart throbs. Form following function. Truth to materials. And you can see it all! Clearly!! Too bad for Mies and the Prof that real buildings almost never came off that way. Except at night when rooms are lighted, glass-clad buildings simply reflect stuff, a characteristic more recent architects have exploited. Nevertheless, once in a while one can glimpse in reality what van der Rohe and his kind had intended. Below is a recent photo I took of a building under construction in Toronto. Lighting conditions were just right to give it the effect Mies was striving for. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 30, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, September 19, 2008


Annabella at 15
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A spin-off from my recent posting about Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" ... Here's the website of Annabella Lwin, the onetime jailbait-sexpot singer for Bow Wow Wow. Here's the record jacket that made her notorious even in punk circles. Be forewarned: Annabella was only 15 when that sexy photo was taken. What ought to be made of the under-ageness question? Do we have no choice but to draw a line and condemn the image as evil? Despite the fact that it's funny and cute? Despite the fact that it has already attained minor-modern-icon semi-immortality? And despite the fact that the punk scene was teeming with lovably trampy 15 year old girls? Bonus point: The girl in "Mademoiselle O'Murphy," aka "Nude on a Sofa," was 14 at the time Boucher painted her. Kiddie cheesecake? Or a classic work of art? Shortly after the painting was completed Louis XV took the little charmer as a mistress. Read more here. So what kind of misbehavior-slack do we need to cut the arts scene? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 19, 2008 | perma-link | (39) comments





Tuesday, September 16, 2008


More Scruton
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's a beautiful, many-sided, and stimulating new interview (conducted by Diederik Boomsma) with the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Islam, architecture, conservatism, the nation-state ... Loads going on here. One of many fab passages: Question: If modern architecture and modern art is so ugly and devoid of meaning, why don't more people criticize and oppose it? Answer: Everybody criticizes modern art and architecture except the professional critics who know on which side their bread is buttered. We are returning to a more humane architecture, thanks to Leon Krier, et al., and the New Urbanist movement. What would it take? Enlightened patronage, such as displayed by the Prince of Wales; a spirit of defiance towards pseuds like Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind, a willingness to tell the truth about people like the fascist Le Corbusier and the communist Gropius, and a decision finally to say that the city is ours, not theirs. Bonus points: Another long interview with Scruton. A blogposting I wrote about how rewarding I've found it to wrestle with the thoughts of humane conservatives. I'm no conservative myself, but I've certainly learned a lot from exploring the works of smart and classy righties. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 16, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, September 11, 2008


Choosing a How-to-Paint Book
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I've griped more than once on this blog about my lousy art training: here, for instance. The consequence when I decided to take up painting again as I was about to retire was that I ran out and bought a how-to-paint book. Then I bought another. And another. Must have 20 of the darn things now. Since it seems that I'm finally improving at little at painting, I've cut down on such purchases. Along the way, I discovered that they don't always agree with one another. This is understandable because painting, believe it or not, is an art, not a science. Another reason for cutting down on purchases is that there's a lot of agreement between the books (along with those differences), so any new purchase usually yields a large amount of redundancy. After all, painting can be as much a craft as an art, and the purpose of those books is to provide time-tested rules-of-thumb such as "thick over thin" for painting in oils. Nowadays, I tend to look for books that deal with specific aspects of art that I know I need to work on (such as clothing and how fabrics drape). Otherwise, I'll thumb through a book to look at the author's style of painting. If the style doesn't interest or impress me, I probably won't buy the book. But if I find the style interesting and wish that I could incorporate aspects of it in my own work, I'm likely to swipe the plastic through the card reader or call up the amazon.com site and add the tome to my too-large collection. (Hmm. Next time I go to Powell's in Portland, I ought to bring some of the losers along and try to sell them.) This book by British painter David Curtis is an example of a how-to book I bought because the author's style impressed me. Here are some examples of his work I found on the Internet. Some are found in the book, but the book contains others that I find even more interesting. Gallery I don't have a title for this. Curtis is mostly a landscape guy, but does the occasional portrait. Moorings on the Chesterfield Canal Pembrokeshire Sea Cliffs, Port St. Justinian Rocky Cove, Lleyn Peninsula Rooftops and Cliffs, Staithes Fine Autumn Day, Clayworth Wharf Vintage Car Workshop Strikes me as an oils version of Frank Wootton's charcoal automobile drawings. You can't really tell from the sampling above, but Curtis tends to dramatize his paintings by selecting a sun angle that approaches backlighting. Neat trick, though it can become a crutch or habit. One dark secret he didn't reveal was how he does those thin lines needed to depict ships' rigging; I'd love to know that. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 11, 2008 | perma-link | (20) comments





Tuesday, September 2, 2008


Book Draft Snippet
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm still chipping away on that proposal for a book about non-Modenist painting since 1900. I have two sample chapters drafted and am working on a chapter that is intended to set the stage before dealing with the art I wish to highlight. I'm finding that this is akin to writing the state-of-things chapter of a Masters thesis or Ph.D. dissertation. Slow, nasty work; it's rather like trying to pull chickens' teeth. At any rate, it finally seems to be shaping up so I'd thought I'd toss out a paragraph for you to ponder. No guarantee that it'll even be in the draft I mail to publishers; and if it's panned, I'll probably jerk it. In preceding paragraphs I suggest that paintings with staying power are likely to be connected to life experiences common across centuries. I continue with ... Now, I expect some readers to recoil in shock and accuse me of implying that for art to “last,†it must appeal to the lowest common denominator of emotion and taste. I made no such implication, but raise the matter of popularity at this point because it is one of those issues that is constantly present, yet seldom in the forefront of discussions about art. To condemn something for being popular is a form of elitism stemming from the belief that the very best art is a rare thing. So far, so good, regarding the art itself; excellent examples of anything are rare by definition because if they were not excellent they would be good, average or not good -- most things being near average. Where elitism goes wrong is when some elitists think that the same thing holds with regard to art appreciation and that it is they who know best and the other 90 percent or whatever share of the population does not and probably cannot properly appreciate art and whose preferences in art should be dismissed as naïve or even boorish. While it is true that some people put more effort in appreciating art than others, it does not follow that the heavy appreciators necessarily have the best taste; it is possible that they have gotten themselves so wrapped up in theories and wanting to be part of an “in-group†that the art they are supposedly appreciating becomes a secondary matter. I hope to launch the proposal after I get back from a trip to Boston, Québec, etc. Let me thank vanderleun for some thought-provoking tips regarding the publishing industry. But if I screw this up, it it'll be my fault, not his. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 2, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, August 29, 2008


Questions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A line of questions for the day, prompted by this typically beyond-absurd Nicolai Ouroussoff piece from the NYTimes: Why are mainstream architecture critics so focused on such a narrow sliver of building-activity and aesthetic experience? And why are they so averse to taking note of life as it's actually lived? Translated into action, this latter question might lead a critic to -- oh, I don't know -- pass up the latest Gehry or Hadid and instead visit the malls, developments, schools, restaurants, and parks that real people really interact with, learning about and from them, and offering critiques and appreciations. A pretty radical thought, I know ... And -- further! -- why are civilians (and editors, who are supposed to represent the interests of their readers) so willing to put up with this kind of twee carrying-on? Funny how certain kinds of kooky behavior can become the expected thing, isn't it? For example, we take it for granted that an architecture critic should be spending most of his column inches pontificating about the likes of Steven Holl. Yet if the Times' food coverage only concerned the latest $500-a-plate chic eateries -- neglecting cheaper places, farmer's markets, home cooking, etc -- we'd all be having daily laughs at the expense of the newspaper's clueless and pompous twerpery. Further comparisons: What if a magazine's "music coverage" only took in the latest bits of spikey experimentalism? Of if its "movie coverage" paid attention only to the hottest expressions of post-avant-garde-ism? All of which makes me wonder: Where architecture and architecture criticism are concerned, why don't we have a more active (perhaps even a "vibrant") let's-ridicule-these- snobs-out-of-existence movement in the blogosphere? My hunch of an answer: Since many people spend zero time taking note of their environment, it never occurs to them to search out quality conversation about it. Too bad. Link thanks to the smart, funny, and quirky Gil Roth, who has recently been reading Montaigne and enjoying the company of Rufus the daffy and irresistible greyhound. For some reason, when I try to link to Gil's site, the effort torpedos this posting. Gil's site, which otherwise behaves perfectly well, is at: http://chimeraobscura.com Get to know Rufus at: http://chimeraobscura.com/vm/dog-days/ Go and visit. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, August 26, 2008


Munich's Master Poster Artist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- He wasn't a professional painter. I don't even know if he painted as a hobby. So I can't call him a Peripheral Painter for that reason. Nor can I call him "peripheral" because his work is well known to poster-art buffs. On the other hand, even though New York's Museum of Modern Art has a few of his posters in its collection, his work wasn't avant-garde enough to satisfy modernist purists. That and the fact that he did posters for government agencies during Hitler's regime in Germany. The artist in question is Ludwig Hohlwein (1874-1949) who began his studies as an architect, but made his career as a Munich-based poster artist. I haven't been able to find much biographical information about him aside from here and here. The second link is to Paul Giambarba's illustration site, which is well worth perusal. Below are examples of Hohlwein's work. The Giambarba link has some of these as well as other examples. Many more can be seen by googling on Ludwig Hohlwein and then linking to Images. Gallery Combination of a top poster artist and top automobile. Makes me want to dash off and buy that car. (Hope it has air conditioning, a six-speed automatic transmission, a GPS and good fuel economy.) "Spring in Wiesbaden" seems to be a travel ad from just before or after the Great War. Hohlwein was born in Wiesbaden, which might have provided added incentive to do a really nice job. Speaking of the Great War, this is an advertisement from early in the conflict (to judge by the helmet) for some kind of "strength and energy" confection. A portable typewriter advertisement, probably from the 1920s. Much of Hohlwein's work, including this, seems to have been done using watercolor washes. Note the skillful portrayal of facial and other planes. Advertising a line of mens' clothing. Another fashion poster, but probably late in his career if the dress is any clue.. The swastika tells us this was done during World War 2. I'm not sure why Hohlwein portrays what appears to be a bare-chested man wearing a stahlhelm (steel helmet) and holding onto a pole of some sort. The caption translates literally as "air protection" or "air security" which might refer to an air warden or air defense -- though wehr might be a better word than schutz for the latter meaning. This is a detail from a poster advertising a brand of cigarettes. I think this is an extremely skillful piece of work. My only quibble is the low spot on the hair above the forehead that seems to be too low to accommodate the likely shape of the woman's head. On the other hand, it's likely Hohlwein worked from a photo to get the facial shading, so who knows? Oh do I wish I had Hohlwein's drawing and watercolor skills!! Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 26, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Monday, August 25, 2008


Manny Farber, RIP
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was very sorry to learn that the painter and film critic Manny Farber has died. He was 91. I loved his art (a few examples are here) and his criticism. The Wife and I spent a little time hanging out with Manny and his wife, the artist Patricia Patterson (they often wrote together), and I can report that I found him a lovable guy: spikey, difficult, and maybe even a little paranoid, but brainy, funny, and soulful too. There can't be many critics who made as big an impact on a medium with a single volume of writing as Manny did on movies with his legendary "Negative Space." But, as far as I could tell, his heart was really in painting. Half of him may have been a wisecracking, off-center, neurotic intellectual -- but his bigger half was a color-drunk west coast sensualist. Some highlights from the press and the blogosphere: David Chute offers some personal reflections, a lot of quotes, and a sensible evaluation. A 2006 Duncan Shepard memoir of his friendship with Manny and Patricia is also a fine snapshot of an amazing era in American art. Michael Sragow recalls his own friendship with Manny. Carrie Rickey recalls Manny's influence, as well as his impact as a teacher. Robert Pincus offers an appreciation of Manny's art and supplies a good short biography of him too. Green Cine Daily rounds up many more links. In sadness, Michael... posted by Michael at August 25, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, August 21, 2008


The Alexander Effect
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- James Kunstler confesses that it didn't all come together for him until he read Christopher Alexander and Andres Duany. I've run into professional architects who have told me similar things -- that they were out there, practicing architecture for a living, yet they didn't really "get it" until they stumbled across Alexander's great "A Pattern Language" and / or his equally-great "The Timeless Way of Building." "Suburban Nation" -- by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck -- is pretty damn mind-opening too. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 21, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments





Tuesday, August 19, 2008


Homage to a Catalan
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- If I were ordered to produce a league table for nations with respect to Western painting as reported in standard art history narratives, the Big Three would be Italy, Holland/Flanders and France. At or near the top of the following rank would be Spain, largely thanks to Velásquez, El Greco and Goya in pre-Modern days. In more recent times, regardless of what one thinks of their work or personalities, it's impossible to deny that two of the most famous 20th century painters were Spanish: Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Dalí was Catalan, Picasso spent his mid-teen years in Barcelona, Joan Miró was from Barcelona, and Hermen Anglada (who I wrote about here) also was from Barcelona. Catalonia, in Spain's northeast, has been uncomfortably Spanish. Catalans have their own dialect, which causes friction with the rest of the country. The region's proximity to France helps make it more "European" than distant parts of the country. These matters and others are treated in the book Barcelona 1900 which deals with the tug of mainstream European avant-garde art and architecture on Barcelona's artistic community. An artist featured in that book is Ramon Casas i Carbó. I wasn't aware of him, but liked his work and thought I'd show you some examples. For biographical information, click on the link above. Gallery Après le Bal - 1895 Before Bathing - c.1895 Madeleine - n.d. From the name, it was probably done in Paris. Mujer Conduciendo - early 1900s This "woman driver" looks like it might be intended for a poster. Julia Peraire portrait - c.1907 Julia was his model, later mistress, and eventual wife. Julia sketch - early 1900s In 1906 he met Julia Peraire who was born around 1888. I wonder a little if this is the same Julia because the woman looks older than 18 and the style of clothing she is wearing was on the way out in 1906. Portrait sketch of Pablo Picasso I'm tossing this in just to show that Casas could depict males. Actually, he did a lot of drawings and paintings of men, but I like looking at his women better. Sketch of woman Lautrec-like, but not so caricatured. Sifilis poster Casas did a good deal of poster art. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 19, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Sunday, August 17, 2008


Less-Forgotten Painters
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Regular readers know that from time to time I write postings about painters who can be unknown to people who took Modernist-centered art history classes in college (myself especially included). My impression is that many of these neglected painters are beginning to be pinged by cultural gatekeeper sonar. Impressions are one thing and numbers are another, usually better, means of trend-tracking. And I have some numbers. Not great numbers, but better than nothing. What I did was grab a couple of "art and artists" "dictionaries" (I'm cribbing from two nearly identical titles) and compared the artists they covered with those I wrote about. The first book is the Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, 7th Edition. It was first published in 1959 and the 7th Edition came out in England in 1997. Only Giovanni Boldini and Jules Bastien-Le Page have their own entries. The other book is the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art & Artists, 3rd Edition. The first edition appeared in 1990 and the latest in 2003. Artists I wrote about that were mentioned are Cecilia Beaux, Boldini, Albert Edelfelt, Axel Gallèn, Philip de Laszlo, Helene Schjerfbeck, Valentin Serov, Joaquin Sorolla and Mikhail Vrubel. The Oxford book has about 650 pages and the Penguin only 580, but that difference is too small to account for the disparity in citations. The Penguin edition is only six years older than the Oxford one, but the first editions are separated by 31 years, which might (or might not) be a factor with greater impact than the tastes of the compilers. A better test would be to compare various editions of the books to see how many of my "peripheral" artists were added over time. Unfortunately, I don't have earlier editions handy. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 17, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, August 15, 2008


'Burb Thoughts, Info, Questions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I dropped this comment on a recent posting about Bill Kauffman, Fred Reed, and James Kunstler. Since the commentsthread was dying out, and since I'm curious about how people will respond to some of my points, I'm reprinting it here. It's good to be blog-host. Was somebody arguing that all malls are bad? Let alone that Fred Reed, James Kunstler and Bill Kauffman are philosophers? I missed those parts of the posting. One fact that a surprising number of you bright people seem unaware of is that post-WWII US suburbia is anything but a spontaneous creation of the free market. There were suburbs before WWII, god knows. And the movement of some people from the city to the edges outside the city is apparently a constant in history. But post-WWII US suburbia -- collector roads, cul de sacs, strict zoning separating retail, industry, and residential, and zero access to public transportation -- is something quite distinct, and quite a weird, never-before- seen-on-the-face- of-the-planet type creature. Post-WWII suburbia is at least partly (if not largely) a function of a number of factors: government guarantees for home-mortgage loans; government sponsorship of freeway building (often said to be the largest civil engineering project in all history); a government-sponsored attack on city downtowns in the form of "urban renewal," which destroyed thousands of neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands of residences, and which forcibly displaced millions of citizens from their homes; and a handy-dandy tacit agreement between government and industry to support and encourage car culture. Notice how many times the word "government" appears in the above paragraph. OK, few people were forcibly moved to the new 'burbs (though some millions were indeed forcibly removed from their traditional city homes). But 1) that's a lot of carrots and sticks the country's elites were applying to its populace, and 2) that's a lot of top-down social engineering. Viewing post-WWII American suburbia as "normal," let alone as something that developed spontaneously out of people's freely expressed preferences, is like ... oh, I don't know, arguing that Cheetos grow on trees. They may be your personal favorite treat-- but your fondness for Cheetos is not a trustworthy guarantee that Cheetos grow on trees. In fact, they're the product of a lot of food engineering. Which of course is OK. But let's at least recognize that there are a few differences between an apple and a Cheeto. Now, would many people have moved to whatever kinds of 'burbs would have developed had the government not interfered, and if we'd all been left to our own devices? Could well be. Hard to know. A couple of questions for you market types? (I'm one myself, with some reservations.) 1) You're moving to a new city area. You're going to have to choose a place to live. We could think of you as a "housing consumer" shopping for a "housing product" in something called the "housing market." In and around many American cities the housing products... posted by Michael at August 15, 2008 | perma-link | (46) comments





Thursday, August 14, 2008


Fred and Bill
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Two super-eloquent writers check in with some thoughts about place. Fred Reed riffs on a theme familiar to those who have read James Kunstler's rants about cities, towns, and sprawl. (Kunstler blogs here. Here's an especially lively recent posting. Bookwise, start with this eye-opener.) Great passage: I am not religious, at least in the sense of believing that I have the answers, but I am religious in the sense of knowing the questions. I know that there are things we can’t know, things even more important than making partner before the age of thirty. Doubtless most of us know this. Yet the tenor of life is not easily escaped. We try. People rush to Europe in search of the old, the quiet, and the pretty. Peddlers of real estate understand the urge, and hawk tranquil rural life while building the malls that will make it impossible. And so hurry comes to Arcadia. People then think of escape to the next small town. We spend a remarkable amount of time fleeing ourselves. Maybe instead we should build a place we like. Bill Kauffman writes to the local paper about the damage a mall did to his beloved hometown of Batavia, NY. (CORRECTION: The Batavian isn't the "local paper." It's an online local-news website for Batavia.) Dandy passage: The mall ought to have been dispatched long ago to that circle of hell reserved for brutalist architecture. For 30-plus years it has been a monument to misplaced faith in big government and capital-p Progress. Urban renewal was a catastrophe for many American cities, Batavia not least among them. The demolition of old Batavia was a crime against our ancestors, ourselves, and our posterity. Kauffman link thanks to Dave Lull. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2008 | perma-link | (23) comments





Sunday, August 10, 2008


Architecture and Urbanism Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Architects go anti-modernism. * Should the federal government really be moving inner city residents to the suburbs? * How walkable is your neighborhood? My own scored 100 out of a possible 100. Have I mentioned that I haven't owned a car in over 30 years? * John Massengale isn't crazy about Beijing's Olympic architecture. A key passage: For every great monument like Bilbao, [contempo starchitecture] produces a thousand clunkers like Blue and San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum. And 100,000 anti-urban clunkers in Las Vegas, Houston, and American sprawl in general. * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote about the failures of architectural modernism. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 10, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Wednesday, August 6, 2008


Read and Discuss
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- In today's Leisure & Arts section of the Wall Street Journal, David Littlejohn registers his unhappiness with glass sculptor Dale Chihuly and the fact that the de Young Museum of San Francisco dared to install a major show of his work. I'm not sure how long the Journal keeps links live, so if you're interested in reading the entire article, click here soon. I happen to be something of a Littlejohn-skeptic. One reason is that he likes Rem Koolhaas' new Seattle Public Library main branch building and I hate the thing. (Yes, sensitive readers, I know that "Hate is Not a Family Value" but, alas, I sometimes allow my human weaknesses to come to the fore.) I also must report the fact that Chihuly and I overlapped briefly at the University of Washington's School of Art. But we didn't know of one another. That said, my assessment of Chihuly's work is a non-assessment -- I neither like it nor dislike it. Perhaps that's because, aside from rare instances, I'm indifferent to sculpture in a positive sense. But I can easily be negative about the silly stuff that passes as sculpture these days. Chihuly's works normally don't strike me as being silly, so I simply don't really react to them. ("Oh. That's probably a Chihuly, huh? Okay.") But the subject of this posting is not Dale Chihuly. It has to do with this paragraph from Littlejohn: The word most commonly used by Chihuly-fanciers to describe the works is "beautiful," a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists. Although some Chihuly objects appear snakelike or surreal, there is never anything troubling or challenging about them. It all looks strangely safe and escapist, even Disney-like, for art of our time. The writhing shapes and bright kaleidoscope of colors signify nothing but the undeniable skill of their crafters and the strange tastes of Mr. Chihuly. More specifically, I'm focusing on this sentence segment: "...'beautiful,' a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists." So he's saying that after 1885 or thereabouts, "serious" art has little or nothing to do with beauty and beauty has little or nothing to do with "serious" art? Discuss, if this interests you. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 6, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Sunday, August 3, 2008


Hermen Anglada-Camarasa
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- [Applies lipstick to pig ...] I suppose a good result of having had a standard Paris-centric art history course in college is that I can experience the surprise and enjoyment of discovering interesting painters who weren't mentioned in class. One such artist I recently stumbled across is Hermen Anglada-Camarasa (1871-1959). The most comprehensive biographical information I could find during a brief Web search is here -- a Spanish-language Wikipedia page. Spanish isn't one of my languages, so I hope the following career snippet isn't too far off the mark. Anglada was born in Barcelona, the part of Spain with closest ties to France. He studied painting in Spain and then spent some time in Paris. In 1913 he moved to the Balearic Islands and seems to have spent the rest of his career there. The important thing is his art, and here are some examples. Gallery Le Paon Blanc - 1904 Sonia - n.d. Granadina - n.d. Des nudo bajo a parra - 1909 Sibila - 1913 Pino de Formentor - n.d. Acantilado en Formentor - 1936 My first reaction is to call him a less-stylized version of Gustav Klimt. The paintings of the women don't suggest much in the way of psychological depth, something critics tend to consider important. Even so, I find Anglada's paintings fun to look at and wouldn't object if one magically appeared on a wall in our house. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 3, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments





Tuesday, July 29, 2008


A Dubious Yet Perhaps Provocative Comparison
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- As a cultureguy, I haven't been able to help being struck by something amidst all my low-carb readin'-and-research: the way the officially-endorsed low-fat gospel resembles the generally accepted view of the arts. It may work for a few, and it may have its theoretical appeal. But for the rest of us -- and on a day-to-day basis -- it may well be counterproductive, unhealthy, and perhaps even destructive. Interesting to learn that -- much like the conventional view of culture -- the low-fat gospel had its origins in the 1960s and 1970s. The idiotic Food Pyramid? That's something we owe to counterculture hero Sen. George McGovern. What to make of this? Semi-related: I made fun of what I called "the Arts Litany" back here; back here, I explained that our current conception of "literary fiction" is an artifact of the 1960s and 1970s. Here's one of my many bitch-fests about the New York Times Book Review and its bizarrely blinkered yet supposedly good-for-us vision of fiction. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 29, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Thursday, July 24, 2008


Foujita, the Serious Show-off
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Paris in the 1920s was crammed with artists. A few, such as Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Léger are still famous or at least well-known to art fans. Many never got much notoriety and are deeply buried in the footnotes of art history. Then there was a middle group whose members were fairly well known at the time but whose reputations since have fluctuated at best or, more often, slowly faded. How many of you have heard of Kees van Dongen (from the Netherlands), Moïse Kisling (Poland), Jules Pascin (Bulgaria) and a Japanese import who was usually called by his family name, Foujita (French spelling -- the English version is Fujita). All four expatriates were party animals. I first encountered them in this book, a photo-filled tour of the Paris art world of the first 30 years of the last century. The book uses famed model, singer (sort of), writer (an autobiography), painter (amateur) and art world personality (huge!!) Kiki (née Alice Prin) as its title's centerpiece even though she didn't arrive on the scene until the early 1920s and became artist-photographer Man Ray's muse and mistress. Furthermore, pages and pictures devoted to Kiki are a small share of the total. That's okay, because the rest of the cast is an amusing and often, eventually, tragic lot that I, at least, find fascinating. As for Foujita, we find him at Kiki's book-signing party (p. 189), And there's a spread (pp. 180-81) devoted to him. Photos include three of him and third wife "Youki" (née Lucie Badoud, who later married poet Robert Desnos), one a portrait, another a publicity shot in his studio and one of them on the beach at Deauville. Another Deauville photo has Foujita and famed musical hall star Mistinguette hugging. Yet another shows him with singer Suzy Solidor on a beach wearing beach costumes he designed and made. Finally, there's a photo of Foujita riding a mini-bicycle along a boardwalk. Page 175 shows him playing drum for a miniature-circus performance by Alexander Calder (of later mobile fame) in his (Foujita's) studio. There's another spread (pp. 150-51) with a photo of the building where his fancy studio was located, and another of Youki, the expensive Ballot automobile Foujita bought her with their Basque chauffeur. Other pictures are of Foutjna vacationing in the Pyrenees and of painting Anna de Noailles. Pages 130-31 have party group-photos that include Foujita. A third spread (pp. 100-101) deals with early days of the Foujita-Youki relationship. There's more, but you surely get the idea that Foujita was a publicity hound as well as a successful society painter during the Twenties. So I found it interesting to read this fairly recent biography of the man by Phyllis Birnbaum, who knows Japanese and has spent plenty of time in Japan. I haven't read other books about Foujita to give me a wider perspective, but Birnbaum's biography strikes me as being fair in that she presents opposing takes on him by Japanese... posted by Donald at July 24, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Sunday, July 20, 2008


More on Parking
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Does "free" parking come at too high a price? UCLA prof Donald Shoup thinks that we have our priorities -- and our pricing schemes -- all wrong. "I don't see why people should have to pay market rents to live in a neighborhood, but the cars should live rent free," he says. Watch an interview with Shoup here. Listen to one here. Here's Shoup's book about parking. I wrote about how well-done parking arrangements can help bring a downtown back to life back here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 20, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Saturday, July 19, 2008


Mystery Painting Identified
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few days ago I wrote a posting lamenting that I'd noticed an interesting print that I couldn't identify and pleaded for help from our art-savvy readership. Lo and behold, reader S. D'Arbanville came through (see the posting's comments) ... many thanks! The painting is Fin de Souper by Jules-Alexandre Grün, (1868-1934?) dated 1913. (In my posting I suggested that it was done between 1912 and 1920, so I got that bit right. On the other hand, I privately guessed that it might be by an English artist, missing the target on that point.) For information on Grün, I strongly suggest you click here; the link contains a lot of information about this comparatively unknown artist. It also claims to identify his self portrait in the painting as well as images of his wife and fellow poster-artist Jules Chéret. Here are examples of Grün's work: Gallery Fin de Souper in the light intensity of the reproduction I saw. Here is a lighter version. I prefer the dark one. Vendredi su Salon des Artistes Français - 1911 A Group of Artists - 1929 Poster, 1903. Poster, no date, but probably 1900-07. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 19, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, July 14, 2008


Modern Classicist
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Meet Scottish classical sculptor Alexander Stoddart. Not having seen any of his work in the flesh, I don't really know how I feel about it. I do know, though, that I'm very glad that he's out there doing his impressive best to create persuasive classical sculpture in the modern world. A sentence from the article struck me especially hard. When Stoddart was an art student in the '70s, practising his representational art, "graffiti in the lavatories labelled him as a fascist because he refused to veer from the figurative path." Ah, yes, those liberal and open-minded art students. Here's Alexander Stoddart's website. Completely unrelated: Diana Rigg, who turns 70 this month, still smokes, drinks, and drives a sports car. Diana's daughter Rachael Stirling is also an actress, and looks a bit like her mum. Here's a visit with Rachael. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 14, 2008 | perma-link | (7) comments





Sunday, July 13, 2008


Mystery Painting
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- We were visiting Spokane and northern Idaho last week, lodging at the Holiday Inn Express in Spokane Valley. In the lobby were a number of framed prints, including the one below. Sorry about the poor quality, but the lighting was bad when I snapped it and I tried to digitally enhance the image as best I could. Mystery painting: Title and artist, please. The scene is of a bunch of rich old gents and sweet young things around a brightly lit table. All are well dressed and seem to be having a swell time chatting things up. From the women's fashions and hairdos, I'd peg the date sometime between 1912 and 1920. Few critics would consider it a great work of art. However, I found it quite interesting to look at because it attracts and holds one's attention (if one is interested in people, at any rate). It also interested me because it seems skillfully done. For instance, note that the girl on the left is illuminated by two light sources: the yellow table lighting and a daylight source to the left of the scene. The figures are believably posed and nicely drawn. Nothing profound here. No irony or social commentary other than perhaps the age contrast between the sexes and whatever that might suggest. One might consider it a Great War era version of a Watteau. My biggest problems with it are that I have no idea what the title is and I don't know the name of the painter. Frustrating, because I'm really curious. Do any of you recognize it? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 13, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments





Sunday, July 6, 2008


Shoot First, Paint Later
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I recently bought two books that happened to have a common sub-topic. They are: Richard Estes Jack Vettriano: Studio Life That topic is use of reference photography by painters. This is something purists have been declaring for years to be Avoided At All Cost, lest the artist be shunned (or some other dire fate). What you're supposed to do is hire models if you're painting people or gather up a bunch of equipment and supplies and head to the countryside and do the plein-air thing. Painters of a practical bent shrugged off the guilt-trip long ago. Edgar Degas is known to have been a photography fan. Alphonse Mucha routinely took reference photos of models. There are books about him that include his reference shots along with the finished art. This book is a collection of his photos. Illustrators tended to use reference photography extensively. This is partly to save expenses on model posing time -- an hour or so before the camera is a lot less costly than a day in front of an easel. Norman Rockwell, for example, used live models early in his career but later usually worked from photos. John La Gatta, on the other hand, preferred a model before his easel. The Richard Estes book cited above includes a partial transcription of a 1977 interview in which he holds forth on art (he doesn't much like Modernism) and the use of photography. (Note: The book is bi-lingual Spanish and English, so isn't as meaty at its 190-ish page count might imply.) Estes really has no choice but to work form photos because his depictions are mostly of transient conditions. He shoots lots and lots of photos and will return to the scene later to get more pictures if the first shoot was inadequate. He seldom or never works from a single reference photo, instead combining parts from several. One reason for this is photographic exposure: Most photos are exposed for a sunlit subject or a shady subject, and a scene combining both adequately on one image is hard to get. But his paintings usually demand both convincing lighted and shady areas, so different reference photos are needed. Vettriano is self-taught, initially working from stock photos in how-to-paint books or pictures from magazines and other convenient sources. He continues to rely exclusively on reference photos, most of which he takes himself. Although he can easily afford model fees, he doesn't like to paint from life because it makes him nervous, he claims. A shy man, he gladly switched from film to digital imaging because he felt embarrassed dropping off film rolls filled with images partly undressed women at the local Boots store (Boots is England's large drugstore chain). He saves some money by using himself as the model for male figures in his paintings. As for female models, he says he prefers older (say, mid-30s) women to younger ones because they show more character. He also admits to the occasional affair... posted by Donald at July 6, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, June 28, 2008


An Astonishing Art Rediscovery
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Revolution continues to shake the art world. Well into the process of being overturned are the reputations of hegemonist white males whose corporeal forms long since flatlined to room temperature (or to express the thought more crudely, died). May maggots feast on their canvasses as well as their carcasses! We have come far, my friends. The atrophying of Abstract Expressionist painting (mere wall-decorations lacking any semblance to irony, intellectual content or political meaning) opened doors to bold new artistic concepts. First Pop Art. Then Op Art. Minimalism. Earth. Performance. Conceptual. Neo-Dada. Installation. The parade of our triumphs seems endless. Best of all, I now have the extreme pleasure of announcing the latest breakthrough in the war to stamp out that vile oppression known as Western Culture. Behold: Anthropomorphic Art!! His Station and Four Aces - C.M. Coolidge, 1903 This discovery -- in fact, a shatteringly important re-discovery -- is the body of work by the too-long obscure artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge who we have every hope was no relation of the foul, heartless Calvin of the same last name. His genre has been known as Dogs Playing Poker, but an effort is hereby underway to devise and popularize a more politically relevant label for this landmark series of paintings. The second link indicates that a pair of Coolidge's series were auctioned together for a sum greater than half a million dollars. Clearly, even the market (I spit on its name) has begun to recognize Anthropomorphic Art. Allow me to analyze the painting so that you may better understand how it will reshape the world of art. The use of anthropomorphic dogs is appropriate since the shared DNA of canines and humans is a very high percentage of each species' total. Indeed, this is the prime thrust of Anthropomorphic Art: driving home to viewers that human hubris is the acting-out of a profoundly unjustifiable genetic delusion. Its salient defect is the fact that all the subjects depicted are wearing male clothing. Grudging allowance should be made in consideration of the date of its completion; presumably, future Anthropomorphic Art will redress this grave imbalance. On the other hand, the possibility that one of the subjects is in fact transgendered cannot be entirely ruled out -- consider the standing figure grasping the umbrella, for example. Another defect is that three subjects are shown with pipes in their mouths. Since no actual smoke is seen, they clearly are not smoking. Nevertheless, the presence of the pipes is disturbing in a non-ironic way. Although the dress of the card players appears bourgeois, the game itself is proletarian (note especially that the playing-table is colored red). This presents us an ironic commentary on the imagery of self-presentation in a society shot through with falsehoods within falsehoods. Of special note is the authority-figure of the train conductor. His blue costume is in striking contrast to the ochres and browns of the others. His hat is clearly a képi of a design... posted by Donald at June 28, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Monday, June 23, 2008


A Perl of a Critique
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Arts & Letters Daily directed me to this article by Jed Perl, art critic of The New Republic, in which he lashes out at some new museums and big-name Postmodern artists. Among many other things, he mentions that: I wish more museum directors and trustees understood how hungry--and how disgruntled--museumgoers in America really are. Again and again, people are pointed in precisely the wrong direction. It is depressing to think how many people have visited LACMA in recent months to see BCAM without sparing a minute for the Ahmanson Building. They literally do not know what they are missing. From Los Angeles I went up to San Francisco, and it is more or less the same story. Everybody rushes to the Museum of Modern Art and the De Young, two overblown buildings with sporadically important collections, while the most beautiful museum in the city--the Legion of Honor, in which masterpieces by Watteau, Le Nain, and Seurat have been given a thrillingly elegant installation- -is hardly ever mentioned. It's my fault that I don't know if the assault is typical of Perl's criticism. I recently read his book New Art City, a sympathetic, if heavily padded, account of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. But that was it, until now. I simply assumed that he was in the tank for Modernism in all its forms. Clearly I need to pay him more serious attention, because his anti-establishment attack takes a certain amount of guts for a professional critic. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 23, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Sunday, June 22, 2008


Impressionism's Inspirations
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It started in Denver, went to Atlanta and is now completing its run in Seattle. It's the exhibit titled "Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past." The Seattle Art Museum page describing it is here. From what I read, Impressionism is a hot box office item for art museums. So the trick is to devise new ways of packaging the paintings. The current show uses what I consider an under-recognized fact as its hook: Impressionism wasn't created out of thin air. That's the good bit. The not-so-good bit is that the effort was feeble. That said, it's only fair to recognize that assembling an exhibition from many different collections is not easy. I've never tried it, but I can easily image that it's a murderous process where frustration piles upon frustration. An example is the following juxtaposition SAM used to publicize the show. Lady in Fur Wrap - El Greco - 1577-80 Portrait of Isabelle Lemonnier - Éduard Manet - c.1879 Ann Dumas, of the Royal Academy of Arts, London and co-curator of the exhibit, mentioned in a talk to museum members that she really wanted to pair the Greco with a copy made by one of the Impressionists. The copy would not be lent, so she had to make do with a Manet painting that at least had a woman wearing a fur as its subject. The most unusual part of the show contained a number of drawn and painted copies of art in the Louvre by several Impressionists when they were young and learning their craft. An exception was a semi-copy by Berthe Morisot done when she was a mature artist. The point the curators were trying to make was that most Impressionists respected earlier art and didn't reject it utterly. The exhibit's force dwindled rapidly in other galleries where thematic juxtapositions with (mostly) 17th and 18th century paintings were placed. The themes included landscapes, nudes and children -- common grist for painters before and since the Impressionists. In other words, no big deal. To me the key painting of the show was this: A Young Woman Reading - Jean-Honoré Fragonard - 1776 Its significance was was largely ignored in the little plaque next to it, though it might have been featured in the recording doohickey some viewers opt to cart around. This Fragonard has to be seen in person. The various reproductions of it in the museum store (posters, postcards, the exhibit catalog, etc.) as well as the one shown above don't capture the color of the original. The red-orange areas on the subject's face are much stronger than what you see here. The cool areas of the face are a strong greenish-blue. The brushwork is bold. Even though one might call it proto-Fauve given its coloration, it's probably closer to Impressionism. Lacking are broken color and short brush strokes that Monet and Pissaro might have used. Hell -- it's practically an Impressionist work done a century early.... posted by Donald at June 22, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, June 20, 2008


Politically Incorrect Ornamentation?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The message "function good, ornament bad" is the best distillation I can come up with from my experience in architecture classes I took in the late 1950s. Time has passed, obviously, and Postmodernism marked the entry of the nose of the ornamentation camel into the tent of pure, Modernist architecture. Needless to say, architects trained circa when I was in school were unhappy with that development and controversy has continued till this day. I was glancing at the Harvard Design Magazine last week at the local Barned & Noble and stumbled on this article by Robert Levit titled "Contemporary Ornament: The Return of the Symbolic Repressed" that deals with this book: "The Function of Ornament" by Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo. I later located a copy of the book and skimmed it, but didn't buy it because, since I retired, my book-buying budget has taken a serious hit. I mention this because it means that I can't give an evaluation of Levin's take on the book. But that doesn't really matter. Whether the thoughts are from Levin or Moussavi or Kubo, a line of reasoning interested me. Here are some carefully cherry-picked quotes from Levin: If one may take The Function of Ornament as an indicator of an important vein of sentiment in the architectural community, it names ornament, welcomes it back, as it were, but only on condition: ornament must function. Ornament may be back, but only by putting behind what gave it its past notoriety: its position outside of instrumental need, which is to say, its openly symbolic nature. ... As Moussavi and Kubo make evident in their title, they will resurrect ornament on a functional foundation. The control of light and the assembly of walls, structural skeletons, light-diffusing walls and ceilings, are instrumental bases for exercises in pattern-making. Now rooted in function, questions of a purely symbolic or formal motivation can be put aside. With this move, a foundational polarity in Modernist architecture seems to dissolve—its distinction between substantive categories of material, structure, and space on the one hand, and ornament on the other. Moussavi expresses concern about the communicative goals of Postmodernist architecture with its applied ornament. Citing the pluralist nature of contemporary society, she doubts that a coherent system of signs capable of communicating with architecture’s varied publics can be made. ... Ornament does not pose a problem for our moment because it is superficial, added to the surface of buildings (as if after more important matters). It is a problem because, more explicitly than questions of type, structure, building arrangement, room distribution, and volume (all more readily seen as producing our sheltering environments), ornament remains more stubbornly a symbolic substance. ... So what is wrong with symbolic form? In Moussavi’s view, it cannot speak to today’s plural publics for whom the symbolic can only be opaque. ... Symbolic form requires levels of cultural familiarity (an erudition of sorts). Its limited legibility makes it undemocratic. (This is implicit in... posted by Donald at June 20, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments




Creativity Goes Amok Once Again
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Stuart Buck gives a convincing thumb's down to a proposed new piece of "blobitecture" in Prague. Though it doesn't qualify as blobitecture, Will Alsop's new arts center for West Bromwich is equally preening and silly. Has anyone else noticed that public funding is involved in both these projects? A century ago the buildings that governments erected were often sturdy beauties. Today they're often offenses. What changed? An a propos quote comes from the great Leon Krier: "As is the case with all good things in life -- love, good manners, language, cooking -- personal creativity is required only rarely." Best, Michael UDPATE: Rick Darby has a fun, smart and eloquent go at a current Chicago project. Is "monstrosity" too strong a description for it? How about "kinky dildo"?... posted by Michael at June 20, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Wednesday, June 18, 2008


Art in America
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I struggled to come up with a apt, succinct title to this note, but had to leave to catch the preview showing of an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. So I simply used Art in America, the name of an art magazine where "Art & Politics" is the theme of its current issue. Its puny web site includes the following contents list for the issue. In Times of Trouble – some recent films and videos provide a wide-angled look at a world of violence. Collateral Damage – in a gripping new monument, Siah Armajani traces parallels between the attacks on Fallujah and on Guernica. Global Warnings – the icecaps are melting, storms are increasing, species are dwindling. Several exhibitions ask, how can art help? Talking Politics 2008 – six artists whose work courts controversy exchange ideas about the common ground between politics and art. Rules of Engagement – a number of artists reexamine the evidence on documentary photography’s truth value. Written in Stone – using salvaged blocks, Michal Rovner assembled an imposing testament to the possibility of cooperation in the Mideast. Handforth’s Fallen Angels – Milton’s Paradise Lost, along with recent malfeasance and loss, frames Mark Handforth’s new work. Sticking It – a 40-year survey of Judith Bernstein’s drawings showcased her signature image: a phallus that’s also a very big screw. Front Page – the latest news and notes from around the art world. Based on this evidence, I suspect a fall issue will be devoted to Barak Obama campaign posters designed by artists ranging from students to jet-setters. Art in America claims to be "The World's Premier Art Magazine" (see link). Wait a minute. Art in America as The World's Premier Art Magazine? Filthy imperialists. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 18, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Monday, June 9, 2008


Heterodox Thinking on Architecture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is Leon Krier as great an architecture-and-urbanism thinker as Jane Jacobs was? Since I suspect that he may be, it's nice to see that Roger Scruton does too. If you've ever rolled your eyes in exasperation when reading a conventional piece of architecture history or criticism, Scruton's essay should come as a relief and a blessing. It's a great introduction to a way of seeing and experiencing architecture-and-urbanism that's helpful, down-to-earth, poetic, and moving. Here's a review of Krier's best-known book. Here's a long q&a with Roger Scruton. I wrote an intro to Jane Jacobs back here. In related news: Lakis Polycarpou conducts a discussion with James Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros: Part One, Part Two. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 9, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, May 31, 2008


A Gehry Monument to Himself for NYC
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Gil Roth at Virtual Memories called my attention to this article in today's New York Times about a Frank Gehry skyscraper under construction in Lower Manhattan. It includes a school on the first few floors. And is located in the Brooklyn Bridge approaches / City Hall area, according to the article by Times architectural writer Nicolai Ouroussoff. Even better, it will be a modest 76 stories tall and have a wavy, Expressionist exterior. But best of all, Just as important, the design suggests that the city is slowly if hesitantly recovering from the trauma of 9/11. Only a few years ago, as plans were readied for a bunkerlike Freedom Tower downtown, it seemed as if the Manhattan skyline would be marred by jingoism and fear. ... Mr. Gehry’s tower, by contrast, harks back to the euphoric aspirations of an earlier age without succumbing to nostalgia ... it signals that the city is finally emerging from a long period of creative exhaustion. ... A lesser architect might have spoiled one of the most fabled views in the Manhattan skyline. Instead Mr. Gehry has designed a landmark that will hold its own against the greatest skyscrapers of New York. It may even surpass them. Once again "creativity" trumps quality. Well, hmm. In fairness, I suppose we should wait until the thing is completed before we concur with Ouroussoff's implied contention that Gehry is The Second Coming of Raymond Hood. And as Michael Blowhard likes to remind us, we'll have the next 80 years or so to do that evaluation. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 31, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, May 29, 2008


Sensationally Traditional
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is the imbalance between Modernist and more traditional painting in the process of being redressed? I wish. Since any such redressment will probably be a long-term process, it's too soon to tell. Too soon for me, anyway. Nevertheless, I can grasp at straws as well as the next person. The most recent straw in the wind is Juliette Aristides' latest book Classical Painting Atelier. (She previously wrote a book about drawing that also can be found in bookstores or ordered via Amazon.) Aristides, according to the cover flap bio, trained on the East Coast and now is an instructor here in Seattle at the Gage Academy of Art. I am greatly embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of the Gage until I read that snippet. Seeking atonement as well as trying to satisfy curiosity, I did a little Mapquesting and hopped into my trusty Chrysler to find the joint. And voila! It is housed in a former girls school on the grounds of St. Mark's Episcopal cathedral on Capitol Hill. According to their Web page, evening drawing sessions are available; I'd be tempted to sign up, but I travel too much to get my money's worth. Back to the book. It contains much useful information and serious art students should read it because Aristides knows (and demonstrates by her own painting) what she's talking about. For me, the highlights were the illustrations. Besides the Usual Suspects such as Rembrandt, Hals, Velázquez and Vermeer, she includes fine paintings by more recent artists including Cecelia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, William Bouguereau and Albert Handerson Thayer. And, related to the matter of a potential return to traditional painting, Aristides included works by living artists, some of whom who are established such as Andrew Wyeth and Odd Nerdrum, and others who are early in their careers. Here are some examples I grabbed off the Internet. The ones farther down might be dicey if you are at work, so use caution. Of course you can justify viewing them because, after all, they are Art. Gallery Transparent and Solid by Gary Faigin, 2000 Let's start off with two still-life paintings. The objects and eye-level viewpoint are contemporary, but the handling is Academic. Interesting mix. Mertz No. 11 by John Morra, 2006 Okay, this one wasn't in the book. I couldn't find an image of Mertz No. 2 on the Web, so this will have to do. Similar to what Faigin was attempting. Corner Window 2 by Daniel Sprick, 2001 A still life with a whiff of landscape. Plus a dab of Surrealism; it looks like those tulips are suspended in thin air. Flora by Nelson Shanks, 1994 Apologies for the small size -- it rated a full page in the book. What fascinates me is the light source that shines upwards at about a 60 degree angle from the horizontal and its effects on the subject. Carolina by Jacob Collins, 2006 I think this is Collins' best painting... posted by Donald at May 29, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Sunday, May 25, 2008


Mickey D on Steroids
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some readers in the gray-or-dyed-hair demographic might remember the early McDonald's stands. The ones with golden arches bracketing a service counter, kitchen and storage area; there was no indoor seating. Some new McDonald's buildings have retro'd (howzzat for verbing a noun, folks) the bracketing arch style. But what I've noticed here and there was nothing compared to the McDonald's near our hotel in Chicago, just north of the river. Behold: Gallery Here's the set-up. Large parking lot, drive-thru, large but otherwise pretty conventional first floor as hamburger stand. It's the upper floor where things get interesting. Not shown is the coffee house cum gelato bar service counter. This shot gives a general idea as to what's there otherwise. Next, some details. Here are some of the booths. The large windows and second-floor location and viewpoint are about all that's different from ordinary McDonald's. This is one of the lounge areas. Nice furniture. Even nicer furniture. Those Barcelona Chairs don't come cheap. So what are you waiting for? No more sneaking into McDonald's or making excuses to spouses, friends or co-workers. At last, a place where you can have a Big Mac and power meeting at the same time. If you happen to be in Chcago, that is. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 25, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Thursday, May 22, 2008


Surrealistic Dreaming
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Throughout recorded history some people have considered dreams to be really important. They would be a source of messages from God or perhaps were a mechanism for foretelling the future. More recently, they have been considered a window to deep aspects of one's personality. When I was in grad school I once stopped by the medical school library for a reason I no longer remember. Wandering along shelves carrying recent editions of journals, I happened to pause and look at the table of contents of a psychoanalytic journal. One of the articles was about Umbrella Symbolism in dreams. I gave the piece a quick scan and noticed that this contribution to science was based on three cases! Which is one of many reasons why I never took Freud very seriously. My own dreams are usually pretty ordinary. I seldom even dream about things that are current in my waking hours -- even important or stressful things. If Freud had analyzed my dreams, Psychoanalysis might never have been born. But I'm an arts buff (it sez so on the panel to the left), so what about connections between dreams and painting, say? Hmm. [Scratches head] Why of course! Surrealism! Some Surrealists bought into Freudianism (or claimed to do so). They supposedly painted what they had dreamed. The best known Surrealist of this school was Salvador Dalí who depicted drooping watches, people with window-like holes cut through them, ants crawling over stuff -- all sorts of weird scenes that were supposedly dream-driven. Other Surrealists painted other strange scenes. I have never dreamed anything like Surrealist dream-scenes. Things in my dreams are realistic even if they are not representing objects in my waking world. For example, a couple of times a year I dream about being back at my frat house. I might be younger or my actual age, but not an undergraduate -- the details don't matter here and I can't recall them in any case. Sometimes Greek Row and the frat house are as they are in reality. Other times its architecture has been altered as the result of a renovation. Sometimes Greek Row has changed somewhat; buildings are different, locations of houses might have changed a little. But the architecture and other setting details are entirely plausible. Nothing is weird. Cynical me, I've never been convinced that dream-painting Surrealists painted actual dreams. I think they simply came up with stuff that made for good public relations to entice buyers. Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I'm a dullard who's lacking in the imaginative dream department. Will anyone out there step forward in Comments and admit that they actually dream stuff like Surrealists painted? Comments by folks who only dream about ordinary things are also welcome. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 22, 2008 | perma-link | (8) comments





Sunday, May 18, 2008


Notre Dame Gothic
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Last fall I wrote about how the University of Washington dealt with the problem of Collegiate Gothic in the modernist era. My review was mixed. Yesterday I was in South Bend, Indiana and finally broke the inertia of driving south on the main drag to check out the Notre Dame University campus. It happened to be graduation day, but we were able to find parking and walked from the lot to the golden dome and back. Here are some of the buildings I saw: Gallery Yep, this seems to be the right place. Our Lady is to the left, and the dome to the right. Let's start at the dome and work back. This is the Main Building with the dome on top. It's the center of the campus and likely one of the first buildings built. Most colleges start small, with an Old Main or somesuch that initially housed everything. Here, the Main Building sets the campus tone in terms of brickwork (though it's slightly more yellow), if not in architecture. Some of the nearby buildings -- also a century or more old -- are Romanesque in flavor. Then the shift was made to a simplified Collegiate Gothic. I'll leave it to Notre Dame savvy readers to tell us when these were built. If I correlated correctly with my campus map, this is Alumni Hall. Note the color of the bricks and the green-gray slate roof: these are examples of the two main unifying elements. Not all is traditional. This is the Hesburgh Center for International Studies. It's Post-Modern in that it acknowledges its architectural environment. Could be better, could be worse than it is. The Center For Continuing Education is stark. So are many other buildings that are, unlike this one, away from the Notre Dame Avenue axis. Coloration ties it to the rest of campus, but it's out of place nevertheless, given its location. New construction just off the axis, and it looks like it will have a Gothic theme of sorts. Across Notre Dame Avenue from the Hesburgh is the Alumni Association Building which is simplified Collegiate Gothic. Behind it is the bookstore which contains the largest "logo" shop I've ever seen on a college campus. Apparently Notre Dame, besides having "subway alumni" also has "Boeing alumni." [Translation: In the glory days of Irish football, ND had lots of Catholic fans who never attended college. By "Boeing," I refer to the ease of transportation allowing alums and others to get to South Bend and scoop up sweatshirts, baseball caps, beer mugs, et cetera.] Finally, near the main entrance to campus is the DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts, a massive building that does a nice job of maintaining the architectural theme despite its bulk. Notre Dame strikes me as being far more successful than the University of Washington in maintaining a unified campus "look." Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the Fighting Irish have a School of... posted by Donald at May 18, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, May 15, 2008


Peak Oil, Simmons, Kunstler
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Those curious about the Peak Oil theory but perhaps a little tired of James Kunstler may enjoy this interview with investment banker, conservative dude, and Peak Oil believer Matthew Simmons. It would be hard to turn up a clearer, more concise presentation of the thesis than this one. If you haven't had your fill of Kunstler, here's an interview in which he brings together nearly all his themes. One especially nice passage: The ideas issuing from the highest circles of architectural education today are patent absurdities, such as the idea that novelty ought to trump the public interest, or the idea that ‘creativity’ (so-called) is a superior method than the emulation of forms that have already proven successful (meaning problems already solved). Personally, I view some of the leading architects of our time as being among the wickedest people in the world ... The record of their ideology in the cities and towns of America is there for anyone to see: abandonment, ruin, and the dishonour of the public realm. I know less than nothing about Peak Oil. But where Kunstler's evaluation of the high-end architecture establishment and its work goes, I'm with him all the way. Best, Michael UPDATE: Thanks to BIOH, who points out a blog that takes quite a different view of Peak Oil.... posted by Michael at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, May 13, 2008


Glass Staircases
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to visitor Bryan for pointing out this NYTimes article about the current fashion for glass staircases. Funny comment from Bryan: "Glass, glass, glass. You would think it's this mysterious brand-new material, architects love it so much." Please, can someone commission a nature-or-nurture study of modernistic architects? Is the tendency to worship transparency and geometry something that some people are born with? Or are they brainwashed into their fascination with it? Small point: Given that pre-modernist and non-modernistic architects aren't mesmerized by abstraction to anything like the extent that the modernistic crowd is, this can't have to do with architects and architecture per se. After all, some architects -- not the kind who get tons of coverage from the likes of the NYTimes, alas -- are actually concerned with such values as shelter, social life, solidity, and even coziness. Visit John Massengale and Katie Hutchison for glimpses of a world the NYTimes will tell you very little about. Gotta love this quote from Rick Mather, the architect who created the glass staircase featured in the Times' story: “I like the ambiguity of it, I like that it brings in light, and I like that it disappears,†Mr. Mather said. “I like to not show how it’s supported.†Yup, that's what we want our architects doing: not creating satisfying and solid spaces and structures, but dissolving our structures around us. At his website, Rick Mather shows off a lot of flat planes, geometry, glowiness, crisp edges, and glass. Mather shows off little but that, it seems to me ... But, heck, well, at least his clients know what they're in for. God, but it must be exciting for architects to imagine themselves to be not just humble service-people doing their modest best to contribute a little to our shared quality of life, but instead to picture themselves as gurus, philosophers, and experimental scientists. Let's rescue humanity from tradition, from brick, even from rooms (modernistic architects prefer "spaces" to "rooms") -- from any familiar sense of how we're being sheltered! Too bad about those people who are terrified by the experience of, say, glass staircases ... But (as always) sacrifices need to be made so that the "liberation" process can move forward. Bryan's note reminded me of some vidclips I'd collected of the glassy insides of one of NYCity's Apple Stores. So I threw them together and hit iMovie '08's "Upload to YouTube" button. Here's my latest production, already viewed by 12 discerning and fortunate viewers, I see: Not a complete surprise to learn that Mr. iPod is a transparency buff himself, is it? I wonder if someone might want to suggest to Steve Jobs that the values that make for a nice computer or music player might not be the ones that are appropriate for buildings. In any case: Some people sure have weird tastes in architectural thrills. Too bad so many of them are architects. Modernistic architects: Preening zombies we need to learn to... posted by Michael at May 13, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Friday, May 9, 2008


Responding to Thursday
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- On an interesting thread over at GNXP, Thursday issued a challenge. I'd been goofing around, writing that "novels themselves were quite disreputable at the outset -- the reality TV and tabloid-TV of their day. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that some novelists started putting on airs." Here's Thursday: Bullshit. No less a "serious" personage than Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a novel and a very good one too. Novelists like Richardson, Fielding, and Burney were considered serious writers right from the beginning. Haven't you read Boswell's life of Johnson. I have a hard time believing Jane Austen didn't take her meticulously planned and written books as high art. Tom Jones is planned to classical perfection. Critics like Hazlitt and Coleridge took the novelists like Richardson, Smollett, Sterne and Fielding seriously right from the start. Stop trying to rewrite literary history as if no-one had any clue what was high art and what wasn't. OK then: Time to get serious myself. Here's my response to Thursday: You're making a basic mistake. You're projecting current-day critical rankings back onto past eras. You're assuming that what we now consider great was self-evidently Great at the time. No. Look, what a work's reputation is today often has zip to do with how it was taken (and what it represented) when it was produced. What we now consider great was often taken for granted at the time, or looked-down-on. Defoe's novels are just one example. At the time they were published they weren't taken to be novels in our current sense. They were made-up fantasies that pretended to be works of reportage -- in other words, they were aesthetically and morally dubious productions akin to today's scandal sheets and reality TV, or maybe even to those books that turn up every few years about alien encounters in Australia. It took more than a century before many people started wondering if maybe "Robinson Crusoe" wasn't a pretty good novel. Works often become "literature" in hindsight, not at the time of their production. No matter how great we recognize "Tom Jones" to be today -- and I'm a big fan myself -- the early British novel was a scrappy and aesthetically scorned form, far more akin in its time to what journalism and TV are these days than to today's "literary fiction." The early English novel was a middle-class market phenomenon, not a serious or intellectual or literary one. We've learned to see structure, complexity, grandeur, and depth in these books only in retrospect. From Wikipedia's "literature" entry: "Early novels in Europe did not, at the time, count as significant literature, perhaps because 'mere' prose writing seemed easy and unimportant." From an online resource about Jane Austen: "In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash ... In Jane Austen's day, novels actually had something of the same reputation that mass-market romances do today." No matter what your opinion of Austen's books these days, and no... posted by Michael at May 9, 2008 | perma-link | (16) comments





Thursday, May 8, 2008


Julian's Place
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- PatrickH and Benjamin Hemric are raving about the new place that painter / filmmaker Julian Schnabel has created in New York City's West Village. Thanks to Benjamin for turning up this page of info and pix. I haven't visited yet, but from the photos Schnabel's place looks like overripe decadent boho bliss of a very high order. (FWIW, I don't care for Schnabel's paintings, which I find bombastic and silly. But I think he's a very talented filmmaker. Start with his biopic "Basquiat," which features a great performance by Jeffrey Wright, and which does a peerless job of conveying the intoxicating / nightmarish quality that life in the NYC visual-arts world can have.) One non-fan has this to say about Schnabel's new place, though: "He's obviously trying to pretend that this looks somehow Florentine or Venetian, when, really, it looks like a Malibu Barbie house that exploded." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 8, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, May 7, 2008


Steve on Art
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Steve is asking all kinds of Sailer-esque, so-basic-they're-dangerous questions about art and art history. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 7, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments




The Human Touch
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A little fun with comparing-and-contrasting. In our first pairing, the theme is outlines and shapes. The top building, the traditional one: Check out the variety and quantity of shapes. Trace the outline of the building with your finger -- takes some concentration and time, no? Incidentally: You may or may not know the names and histories of all the architectural elements playing roles in this composition. It really doesn't matter, unless you're (shudder) a scholar or a pedant. The important thing is to sense that they're embedded in western art history. And how is it possible not to do that? The bottom cluster of modernist buildings: a buncha shoeboxes covered with graph paper. One of them has been given a twist -- that's what too-often qualifies as "architectural creativity" these days. Trace these outlines with a finger -- it's fast, easy, and majorly boring. We're in a world of simple geometry and dumb abstraction, in other words, with no connection to anything of substance or depth, especially pre-1900 western art history. An analogy. Traditional architecture is to modernist architecture as traditional handmade art is to Adobe Illustrator images. In a handmade image ... ... you feel the presence of a person. There's subtlety, texture, depth. In many Adobe Illutrator images ... Well, they certainly pop. This image is what people in the media biz might call "a quick read" -- it's all edges, planes, gradient fills, and color swatches. But -- despite the whirliness and effects -- one glance at this image and you're done with it. Like the modernist buildings in the photo above, the Illustrator image has all the personality and lovableness of a bureaucracy. (Small aside: Doesn't it often seem that everything in our culture is doing its best to turn into spinning TV graphics?) Our next theme is color, scale, and texture: Top image: Warm colors. A structure that relates to your scale as a physical being, and that coexists easily with nature. Imagine reaching out and touching the stucco, the red tiles of the roof, the canvas of the awnings (awnings are architecture too): Nubbliness, weight, age ... It all makes me want to settle in, sip wine, and enjoy the day. Bottom image: So far as colors go, it's all neutrals. So far as scale goes: a kind of ballooning overwhelmingness. Put a tree in the midst of that scene and it'd look pathetic -- this world is a completely paved-over one. As for the materials ... Well, imagine reaching out and giving these surfaces a touch: slick and cold glass and metal; post-industrial surfaces made of god only knows what. To me, the scene resembles a loading dock full of computers and keyboards cast off by giants. It's one of the last places where I'd be tempted to take my ease. Hey, another analogy: The adobe-and-red-tile-roof building is like this pot: unmistakably hand-made, and redolent of character and culture. (In the case of this pot, Native American.)... posted by Michael at May 7, 2008 | perma-link | (17) comments





Thursday, May 1, 2008


Diebenkorn, Dubrow
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of art shows I visited recently were rewarding not just because of the excellent art but because of some unexpected connections. The first was "Diebenkorn in New Mexico." Are you familiar with Richard Diebenkorn? His reputation goes in and out of fashion, at least here in New York, and I've lost track of what kind of esteem he's currently held in. He was born in 1922 and died in 1993, and spent most of his life in California. He was known for his figurative painting and for his abstracts, and also for the unself-conscious way he moved back and forth between representationalism and abstraction. His figurative pix are easy to read in abstract terms; his abstract pictures seem far more grounded in real-life perception (of landscape especially) than most abstracts are. His "Ocean Park" series, which he began painting in the late '60s, is probably has best-known work. As far as this show went: Using G.I. Bill money -- the history of the impact of the G.I. Bill on American art really needs to be written -- Diebenkorn studied at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque from 1950 to 1952. He was then in his late 20s. This was a show of drawings and paintings he did during those couple of years. These are images made, in other words, before he became a known quantity. I loved the show, which I found it refreshing, and pleasingly visual. No conceptual hijinks here, thank god. Thank god too that this wasn't high-period, magesterial, masterly art, purified by vision and tempered by experience -- I wasn't in the mood for any of that. No, in these drawings and paintings there were lots of stray ends, and even bits of undigested corniness. But that was perfectly fine with me: This was a show of the work of a talented young man, and much of the fun of it was enjoying Diebenkorn's youth, his energy, his adventurousness, and his sometimes goofy experiments. He was having fun himself, blundering eagerly from one idea to the next. Diebenkorn apparently loved the desert -- the Indian glyphs, the dazzling light, the muddy / tawny colors. He also, at this time, loved George Herriman's comic strip "Krazy Kat," and he'd recently studied with another fave of mine, the Bay Area Figurative painter David Park. The images Diebenkorn made in New Mexico are a jumble of all this and more. They aren't theoretical, they aren't just about "the paint." They're doodly, blotchy, sometimes rhapsodic / sometimes silly catch-alls, made from lived experience and visual awareness. This is what's on my mind; this is what's in my eyes. Personally speaking, what I tend to enjoy most about Diebenkorn is his lightness, his perceptiveness, and his quickness. He often used oil paint (generally a time-and-effort-intensive medium), he sometimes painted on a large scale, and he was certainly influenced by such backache-inducing modernists as Clyfford Still and Willem De Kooning. But Diebenkorn's paintings have... posted by Michael at May 1, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments




A Couple of Architecture Links
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Catesby Leigh thinks the New Urbanists should stop arguing about buzzwords. * Andrew Cusack celebrates a new building designed to fit in, not stand out. That's what 99% of buildings should set out to do, it seems to me. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 1, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, April 29, 2008


Icon World
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Before the first Macintosh went on sale in 1984, I don't think I'd ever heard the word "icon" used to describe a stick-figure "graphical" visual before. Come to think of it, I don't think I'd ever heard the word "graphical" before either. But all of a sudden it seemed that everyone had an opinion about "graphical interfaces." Here's a shot of the original Mac 128k screen: It seemed a like foreign (if appealing) universe. Outlines? Impersonal lines? Hyper-simplification? Pictographs? It seemed more like ancient Egypt than modern America. In America circa 1980 you might occasionally run across schematic drawings by engineers and architects: Those male and female outline-drawings that pointed you to men's and women's toilets were a staple of international airports. But -- strange though it can seem today -- the arrival of pictographs seemed pretty damned exotic. The world simply hadn't been heavily decorated and punctuated with hyper-simplified symbolic line images. These days, by contrast, it can seem as though icons (like tags) aren't just everywhere, they're a defining characteristic of modernity. What's a button, or a screen, or even a thought, without its own icon? I'm OK with this in a general sense, not that my opinion should matter. Eye-candy? -- I often like it, especially when the eye-candy serves a usability purpose as well as a delight purpose. I'm reminded that, back in the early '80s, I knew a writer who was struggling unsuccessfully with adapting to computers. Publications were demanding that writing be delivered in computer form, and -- as brilliant as he genuinely was -- the poor guy simply didn't have a computer-compatible brain. The screens presented by early-'80s PCs (green letters on black) put him off. File systems baffled him, and having to memorize basic computer commands ... It all made him just about weep with frustration. I don't mock this, by the way. People who don't happen to have brains that synch up well with computers are at a serious disadvantage these days. Come to think of it, one of the biggest changes I've witnessed in my lifetime is the development of a general expectation that everyone should be able to manage computers. It's a strange expectation, when you think of it. I work in an arty-media field, for example, yet it's all now based on computers. How bizarre that English majors -- English majors!! -- are expected to be competent with computers. Hey, IT people: There are perfectly decent and intelligent people out here whose brains just don't do the computer thing very well. Yet here we are today, nearly all of us spending our professional days serving the great computer god. There are moments when it all seems like nothing more than a naked power-grab by the geek class, doesn't it? Anyway, as of 1983 my writer-friend was in despair. His brain just didn't -- and really couldn't -- work the command-line way. Then, in 1984, he bought a Mac, and his problem was... posted by Michael at April 29, 2008 | perma-link | (15) comments





Sunday, April 20, 2008


Painted Classical Sculpture
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, those Greek and Roman marble statues were (often? usually?) painted to look more lifelike. We know this because tiny traces of the paint can be detected. For some reason or another probably having to do with the fact that I'm a paint 'n' brush guy, I don't get worked up over classical sculpture. Not to the point that I've carefully studied such objects or read much in detail about them. So I didn't know that there have been attempts to recreate some statues, paint and all. Fortunately, the Getty Villa, where Pacific Palisades meets Malibu, currently has an exhibit titled "The Color of Life" which deals with colored sculpture over the years. I visited the Villa a week ago. Examples were brought in from such museums as the Munich Stiftung Archaeologie and Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek and Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Gryptotek. Besides examination of original pieces for information about pigments used, it was necessary to produce copies of the originals to use for reconstruction attempts. This article explains how the sculpted head of Emperor Caligula was reproduced. Below are some examples. Gallery The Peplos Kore - Greek, c.530 B.C. These are reproduction versions of a pre-Golden Age work (note alternative left arms, feet). I wonder if the original colors were really as intense as shown. Original sculpted head of Caligula Original with copy Attempted reconstruction of paint application The Getty had this head along with a second reconstruction. The one done a few years after the first try seemed more realistic, but still too stark and hard-edged to me. Sorry to say, I've already forgotten whether the head above is the first or second attempt. The results strike me as being too garish, but I wasn't around at the time and ought to defer to the experts. Still, I would expect better of the Greeks and Romans. On the other hand, from surviving evidence, the Romans seemed to be better sculptors than painters. This is odd, because lifelike sculpting requires good knowledge of human anatomy. If sculptors were highly knowledgeable, why weren't many painters? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 20, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments





Friday, April 18, 2008


Katie's Book
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Good news. Katie Hutchison -- an inspired new-traditionalist architect as well as a most-excellent blogger -- will be writing a book for The Taunton Press, one of the best publishers in America. Read about Katie's appropriately modest and touching subject, namely small retreats, here. (MBlowhard mini-rant: An architect writing not a work of chic hyper-theory but instead something sophisticated-yet-accessible that might be of use to normal people -- now that's an event to be celebrated!) If you know of any successful and appealing examples of small retreats that deserve consideration for a place in the book, be sure to get in touch with Katie, who can be reached at katie-at-katiehutchison-dot-com. I rhapsodized about The Taunton Press back here. Sample some of their beautiful books here and here. Don't be completely surprised if -- as you let your eye and mind play over their products -- you discern a certain kinship with the thought of Christopher Alexander ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 18, 2008 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, April 17, 2008


This is Not Art
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- So it was a hoax. That Yale art student didn't really collect material from repeated self-impregnations and abortions as an art project. The New York Sun reports that she was actually doing "performance art." Key graf: "Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art," a Yale spokeswoman, Helaine Klasky, said. "She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body." So far as I'm concerned, none of the episode was art. It was a self-promoting public relations stunt justified by Feminist gibberish. The sad thing is that real art gets tarred by such juvenile acting-out. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 17, 2008 | perma-link | (13) comments





Wednesday, April 16, 2008


Lego Living
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- So there I was, innocently strolling the streets of downtown Seattle doing my usual scene-check. Then I came upon something odd -- even for Seattle. Let me show you ... Hello. What's that? The thing on the roof of that building? Hmm. Some sort of structure. Looks like a chair in a window. And there's a sign below it with an arrow pointing upwards. The sign explains that those are modular apartments intended for urban use, and this link is provided. I went up on the roof to look at the display more closely. The units seem to be about the size of mobile homes. I snapped this photo of a poster with a conception of what such modularized apartments might look like. Okay, so the actual apartments are to be assembled on plots of land. But the idea of putting such units on roofs, as the demonstration units are, is kinda odd, intriguing and possibly repellent. This raises the concept of trailer trash to a whole new dimension. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 16, 2008 | perma-link | (17) comments





Monday, April 14, 2008


Cindy Sherman Is Simpler Than the Intellectuals Imagine (And So Is Most Art)
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- When the photographer Cindy Sherman made her Untitled Film Stills back around 1980, critics and academics dreamed up all kinds of hyperintellectual arguments to tell us what she was really up to in the photos. Since Sherman was both in these sorta-recreations of iconic "female" images and in charge of them, we were given to understand by the experts that Sherman was -- at the least -- criticizing "power," undermining sex roles, and making numerous weighty feminist and theoretical points. Fun to learn then -- from a quick interview with New York magazine -- that Sherman in fact put nothing of what the critics saw in them into her photographs. Theory? Nope. Feminist points? Not a one. In fact, Sherman explains, the photos mainly arose out of her feelings about dressing up in costumes and putting on makeup. Hey, quel surprise: She's an artist, and not an intellectual who just happens to be expressing her wickedly complex theoretical structures through, weirdly enough, photography. A great passage from a recent Shouting Thomas comment: To reiterate... musicians aren't very bright. If they were, they wouldn't be musicians ... The same is true for just about all artists. If they had any sense, they wouldn't be artists. I'm reminded of a funny crack uttered by the much-missed Vanessa del Blowhard some years back about developments in downtown theater. There was a stretch in the '90s when edgy theater artists were showcasing garish colors, laughtracks, snappy pacing, game-show formats and such. The critics were treating themselves to a field day explaining that what these deep, complex, and (as always) "critical" artists were up to was subverting our media-drenched assumptions with their media-based strategies. Vanessa, who actually hung out with a number of these actors and directors, laughed and said to me, "What nonsense. These kids are creating theater pieces that resemble live versions of television because TV is what they really like. They like TV, and they want the theater they create to be like TV." Incidentally, I rather enjoy Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills -- I'm not putting her down. I'm having a chuckle at the fabrications of intellectuals, and I'm wondering why, where the arts go, anyone cuts critics and intellectuals any slack at all. A life free of their theories, rationalizations, and projections can be such a pleasingly straightforward thing, can't it? Incidentally: Girls' love of trying on clothes, experimenting with makeup, and posing in front of mirrors and cameras -- well, if I were in the culture-observing game, I'd venture the thought that it's one of the most powerful forces at large in culture today. That's pretty simple, isn't it? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 14, 2008 | perma-link | (33) comments





Wednesday, April 9, 2008


Political Art Is ... Forever?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I don't see all that much of it in person. But I do notice a fair amount of coverage regarding political art in some art magazines and books. Political art is nothing new. An example I wrote about a while back was Picasso's "Guernica." And in the 19th century we find Manet's painting of the execution of Emperor Maximilian by the Mexicans and Goya's depictions of war. If politics is defined more broadly, art extolling existing regimes might be said to go back as far as the time of the early pharaohs: but that net is too wide for my purposes here. Although some political art -- such as the Manet and Goyas just mentioned -- has staying power, most is probably doomed to oblivion. If I were an artist and painted something political, I'd do so knowing what I did was essentially disposable art. And for all I know, this is just what real political artists think. The reason why politically-themed art has a short shelf-life is obvious. Time does march on and issues that were once blazing hot become paragraphs and footnotes in dry history books as decades pass and generations die off. If an artist really does want immortality by painting political themes, I advise him to include as many universal themes as he can along with the issue-driven stuff. To illustrate this, below is a painting that has been in the Museum of Modern Art's collection for decades. If my fuzzy memory is correct, I saw it displayed in the early 1960s; I don't know if it's currently on a wall or in storage. The Eternal City - by Peter Blume, 1934-37 According to the brief biography on MoMA's web site, this was Blume's only political painting. As it happens, I know what the painting is about. Furthermore, I suppose that quite a few (most, even?) of this blog's readers also know. But what about your friends, co-workers and family? Especially high school and college age youths who only have a hazy idea when the Civil War was fought. My gut feeling is that less than 10 percent of the American population can explain the political context of Blume's painting whereas well more than half might have when it was new. And in another 70 years? ... Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 9, 2008 | perma-link | (23) comments





Saturday, April 5, 2008


Painter Babes
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There were lots of really nice-looking gals around when I was in art school. That was back around 1960 when it wasn't considered a near-crime for women to snag a husband in time for college graduation. So a lot of sorority girls would major in art or music or Home Economics and, if all went well by their Junior or Senior years, walk the halls of ivy sporting a fraternity pin or engagement ring. On the other hand, attractive female artists were nothing new, even by 1960. I could conjure up some possible causes such as social background and selective breeding, but will leave it to Comments for better-informed speculation. Below are some examples for your consideration. Angelica Kauffmann - self portrait - 1787 Kauffmann (1741-1807) was born in Switzerland and had a highly successful career working in several countries. Among other achievements, she was a founding member of London's Royal Academy. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun - self portraits c.1782 and 1790 Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) was also very successful, painting several portraits of Queen Marie-Antoinette while still in her twenties. She had to flee France after the Revolution, but returned a few years after Napoleon seized power. Berthe Morisot - photograph and Portrait by Éduard Manet, 1870 Morisot (1841-95) was one of the original Impressionists. She came from a family with wealth, was painted on several occasions by her friend Manet, eventually marrying his brother Eugène. Elin Danielson - self-portraits, 1900 and 1903 Danielson (1861-1919) was a Finnish artist whose biography can be found here. Suzanne Valadon - drawing by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, photo Valadon (1865-1938) began as an artist's model, posing for several Renoir paintings. She took up art and was largely self-taught, but received encouragement and tips from Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, who admired her drawing ability. She was the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo. Elaine and Willem de Kooning, 1952 Elaine (1918-89), wife of Willem de Kooning for a time, is perhaps best known for her portraits of President Kennedy. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning Birthday - self-portrait by Dorothea Tanning, 1942 Tanning (b. 1910) was the fourth and final wife of Surrealist painter Max Ernst. She changed from Surrealism to nearly-abstract painting and later became as writer as well. What other artists qualify for this Pantheon? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 5, 2008 | perma-link | (19) comments





Thursday, April 3, 2008


It's All in the Nose
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Omigosh indeed. A fun and apt response from FvBlowhard, to whom I earlier emailed a link to this vid: "Wowee! That certainly upsets a lot of assumptions about art-making! Unless the elephant was elaborately trained to do that. Well, wait a minute, I guess I was trained to do some art stuff, too. Well, that’s one interesting elephant, trained or au naturel!" Best, and wishing I had half that creature's style, Michael... posted by Michael at April 3, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, April 2, 2008


Nikos and James
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- New American City interviews a couple of MBlowhard faves, James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros. The article has me thinking about cars, cities, and suburbs ... I'm no knee-jerk enemy of cars, and there's much about life in New York City that can irk me -- cramped spaces, obnoxious people, frantic pace, etc. But I really, really adore having most of what I need and want on a day-to-day basis available to me within walking distance. It feels civilized. To gloat for a sec: Within ten blocks of our apartment we can find grocery stores, delis, yoga and Gyro studios, shops of all kinds, movie theaters and theater-theaters, art galleries ... My office is three miles from where I live, and I walk to work nearly every morning. It's really lovely having all this walking built into my day. I haven't owned a car in 30 years. When I visit the rest of the country, I often find much there to envy and enjoy. But not the driving. I hate the way so much of life in 99% of the U.S. is organized around cars. If you say "Hey, let's go out!," what that usually means is, "Let's go to the garage, get in the car, spend time in traffic, park in another garage, then get out." Doing the chores usually means driving through traffic from one parking lot to another parking lot. Walking? Well, that usually doesn't just happen, as it does in New York City. It's usually something you need to make special time for. James Kunstler blogs here, and has a website here. Nikos Salingaros' website is here. If you haven't read the 2Blowhards interview with Nikos already, go to the top of this blog, click on "Interviews," and enjoy a very stimulating discussion. Oh, I just noticed something entertaining. Ah, those open-minded architectural progressives ... What are your own feelings and tastes where cities, cars, walking, and the 'burbs are concerned? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 2, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, March 28, 2008


The Most Damaging Artist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- What is Art? Pretty nearly everything, it seems. All it takes is a self-proclaimed "artist" or his gallery guy or a copy-hungry reporter or art critic to announce to the world that this assemblage or that hardware store object is Art. I think this is nonsense. It has become a prime case of "If everything is Xxxxx, then nothing is Xxxxx." My own modest proposal is to call Art pretty much whatever was considered Art in 1900. What's been added since then strikes me as being mostly "art" -- and much of it doesn't even rise to that level. As a corollary to my modest proposal, those things now called "Art" but that were not Art in 1900 ought to be called Other Stuff. There is so much Other Stuff around, I'm tempted to write the powers-that-be at London's Tate Modern humbly requesting it be re-branded the Tate Other Stuff. And who is to blame for getting us into this fine kettle of Other Stuff? The man who I consider the artist who caused the most damage to Art: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is known for such Other Stuff works as designating a urinal as a piece of sculpture and painting a mustache and beard on a print of the Mona Lisa. His "readymades," including that urinal and a bottle rack along with his other art-world pranks blazed the path for what all too many Post-Modernists have been doing since around 1960. I wonder about all this talk of contemporary "artistic creativity" when it should be obvious that Big Dada did it first. End of rant. Have fun in Comments. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 28, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Tuesday, March 18, 2008


"Early American Art"?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's an example of something that 1) is all-too-common and 2) really irks me: the way many arty types take it for granted that the story of American art is the story of modernist American art. Yo, artworld: Calling Georgia O'Keefe an example of "early American art" is like calling "Reservoir Dogs" an example of "early gangster movies." It's overlooking an awful lot, and it's promoting a restrictive and stupid myth. I raved back here about what a wild and glorious free-for-all pre-modernist American art was. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 18, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, March 11, 2008


How Should Museum Art Be Selected?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- My copy of The New Criterion arrived yesterday, and the first article I dove into was this one, "Revisionism at the Met" by New York Sun art critic Lance Esplund. He has been examining the recently re-done Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture and isn't entirely pleased. And he has some concerns about the direction the Met as a whole seems to be taking, but I'll leave that for another time. Another matter I won't deal with here is the validity of Esplund's complaints about the galleries. That's because I don't visit New York City often and haven't seen them in their present form. What interests me for now is the following passage. More and more, museums are allowing the public to decide what is and is not worthy in art. Websites and notebooks accompany galleries and exhibitions, so that visitors can weigh in on issues concerning what they saw, didn’t see, would like to see, or would like to see changed in museums. I think there is a lot of value to be gained here, as long as public opinion is taken for what it is -- public, rather than expert, opinion. The problem is that the experts and policy makers (museum curators, directors, and trustees) appear to be making decisions based on public taste. It is public opinion—or, more correctly, the desire to appeal to public, or populist, taste -- that has ruined the once-magnificent Brooklyn Museum of Art. And, based on what is happening within certain areas of the Met, including the Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, there is a sense that populist, crowd-pleasing taste -- or at least an appeal to that taste -- is weakening the museum’s foundations. Or, worse yet, there is a sense that populist taste is a Trojan horse that is already inside the gates. Let's see: letting the public taste camel get its nose in the tent will ultimately lead to a Met gallery of paintings of Elvis on different colored velvets. Well guess what: that very same Elvis gallery might result if left to "experts" and "professionals" uncorrupted by the public. All it would take is a prominent critic or two to proclaim that Elvis-on-velvet paintings really are art worthy of attention and respect. And if words such as "ironic," "paradigm," "deconstruction," "narrative," "subversive" and "meta-theory," were used in the right places, museums across the land might well stampede to the nearest shopping mall art show to scoop up their own Elvis collection. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously complained about the defining-down of deviancy. I think the same might be said of art. The term for what once was rarefied has over the years been applied to seemingly nearly everything. A visit to the Tate Modern a few years back confirmed this for me. Rather than art, I thought most of it was sh*t. Disagree with my opinion? Then let me add that... posted by Donald at March 11, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, March 5, 2008


Some Architecture Musings
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Inspired by Donald's posting about the Seattle Central Library, I was e-chatting with a friend about buildings, architecture, and modernism. I wound up dashing off a note that I was pleased with. Never one to forego EZ blogging, I present it here: I kinda like a certain amount of chic architecture purely as "design." Shrink a Frank Gehry building by a factor of 1000, put a 60 watt bulb in it, plunk it on my coffee table, and I'd enjoy it as a fun, kooky lamp. Mies van der Rohe had a much snappier sense of abstract design and proportions than I ever will -- he'd have been a great layout artist. It's absurd, though, to proffer their kind of thing as buildings. In Gehry's case: Asking people to live in a piece of swoopy sculpture? Whose dumb idea was that? In Mies' case: What kind of nutcase would maintain that people should live in the equivalent of a sharp-looking piece of magazine design? Plus there's all that awful "empty space" around so much modernist architecture -- dead plazas, streets that no longer work as living urban streets ... It's sterile, dead-end stuff. People tend to move out of a city that becomes too dominated by modernist (po-mo, decon, etc) buildings and spaces. Which is finally what clinches the deal for me: the "Modernism" thing is an experiment that just didn't work. People voted with their feet. So let's put a stop to it, and pronto. The forms of traditional-style building evolved because they served people's needs and pleasures well, or well-enough. You toss these forms out (or monkey with them too dramatically) at your peril. It's useful to think of traditional buildings and traditional urbanism as evolved things, much like biological creatures. They've evolved in the way they have for many reasons, almost certainly more than we'll ever be consciously aware of. Mess with 'em too heedlessly and something's likely to go haywire. Another fun way to think of traditional architecture: as akin to tonal music. Scales, chords, harmonies, rhythmic patterns ... For some reason or other, tonality speaks to people, where purely intellectual and abstract musical structures strike most people as bewildering and alienating. And of course musical tonality has a history that's similar to that of traditional architecture. Both evolved in a trial-and-error way, in relationship to people's actual (and very possibily biologically-based) tastes, pleasures, and preferences. Modernist architecture by contrast has always been a top-down, theory-driven kind of thing -- a cage imposed on us rather than a creature that has been nurtured and that has grown to take its place in a larger ecosystem. Modernist architecture never stops haranguing us about what we ought to like and how we ought to live. Traditional architecture -- well, it is what we like; it is how we like to live. Funny too the way that the "radical" (haha) architecture set has often claimed that they advocate what they do because they're... posted by Michael at March 5, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments




Seattle Central Library Revisited
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of years ago I kvetched here about the then-new central branch of the Seattle Public Library. It was designed by red-diaper starchitect (hey! how's that for a double ad hominem whammy?) Rem Koolhaas and greeted with praise by the local media and cultural establishment. Some of the enthusiasm has cooled. The Wikipedia entry current when this post was written (see here, scroll down a ways) mentions that a Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer was rash enough to mention that not everyone was happy with the building. I happen to think that the library was a horrible aesthetic mistake that Seattle will have to live with for the next 40 or 50 years (that's how often central libraries seem to last hereabouts). Actually, it might be around much longer than that if the usual fools declare it a "landmark." Today I'll try to set aesthetics aside for the most part and deal with function -- how well the building works. I'm afraid this will be pretty superficial in that I only entered the place to do one task. Still, it might represent what other citizens experience if they aren't steady library users. Speaking of steady use, let me footnote that I went to the central library a lot when I was in high school. (That building was two generations removed from the present one, being a Carnegie-funded library that came on line about a hundred years ago. It was torn down and replaced by a conventional Modernist structure in the late 50s.) I would catch a bus near my high school, ride downtown, walk to the library and browse until it was nearly time for my father to leave work. Then I'd walk the block to his office and hitch a ride home. Much of my browsing was in the art / architecture areas (the low 700s, for you Dewey Decimal System fans). A couple of weeks ago Nancy was attending a big garden show in town and I had two or three hours to kill. The thought hit me: Why not go to the library and see what they have in those low-700 stacks these days. So I did. This was perhaps my third visit to the new building since it was opened and my first attempt at actually using the thing. Let's switch to Gallery mode. These are images I grabbed from the Web. Exterior view, daylight Seen from Fourth Avenue, looking northeast. X-ray diagram Same geographical orientation as photo above. The green colored part takes in the non-stacks part of the library -- children's room, reading room, meeting rooms, etc. Note the slope of the site indicated in gray. Fourth Avenue is to the left, Fifth Avenue is uphill towards the right. Entrances are on Fourth and Fifth avenues. The pink floors are the stacks that form a vertical zig-zag pattern: it's sort of like folded computer print-out paper. However, the north and south sides of these numbered floors are slightly offset... posted by Donald at March 5, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, February 29, 2008


Our Postmodern Economy
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards, It has occurred to me from time to time that shifts in a civilization probably show up more clearly in the arts than elsewhere. As one example, let’s look at the transition in painting from representation to more conceptual modes such as cubism and abstraction; this occurred in the first couple decades of the 20th century. This shift occurred at virtually the same time that the professions -- our technocratic elite -- emerged in their modern, self-regulated form. As Robert H. Wiebe points out in his book, "The Search for Order 1877-1920," practitioners of law, medicine, teaching, architecture, social work and other forms of administration seized the reins of their own professional status around the year 1900. During this era, members of various intellectual "guilds" got legal control over the education of their prospective members, over certification (who got a license and who was kept out), and over disciplinary proceedings governing their members. While Wiebe claims the critical decade for the development of the self-consciousness of the professions as social leaders was between 1895 and 1905, the complete consolidation of professional self-governance took a couple decades to complete. Let me be clear what it means when professions are able to control themselves, with full cooperation by the government. It means the recognition in law that these groups constitute a leadership class that can not be meaningfully directed by outsiders. Sounds like a pretty thorough endorsement of elite status to me. While these specific dates and examples come from the United States, the rise of a new class of experts (distinguished by their technical education, claiming to embody the power of advanced science and working in close communion with both industry and government while largely remaining formally independent of both) was common to all advanced countries at this time. Is it an accident that modernism, a self-consciously "advanced" art, distinguished by its focus on concepts rather than ordinary appearances, occurred at the same time as the rise of a conceptually-oriented class of technocrats? I think not. In fact, the so-called avant-garde of the early 20th century art world could be better described as bringing up the rear or hitching a ride on coattails of this social dynamic, which had been in train for a couple decades when the art world finally woke up and clambered onto the bandwagon. So if changes in the art world generally echo or reflect changes in the real world -- a proposition that can be illustrated by countless examples -- what do our contemporary arts show us about developments in the real world today? When you look at, say, a Frank Gehry building, with its billowing, twisted, slanted forms, what is being conveyed? I’d read it as saying, "These twisted planes are walls if I say they are. I (the architect, that is) have got the advanced materials and computer software to make them work (more or less) as walls, and I’ve got a patron with enough dough to disregard... posted by Friedrich at February 29, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Saturday, February 23, 2008


Tiepolo's Hottie Madonnas
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I wonder how he got away with it. The Madonna, the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God -- a devotional figure central to the Catholic Church -- traditionally has been depicted as a serene, perhaps somewhat distant, idealized, saintly woman. There have been countless depictions of her in painting and sculpture over many centuries, so there is no strict uniformity in what we see in museums, cathedrals, parish churches and on household walls of the devout. Still, I cannot recall seeing a intentionally ugly Virgin. My take is that she is usually shown as pretty, but in a restrained way. But one famous artist, the Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) painted Mary as a babe. Um, let me qualify that. He tended to pain her as an attractive women such as he could see daily on the streets, canals and plazas of Venice. Or like women we can see daily in the towns and cities where we live. Unlike stylized women that tended to appear in non-portrait paintings until the late 19th century, Tiepolo's Madonnas and female saints look normal. Plus, they have sex appeal. One would think that painting Modonnas with sex appeal would have led Tiepolo to the stake or at least a public recantation. But no, he was hugely successful, his paintings and frescoes appearing in churches in many Venetian neighborhoods and elsewhere in northern Italy as well as Spain, where he ended his career. And he's perhaps most famous for ceilings, the most noteworthy of all in the Residenz of the Prince Bishop of Würtzburg. Here are some examples. The original paintings are so large and full of figures that the Virgin's face can be hard to see on a computer screen; I strongly recommend that you find a book about Tiepolo to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. I notice that English translations or versions of titles can vary considerably, perhaps because some Tiepolo works might not have had formal titles in the first place (I'm speculating). So the titles I use here might not agree with titles shown in Tiepolo books. Gallery Immaculate Conception - 1767-69 Immaculate Conception - 1767-69 (detail) Out Lady of Carmel - 1721-27 Out Lady of Carmel - 1721-27 (detail) The Virgin Appearing to St. Philip Neri - 1740 Virgin Appearing to Dominican Saints - 1747-48 Alternative title: The Virgin Mary with Saints Catherine, Rose of Lima and Agnes of Montepulciano. Apparition of the Virgin to St. Simon Stock - c.1748-49 Alternate title: The Virgin Mary presenting the Scapular to St. Simon Stock. In all the paintings shown above (aside, perhaps, from the one of St. Philip Neri), Mary has a haughty look. And, with nearly closed eyes, see seems (to me, at least) sensual rather than spiritual. This seems most pronounced in the St. Simon Stock painting, which you will have to find in a book to get the full effect. In the painting of Mary with Sts. Catherine, Rose... posted by Donald at February 23, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, February 22, 2008


Frozen Mischief
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another excellent large-scale prank from ImprovEverywhere. My favorite overheard remarks: "It's some kind of protest, probably." "Either that or an acting class." Very Dada, no? Here's a sensible look at a new Dada exhibition from the Times of London. Verdict: A fun moment of wild mischief -- but what kind of sense does it make to give Dada a lot of museum space? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 22, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, February 21, 2008


Architecture Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Charles Siegel thinks that John Silber's new anti-starchitecture book doesn't go far enough in its condemnation of absurd buildings. * Charles Siegel is also the author of a small new book that I just finished reading with a great deal of pleasure, "An Architecture for Our Time: The New Classicism." In the first part of his book, Siegel brings us up to the present: How have we come to be living in a world where absurd architecture is the standard / accepted thing? Charles supplies the best short answer to this question that I've ever read. In the second half of the book, he offers an argument for reviving architectural classicism. It's the book's manifesto section, and it's stirring and stimulating --- you don't have to agree with Charles' every point to find a visit with his mind and his thoughts very rewarding. Let me add that the book is beautifully scaled: While it's a short, fast, and fun read, the amount of knowledge, experience, brains, and wisdom that Charles packs in per word is awfully impressive. As a writer / publisher, Charles is resourceful and entrepreuneurial. He offers a book of idiosyncratic length -- as long as it needs to be but no longer -- in hard-copy, HTML, and downloadable-PDF versions. Snag a copy here. Charles runs the Preservation Institute and blogs here. * Sigh: Some atrocious concrete-bunker-style high-rise apartment buildings a few blocks from where I live in Greenwich Village may soon be officially declared landmarks -- yet another example of how the preservation movement (which was founded in order to combat the depradations of architectural modernism) has been captured by establishment modernists. Benjamin Hemric, who often offers erudite and insightful commentary here at 2Blowhards, gets off a number of informed and sensible comments on the New York Times's blogposting about the brouhaha. * MBlowhard Rewind: Back here, I wrote about the hideosity of the modernist urban form known as "towers in the park," and included a couple of snapshots of the awful I.M. Pei buildings that may now be declared landmarks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 21, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, February 19, 2008


Urban Squeezing
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's not yet Hong Kong. Or even Manhattan. Not yet, anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if Seattle's planners and their political and media allies, deep down in their hearts, would like the city to resemble those places. When I was growing up, Seattle was a city of detached houses. There were a few areas with "high rise" (in Seattle's case, six floors and higher) apartment buildings. Other areas had lower-density apartments. But apartments were decidedly the exception, not the rule. For the last few decades, in the name of saving the planet, Seattle zoning has encouraged both high (including 30+ floors) and low rise apartment buildings. Detached housing is still allowed, but lots have been subdivided in halves or thirds and the new structures pretty much fill the available land. A new kind of housing hereabouts is the townhouse -- something I'd previously encountered in San Francisco and large cities in the Midwest and Northeast. Here are some recently-built examples. The lower photo shows the driveway and parking situation in greater detail than the top photo -- basically an "establishment" shot as they say in the movie trade. There seems to be a little problem here for many car owners: where is the room to maneuver a car into those garages tucked under the houses? I'm pretty sure my car (the blue one at the right of the top photo) could never make it. Therefore, I have to conclude that Our City Masters really want us to drive one of these: That's if we are so brazenly anti-Earth to own a car in the first place. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 19, 2008 | perma-link | (15) comments





Friday, February 15, 2008


Paul Avril
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Why didn't our college art-history profs tell us anything about Paul Avril? (NSFW.) I bet a lot more boys would develop an interest in the arts if only their teachers would introduce them to artists like Paul Avril. Here are some of Avril's illustrations for "Fanny Hill." Gotta love the strictness of his neoclassicism. Thwack! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 15, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, February 8, 2008


A Quick Rant
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Steve wonders about the most important Americans where culture and art go. It's a fun and provocative posting. In my comment on it, I headed off at a bit of a tangent and babbled my way into incoherence. But I was pleased with myself anyway. Here's my comment Fun, as ever. Still, this phrase -- "There's an obvious high culture / academic orientation to the lists" -- makes me want to say, "Hell, yeah. And that's a major problem, particularly where the American arts go." Look (I'm addressing myself to Charles Murray, I guess, or to scholars, or something): America has *seldom* been fabulously strong where high culture is concerned. We've had a few moments and a few peaks. But our high culture has mostly been strained and tight -- it has mostly represented a striving in the direction of Euro ideals. And since we seldom feel as entitled to "culture" as the Euros do, we seldom enter into and flourish there in similar ways. Our market, if you will, for high culture has always been a skimpy and beleaguered one, and the art we've produced for it has almost always reflected that fact. In fact, we often seem to spend more time complaining about how Americans don't care about fine art than we do actually creating and enjoying the stuff. On the other hand, where the popular, commercial and folk arts go (as well as homegrown eccentrics, and one-of-a-kinds, and make-it-up-as-they-go types), we're perfectly amazing. The two biggest triumphs of 20th century art? In terms of oomph, scale, reach, and popularity, how can you beat Hollywood-style movies and African-American (and Af-Am-influenced) music? And it's (IMHO) quite something to open up a discussion of American culture while overlooking sitcoms, the blues, standup comedy, rock and hiphop, popular dancing, acting, commercial fiction ... (Incidentally, I'm obvoiusly ranting here, not addressing anyone in particular, aside from some academically-oriented snobs ...) But that's always a problem when you let academics and intellectuals define what's meant by culture, isn't it? They're going to tend to treat as "culture" what their idea of "culture" is. Which means that if they're intellectually-inclined (and what intellectual isn't?) they're going to show a preference for more-rather-than-less intellectual art. And if they're Euro-academically inclined, they're going to think of "culture" as something that's kinda-sorta French, or maybe German. Which results in the tangle we have: a class of gatekeeper-types who insist on applying Euro-intellectual standards to a culture-verse that doesn't actually have a whole lot to do with Euro-intellectual standards. And who mostly find us lacking. I like Charles Ives myself, but I also think Chuck Berry was a hell of a composer. Like it or not, we aren't a second-rate Euro-culture. We're our own kooky scene. Or bundle of scenes. An example of how applying-inappropriate-standards steers people wrong: Someone with a strong conviction that lyric poetry is the truest-purest kind of art there is could look at Ancient Rome and say, "Well,... posted by Michael at February 8, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments





Thursday, February 7, 2008


Architecture Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Witold Rybczynski asks a sensible question: Are avant-garde architects really ahead of their time? "The truth is that buildings belong firmly to their own time," writes Rybczynski. "This is especially true of architecture that self-consciously attempts to predict the future." (Link thanks to Mike Snider.) * Speaking of absurd architecture, it's always good fun to check in with James Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month. I complained back here about how blindingly shiney many modern buildings are. * Valerie Easton confesses that she was inspired to write about gardens when she read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language." A lot of people have found "A Pattern Language" to be very inspiring. * Here's a hyper-condensed (as in, it shouldn't take you more than two minutes to flip through it) look at the Alexander approach. * Charlton Griffin turned up this haunting guide to some of the former Soviet Union's abandoned structures. * Thanks to Michael Bierut for pointing out an Esquire article about the worst building in the world. * Dave Lull turns up a good Noah Waldman essay for First Principles about the meaning of the classical-architecture revival. What's it all about? And why is it happening now? * Katie Hutchison pens an ode to a lovely porch, suggests tackling the infrastructure first, and researches Samuel McIntire, a Salem, Mass., neoclassical master. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 7, 2008 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, February 5, 2008


Roger on Nikos
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to this impressive New Criterion piece by Roger Scruton. In it, Scruton (a philosopher as well as one of the best writers on architecture around) reviews three books that share an anti-starchitecture stance. He likes them all, but saves his most enthusiastic words for "A Theory of Architecture" by 2Blowhards fave (and occasional contributor) Nikos Salingaros. Scruton writes: "No reader of A Theory of Architecture can fail to recognize the seriousness of tone, and the profundity of observation that went into the writing of this book, or to appreciate the many insights, both into the beauty of the old vernacular styles, and into the empty offensiveness of the modern." That's some high (and well-deserved) praise. Nikos is (IMHO) an important and much-underrecognized thinker, and it's very pleasing to see the world begin to take note. Buy a copy of Nikos' "A Theory of Architecture" here. His "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction" is pretty damn great too (and features introductions by Jim Kalb and yours truly). Visit Nikos' very generous website here. To enjoy a wide-ranging five-part interview with Nikos, go to the top of 2Blowhards and click on "Interviews." Nikos is in the midst of delivering a stimulating online lecture series. Get to videos of his talks by visiting this page, scrolling to the bottom, and calling 'em up. Here's Roger Scruton's website. I loved this Scruton book about architecture, and found these short popular works of his about philosophy and culture terrific -- easy to enjoy and very brain-opening. Read an interview with Roger Scruton here. Best, Michael UPDATE: Lakis Polycarpou wonders why so many people think that the aesthetic and the practical are at odds. Lakis relies heavily on Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.... posted by Michael at February 5, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, February 1, 2008


I Am Not Worthy
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Some excerpts from an email recently sent around by an organization called Americans For the Arts: One of our main objectives is to support and secure federal, state, and local education policies that provide students a balanced education and prepare them to compete in a globally innovative and creative workforce ... Americans for the Arts maintains that arts education develops the precise set of skills students need in order to thrive in a global economy that is driven by knowledge and ideas ... Formalize an incentive program to hire arts educators and strengthen the Arts in Education program at the U.S. Department of Education through revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act ... Now, I have tended to think of myself as a pretty committed culturebuff. But this email has got me thinking that perhaps I've been mistaken. After all, my hopes for culture have zero to do with the agenda of Americans for the Arts. Personally I'd love to see people free their experience of the arts from the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and worthy-nonprofit types, 90% of whom seem to me to be devoted to bleeding the arts of everything I love the arts for. * Some headlines and taglines from recent issues of the highbrow lit magazines Bookforum and The Boston Review: Slave Trade On Trial Richard Locke on Pat Barker Jyoti Thottqm on Tahmima Anam's "A Golden Age" Matthew Price on Richard M. Cook's "Alfred Kazin: A Biography" Vivian Gornick: Hannah Arendt's Jewish Problem J.K. Bishop: The Art of Dying Peter Terzian on William Maxwell's Early Novels and Stories Now, I'm a big reader, and during one 15 year stretch I even followed the NYC publishing world -- and new literary fiction -- pretty closely. Yet I'm never, ever going to read any of those pieces. In fact, I look at Tables of Contents like these and think, "Isn't it amazing? Some people are still arguing about Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, William Maxwell, and slavery." I also can't tell you how bizarre I find it that not a single word reflecting an interest in entertainment values appears in any of those headlines. Real intellectuals apparently have a hard time staying awake when topics like suspense, humor, characterization, plotting, sexiness, pacing, and identification come up. I guess I have no choice but to say it loud and say it proud: I am 1) not a Worthy Artsperson, and 2) certainly not a Serious Reader. Funny how good it feels to get these two admissions out there in public. Back here I wrote about what I called "the Arts Litany" -- the list of beliefs and convictions that arts people are expected to hold. FvBlowhard responded here. Do you keep up with any of the heavyweight art-or-lit mags? If so, what on earth do you get out of it? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 1, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments





Tuesday, January 29, 2008


Starchitects Win Work
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Zaha Hadid will be designing an art museum for Michigan State University. Have a look at what she's gifting our Midwest with: MBlowhard verdict: Chic transnational zigzaggy gleamingness -- cozy! But even as a place to park tractors and weed-whackers it seems unfinished. Steven Holl wins the job of designing some new "design arts" buildings for Princeton. I wasn't able to find a visual of what Holl has in mind for P.U. But here's a recent building that Holl did for the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City: MBlowhard verdict: When oh when will avant-garde -- er, make that establishment -- architects tire of their fascination with shoeboxes? Where glowy abstract shapes go, I prefer Japanese paper lamps, thankyouveddymuch. Since the 1950s, Princeton has sponsored some of the worst of contemporary architecture. It's as though the people who run the university have been on a mission to deface the beautiful campus that they've been entrusted with. With Demitri Porphyrios' new-traditional Whitman College (largely funded by eBay's Meg Whitman), it seemed for a moment that the university had seen sense, and had even begun to repair the damage -- John Massengale offers a terrific tour of Whitman College here. But I guess today's administator class will always revert to type. Pretty funny that glitzy loading docks and oversized perfume counters are what our architecture establishment sees fit to sell isn't it? If that's what passes for "architectural excitement," perhaps we'd all be better off without it. John Massengale raises astonished eyebrows at the pretentious crappiness -- er, make that the "architectural excitement" -- of the Akron Art Museum's new addition. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 29, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments





Monday, January 28, 2008


Un-Masterly Anatomy
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I freely admit that my art training was sketchy -- in the superficial sense (see here, for example). It can be tempting to blame that, rather than lack of competence, for the large doses of mediocrity my paintings possess. But the sad truth is, I don't quite have the art species of Right Stuff. From what I've read, art school training generally hasn't improved much since my student days. Perhaps that's one reason so much Po-Mo painting depicting people is so poorly done. Maybe all those claims of trying to be "edgy" are excuses for inability to draw anatomically correct human beings. But what about the Masters? Masters received extensive apprenticeships or, later, academic training that included lots and lots of drawing. They surely would get anatomy right. Well ... not always. One Master who was notoriously casual with the human form was Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919) had his bad moments as well. I suppose this ought to give me a little hope. Let's look: Gallery Ingres - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière - 1805 The young subject died two years after the painting was completed, so might have been sickly. In any case, the area of the shoulders and upper torso seems too small. The left arm appears to be too large -- arm distortion being a recurring feature in Ingres' portraits. Ingres - Madame Marie-Geneviève-Marguerite de Senonnes - 1814 Here it is the right arm that looks a bit odd. Ingres - La Grande Odalisque - 1814 Her back seems too long. Ingres - Comtesse Louise-Albertine d'Haussonville - 1845 Her upper right arm seems too long and rubbery. Renoir - The Umbrellas - 1881-85 Renoir also could have arm trouble. The woman with the basket has a left arm that is too long above the elbow and too short below. Renoir - Dance in the City - 1883 The woman was posed by artist Suzanne Valadon. Her ear seems placed too high on her head. Renoir - Suzanne Valadon - 1885 This time, he got it right -- assuming her right ear (shown here) is actually placed opposite her left one. Toulouse-Lautrec - The Hangover - (Suzanne Valadon) - 1888 Another take on Valadon. I can find no photo of her that shows her ears. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 28, 2008 | perma-link | (20) comments





Wednesday, January 23, 2008


Nikos Lectures
MIchael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not to intrude on the flow of FvBlowhard's magnificent "New Class" series of postings -- go here and here... But I don't want to miss the chance to alert visitors to a welcome treat. Mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros will be delivering a series of fab-sounding lectures online on the theme of how to create buildings and spaces that have life-giving properties. Scaling, fractals, cellular automata ... If terms like those make you dizzy with interest and delight, then you won't want to miss out. Watch Nikos show how cutting-edge science can be merged with the arts and crafts. Algorithms, harmonies, and emergent systems meet the New Urbanism -- go, baby, go! This page contains details and dates. This page will keep an archive of the lectures for catch-up viewing. Lecture #1 -- on recursion, the Fibonacci Sequence, and scaling -- hits the web this Thursday. Hey, that's tomorrow. What with resources like the Teaching Company, the Mises Institute, and now Nikos, it's quite amazing what civilians have easy access to in the way of intellectually stimulating talks these days. Let no one say that this isn't a great time for those who love keeping their brains alive. If you haven't already, be sure to read the 2Blowhards interview with Nikos Salingaros: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five. It's as mind-expanding as anything we've published. Nikos' own website is here. I notice that another amazing thinker, traditionalist conservative Jim Kalb, has been mulling over some architectural questions recently: here, here, and here. 2Blowhards did a three-part interview with Jim: here, here, here, with an intro by moi here. Now, back to FvBlowhard's magnum opus ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 23, 2008 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, January 15, 2008


Bischoff of California Impressionism
Donald Pittenger writes: Last month I wrote an introductory post about a group of plein air painters known as the California Impressionists. Previously, I wrote about Arthur Mathews, one of the group. In the first article linked above, I tried to avoid including images from the best of the California Impressionists because I wanted to save that ammo for better uses, namely feature posts. So today, I offer Franz Bischoff, an artist who made his mark in two fields: ceramic decoration and easel painting. There doesn't seem to be a lot of biographical information about Bischoff on the Internet, but here is an item about him on the Irvine Museum's site. (By the way, the Irvine Museum is small, but has an outstanding collection of California Impressionist paintings.) Bischoff (1864-1929) was born in Bomen, Austria and studied applied design, watercolor and ceramic decoration in Vienna before emigrating to the United States in 1885. He began his career as a china decorator in New York City, continuing in this field while relocating in Pittsburgh, Fostoria, Ohio, and Dearborn, Michigan (1892). By the turn of the century he had gained fame in this line of work, at one point operating two schools. Bischoff's first encounter with California was in 1900. He was so smitten that, in 1906, he closed his business and moved his family to the Los Angeles area where he pursued a new career as a painter. Success in painting came as rapidly as it had in ceramic decoration, though he did maintain a small hand in the latter field. His California stay was interrupted in 1912 for an extended visit to Europe where he studied the art of Old Masters and French Impressionists. Gallery Franz Bischoff in his Dearborn studio, around 1900 Example of Bischoff vase Carmel Coast The reproduction of this painting I have in a book is less red-looking. Thr lightest surfaces on the big rocky areas are yellow. There are a few patches of tinted Indian Red in the foreground, the same color appearing in the clouds. Since it looks better, I assume the book version is more true to the original than the image I grabbed off the web. Clounds Drifting Over the Mountains Cypress Point Picking Flowers Bischoff didn't limit himself to flowers and landscapes. Here he adds humans to a country scene. The Yellow Dress Another painting featuring people; landscape is almost entirely missing. More posts on major California Impressionist painters will appear from time to time. But Bischoff, because he painted ceramics, plein air landscapes and human fugures, gets my vote as being the most versatile of the lot. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 15, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, January 10, 2008


A Few Small Beefs with Paul Cantor: Part Two
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here I raved about a Paul Cantor lecture series about culture and commercial life. A few days later I treated myself to a niggle with one small aspect of Cantor's series. (Short version: Cantor's version of "art history" is more conventional than the one I prefer.) In this posting, I'm going to register another quibble with the series. A quick reminder not to take me seriously when I say that I'm quibbling. Cantor's series is sensationally good -- as in really-really, double-deep, better-than-anything-I-had-in-college good. Cantor is realistic, shrewd, knowledgeable, helpful, and provocative. His ideas and his facts ring bells and set off thoughts. And it's a really-really, double-deep great thing that he (and the Mises Institute) have made his talks available online for free. So these postings of mine aren't really disagreements with him at all. I love Cantor's series, and I recommend it highly. All I'm doing is riffing on themes that he has laid down. Quibble #2: The question of folk and amateur art. Cantor's main goal in his lecture series is to get listeners over any artsy-fartsy, romantic cultural snobbishness towards commercialism. He accomplishes this brilliantly, as far as I'm concerned. He points out that (for instance) such immortal titans as Shakespeare, Rubens, and Dickens were, in their time, butt-kicking, scrappy creativity-entrepreneurs who were doing their best to thrive in lively culture-market contexts. Cantor is just as insightful about his fellow intellectuals, profs, and culture-critics. He points out, for instance, that it took the intellectuals many decades to acknowledge that movies -- which are now generally felt to have been the dominant art form of the 20th century -- were an art form at all. "Cultural critics are usually a generation if not a century behind in terms of their responses and observations," Cantor wisecracks, and hats off to him for being so blunt about this fact. It's a big help to get the "experts" in a little perspective. Cantor is terrific, in other words, at exploring the relationships between creators, audiences, and evaluators, as well as between high art and popular art. Part of what makes his case so compelling, by the way, is that -- despite his openness to popular art -- he digs high art too. He isn't some defiantly uncultured populist doing his crude best to defile the finer things. He's simply a very educated and enthusiastic guy who is realistic about how culture works. And here's where I locate space for my little contribution. In the midst of the tensions between high art and commercial art that Cantor spells out and explores so well, what he leaves a little underrecognized is the question of folk art and amateur art. It's a dimension of the culture-thang that I think deserves recognition. Let me pass along a general snapshot of culture that I've found handy and useful. (I'm assuming that, like me, you sometimes find it useful to separate facts out into neat piles. Then -- whee... posted by Michael at January 10, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, January 9, 2008


Oh, Those Copycat Japanese
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- When I was younger, Japan had the reputation of not being innovative. It copied this, that and other things from Western sources. This is understandable, given the Meiji Restoration and the Westernization it entailed. By the 1970s, the Japanese had pretty well assimilated Western technology and acquired a new reputation as innovators, particularly in the realm of consumer products. In art, Japan never had a copycat image. Rather, Japanese influence was strongly felt in late 19th century Europe, mostly in term of certain compositional practices and in the use of flat or nearly-flat areas of color. When I toured Claude Monet's house in Giverny, I was surprised to see wall after wall covered with small, framed Japanese prints. However, Japanese artists did try to copy Western art, even in the years of isolation. A recently-closed exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, in cooperation with the Kobe City Museum, presented Japanese paintings, maps and other artifacts that drew heavily on Western examples brought by Dutch traders to their Nagasaki compound during that era. Below are some images from the Seattle Art Museum web site, furnished to it courtesy of the Kobe City Museum. Note the use of linear perspective, oil paints and other Western touches. Since the 18th and early 19th centuries many Japanese artists were influenced by or even wholly converted to Western-style painting. But I thought you might find these early examples interesting. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 9, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, January 8, 2008


Dutton's Doings
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm glad to see that the great Denis Dutton -- aesthetician, philosopher, and founder and editor of the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily -- is up to substantial mischief. Don't miss his contribution to Edge's 2008 World Question, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" In it, Dutton recounts how shook up he was, as a good Darwinist, to think through the consequences of sexual selection. As he says, selection reintroduces "purpose" back into the evolutionary equation: The revelations of Darwin's later work ... have completely altered my thinking about the development of culture. It is not just survival in a natural environment that has made human beings what they are. In terms of our personalities we are, strange to say, a self-made species. As I mull over his point in my dimwitted way, I find myself thinking, Hmm, that certainly puts an end to determinism, and reintroduces that nasty "mystery of it all" category all over again, doesn't it? Fine by me! (Which reminds me: Going through some of the other responses to Edge's inspired question, I was tickled by the number of brilliant scientists who confess to a common experience: waking up one day to to the fact that science -- as freakily impressive and powerful an enterprise as it is -- doesn't, can't, and never will Explain It All. Geniuses, eh? I mean, any guy who has ever dated a few women, let alone gotten married, could have told you that there are phenomena that will never yield to rational explanation.) Dutton has also created a new best-of, one-stop, digest site for those interested in the climate-change issue: Climate Debate Daily. Check out what the mainstream is saying as well as what the skeptics are taking issue with. Climate Change Daily looks brilliant, and is already a-fizz with much enticing linkage. Here's hoping the site will promote the kind of wide and open debate in the eco-bio-climate-sphere that Arts & Letters Daily has fostered in the culturesphere. I'm triple-thrilled to see that Dutton also has a book scheduled to come out soon. Its subject: evolutionary biology and the arts. From its description, "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution" looks to be the book that I've been waiting for for a very long time: a comprehensive survey of the way that evolutionary theory and neuroscience affect our view of the arts. I'm also hoping that Dutton's book -- which should go on sale in July -- will be the book that will stimulate one of the longest-overdue conversations that I'm aware of: the one about what kind of sense it makes to think of art as socially-constructed, let alone a progressive force. Really, I'm hoping that Dutton's book will topple the current artchat and art-thought regime entirely. I happened to tune into this scene early on, and its views and contributions clicked with me instantly. Evo-bio (and neuroscience) struck me as very effective antidotes to the politicized, substance-free, and unhelpful... posted by Michael at January 8, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments




Cities and Icons
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Even though I've traveled over much of the United States, that travel took place over such a long span of time that I haven't been to some cities in 20, 30 or even 40 years. Over that much time, their skylines change; 60 years ago cities with 25+ story buildings were rare and now they are a lot more common. But the key thing is that those modern skyscrapers usually look pretty much alike, and so do the cities that contain them. That's why, when I see a photo of a city in, say, an advertisement, I often have no idea what place it is. This isn't always the case, of course. Consider this photo that I took recently: Most of you will instantly recognize the setting as Honolulu because the famous Diamond Head volcano cone is in the background. This picture was taken from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, hence the pink accents on the beach gear. What you need to realize is that Diamond Head is iconic. Unless a city has some sort of icon -- be it a building, the physical setting, whatever -- it will be nondescript, especially to people not familiar with it. Here are some city photos for your consideration. How many cities do you recognize? Gallery City "A" City "B" City "C" City "D" City "E" City "F" City "G" City "H" The cities are: A = Charlotte, NC; B = Rochester, NY; C = Columbus, OH; D = Kansas City, MO; E = Denver, CO; F = San Francisco, CA; G = New York City; and H = Seattle, WA. I suppose most of you correctly guessed the last three cities -- San Francisco, New York and Seattle. San Francisco because of its setting and perhaps because of the pyramidal Transamerica building. The New York picture shows the famous Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, though the latter might be harder to recognize because many people aren't familiar with its night time lighting schemes. Seattle is known because of the Space Needle in the foreground, though a Needle-less photo that included Mt. Rainier in the background might have been equally useful for identification. I haven't been in the other cities (except Denver) for decades and probably would have failed to identify any except perhaps Columbus (thanks to the pre-WW2 tower towards the center-left of the photo). How about you? Actually, there's no truly important reason why a city has to be so distinctive that people from the other side of the country or even overseas can identity it instantly. Iconic status isn't a necessity for a nice lifestyle. Still, isn't there such a thing as icing on the cake? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 8, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, January 3, 2008


A Few Small Beefs with Paul Cantor: Part One
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few days ago I recommended a free, downloadable audio lecture series by Paul Cantor about culture and the market. Today and tomorrow I'm treating myself to a few quibbles with Cantor. Let me say first that this is entirely unfair of me. Cantor is (IMHO) helpful, brilliant, accurate, healthy, and entertaining. He's undogmatic, streetwise, and (especially for a prof) amazingly respectful of actual experience. He's also sophisticated, nuanced, and appreciative -- of art itself and of life's many ironies. Besides, Cantor's point in his lecture series isn't to provide a Compleat Account of art and culture but rather to help culturefans cast off their usual anti-commercial bias. He means his lectures to be a corrective to the usual nonsense, and he achieves his goal wonderfully. But I'm going to treat myself to a few quibbles anyway. Please understand though that I'm not really quarreling with Cantor. I'm on the same team as he is. I'm taking issue with him only for the sake of making my writing challenge a little easier. In reality, I'm just adding my own two cents to the conversation. The first of my points: The art history thing. Cantor gives a fresh and realistic account of art history, one that's infinitely more true to the facts than is the one usually sold by schools and by the media. Bravo, excellent, superb, etc. My quibble: The "art history" that Cantor discusses strikes me as very narrowly defined. He accepts the usual list of greats, as well as much of the storytelling that connects the dots between them. In painting, for instance, the conventional art-history story goes: Renaissance- Baroque- Neoclassical- Romantic- Impressionist- Cubist-Surrealist-AbEx, etc etc. Cantor's evidently OK with that story; he just wants it told in a truer-to-life-than-usual way. Me, I'm not OK with it. I mean, there "art history" is, and that's OK with me, of course. But I'm also struck by the fact that there's so much more to the story of "visuals" than the "art history" version of it. In fact, the more I awaken to the actual facts of visual culture, the more I lose interest in the conventional "art history" part of it. Art history (in the usual sense) is a fine topic, but it's no more than one small chapter in the very large book that contains the record of how humans have decorated themselves and their world, have expressed themselves in visual terms, and have made life more lively and rewarding in visual ways. A few examples of what you don't often run across in "art history": erotic photography, food packaging, jewelry, typography, television graphics, greeting cards, automobile design, book jackets, movie posters, sports visuals, clothing, lingerie, computer graphics, glamor lighting, magazine design, makeup ... Not to mention how individuals decorate their homes, dress themselves, do their hair, etc. Did I mention lingerie? Oh, I see that I did. Well, I hereby mention it again. The people who design, manufacture, and promote lingerie... posted by Michael at January 3, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments





Sunday, December 23, 2007


Pic of the Day
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards, I have to confess a secret shame. Despite my very real admiration and attraction to the Impressionist school of landscape painting (including both the canonical French masters and the California school), I like Romantic landscape painting even better. There, it feels good to get that off my chest. I'm not saying I don’t have issues with Romanticism generally, although when push comes to shove most of my issues are actually with the way Modernism filed the serial numbers off of any number of Romantic notions and then misused most of them in the 20th century. But I have no issues at all with Romantic landscape painting. It's big, it's vast, it's cosmic, it's Deistic or polytheistic, and heck, it's often (although not always) amazingly brightly colored. It can combine the Big Picture with reassuring little passages of detailed description. It often transparently glues together different moments of time, different sources of illumination and absurd disjunctions of scale. All this makes me ridiculously happy, although I can assure you that I've dutifully absorbed many lectures about how modern landscape painting is morally superior because it refuses to do any of these inherently fun things. Anyway, it’s always a thrill to come across a new artist that I like, or at least an artist that is new to me. That’s why I’m posting this picture by an artist whose work I never laid eyes on before today, despite the fact that he died 120 years ago. Feast your eyes on this painting by Peder Balke (1804-1887), a Norwegian painter who, according to Wikipedia, …was known for portraying the nature of Norway in a positive manner and influenced a dramatic and romantic view of Norwegian landscape. Balke, P., Stedtind i tåke, 1864 You can see more pictures by Balke and read more about him here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at December 23, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, December 20, 2007


Art School Confidential
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few weeks ago, Friedrich called my attention to James Elkins' book Why Art Cannot be Taught. I read it and found it a little hard to follow. Maybe that's because I've had a cold and couldn't focus. Or, more likely, my feeble mind can't deal with even semi-scholarly material any more. Nevertheless, I found the book interesting because it presents an inside view of art schools (in this case, the school at the Chicago Art Institute, circa 2000). My own art school experience was quite different from Elkins' description. Aside from the 40-year time difference, I went to a large state university and wound up majoring in Commercial Art, not the same breed of cat as Fine Arts. Elkins deals mostly with the critique, which apparently is how BFA and MFA students are evaluated and directed in their progress. This kind of critique involves up to half a dozen faculty members from various fields (not all from the student's field) "tasked" with evaluating the work and/or the student herself. (Note the "herself." Elkins annoyingly uses a female generic gender rather than the traditional male generic. Doubtless this is a noble gesture on his part, but it brought me to a halt every time I encountered it.) The critiques I experienced in studio classes took place after the class had partly or entirely completed a project -- painting a portrait, say. The instructor would walk from easel to easel and make a few comments. No faculty herd, which I suppose must have been reserved for Masters level students. One thing that struck me was how many fields are now considered worthy of instruction in art schools and college art programs. Since my students days, photography, textiles, video, performance, computer, neon, holography, kinetic sculpture, installation and other "arts" have been added to the curriculum. I'm ashamed that I've never thought to get on the internet and look up what various leading schools are offering: it should be interesting. Elkins acknowledges that the general public does not look at artists in as kindly a light as artist students themselves do. He also stresses that art students reflect their own times (and influences) to such a degree that, after a period of years, one student's work seems indistinguishable from all the others. And this is likely to be true for all the presumed inventiveness of today's art school; in 50 years the probability is that the stuff will look pretty similar. Moreover, almost no student currently enrolled is likely to ever be self-supporting by art sales, and even fewer will be "known" even locally. Nevertheless, cohorts of students continue to pass through the educational system and faculty members congregate time and again to conduct critiques that, in the long run, are likely to be meaningless in the history of art. Elkins makes the following claims about what students cannot learn in today's art schools and colleges (pages 72-82): Art that involves traditional techniques. Art that takes time.... posted by Donald at December 20, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Wednesday, December 19, 2007


Architecture and Urbanism Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Charles Paul Freund documents a juicy case of preservationism gone loony. * New York Magazine's Year in Architecture sure isn't my year in architecture. * John Massengale has a funny go at a typical New York Times architecture review. It would be sooooo much easier on the nerves if the Times would just admit, once and for all, that they don't run architecture coverage, let alone architecture criticism. Instead, they run starchitecture propaganda. * Town planners have a lot to answer for, writes Stephen McClarence. * These days, it looks like it's the starchitects (and their sponsors) as well as the planners who have it in for our cities. Check out this recently approved addition for the Tate Modern, for example. Does that say "London" to you? It says "Vegas-gone- deconstructionist" to me. * Here's an excellent introduction to the heterodox architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, a hero of mine. Here's the transcript of a legendary debate between Alexander and avant-gardist Peter Eisenman. * Katie Hutchison thinks that there's little that's as beautiful as a worn, painted floor. * MBlowhard Rewind: The architecture establishment would like you to believe that the history of architecture is the record of one blazing innovation after another. Back here, I argued that architecture history is better understood as a series of revivals. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 19, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, December 18, 2007


Fab Freebies
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Lexington Green points out an amazing free resource -- the website of Alan Macfarlane, a topnotch British prof and anthropologist with a special interest in economics. Macfarlane, who is well-known in Britain for his popularizations as well as for his academic achievements, has put an almost overwhelming amount of his work online: books, lectures, interviews, research, and more. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what Macfarlane has made available but my head is already spinning in the most pleasant of ways. Check out this jaw-dropping collection of interviews with prominent anthropologists and sociologists, for just one instance of what's there to be explored. Download 'em and put 'em on your iPhone. I'm looking especially forward to the talks with Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Lex describes Macfarlane as "anti-Marxist" and "sensible and empirical," and he calls Macfarlane one of his own intellectual heroes. That's one terrific recommendation. Lex suggests starting with this TV series, as well as this collection of downloadable e-books. * Thanks to visitor Brian for pointing out this Paul Cantor lecture series about culture and the market from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. (Where has Brian been recently? I miss his brains, humor, and spirit.) I'm about midway through the series and I'm enjoying it thoroughly. Cantor is brainy, exuberant, and very likable -- a wisecracking and irreverent, yet truly culture-entranced, guy. He's a spritzer, and he's very spontaneous, so the talks are alive. Yet he manages to keep his material organized too. To do Cantor a small injustice, his theme here is, "Commercialism ain't bad." And his main goal in the series is to get people with an interest in culture over the cultureworld's usual anti-commercial bias. In this, his series resembles Tyler Cowen's "In Praise of Commercial Culture," a book that looks with every passing year more and more like one of the most important arts books of the past few decades. (Here's a semi-informative review of Cowen's book.) Cantor is very generous in acknowledging Cowen's work, as well as the contributions of other researchers and writers. Hey, here's a discovery that you make if / when you go into the cultureworld: Most of what you wind up talking about with other arts and culture types isn't ideas and aesthetics. Conversation inside the NYC cultureworld is often anything but highflown, in fact. Usually what you wind up talking is jobs, money, grants, and gossip. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Artspeople gotta pay the bills too, and this is their shoptalk. Still, it's one of those disappointments that culture-besotted newbies have to look forward to. The sad fact is that if you're hungry for sizzling yak about the arts, generally speaking you gotta turn elsewhere. Cantor is sensible and vivid on some really important questions: The market as a feedback mechanism, for example. It's common to think of "the market" as something that degrades the purity of aesthetic creations, and there's no question... posted by Michael at December 18, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, December 17, 2007


Schjerfbeck's Drift to Modernism
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Finland produced some interesting artists who were active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I wrote about Albert Edelfelt here and Axel Gallén (Akseli Gallén-Kallela) here. Another artist whose work impressed me a few years ago as I made a mad, just-before-closing-time dash through Helsinki's Ateneum was Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Although she lived into her 80s, Schjerfbeck was sickly and faced economic problems early in life. Biographical information can be found here and here. What interested me was Schjerfbeck's transition from being a traditional/realist to a Modernist painter. This was made quite clear because the Ateneum devoted an entire room to her work and all I had to do was stroll along the walls and note the paintings' dates. The following Gallery section should give you a sense of what I saw. Gallery The Convalescent - 1888 In her mid-20s Schjerfbeck was still painting in a mainstream non-Impressionist style; her brushwork and sketchy background suggest John Singer Sargent's work. Portrait of a Young Girl - 1886 Painted two years before the painting shown above, this work is sketchier, but still within parameters set by the better non-Impressionists elsewhere in Europe. I find this a very satisfying painting aside perhaps for a minor quibble about the treatment of the girl's garment. The Seamstress - 1903 By the dawn of the 20th century Schjerfbeck edged away from free brushwork to a more "designed" approach. Again, a satisfying work because the stylization is kept under control. Self-Portrait - 1915 Modernist influence has now sunk in. Whereas the face is correctly proportioned, what can be seen of the torso seems distorted. The painting style has moved from "sketchy" to highly stripped-down. Schjerfbeck's good compositional sense remains intact. Einar Reuter - 1919 Modernism has taken hold completely. All the qualities I liked in the Schjerfbeck paintings shown above are gone. Varjo Muurilla - 1928 Better composition and color use than for the Einar Reuter portrait. Pretty abstract, but nice. The last painting shown above seems better than what I remember seeing at the Ateneum. My impression was that Schjerfbeck's work had pretty well gone to pot before 1920 in a quest to be "with it." Even so, she still had enough compositional and color sense to salvage a little something during and after abandoning her younger approach. Many of her contemporaries who were seduced by Modernism (or felt compelled to switch out of fear of losing sales) were less successful. If I can find good examples of this, I'll pass them along. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 17, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, December 12, 2007


Walter Dean Goldbeck Illustrations
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Nothing profound here. Just a few illustrations circa 1910-20 from an illustrator no one seems to know much about today. His name is Walter Dean Goldbeck, apparent dates 1882-1925. An item about him can be found here (scroll down). The first two picture don't strike me as being anything special, but the two at the bottom seem nicely done. Enjoy. Gallery Woman as Deity From "The Bear's Claw" From "The Shogun's Daughter" The Light of New York - ad for General Electric, c. 1911-14 Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 12, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, December 11, 2007


Best-Ofs, 2007 Edition
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Tyler Cowen reviews some of this year's best-of lists. In this long-ago posting about best-of lists, I cheered 'em, but I also asked critics a few questions about 'em. It's that time of year again, ain't it? Grinchly, Michael... posted by Michael at December 11, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, December 10, 2007


Derriere Guard Alert
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The ever-useful Arts & Letters Daily site offers this link to a December 2007 New Criterion article by James Panero about a group calling themselves the "Derriere Guard." Apparently the poor fools want to bring back "traditional forms and techniques" to art: In the fine arts, that means Classical Realism, a movement seeking to reunite beaux-arts technique with classical ideals through a loose network of schools, ateliers, and apprenticeships. This year’s Derriere Guard festival brought together a weekend of talks with presentations of realist art and classical architecture, poetry, dance, music, drawing [...] Panero begins with a put-down on Tom Wolfe because Wolfe doesn't like Abstract Expressionism and considers Picasso a fraud. Then he goes on to mention some Guard events, bringing the name of painter and art school proprietor Jacob Collins who is striving to roll back the Modernist tide rather than simply complain about it. But much of the piece is about Wolfe and suggests that he is some kind of conspiracy theorist regarding the promotion of Modernism. The last part of the article focuses on the Classical Realists (the artists, not the activist group) in a more sympathetic -- though equivocal -- manner, noting parallels with the struggles of the early Impressionists against the Establishment of their day. Altogether, a rambling essay with no clear, take-away idea. Perhaps that's because of a sort of feud between Wolfe and The New Criterion's founder and present co-editor/publisher, Hilton Kramer. Panero naturally sides with Kramer, much as National Review writers tend to avoid strongly disagreeing with William F. Buckley. For this reason, I read Panero with a wary eye. (Full disclosure: I'm a New Criterion subscriber.) As the for Derriere Guard, this is the first time I've heard about it. Chalk that up to living far from New York City or perhaps my habitual sloth and ignorance. It was nice to learn about the group and its activities. Modernism and its spawn remain far too powerful for the good of what's left of Western culture and, until it is cut down to its proper size, I welcome just about any group willing to join the fight against it. Now re-read the last sentence carefully. I did not advocate complete elimination of Modernism. Some 2Blowhards readers seem to think that's my position. Perhaps that's because, even though I was educated to like Modernism, I no longer care for much of it and am not shy about saying so. But not caring for something is not the same thing as hating it and wishing for its destruction. In an ideal world, I would like to see Modernism and, especially, Post-Modernism held to the same level of importance and prestige as our present cultural elites regard, say, Thomas Kinkade. And Picasso. Was Tom Wolfe correct to consider him a "fraud?" I think that shoe doesn't completely fit. "Clown" seems more accurate. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 10, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, December 7, 2007


What Will Last?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thursday takes up a Charles Murray challenge and lists some contempo-ish art-things that he thinks might still be vital in 200 years. It's a good list. Commenters at Steve's blog pitch in with a lot of suggestions and ideas. My response: I'm not sure that in 200 years anyone will be remembering anything from the past. Something we may take a little too for-granted is the existence of a Museum of Past Worthiness and Greatness. We maintain it, we argue over what deserves to be included, we teach it, we get upset (or cheer) when the canon is dissed, etc. What we don't do often enough is recognize that the existence of this Museum is a historical anomoly. In most places, at most times, people didn't maintain a Museum of Past Greatness. (Or if they did it was a much more informal one than our version.) They just lived, created, and enjoyed in the present. There was no Lincoln Center in 1700 Europe, keeping alive the "canon" of past musical greatness. There were just bands, composers, and audiences making and enjoying music in the present. Old music? It was done, over, forgotten. Art museums as we now think of them are themselves of very recent vintage. They're mainly creations of 19th century Europe. As for today ... Well, it seems to me that we're already in an era where people are living, creating, and enjoying in the present far more than they they did even in the very recent past. YouTube, Facebook, viral videos ... iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand ... In our mix-and-match, collage-it-together-for-yourself world, it's all about instant impact -- about making and enjoying and moving on. Look at the film world, for example. While the New Wave and '70s filmmakers discovered film history and made it their own, there aren't many contempo filmmakers who make any use at all of "film history." They couldn't care less. Today's hot and talented youngsters are involved with ads, TV, magazines, videos, performance art, and clothing styles, even with skateboarding and tattooing -- with stuff that's hot now. They just aren't that interested in film history, and certainly not in the museum sense. Since this seems to me to be the direction culture is going, my guess is that in 200 years museum-style "art history" itself will be a thing of the past. People with cultural inclinations are going to be making videos, collaging together music tracks, assembling Flash-like multimedia things. They'll be posting them online and social-networking them back and forth to each other -- and that'll be what "culture" will be. As for the artistic past? Seems to me likely that people will raid the past for ideas, because why not? But the history of art won't be a cultural presence in the "canon of greatness" sense, and almost no one will be taking part in "Does this deserve to be considered great?" conversations. To the extent it'll have any life at all, the cultural... posted by Michael at December 7, 2007 | perma-link | (31) comments





Tuesday, December 4, 2007


DVD Journal: "Pulp Fiction Art"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Given its title and its publicity material, you might expect the documentary "Pulp Fiction Art" to comprise a quick intro to the era of pulp-magazine fiction followed by interviews and encounters with, and bios and appreciations of, the artists who created the era's visuals. The film turns out instead to be more of a jumble than that: a zig-zaggy, 55 minute-long survey of the pulp fiction era generally, with some minutes with the artists (Norman Saunders, Ernest Chiriacka, a few others) crammed in here and there. But as modest as the film is -- and, yes, it did feel a bit like an opportunity lost -- I enjoyed it anyway. The overview it provides of the pulp-magazine era may resemble a disorganized term-paper, but it's still informative -- and newbies to the material will learn quite a lot. Many of the interviewees (especially some collectors and fans) are amazingly articulate about and appreciative of the art. And if the time the film spends with the actual artists and illustrators is 'way too small, that's still a lot better than no time spent on them at all, which is the treatment you'll find accorded to pulp-fiction artists in most histories of American art of the 20th century. Jamie McDonald, who made the film, never loses track of his subject's central irony: Although this really was an amazing episode in American visuals, almost no one was aware of the fact at the time. Highbrows of course turned up their noses. The artists thought they were doing mere commercial work, cranking out tawdry paintings for a sleazy market. Many of them had their sights focused on higher, fine-arty things; they often didn't even bother to sign their pulp work. Yet these lewd, exploitative images are turning out to be the art that they'll be remembered for. It's sad to be reminded of the fact that nearly all of the original paintings were simply thrown away once they'd been reproduced. Today the work of people like Rafael DeSoto and Margaret Brundage is much loved, enthusiastically enjoyed, and widely influential -- and collectors pay big bucks for the handful of originals that still do exist. As for the self-consciously significant work of that era? Well, some of it's still enjoyed too. Since the film is so skimpy and modest, it's a little hard to recommend a purchase. But why not put the film near the top of your Netflix queue? I'm very fond of this book, which includes lots of excellent reproductions of pulp fiction art. H.J. Ward, who specialized in illustrations for the "spicy" market and who made the image at the top of this posting, is a particular favorite of mine. (I found the image above at this website.) Someday I'm going to buy a copy of this book about the art of the "girly pulps." Semi-related: I wrote about the film "The Notorious Bettie Page" here; Donald wrote about pin-up art here and here; Friedrich wrote... posted by Michael at December 4, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, November 27, 2007


Italian Efficiency
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The trains we rode during our recent Italian trip ran on time sometimes and only once were we seriously late on arrival. Otherwise, such delays as there were, were on the order of five or ten minutes. Il Duce Mussolini, wherever he is, must be displaying half a smile. Even more efficient -- or might I say dictarorial -- was the Galleria Borghese in Rome, home to such noted artworks as Antonio Canova's "Paulina Bonaparte as Venus Victrix." Paulina was Napoleon's wild kid sister who posed semi-nude for Canova. The Wikipedia entry for Canova is here (scroll to bottom for a Paulina picture). Nancy is a huge Canova fan, so a visit to the Borghese was a must. However, as we discovered, one doesn't casually bop into the place. Reservations are required. Luckily we were in Rome for enough days that we were able to get on the list. Things got even stickier once we arrived at the Borghese. It seems that visitors have a two hour time limit to see what they can -- half an hour in the paintings galleries and the balance viewing sculptures. I'm pretty fast when in museum-viewing mode and therefore didn't find out if, or how drastically, these time limits are enforced. In any case, we could linger in the museum shop/cafe area as long as we wished. Never experienced such a thing before. But rules are rules and not to be quibbled by foreigners. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 27, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Sunday, November 25, 2007


Las Vegas Goes Modernist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is the Las Vegas Strip as we know and love it. But it changes moment by moment. Some of those changes are almost undetectably minor. Others have the potential to alter the character of the place. For instance, this is what I saw last week while we were on our annual visit: Hmm. No monster pyramids. Not a single half-size Eiffel Tower. Nor a 30-story Italian villa. I saw not a sign of fake pirate ships and toy volcanoes. No. It's, it's ... The Horror!!! ... Modernist Architecture! Modernist architecture in the form of the CityCenter project, a multi-billion dollar effort by our friends at MGM Grand that replaces a nondescript jumble of seedy stores and aging time-share condos. Here's what it might look like when completed: Here is the flashy official site -- but it might be handier to link here to its Wikipedia entry which contains under-construction photos and a set of views of projected final appearance. I have no idea what was on the minds of the geniuses behind CityCenter. Instead of letting Vegas be Vegas, a lesson that Robert Venturi famously urged architects to study, they opted to grace the strip with the artistic fruits of starchitects. The rogues gallery of architectural offices doing CityCenter buildings includes Cesar Pelli, Rafael Vinoli, Lord Norman Foster, Helmut Jahn and Daniel Libeskind. And I'm all but certain the results will be perfectly swell. If you love the sort of sterile, geometry-based glass 'n' steel structures that warms our hearts when we conjure images of New York City's Sixth Avenue -- with the switcheroo that some CityCenter buildings are curved! My head reels in admiration for such imaginative solutions. Will CityCenter wreck the Strip? Big though it is, it's still fairly small given the huge size of the place. So long as no similar projects are built, it won't fit in well, but might be tolerable. Tolerability might be enhanced if the owners pry loose starchitect hands at street level; lots of flash and pizazz for pedestrians would distract from the monster blandness of the tall, background structures. We Shall See. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 25, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, November 23, 2007


Visual Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * I've just enjoyed going through the website of Gabriella Morrison, a Canadian artist who left a perceptive comment on Donald's recent Italian-painters posting. A little Wayne Thiebaud, a little Emily Carr, a little Philip Pearlstein ... I'm just describing, by the way. I have no idea if Gabriella considers these painters to be influences. She makes quiet, warm, relaxed work that's also witty and incisive, and genuinely bohemian. It's the kind of art that makes me want to go take an art class -- which I mean as a high compliment. * I'm also lovin' the funky wooden bas-reliefs of Dutch artist Ron van der Ende: satellites, photocopy machines, and old cars presented with a captivating combo of model-making, little-boy mischievousness and grown-up gravity. * Figure-drawing buffs won't want to miss this marvelous animation. * Thanks to Jonathan Schnapp for pointing out Sexy Losers, an online comic strip about arty kids. Much of "Sexy Losers" is really filthy in an old-fashioned underground-comix way, so be warned. Or be delighted. * Michael Bierut wonders what it takes to do "ugly" design properly. * Michael also points out a terrifying set of pages from a 1975 J.C. Penny's catalogue. The '70s, eh? It's the decade that keeps on giving. * Browsing bliss for fans of pulp art. * Tim Souers takes a look -- actually, a number of looks -- at Barry Bonds. * Brown eyes, blue eyes ... What kind of difference might it make? * MBlowhard Rewind: I wrote about the one-of-a-kind San Francisco artist known as Jess here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 23, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, November 20, 2007


Italy's Dabbers
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Once I started this gig as a full-time Blowhard I realized that the art history class I took eons ago was a flimsy basis for writing even halfway solid articles about art. So for the last two years the majority of books I've read have been general art histories and volumes dealing with individual artists and artistic schools or movements. For example, I'd never paid much attention to the Impressionists. That's because I thought that Monet, Pissarro and others using broken color and short, distinct brushstrokes produced paintings that seemed too "unfinished." To me that was Impressionism, a painting style I didn't (and still don't) particularly care for. Now I've learned what I should have known better years ago: The Impressionists were a loose association of painters who at times exhibited with one another, yet didn't share a common style. Yes, I knew Manet was an Impressionist and didn't paint like Monet -- but the meaning of this fact didn't sink in as deeply as it should have. Nor did I really understand that Degas considered himself a traditional painter who did his work in a studio and not plein-air, as did most other Impressionists. I have come to agree with the implication by some art historians that Impressionism (and Post-Impressionism, for that matter) is a term that is something of a roadblock to understanding the history of painting in the last third of the 19th century. It would be better to try not to use the word and instead focus on painting styles. For example, Manet, Degas and the early Caillebotte (along with a number of non-Impressionists) might form one group while Monet, Pissarro and the later Caillebotte (and others) could form another. Which brings us to a near-contemporaneous group of Italian painters called I Macchiaioli. There are explanations of the term to be found various places on the web. Wikipedia, for example, says that the term Macchiaioli originated in a hostile review in the 3 November Gazzetta del Popolo, though the artists themselves used the word macchie to describe what they were dealing with -- the effect of light and shade, according to the entry. Macchie and derivations can mean "spotted" or "speckled" as well as an alternative meaning of "outlaw." So the article cited above might have had a dual negative sense of "outlaw daubers." Some sources translate Macchiaioli as "spotters," but that doesn't convey much to me. Therefore I use the term "Dabbers" as I did in the title of this post. It strikes me as having a better artistic relationship than does "spotters" because it suggests a technique that some probably used. Both English words lack the light/shade meaning, which perhaps might be invoked by "dappled" -- which has little or no meaning in art. Apparently Macchiaioli is one of those untranslatable words we are more or less stuck with. The core Macchiaioli were a group of art students and young artists in Florence in the mid-1850s dissatisfied with... posted by Donald at November 20, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments





Monday, November 12, 2007


What Ever Happened to "First Do No Harm"?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- MIT sues Frank Gehry. The school says that the goofily off-kilter Stata Center -- which Gehry designed and which has been lavishly praised by the architectural establishment -- is plagued by persistent leaks, cracks, and mold problems. Gasp: Bizarro-chic new architecture that garners critical praise yet that fails in the most basic ways as pleasant and effective shelter -- now doesn't that come as a surprise? From Wikipedia's entry on deconstructivist hero Peter Eisenman: [Eisenman's 1989] Wexner Center, hotly anticipated as the first major public deconstructivist building, has required extensive and expensive retrofitting because of elementary design flaws (such as incompetent material specifications, and fine art exhibition space exposed to direct sunlight). Its spatial grammar of colliding planes also tends to make users disoriented to the point of nausea, and Eisenman has been known to chuckle in lectures about making people vomit. Talk about high maintenance! Buyer beware, of course. But it's probably a good idea for readers of the architectural press to beware too. What on earth is this crowd trying to put over on the rest of us? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 12, 2007 | perma-link | (19) comments





Saturday, November 10, 2007


Giovanni Boldini: The Paris Connection
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the quirks of 19th century painting is that the greatest feather in an aspiring academic artist's hat was being awarded a Prix de Rome scholarship to study in Italy -- yet young Italian artists had to come to Paris in order to make their names known. Such was the case for Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931). Starting his career in Florence, he moved to Paris in 1871 after a London sojourn. By the 1890s he was one of the most fashionable portrait artists in Paris, though he is not well-known today. Boldini's specialty was flashy, sketchy portraits of women. He married journalist Emilia Cardona in 1929, when he was 87: Cardona was 30. This was the same year Alaida Banti died. Alaida was the daughter of artist Cristiano Banti, who assisted Boldini's career after the young artist moved to Florence from Ferrara. Alaida was a teenager when she met Boldini and fell in love with him. Cristiano did not approve of the relationship. My Italian is too sketchy to pursue this, but apparently Boldini and Alaida maintained some sort of relationship even after he left Italy. He proposed marriage in 1903 but this was thwarted by Cristiano, who died the following year. I have no idea why they didn't marry after the death of her father. Nor do I have any idea what this might have to do with Boldini's art. But gossip can be interesting, don't you think? Rather than go into other, more relevant details of Boldini's life, let me offer some links for you to explore. Here the Wikipedia entry in English and here is the Italian version which offers more detail and illustrations. A biographical sketch can be found here, and it contains an assessment by Time on the occasion of his death. Finally, here is another Italian link which has a number of examples of Boldini's work. Gallery Giovanni Boldini Diego Martelli in uno studio pittore - c. 1867 Martelli was an influential critic and buyer of art. The original painting is smaller than it seems, but I can't find its exact dimensions. Place Clichy - 1872 Boldini painted street scenes, landscapes and still lifes in addition to his portraiture. Giuseppi Verdi in cilindro - 1886 This is one of Boldini's best-known and most-reproduced works. James McNeill Whistler - 1897 Although Boldini specialized in portraits of women by the 1890s, he also had male sitters. Lady Colin Campbell c.1897 Hmm. Seems I've been neglecting those female ritratti. So here goes ... Nudo - 1911 Well, I suppose it's a portrait of sorts. But who cares. Mademoiselle de Gillespie - 1912 This seems a little stylized, so I wonder what she actually looked like -- a non-exhaustive Web search drew a blank. La Marchesa Luisa Casati con uno leviero - 1908 One of Boldini's flashier efforts. What did she really look like? How much is Boldini fooling/teasing us? Photo of Luisa Casati - 1912 Maybe Boldini didn't over-dramatize too much.... posted by Donald at November 10, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Tuesday, October 30, 2007


Wisdom from the Grumpy Old Bookman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Since I'm still floundering around in a flu-ish, cold-ish fog, I'm going to let one of my betters do the speaking in this posting. Michael Allen, aka the Grumpy Old Bookman, has written a book called "The Truth About Writing" that's a weatherbeaten, beady-eyed, plain-spoken wonder. Do you want to know what the writing game and the publishing game really consist of? You can't do better than read Allen's book. I know of few books that speak as directly and truthfully about the arts-life generally, come to think of it. Some nice passages: Most professors of English literature, and most of the highbrow literary critics of this world, would have us believe that there is, metaphorically speaking, a hierarchical tower of fiction. This tower is something like a block of flats. At the top, in the exculsive pethouse, is a small amount of "literature," i.e. Great Novels. In the basement is a large heap of trash ... The truth, however, is that there is not a top-to-bottom hierarchy of fiction, with great books at the glorious summit and "trash" or "pulp" at the unspeakably vulgar bottom. If we must think of the range of available fiction in visual terms, it is best to think of a broad spectrum of books, which runs horizontally. You might care to imagine a street in whcih every buiding is a bookshop containing a particular kind of fiction ... Consider the vested interest of all those who teach the subject of English literature. They are all doing pretty nicely, thank you, preaching the 1947 party line, and they're not too keen on having any revisionists question it ... The facts are really very simple. A book eitherworks in terms of producing the intended emotion in a target reader, or it does not ... Personally I do not believe that a book can be said to be good or bad in any absolute sense -- it is only successful or unsuccessful in terms of its intended audience ... If there are no great novels, there is no hierarchy of fiction, with the good stuff at the top and the trash at the bottom. Indeed, only the briefest of considerations will demonstrate that the trash is every bit as effective in generating emotion as the so-called good stuff. Usually, in fact, a lot better ... Books which continue to be enjoyed for long periods of time tend to become known as "classics." This is a convenient shorthad term, but again, you should not be misled into assuming that it implies some absolute quality ... As for striving to achieve classic status yourself -- forget it. Your first task, when writing a novel, is to make it work for your intended audience today. Let the future take care of itself ... A work of art is .. a work which has been created through the exercise of skill, rather than by accident. The most common use of the term is in relation... posted by Michael at October 30, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments





Tuesday, October 23, 2007


Flickr Huh?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Do you "get" the wonderfulness of Flickr? Me, I've discovered that I lack the Flickr gene entirely. I didn't think this would prove to be the case. A few years back, I was as excited as everyone else was about Flickr. The world had never seen such a cool web-thing. Overnight it seemed that everyone embraced Flickr. Flickr was showing us a whole new way to interact with photos, even with the web itself. The mind boggled, the heart raced. I paid for a Pro account, I uploaded a lot of pix ... And I've barely used the service since. Wondering why, I come up with one thing only: I haven't discovered a single reason why I would use Flickr. I find its "Photostream" method of organizing photos confusing. I don't understand the difference between "Sets" and "Collections" -- and, hell, I don't want to understand it. Photos as Flickr displays them are rather small, and the service has been pokey-ish on all the computers I've tried it on. I tired very quickly of watching little pink and blue balls circle around each other above the word "Loading" ... What first appealed to me about Flickr was the idea of storing photos online. No more chance of losing them due to a home-hard-drive crash; easy to access them from no matter where. In practice, I've found that a combo of iPhoto on the home Mac and a weekly backup to an external hard drive suits me far better. I've also found that, when I'm away from home, one of the last things I feel a desire to do is to play with my photo collection. So much for my initial hopes and plans for the service. As far as using Flickr as a way to show off occasional handfuls of photos to friends and family goes, I've found Flickr to be a bust there too. My first preference is to email photos to family and buds. My second is to use Google's free Picassa Web Albums, which seems to me easier and faster to use than Flickr does; it also displays photos to better advantage than Flickr does. IMHO, of course. My own disappointment notwithstanding, Flickr and the impact of Flickr roar on, of course. Yahoo! bought Flickr for a rumored $15-$17 mill -- and Flickr at Yahoo! has been such a popular attraction that Yahoo! has junked their own old-timey photo service. Meanwhile, Flickr seems to be generally deferred-to as a pioneer of Web 2.0, if not Web 3.0. What is it that enchants so many about Flickr? Many people are evidently getting something out of Flickr that it doesn't even occur to me to look to Flickr for. What could that be? I have two hunches. One has to do with the idea of a website not as "a brochure with links" or as "a book with links" but as "a place to visit and play with." People don't just use Flickr... posted by Michael at October 23, 2007 | perma-link | (24) comments




The Best Adventure Comic Strip Artist?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Newspaper comic strips started off as humor and that's pretty much what the radically miniaturized versions of today offer. But during the 1930s, "adventure" strips came to the fore. Think Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, Red Ryder, The Phantom, Smilin' Jack and Mandrake the Magician. This genre continued through the 40s and 50s, eventually fading as television and shrinking newspaper cartoon-panel sizes took their toll. Most adventure strips weren't well-drawn. In part this was because many of the cartoonists lacked extensive art school training. Perhaps more importantly, the pressure of cranking out panel after panel --- especially for a strip running both daily and Sunday -- is a punishing task. So most artists cut as many corners as they could to keep the product flowing. Successful strips, those with large syndications, generated a large enough cash flow for the cartoonist to employ assistants. Sometimes the assistants did the backgrounds or perhaps the inking over "roughs" drawn by the cartoonist himself. And there are instances where the assistant would do all the drawing, this being possible if the "author's" style could be exactly mimicked. Nevertheless, some adventure strips rose to a level that might reasonably be called "art," if indeed "commercial art" is Art and not simply "art" as a task or process. This is my favorite book about comic strips. First published in France in 1967 under the title Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative, it treats comic strips as art and contains an excellent selection of the best panels appearing up to that year (along with some mediocre ones to complete the coverage). If adventure strips are borderline or even actual art, then who were the artists doing that high-level work? Who was best? I don't have the digital space to be encyclopedic, so will focus on those active in the 1930s who I consider superior. The first is Noel Sickles, who for a time drew the "Scorchy Smith" aviation strip. He didn't do Scorchy for very long and quit to become a successful commercial artist. It's pretty shrunken, but below are sample panels. Noel Sickles - "Scorchy Smith" Note that Sickles was (1) skilled at drawing humans, an ability not common in the comic strip universe, and (2) employed large areas of black for reasons of design as well as for the occasional chiaroscuro effect. Due to his short stay in the field, I'll eliminate him from my "best" list. That list is comprised of Milton Caniff, Frank Godwin, Burne Hogarth, Harold Foster and Alex Raymond. Let's take a look. Gallery Milton Caniff - "Terry and the Pirates" Many observers consider Caniff the best "all-rounder" in the adventure strip field. He could plot and write well and his panels were powerfully done once he shifted from pen to brush. The only place I can fault him is that his humans tended to have a caricature-ish tinge: they aren't quite convincing. It's likely Caniff did this for dramatic effect. Frank Godwin - "Connie" --> Frank... posted by Donald at October 23, 2007 | perma-link | (9) comments





Tuesday, October 16, 2007


Fascist Buildings
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm not writing about buildings that seem fascistic in their relationship to occupants, though Lord knows there's plenty of grist for that mill. No, this is simply a quick post showing a few buildings I encountered in Italy that were built in the days of the Mussolini regime. I'm not sure I'd even give the matter of Fascist-era architecture much of a thought except for the fact that popular travel writer Rick Steves takes the trouble to mention in his Italy guidebook that this or that building dated to Mussolini. So if Über-Liberal Steves seems a bit obsessed by Fascist-era buildings and not, say, those from the reign of King Vittorio Emanuele, then attention obviously must be paid. I haven't researched this subject, but from casual observation I found nothing particularly evil or even unusual about the Fascist-era buildings that I came across. Mussolini's agenda included making Italy a modern, efficient country, so advanced (for the times) artistic and architectural concepts were favored by the State. In practice, this meant Art Deco-inspired styles in the late 20s and nearly ornament-free buildings in the later 30s. Similar architecture can be found all over the USA in the form of government buildings funded by Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-fighting agencies. For what it's worth, here's what I photographed: Gallery Milan's Stazione Centrale The present Milan Central Station was designed years before Mussolini took power, but not dedicated until 1931. According to this report, modifications were made to the design during the long construction process. Although Steves notes an association with Mussolini, that's not really apparent from the architecture. The station is undergoing renovation and was a mess when we were there which made it hard to evaluate. Florence's Stazione Centrale Santa Maria Novella Opened in 1935, Florence's central station is clearly Modernist in spirit. (For a Wikipedia link, click here, though I must caution you that it's in Italian.) Perhaps the architecture seemed shockingly modern when the station opened; certainly it wasn't in the spirit of the rest of central Florence. But the station is on the edge of central Florence, which lessens the visual damage. From a 2007 perspective, the building strikes me as nondescript. Government building, Rome I think I snapped this while strolling a ways northwest of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, but didn't write down details. Anyhow, it's Fascist-era. Mediterraneo Hotel, Rome This is where our tour group stayed. Very convenient for travelers arriving on the train from Fiumicino Airport: it's only a block from the plaza in front of Rome's Stazione Centrale. According to its web site, the hotel was opened in 1938. So far as I know, it was a private project, yet it is in the spirit of government buildings of the time. Later, Donald... posted by Michael at October 16, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments




Kalb on Alexander
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Jim Kalb is having an appreciative wrestle with volume one of Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order": here, here, here, here, here. Since Alexander is, for my money, one of the really important thinkers of our time -- hint: It ain't just about architecture -- and since I find Jim to be one of the most substantial and thoughtful of bloggers, I'm one happy reader. Jim's verdict on the book: "I can't think of another book on any topic published since the Second World War that strikes me as equally valuable." I'll second him on that. The Alexander-Kalb matchup is one made in 2Blowhards heaven for another reason too. Early on we did a long interview with Nikos Salingaros, a mathematician, architect, and architectural theorist who has worked closely with Christopher Alexander. You can get to all five parts of the interview via this posting. Nikos' own very generous website is here. We also ran a three-part interview with Jim Kalb, in which Jim explains the nature of real conservatism: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. Please do treat yourself to both of these interviews. They're real brain-openers. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 16, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments





Monday, October 15, 2007


Modern Art, Italian Style
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Rome has the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in the Villa Borghese park area and Florence the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in the Palazzo Pitti museum aggregation. The former deals with art from the late 18th century to the mid-20th century while the latter's time frame is 1784 to 1924 or thereabouts. Italians seem to view art with a longer perspective than do Americans or even northern Europeans: something to do with Etruscans, Greeks and Romans, perhaps. To them, "modern" is something that happened after the Renaissance as well as the Baroque and Rococo periods. Recent art? That would be called "contemporary" -- for what it's worth, Rome does have its Museo di Arte Contemporanea. I visited the "modern" museums and found them worthwhile. As many Faithful Readers know, I'm especially interested in non-Academic, non-Modernist art from the second half of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th. This is because I think that Modernism (and its PoMo guises) was a probably necessary experiment that largely failed aesthetically, even though it has remained commercially successful. Non-Modernist art might offer clues as to the direction art might take once Modernism shrinks to proper place in the art pantheon of movements and styles. The web site for the Rome Moderna is here and that for Florence's is here. The Florence gallery features the Macchiaioli movement, and I'll deal with them in a later post. For now, I'll discuss the Rome Moderna. The building is divided into four main gallery blocs along with connecting spaces. The bloc containing works from the first half of the 19th century was closed the day we visited, so we had to begin with art from 1850 or a little later. Yes, I'm letting my biases show, but I found the paintings from 1860 to 1910 fascinating. Here was gallery after gallery, most with several eye-catching paintings by artists I'd never heard of in college art history courses or seen mentioned in art history books. I've taken some heat from readers regarding my "peripheral artists" pun when I wrote about Finnish, Russian and Polish artists from the same era, but here were artists not peripheral geographically who have been consigned to art-historical oblivion. Why? Most likely because they fit neither the Paris-centric 19th century art history narrative nor the teleological Modernist narrative of mid-late 20th century writers. If you feel like mousing around on your own, the link above offers a secondary link to pictures of paintings and sculptures in the collection. Or you can click here for a Google-based set. Otherwise, below are a few painting I found interesting. Gallery Domenico Morelli - Ritratto di donna in rosso - circa 1855 "Portrait of Woman in Red" interests me because it has an Impressionist feel even though it predates the movement by about a decade. Domenico Morelli - Le tentazioni di Sant'Antonio - 1878 Another Morelli --"The Temptation of Saint Anthony" -- is earthy and dramatic. Like certain examples of... posted by Donald at October 15, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, October 12, 2007


Separating Art and Artist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Can a work of art be evaluated without reference to the personal qualities of the artist who created it? Should a work of art be evaluated without reference to the personal qualities of the artist who created it? I'm only a casual reader of art criticism, but it strikes me that these are perennial questions that seem to pop up whenever an artist is "controversial." The idealistic response, if I understand the issue correctly, is that a work of art both can and should be evaluated independently of the artist. And as surely as the New York City sun rises over the East River and sets over the Hudson, this ideal is honored in the breach. I don't keep statistics on this, so I'm just guessing when I say that qualities of the artist tend to enter the scene when the critic does not like those qualities. This approach can be difficult for the critic if the artist has produced works that, by consensus, are considered great or even significant. That is, the critic might agonize, as Michael did (very mildly) here over film-maker and Hitler groupie Leni Riefenstahl. Poet Ezra Pound was another problematical case from the age of Fascism as was, to a much lesser degree, Herbert von Karajan. And it's my impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that current academic critics are quick to veer from the art to dwell on the hated racist/patriarchal/capitalist/whatever social milieu that spawned the item being evaluated. It's less common, but occasionally artist qualities the critic approves of or finds worthy can enter into the evaluation. To me, the prime example is Frida Kahlo whose wretched/tragic life seems to outshine her art. Let's see ... she was female, crippled, married to famous artist Diego Rivera, died young, and was a Communist or fellow traveler. At any rate, when I see references to her, it's the biography that's stressed, not so much her paintings. Perhaps that's because, down deep, the critics realize that her art was banal and repetitive -- not top-grade stuff. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 12, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Thursday, October 4, 2007


Too Much Glass
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Design experts often rhapsodize about the glories of huge, unbroken expanses of glass -- yet in common experience, large stretches of glass often prove cold, barren, and blinding. Katie Hutchison praises the virtues and pleasures of windows that are divided up into panes. (I wrote a little something here about the way many architects over-value glass.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, October 3, 2007


Art Find for the Day: Erwin Haya
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A fast posting to note that in my websurfing-time today I've been enjoying Erwin Haya's quick-witted and high-spirited comix art. It's giddy, cheerful, and likably unpretentious. Erwin -- who bills himself as "OneSickIndividual" -- creates what seems to me like pin-up art for the skateboarding, "Ren & Stimpy" set. That's high praise in my book. I sent a link to Erwin's site along to Friedrich von Blowhard, who responded with the following fun set of musings: I love the title: My Artistic Commode! This guy is a gem. I wonder if "cartoony-ness" is a personality trait. In other words, cartoon artists basically develop a standard figural model, which they can then play with in different poses, with different clothes, etc. It makes what they do kind of analogous to a writer who has mastered an alphabet, and then uses it to tell a story. It also implies a certain solipsistic tendency, insofar as the cartoonist/writer isn't that concerned with what's going on outside themselves. It is, however, very different from, say, the paradigm of an Impressionist painter, who is trying to describe a given external reality.Not that one is better than the other, just pointing out how they're different. Hmmmm. You can buy prints, posters, books, and t-shirts by Erwin here. Semi-related: Donald wrote about traditional pin-up art here. Friedrich von Blowhard wrote about pin-up-paintin' titan Gil Elvgren here. Friedrich and I swapped notes about Edward Leeteg, the legendary father of painting-on-black-velvet, here and here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, October 2, 2007


Poetry, Fiction, Length, More
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- This piece by the NYTimes' Corey Kilgannon about Frank Messina, a Mets fan who writes poems about his team and about his feelings about them, is a sweetheart: amusing and touching -- "appreciative" in the best sense of the word. It also triggered off an email back-and-forth between FvBlowhard and me that, for better or worse, I'm copying-and-pasting into this blog posting. Hey, 2Blowhards started as an extension of the email exchanges FvBlowhard and I were already having. Every now and then we have to reconnect with our gabby-arts-buddies roots. FvBlowhard: The problem with modern poetry is that guys like the guy in this story are treated as laughable. He, not the poetry establishment, is the one in touch with the spirit of Homer. He may not be all that good as poet, granted, but that's really beside the point; he is marginalized not for how he does poetry but for the purpose he is putting it to. MBlowhard: That's a great article, tks. Nice catch by the reporter. And gotta love people who really do what they do for the love of it. My own current rant has to do with length. The Wife is back to working on another novel. She's really determined to be a pro and to make money doing it, and good for her. Me, I had a mini-crisis the other day. I have a short novel all sketched out, a good first draft of it down on paper, etc. And I was having hard time facing the next stage -- moving from "rehearsals are going well" to "let's get this baby up on its feet." The Wife looked at me, read my mood, and said, "Novel-writing's a job. You've got a fulltime job already. Why not let yourself do manageable projects instead, at least until you retire?" She was right. I set the novel aside and the gloom lifted. Anyway, my thesis about length and scale boils down to a few points. 1) Novels are the limit of what humans can do. 2) Doing anything on that scale isn't going to be fun-fun. Some exceptions allowed for, few novels have been written on a pure breeze of inspiration. Most have, to some extent, been ground out. 3) Most stories don't need to be more than 5-50 pages long. All of which means that most people who write novels are weirdos (because who else would inflict such a lot of loneliness and delayed-gratification on themselves?), and that most novels have a lot of padding in them. Exceptions (the work of professional writer-entertainers especially) allowed for, of course. Given all this, why on earth do readers expect or even want novels? And why on Earth would anyone -- or anyone from a normal range of emotion, drive, ability -- want to write them? I mean, really, compare a novel to a movie. A movie gives you a complete story, the energies and personalities of tons of people who are pitching... posted by Michael at October 2, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments





Sunday, September 30, 2007


Balint Zsako
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Art find for the day: Balint Zsako, who was born in Hungary and now lives in Toronto. Balint often works in ink and watercolor, and he seems to enjoy walking the line between fine art and illustration. His paintings and drawings are musing, dreamlike, poetic, and mucho preoccupied with branches and roots, fluids and orifices, and machinery. In their whimsicality and power, they're like a cross between Saul Steinberg and "Eraserhead." Here's Balint's very rewarding website; here's a very rewarding q&a with him. Great exchange: Q. If you could pinpoint the characteristics of people who collect your art, what would they be? A. They generally have a good sense of humour with an appreciation of both the refined and the obscene. Don't overlook Balint's mindbending, brainstormy journals, which can be found on his website under "Gallery." I discovered Balint thanks to Drawn! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 30, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, September 29, 2007


Some Katie Opinions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Katie Hutchison celebrates a picket fence, but thinks that the aluminum siding has got to go. She also visits the house that Modernist hero-titan Walter Gropius designed for his own family, and gets a case of the giggles. The Wife and I reacted similarly when we toured Frank Lloyd Wright's legendary Fallingwater. I wrote about our visit here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 29, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, September 17, 2007


The Problem of Simplicity
Donald Pitenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- "%$^**@&%#," I say. That's because my draft of this article in the blog queue disappeared into the Big Black Hole of Lost Blog Posts. So what follows is a stripped-down, less fancily phrased and structured version of what I had written a week or so ago. As I said, "%$^**@&%#." Part of Modernism's rejection of the 19 century was the introduction of a dogma of Simplicity. This did not affect painting to any great degree; a Pollock drip-painting can hardly be called simple. But Simplicity did take hold to a considerable degree for sculpture and triumphed in the fields of Architecture and Industrial Design where ornament was abolished in the former and reduced to "speed strips" in the latter by 1940. The Postmodern era has been slightly more tolerant of ornament. Geometry-based patterns are allowed on occasion as are repeated structural details that can give an ornamented appearance of sorts. Nevertheless, a small set of simplified shapes is expected to comprise the essence of the building or object. I have nothing against simplicity. Industrial-Designed objects, if they have smooth, simple surfaces can be much easier to keep clean than objects with lots of tiny places where dust and dirt can collect. And simple objects can be seem jewel-like if placed in contrasting settings -- for example, the newly-built Lever House building on what was then pre-Modern Park Avenue in New York. Even so, Simplicity -- if it is pervasive -- runs counter to what seems to be deep-seated, perhaps evolutionary, human visual preferences for nature-based forms. Such forms are definitely non-geometrical and tend to the complex as opposed to the simple. (Though contrasts such as rolling fields with copses of trees and background wooded areas might skew towards the simple, yet can be pleasing to view.) Furthermore, non-simple familiar objects probably hold viewer interest longer than greatly simplified or geometrical forms. I'm thinking of human faces and bodies as well as landscape scenes. But even complicated man-built landscapes can qualify. I can imagine myself studying a panorama of Paris for just as long as I might the Grand Canyon. To illustrate what the title of this post -- The Problem of Simplicity -- is about, consider two sculptures: Gallery Bird on Space - Constantin Brancusi - 1923 et. seq. This a one of my favorite sculptures. Despite its subtle forms I can pretty well assimilate visually it in two or three minutes. Monolith - Gustav Vigeland - completed 1943 I've never been to Oslo where a park has been set aside for Vigeland's works. But, because of the large amount of human subject-matter, I imagine that Monolith would hold my interest considerably longer than Bird in Space. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 17, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, September 12, 2007


Dealing With Collegiate Gothic
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Collegiate Gothic was the epitome of architectural fashion for American colleges and universities during the whereabouts of the first third of the 20th century. I'm very fond of that style and enjoy seeing it when I visit Yale, Cornell, Princeton and other universities with significant concentrations. But what do architects steeped in Modernist and Po-Mo dogma do when new buildings are added to a Collegiate Gothic core? There are three basic strategies for this situation: (1) ignore the past and build what you want; (2) grit your teeth and continue with Collegiate Gothic; and (3) create buildings that blend with Collegiate Gothic to varying degrees. The third strategy is the most interesting one because it shows what architects design when their hearts aren't completely in the game -- how much do they compromise and how do they go about compromising. The University of Washington is an interesting test case because, since a campus plan using Collegiate Gothic first emerged in 1915, architects have had to acknowledge the style. The remainder of this post is a gallery of photos I took recently along with captions in which I explain and interpret. I'm sorry that this post is a little lengthy, but the subject can't be dealt with using only four or five illustrations. Gallery This is the main quadrangle. Here and in many other parts of the campus vegetation is thick -- too thick, in my opinion. Major trimming is needed so that buildings are visible and free from potential damage to brickwork in the damp Seattle climate. The Japanese cherry trees in the photo have been in place for around 45 years and render the Collegiate Gothic classroom buildings nearly invisible when leaves are out. The "Quad" sets the style for the main part of campus. Bricks are a reddish-orange color and trim is a pinkish cream. My other alma mater, Dear Old Penn, standardized on Burgundy-colored brickwork to unify the campus. Here's a better view of a building done in Collegiate Gothic style. This represents the take-off point for architects working in the 1950s and later. The Mechanical Engineering building was built in the 50s in a nondescript style that nods to Collegiate Gothic only in its standard UW brickwork. At the center-left is an engineering school building completed around 1960. There apparently was a little pressure to compromise with Collegiate Gothic -- hence the fussy, abstracted-Gothic motif. The main campus plaza. A parking garage is below ground level and the towers are ventilators. The area was built during the early 70s when Brutalism was the architectural fad. No Gothic touches, but the brickwork is UW standard. Meany Hall performance center, sited on the plaza shown above, but completed in 1995. Note the odd little triangular windows along the roof line: the architect's reluctant tribute to Collegiate Gothic.. The engineering library and a classroom building dating to the 70s. Again the expected brick and no Gothic. On the left is the Business School... posted by Donald at September 12, 2007 | perma-link | (19) comments





Thursday, September 6, 2007


Pygmy Painters
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in the lamented pre-20th century world of Western art, there strode giants whose names were, and are, known to much of the public at large. Rembrandt. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. El Greco. Van Dyck. Vermeer. Goya. Monet. Van Gogh. As for the 20th century fame? Picasso, for certain. Ditto Dalí. Klimt, increasingly. Pollock, probably. Calder, perhaps. Warhol, maybe. Norman Rockwell, in the USA at least. Today? If you or I were to hit the street asking passersby to name a famous living painter, what responses would we get? I seriously doubt that many average people could name any currently active painter. And if they could, there's a good chance they would name Thomas Kinkade. Don't laugh and get smug thoughts about the lumpenproletariat. Those same proles might well recognize several of the names in the listings above if the living restriction were lifted. I believe it is a fact that there are no living painters (aside, perhaps, from Kinkade -- thanks to his gallery presence) whose names are widely recognized. This is because the art world has become highly fragmented. And it has become so fragmented because of the multitude of Mini-Isms left in the wake of the original Modernist thrust and its culmination in Abstract Expressionism. The past several decades have seen painters -- assisted by galleries, publicists and the art press -- desperately trying to be "creative" and thereby famed for creating a "movement" or art "ism." Sadly for the participants, the result has been the increasing generation of random noise, not clarity. Is there escape from this situation? Yes, there are possibilities. But many in the current art scene would not be happy with them. More on this another time ... Later, Donald PS: A reminder that I'm discussing fame and not artistic excellence, though the two traits tended to greatly overlap before the 20th century.... posted by Donald at September 6, 2007 | perma-link | (17) comments




Architecture and Happiness: More Brick
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here I wrote a posting about a small brick path that gave me some intense architecture-appreciation pleasure. A few of the many possible lessons I'd be happy to draw from this: The space between objects is just as important as the objects themselves; we endow objects -- central focus points -- with far too much importance; there's a lot of value to be found in modest, overlooked nooks and crannies; scale and ambition aren't everything ... In any case, ever since writing that posting my mind and my eyes have been dwelling on the topic of bricks and happiness. My snapshot finger soon caught on and followed along. Let me start -- for the sake of comparing-and-constrasting as well as for the fun of being cranky -- with some brickiness that I most emphatically don't like. A great big upside-down smiley -- a frownie? -- to this impersonal, glossy, bleak wall, for instance: It's no life-enriching experience to pass by that particular wall, that's for sure. It has about as much sensual-intellectual appeal as a cafeteria's floor. As for my usual reflex to blame everything on modernism ... Well, here's an example of brickwork from circa 1960, the height of the NYC version of High Modernism, when architects, designers, developers, and planners were peddling hygiene, clean lines, flat surfaces, right angles, and light, light, ever more light: Yes, yellow bricks -- and wasn't that a great innovation? Verdict: All the personality of a drawing made in MacPaint circa 1984, minus the sometimes likable goofiness. While we think of bricks as heavy objects full of personality laid in courses by handworkers called bricklayers, the fact is that these days most bricks for large projects are mass-produced to a striking degree of uniformity, are assembled into walls off-site, and are then applied to the outsides of buildings in huge blocks. It's a process rather like gluing a sheet of postage stamps onto the side of a cardboard box. And you can tell that's the case, can't you? These bricks are neutral. They don't seem thick or weighty; they certainly don't beg to be touched. They don't say "solid matter," let alone "made by the hand of man." They say something like "a designer thought this would be an appropriate surface treatment." What's with the red mortar anyway? Who thought that was a good idea? And why hasn't he been drummed out of the design field yet? Now, feast your eyes on some old-style beauties. Warmth, heft, irregularity crossed with regularity ... They're like a display in a bakery store. Let's zoom in. Would it be unfair to compare the modern brickwork far above to Wonder Bread and the trad brickwork to a high-quality baguette? To shift comparisons ... For me, experiencing this wall is like looking at a painting by someone like Bonnard -- it's all personality and touch -- while looking at the modern walls above is like leafing through a rather dull trade... posted by Michael at September 6, 2007 | perma-link | (22) comments





Monday, September 3, 2007


Singular Multiplicity
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- In the dawning 20th century, Western painting's parting from traditional ways accelerated. Ideas filled the garrets, studios and coffee houses of Continental Europe, especially in Paris. As 1910 approached, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented the Analytical form of Cubism. Sabine Rewald of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art writes here that The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points. In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or "analyzed" into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During "high" Analytic Cubism (1910-12), also called "hermetic," Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. Here is one of Picasso's best-known portraits from his Analytical phase. Portrait of Amboise Vollard - Picasso - 1910 Picasso's Vollard was the 30 November 2002 Guardian "Portrait of the Week." The article by Jonathan Jones is here. Jones contends There is not a single aspect of his face that is "there" in any conventional pictorial sense. The more you look for a picture, the more insidiously Picasso demonstrates that life is not made of pictures but of unstable relationships between artist and model, viewer and painting, self and world. And yet this is a portrait of an individual whose presence fills the painting. Vollard is more real than his surroundings, which have disintegrated into a black and grey crystalline shroud. Donald Pittenger of 2Blowhards contends that the Guardian's Jonathan Jones' assertions are nonsense. I say that Picasso's Vollard is, at best, an interesting attempt at decorative art. The physical Vollard is barely discernible, the psychological or emotional Vollard even less so. If one strips away the Modernist false god of "honoring the picture plane" and the decorative aspects of Analytical Cubism, one soon comes to the matter of multiple perspectives of the painting's subject. Question: Is breaking the subject into bits seen from different viewpoints and reassembling those bits into a single object the best way of showing multiple aspects of the subject? I think not. This feature of Analytical Cubism results in visual confusion and a serious decrease in viewer understanding of what is being portrayed. If the goal is to show a subject in multiple guises or viewpoints, there are better solutions. And such solutions pre-dated Picasso and Braque. Consider the following pictures. The first apparently was a study to assist a sculptor and the second represents a long tradition of engineering and fabrication drawing.... posted by Donald at September 3, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Monday, August 27, 2007


Craftsman A'Buildin'
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I don't know what's the hot style in domestic architecture in your neck of the woods. But in mine, it just might be Craftsman or Bungalow or whatever one calls the style of modest houses that was popular around 1900-1920. Above is a Craftsman style bungalow in El Segundo, California, built in 1912. There are lots of similar houses here in the Seattle area. The ones I was familiar with when I was growing up were small, such as the one pictured and not to be confused with those large, wonderful creations by architects such as Green & Green. I first noticed a revival of Craftsman style houses in Du Pont, Washington back in the 1980s or early 90s. Du Pont, as the name suggests, was a town created by the company early in the 20th century near one of its dynamite plants. The town was comprised of less than a dozen blocks and the houses were in the prevailing Craftsman mode. When the new development was started by a Weyerhaeuser subsidiary, the decision was made to build houses using Craftsman design elements. In this way, the character of the old town was preserved, but on a comparatively massive scale. A photo of a house in the new Du Pont is below. Now Craftsman style is going upscale. Sunday, Nancy and I drove to Seattle exurbs north of the city of Monroe and found two developments featuring Craftsman style houses. Prices were in the neighborhood of $600,000 for around 3,000 square feet of house with yards ranging from about a quarter acre to nearly half an acre. These developments are the better part of an hour's drive from Seattle on a good traffic day and even farther from the airport, so buyers face a definite trade-off of convenience for better prices and more elbow room. Above is a photo I snapped of a nearly-completed house in one of the developments. The house I inspected was Craftsman on the exterior only, the interior being nondescriptly conventional rather than featuring the rich wood and carpentry of traditional and revival Craftsman / Bungalow style. Nevertheless, these houses serve as yet another indication that Modernism and successor styles are not what people usually choose when they spend a lot of their own money. (Though seriously rich Seattle-ites are more inclined to opt for Modernist syles, as I reported here.) Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 27, 2007 | perma-link | (14) comments





Thursday, August 23, 2007


Skill and the Arts
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Do opera-lovers dress up, fight traffic and pay seriously high ticket prices to hear singers of the calibre found in the average locker room shower stall? Of course not. Would fans of Olympic figure skating competitions tolerate a performer doing nothing but circle the rink like teenagers at the Rockefeller Center ice rink? Never. What about art museum-goers -- do you think they would plunk down the better part of 20 bucks and jostle the crowd to gaze at the works of somebody who can't convincingly paint a human face? Uh. Um. Well, it seems that they actually do. So the question before the 2Blowhards readership today is Why is lack of skill tolerated in the graphic arts, but seldom elsewhere in the arts realm? Okay, okay. There are exceptions. The main example that comes to my mind is that, for decades, pop music singers have been allowed by their audiences to possess average (or worse!) singing voices. That's provided said voice was distinctive or that it conveyed emotional overtones listeners found enjoyable. Nevertheless, in general, rare skill tends to be rewarded in the arts: think instrumental soloists, ballet dancers, actors, and so forth. People are seldom willing to go out of their way to witness things that they themselves can do or surpass. Maybe that's why I tend to be impressed by representational painters who have superb technical skills. But I'll admit that technical skill isn't everything when it comes to graphic arts. An outstanding artist will deliver more than a technically excellent, yet lifeless, image. A great artist needs to "set his stage" compellingly and create an emotional aura to his painting if it is to be recognized as great. Wait!! you say: back up a bit. That opera singer can be seen as being just a puppet of the composer and director -- those are the folks who do the heavy creative lifting. And semi-ditto for a Heifetz or a Yo-Yo Ma and their ilk: although they have some interpretive elbow-room, they remain subservient to composer's creativity. The ballet dancer is a tool of the composer and choreographer. The creator of the work is king, in other words. I don't think so. For example, the composer's work exists only in his mind and on paper until it is performed. And if the performance sounds lousy, it doesn't matter how great the composition is. So composed music is really an unavoidable partnership between performer(s) and whoever writes the music and (if singing is involved) words. A sculptor might have to rely on technicians to help realize the final object. But painters are responsible for the whole shot; besides coming up with the concept, they necessarily do the execution. (Yes, in the classical studio system, the master had students and assistants. But that's seldom the case today, and it doesn't affect the discussion.) Some will argue that innovation in art is important -- perhaps the most important thing. I disagree. If a great... posted by Donald at August 23, 2007 | perma-link | (50) comments





Wednesday, August 15, 2007


Pin-Up Masters
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I used to see them on the walls of dirty, cluttered service station or car repair shop offices. I even saw some at the San Francisco branch of the appraisal company my dad worked for. Now they're gone. A victim of Political Correctness. Pin-Ups is the subject. No, make that pin-up artists, because it's the artist who gives the pin-up its character. There were only a few major calendar companies offering a pin-up line. They generally featured artists who were skilled in the genre and whose work sold well -- the pin-up buying public was not lacking in taste, apparently. Other, sometimes cruder, pin-up art could be found in magazines and on their covers: the publication Movies Humor is an example. 2Blowards has not ignored the pin-up. Friedrich von Blowhard has proved to be a devoted student of famed pin-up artist Gil Elvgren, as can be seen here, here and here. There are books about Elvgren; I'm most familiar with one that attempts to present all known examples ofl his pin-up art as well as examples of his regular commercial work. The original Taschen edition is here and the more recent Barnes & Noble reprint is here. Perhaps the most famous of all 20th century pin-up artists were George Petty and Alberto Vargas, both of whom gained their renown because they were featured in Esquire magazine for many years, whereas Elvgren's work was mostly seen on calendars. If you are interested in artists of the golden age of pin-ups, I suggest the book The Great American Pin-Up, which presents examples of work by dozens of artists who spent at least part of their career in that trade. I used that book as reference for this article, trying to identify artists whose work I thought was especially good. Unfortunately, most of the really good pictures in the book don't seem to be on the Internet, so the examples below are a shadow of the glory and tackiness of the pin-up world. The examples I selected are definitely on the prim side because that suits my public temperament. Besides, my intent is to show the artistic style of the artists, not the content. You can find plenty of content in the books cited in this post. Gallery By George Petty This World War 2 vintage illustration was subject of the wrath of the Post Office. By Alberto Vargas Also from the time of World War 2. Petty and Vargas used simlar techniques for their pin-up work because their work was both in vogue and in Esquire (yes, that small "v" is intentional). The archetype of this style is a illustration of an ultra-leggy girl with a white telephone tucked next to her head. By Gil Elvgren Elvgren cranked out lots of pin-up art. His challenge was to remain within the audience expectations of the genre while providing variety. Even a 12-illustration calendar could be challenging when coming up with subject-matter. And viewers would be familiar with... posted by Donald at August 15, 2007 | perma-link | (83) comments





Monday, August 13, 2007


Me and the Snobs and the Little Guy
MIchael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in this posting, I took a gratuitous swing at the European concert-hall tradition. Challenged by Jult52 about whether that was necessary -- and of course he's right, it wasn't -- I responded with some thoughts that Donald has urged me to turn into a free-standing posting. So without further ado, although with a little additional dolling-up ... Well, "Suck on this" wasn't exactly meant to be taken as a considered (let alone defensible) critical position ... But, what the heck, to indulge in a little earnestness for a sec: I love the Euro high-art traditions. What I don't like (and what I think screws up a lot of American arts discussions and arts education) is seeing American art through a Euro-derived, high-art fixated lens. Sometimes it's helpful, but much of the time it blinds people to the riches we have, or makes them much too modest about them. A lot of our best art (it seems to me) is folk, popular, self-created, entertainment-driven, commercial, eccentric, and/or hard-to-categorize. Much of it wasn't even intended to be taken as art. Meanwhile, our high-art style work, while sometimes amazing, is often either thin on the ground (hard to make a living at it here) or embattled, stressed, and self-righteous in a way that can weaken its quality. As a result we have a culture that's very different from a Euro-ish one in many important ways -- it's scrappy, decentered, unofficial, making-itself-up-as -it-goes-along, and often coming at ya out of seemingly nowhere ... Work that wasn't intended as art -- movies, jazz -- becomes a hugely important part of world culture, while much of our self-consciously arty art goes nowhere at all. So why do many critics, profs, and even civilians insist on applying inappropriate -- or at least what I consider inappropriate -- standards to what we do have? (I think I have a hunch why, btw ... ) Like I say, this kind of attitude can blind us to much of what we have and can make us too modest about how rich our culture is. It can also kill pleasure, and by god I love pleasure. High-art-obsessed types tend to see things awfully hierarchically. One work is automatically more valuable than another simply because of the kind of work it is. A literary novel is automatically more valuable than a collection Dave Barry columns, for instance. Seriously: It isn't uncommon to run into someone in the books world looking at something like a Dave Barry collection and sniffing, "Oh, that isn't a real book" as though he's just seen a dog turd on a sidewalk. Yet Dave Barry has been around for decades, and so far his writing seems to be holding up better than 90% of the lit novels -- the so-called "real books" -- from the same stretch. Similar kinds of people in the visual-arts field view a gallery-style sculpture or piece of installation art as automatically more worthy of "serious" consideration... posted by Michael at August 13, 2007 | perma-link | (54) comments





Monday, August 6, 2007


James Bama: Better Than Photography
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- One can argue -- and many have, over the last 150+ years -- that photography has eliminated the need for representational painting. In return, others have contended that skilled representational artists can offer images that photography cannot. Both viewpoints are right, of course. Supporting the first contention, there is little question that photography pretty well eliminated the need for artists to make "record" type images -- pictures of cityscapes of the Canaletto variety, for example. And the collapse of representational illustration in the 1960s is well known to people such as myself who were in, aspired to be in, or are interested in that branch of commercial art. Supporting the second contention is former illustrator and present Western painter James Bama. Wikipedia has a fairly lengthy biography here. Another non-cursory article that's worth reading can be found here. And if you want to see lots and lots of Bama's work, there's a 2006 book about him that's probably still in print. The publisher's Web site deals with it here and the Amazon link is here. In a nutshell, Bama was born in 1926 and raised in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Much of his early commercial work was done while associated with the Charles E. Cooper Studio, home to well-known illustrators such as Jon Whitcomb, Coby Whitmore and Al Parker from the mid 30s into the 1960s. For many years, in addition to magazine illustration, Bama was a top paperback book cover artist. Unfortunately, I can't locate some of the best examples of Bama's illustration work on the Web. As I just mentioned, the recent book is the best source. But you might try the following link to a back issue of Illustration magazine that had two articles about Bama. It contains thumbnail images of pages that might be of a little help. Scroll down: the Bama stuff is in the top 40 percent or so of the Web page. By the mid 1960s Bama had married and felt the need to switch from illustration to painting. Western painting, to be precise. So off the Bamas went, moving to the Cody, Wyoming area -- quite a change from New York. Since then, Bama phased out his illustration work and makes his living selling original paintings and Giclée images of those paintings. Bama has relied heavily on photographs for much of his career. But, like Alphonse Mucha, for instance, most of his paintings are not slavish copies of the photos. Most of Bama's illustrations and Western paintings seem to have been done on gesso-coated panels rather than canvas or even linen. The hard, smooth surfaces allow a painter to paint in great detail, should he so choose. In Bama's case, favorite details include cloth and skin textures including wrinkles -- all done with slightly impressionistic fidelity. The examples shown below offer no real clue as to how his art has evolved over time. Let me suggest that Bama "peaked" about the time he was... posted by Donald at August 6, 2007 | perma-link | (9) comments





Thursday, August 2, 2007


A Less-Known Herter
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is the last of three reports on some American painters who were active during what the Smithsonian's American Art Museum calls "The Gilded Age" -- the name of an exhibition created by the museum in 2000. This is the book associated with the exhibition. I wrote about Thomas Wilmer Dewing here and Abbott Handerson Thayer here. This post concerns Albert Herter (1871-1950). The museum didn't have much in the way of Herter's work. But tucked into the room featuring Dewing, I spotted this: Woman with Red Hair - 1894 No political theme here, no psychological tension either. Just an aesthetically satisfying portrait -- nuthin' wrong with that, sez I. (I saw a slightly similar painting at the Seattle Art Museum not long ago. It might have been this one from Altanta's High Museum.) Herter's father was a principal in the Herter Brothers furniture-making / interior decoration concern that served the rich in the late 19th century. So young Albert got launched in a social climate that allowed easy entry in to portaiture for a talented artist. Biographical information on the Web is thin, so I'll pass along what little I know and hope it will be helpful. Herter had training at the Art Students League and, later, in Paris -- but I don't know under whom. He taught for a while at the Chicago Art Institute but most of his adult life was spent in New York and California. He had a Long Island estate and a home in the Santa Barbara area. Besides portraits, he did mural work on both coasts. My take is that Herter was a good technician. I haven't seen many examples of his work, but my provisional opinion is that his work isn't as distinctive or interesting as the paintings by Dewing and Thayer. Here are more examples: Portrait of Nabeia Gilbert Landing of Cabrillo at Catalina - Los Angeles Public Library mural Another mural is in the board room of the National Academy of Sciences; click here and scroll down to see the GIF image. One more thing. Does the name Herter ring a bell? Probably not, if you're under 60. But it seems that Albert's son Christian went into politics. He was a Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts and, under Dwight Eisenhower, served as Secretary of State. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 2, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Wednesday, August 1, 2007


Rocky Architecture
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- For much of my life a certain architectural detail has disturbed me. But I couldn't figure out why it did so. A month or two ago I finally found the answer. Let's take a look at some examples of what I'm talking about. The following photos were taken last week while visiting the Oregon Coast. It's those stones on the column pedestal in the first photo and, especially, the round ones on the chimney and planter areas of the building in the lower picture. Why was I disturbed? Because round stones cannot be piled narrowly as in pedestals and chimneys: it is unnatural. Such stones are found on flat areas such as stream beds. Other kinds of stone such as slate or shale are flat and can be stacked. You can see stone walls or fences in parts of New England and Upstate New York. Houses in the Northeast and elsewhere that incorporate flat stonework don't trouble me: I usually like what I see. That's because such stones are used in a natural -- not artificial -- way. Obviously quite a few people like rounds stones on their houses, otherwise I wouldn't be seeing such detailing. But still ... Later, Donald... posted by Donald at August 1, 2007 | perma-link | (19) comments





Wednesday, July 25, 2007


Architecture and Happiness: Bricks and Shadows
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Enough with the negativity and mockery. The Communicatrix, Chelsea Girl, and Raymond Pert have shown me the way: Blog about something positive from time to time, damn it. Good for the mental health, and probably a ray of sunshine for visitors too. (Listen to an interview with Chelsea Girl by Susie Bright here.) Besides, it takes more guts to open up about what moves you than it does to scorn things. For my first act of blogging-positivity, I'm kicking off a series of postings on architecture and happiness. To set this particular posting up, let me begin with -- OK, sure, admittedly -- some negativity, a few examples of the kind of thing I dislike. In the following photo, the shiney blue-green mass on the left is the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed Avenue of the Americas Plaza, in New York's West 50s. What aesthetic qualities is this building selling? Let me suggest a few answers: Blue-green silveriness, reflectiveness, grid-iness, the shock of one large funny angle ... In other words: expert play with chic geometry. Are you surprised to learn that Edward Larrabee Barnes was once a student of Walter Gropius, one of the Very Bad Guys in Tom Wolfe's essential "From Bauhaus to Our House"? How about this next building? This is the backside of the Musem of Modern Art, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. What's it selling? Hmm, let's see. Right angles. Grid-iness. An unexpected big square hole. And a marked contrast in textures, between the matte of the black, the frostiness of one set of glass panes, and the reflectiveness of the other, larger set of glass panes. Expert play with chic geometry, in other words. Funnily enough, Taniguchi once worked for Walter Gropius. Since my digicam-finger was twitchy last week, let me present another example: This is one of New York City's new bus stops, designed by Duncan Jackson of Grimshaw Architects. (Architecture and urbanism buffs refer to such things as street lamps, bus stops, kiosks, etc., as "street furniture.") Let's see: Glassiness, steeliness, angles ... In other words: Yet more expert play with chic geometry. I'm sorry to report that I can't turn up any direct connection between Duncan Jackson and Walter Gropius. Still: Are you surprised to learn that the architecture and design establishment loves these new bus stops? All the structures in the pix above are about lines, planes, glint, surfaces, volumes, and angles. The language of traditional architecture -- which might include columns, pediments, vases, temples, shadows, arches, and stone ribbons -- is nowhere to be found. No porches, no arcades ... Sigh: I do love porches and arcades. For me, looking at the structures above is a little like leafing through stylish algebra and geometry textbooks -- dry, abstract, and mathematical, however chic. What's with that? To what are a civilian's emotions supposed to attach themselves? Back in a previous blogging lifetime, Alice Bachini did a hilarious riff ridiculing architects' obsession with clean lines and precise planes.... posted by Michael at July 25, 2007 | perma-link | (41) comments





Monday, July 16, 2007


Angels and Impasto
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Interesting late-19th century American paintings are easy to find in Washington, DC, as I noted in in this post about Thomas Wilmer Dewing. In addition to a room nearly filled with Dewings, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art has several important paintings by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921). No, that's not a misspelling: the second letter of his middle name is "a," not "e." Biographic information on Thayer can be found here, here and here. Unfortunately, the sources do not agree on all the details. For example, the Wikipedia article (at the time I'm drafting this post) says that Thayer moved from New York City to New Hampshire in 1901, an event followed by the death of his first wife. Other sources say she died in 1891, but agree that the move happened in 1901. In any case, the deaths of two children and the illness and death of his first wife influenced the mercurial Thayer to add angel wings to female figures in what became his best-known works. In addition to allegorical paintings, he painted floral still lifes as well as landscapes of New Hampshire and the Cornwall coast. In the years before the Great War, Thayer became interested in camouflage and wrote a book (published in 1909) that became influential in that field. His art training was classical. He studied at the Brooklyn Art School and the national Academy of Design. After his 1875 marriage, he went to Paris for four years where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Gallery Angel - 1887 Thayer's wife was seriously ill when he painted their 12 year old daughter Mary with angel wings. Thayer liked to paint rapidly, preferring to spend no more than three days at a time on a painting for fear of overworking it -- though he might choose to return to it later. This painting is roughly done, aside from central facial details. If I remember correctly, either it or the Stevenson Memorial painting (see below) in the National Gallery exhibits almost slapdash paint application in the mouth area when viewed in person. Virgin Enthroned - 1891 This was painted not long before his wife's death. Daughter Mary is at the center with her sister Gladys "on her right" and her brother Gerald "on her left" according to information from the National Gallery. (For some reason upper middle class families sometimes dressed little boys as girls in the late 19th century. But I wonder of the reverse of the directions might be more correct.) If you look closely at Mary's chin area you can see some of the odd treatment mentioned above. Young Woman - study, no date I'm including this to further illustrate Thayer's portraiture skills. The Stevenson Memorial - 1903 This is a tribute to author Robert Louis Stevenson. The model was a Thayer household servant, not a family member. It too can be seen at the National Gallery. Monadnock in Winter - 1904 Thayer... posted by Donald at July 16, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, July 11, 2007


Painting Frustrations
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, I know. To be a good artist (painter version), it's generally a Good Thing that you have a passion for painting and paint and paint and paint in order to approach on the canvas what your intention is. "Practice makes perfect" therefore is as true in painting as it is in music, athletics, surgery and other activities demand high skill. Talent is also useful. That's what I read, anyway. And it seems reasonable. Poor me. [Assumes fetal position, whimpering] Now that I'm retired from a career of committing demography, I'm trying to become a decent painter, focusing initially on portraits. I have talent at the second or third rate level. I lack burning passion to paint. At least now that we've gotten pretty well settled in Seattle, I have a few hours a day to devote to the activity -- not paint, paint and paint, just paint a little. Plus I don't have a studio. I work out of a small bedroom. Not much room to store partly-completed canvases. No sink in there, but I'm only a few steps from a bathroom with a sink for cleanup work. The question becomes one of what kind of paints to use. Not watercolor: hate it. Probably not regular oil paints: long drying time and the need for messy solvents. I've used Alkyd oil paints that are nice because they dry in a few days. Their downside is that they too require solvents. I'm presently using water-based oil paints. The advantage is that water is used for thinning and cleanup. The disadvantage is that drying time is comparable to that of regular oils. Which brings me to the subject of acrylics. Acrylics are water-based and dry within the (half?) hour. I sometimes use acrylics for underpainting before switching to oils. I've also tried to use acrylics to paint entire paintings, but the results have been unsatisfactory. The problem is that acrylics dry so fast that it's often difficult to "work" or blend colors. Yes, there are retarding media that slow drying somewhat, but that helps only a little. I know that acrylics are popular, and I understand their practical advantages. But how can I get decent results? Change to more of a poster-like style with lots of areas of flat color? Actually break down and use my brain to plan the painting better? Or should I stick to what I'm doing, eternal amateur arts buff that I am. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at July 11, 2007 | perma-link | (10) comments





Sunday, July 8, 2007


At Right Reason
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Max Goss has arranged for some tantalizing midsummer guest postings at Right Reason. Click on over and enjoy. * The excellent Philip Bess has just completed an ambitious 4-part series in which he makes a very personal case for the New Urbanism: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. Philip uses a lot of well-chosen visuals to illustrate his points. He recently contributed a guest posting about G.K.Chesterton to 2Blowhards, which you can read here. * Rod Dreher delivers the text of a speech he made a while back on the subject of Crunchy Conservatism. Part One is here; Part Two is soon to come. Whether or not you approve of the CC phenomenon, there's no denying that it's something that's in the air. Max Goss reviews Rod's book on the topic here. Eye-opening, thought-provoking cultural thinking from the minds of conservatives ... Prior to the web, who'd have known that such a thing was even possible? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 8, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, July 3, 2007


Nikos on Amazon
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm thrilled to notice that Nikos Salingaros' books about architecture -- previously rather hard to get hold of -- can now be bought from Amazon: here, here, here. They're brilliant. You can get a good sample of Nikos' thinking by reading 2Blowhards' interview with him. All five parts can be accessed via this posting. Here's an impressed and impressive recent Ashraf Salama review of one of Nikos' books. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 3, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, June 22, 2007


Bagatelles
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A while ago I wrote here about Akseli Gallén-Kallela, an important Finnish artist active around the turn of the 20th century. Many of his paintings are in Finland and therefore inconvenient for most of us to view in person. This problem was somewhat alleviated thanks to a major exhibition of his work in Groningen, Netherlands. The bad news is that the exhibit ended 26 April. The good news is that a catalog, in English, is available. I saw copies at a nearby Barnes & Noble store, but it's available here at Amazon. No doubt there are other places it can be found, including museum shops. So you have the opportunity to get a pretty good idea about what he painted from the very good to the so-so. One feature of the catalog that I found especially nice was two-page spreads containing a detail from one or another of his major paintings (illustrated in full on another page). The detail is good enough that an interested reader (such as me) could glean a decent idea as to how Gallén handled brushwork, color overlaying and other details useful to artists. Another book I recently purchased is a biography of architect Bertram Goodhue -- its Amazon link is here. Goodhue was an outstanding architect who died in his fifties, just as Modernism was starting its rise. So there is no way we can be sure what his final, mature style might have been, unlike the case for near-contemporary (and also short-lived) architect Raymond Hood. Among Goodhue's best-known buildings are the Nebraska State Capitol, the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago and St. Bartholomew's Church on New York City's Park Avenue. The book is interesting because its focus is on Goodhue's residential work, less known than his large projects (which the book does not ignore). An interesting sidelight: I'm been seeking a decent book about Goodhue for a year or two. Apparently all the while I was wallowing in frustration, this book was becoming reality: how convenient. Will lightening strike again? Are there any publishers readying books about Frans Hals and Jean-Léon Gérôme? Hope so. (Note: 2Blowhards does not have advertisements, nor do we have deals with companies such as Amazon.com. The Amazon links above are for informational purposes only.) Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 22, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, June 21, 2007


Steps in the Right Direction?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Gotta love those modernist improvements! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 21, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments





Tuesday, June 19, 2007


Industrial-Style Upscale Housing
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A current architectural style fad is what I'll term "Industrial-Look Housing." It seems most commonly used for apartment buildings. Perhaps you've noticed such structures with curtain walls with vertical or horizontal stamped linear elements and perhaps painted using several bold colors. That style also can be found in single-family houses, even some in upscale neighborhoods. Below is an example I came across in Seattle. Gallery This is a house one drives by shortly after entering the neighborhood. It's a bit fancier than most of the others, but it does set the tone. Another fine, traditional-style house. But kitty-corner from it is ... ... this Industrial-Look house. Here's a picture of it looking uphill. I think the vertical-motif cladding on the top floor makes this house first-cousin to a pre-fab warehouse and not in keeping with its (likely) $2 million-ish value. Granted, the site is awkward enough that a traditional-style house might be hard to design. (Most new houses in the neighborhood are traditional in various guises.) And perhaps the interior is well thought out and lovely beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, I don't find Industrial-Look houses attractive, and I think this one is an eyesore in the context of the neighborhood. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 19, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments




Manzoni's Cans
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni canned some of his shit and displayed the cans as art. The gesture was an anarchist's joke at the expense of the artworld -- it was probably meant to be considerably more than that too. In any case, Manzoni's turd-tins eventually became expensive art-things in their own right. Now the joke is getting another punchline -- it turns out that there's no shit in those cans. An artist who worked with Manzoni has revealed that the Manzoni caca-cans are in fact full of plaster. Will the art world take this revelation as further proof of Manzoni's canny greatness? We can only hope. Here's the Piero Manzoni webpage. Wikipedia lists a number of Manzoni's other projects. FWIW, as zany conceptual art-world hijinks go, many of them strike me as pretty inspired. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 19, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, June 13, 2007


Victoria, 2007
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is in response to popular demand for pictures of Victoria, BC in comments to my previous post. Well, in response to Michael's comment -- hereabouts, that is popular demand. Victoria Gallery This is the view from our window on our 10-12 June visit to Victoria. At the end of Victoria's Inner Harbour is the Empress Hotel, opened in 1908. It still pretty much sets the architectural tone for the harbor area. It was one of the Canadian Pacific's marvelous hotels sited from Quebec to Victoria. The part with the Ivy is the original section, to the right is the first major addition. The newest part is barely visible at the left. The Empress is now part of the Fairmont chain. The interior of the oldest part contains plenty of dark, varnished wood, reflecting the hotel's Victorian / Edwardian origins. A popular attraction is afternoon High Tea. This is the harborside across the street from the Empress. Street performers are in action on the wide sidewalk during the high tourist season. Not far from the previous scene is where passenger-service float plane terminals are found. Water-based aircraft arrive and depart frequently during the day. Inner Harbour moorages are busy too. Many of the visiting boats are non-trivial, as the photo shows. The background building framed by the boats is the newest wing of the Empress. Kitty-corner from the Empress is the Pariament or Legislative building. This picture was taken during a Royal Canadian Legion ceremony. Canada once had a significant military that was allowed to decline to an empty shell in the Trudeuapian era. Parliament dome is to the left and to the right is the Grand Pacific Hotel, a fairly new building that echoes the Empress' architecture in a modern vein. Across the Inner Harbour is the Delta Resort, which also offers a modernized take on the Empress. Note the stylized domelet that pays homage (in a small way) to Parliament. The boat in the foreground is a harbor taxi. Not all of Victoria's newer buildings are Victorian. This picture shows condominiums or apartments farther out the harbor area. The buildings in the foreground have traditional touches, but the larger structures behind them, besides destroying the scale of the neighborhood, are in the dull, modernist style. Nor are all tourist attractions architectural. Around 20 miles north of town is the famous Butchart Gardens. In 1900 the area pictured was a quarry. Also on the grounds are Japanese, Italian, Rose and other themed gardens. My wife is a huge fan and almost never misses Butchart when she visits Victoria. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 13, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, June 7, 2007


Symbolizing States
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ever design a flag? I suppose I must have when I was a child, and it would have been an easy task in those days. Easy because I wasn't carrying burdens of design theory, color theory, history, knowledge of symbolism, political pressures and bureaucratic inertia, just to mention a few factors an adult designer might have to deal with. One problem with flag-designing is that a lot of the best designs have already been taken: consider the French tricolor and the 18th century British Union Flag (the one without the red St. Andrew's type cross). As a result, some pretty awful examples can be found: consider the current flag of South Africa with its awkward design and too many colors. South Africa flag Since flags can assume an infinite number of guises depending upon atmospheric conditions (amount of wind, time of day, etc.), I'm inclined to favor designs that are bold, simple or both. Real-world conditions such as those cited above can make my ideal hard to meet. In general, most flags of U.S. states aren't terrible, design-wise. Most are mediocre, but a few are rather nice. Perhaps that's because they were created in simpler times, with fewer interest groups yapping at the heels of the committee in change of flag design. Nowadays, matters seem worse, if the state quarter (25 cent coin) program is any indicator. Most state quarter designs are disappointing in one way or another, in my opinion: only one is top-notch. Coin design is difficult for a host of reasons. One has to do with the circular shape. Another has to do with the fact that the image is normally in the form of a raised relief (though I suppose sunken patterns are possible). Perhaps the trickiest problem is related to the small size of the coin. For the state quarter project, perhaps the worst problem is that of having to crowd in too many images, often enough a map of the state along with one or more theme items. Let's take a look. Gallery Flags Oregon Oregon's flag is pretty typical in that it has one dominant color along with a centered state crest or seal. The Oregon design clarifies which state's flag it is by adding some words to the ensemble. Texas The Texas flag is both simple and bold, which I like. The red-white-blue color scheme and star-on-a-blue-field lead me to deduct a point or two on the distinctiveness scale. Maryland I like the Maryland flag a lot, even though one might argue that four colors is edging towards excess. Still, it's bright, bold and distinctive. The diagonal pattern in the black-gold quarters is interesting because it doesn't create a simple checkerboard. New Mexico I'm inclined to think that New Mexico's flag is best of all. The colors are distinctive and the design is simple. It's weakness might be in the boldness department. Coins Florida The Florida quarter is a case of symbolic overkill. Too many interest... posted by Donald at June 7, 2007 | perma-link | (30) comments




Punk Visuals
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- London's Barbican art gallery is taking a look at the visual side of the punk-rock years. Quick: Who designed the jacket for the Sex Pistols' album "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols"? Answer: Jamie Reid. You can watch a couple of interviews with Jamie Reid here. The London Times has a package of stories that should inform, stir memories, and provoke thought. As someone who spent a little time around NY's punk-rock world -- I was no kind of punk myself but I had a number of friends who were seriously into the scene -- can I express a little surprise? Punk rock was never expected to last. It was meant by the people who made it and enjoyed it -- many of them anyway -- to take the whole pop scene down in flames. Instead it has turned into one of pop culture's most enduring styles. Life is funny sometimes. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 7, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments




More Glassiness
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Taking note of the fact that Philip Johnson's famous Glass House is officially opening to the public, The NY Times' Christopher Mason collects quotes from Johnson's acquaintances and neighbors. They describe a charming man, some great views, and ... Well, when it comes to the gritty particulars of the House itself: leaks, crazy-high fuel bills, and floors so hot you couldn't walk on them in bare feet. As well as -- this is key -- a couple of inhabitants (Johnson and his companion David Whitney) who were, in the words of Robert A.M. Stern, "anal-retentives of the most incredible kind." In the Glass House, there was to be no mess, no rumpus, no trace of anything that wasn't spare, and stage-managed to the final millimeter. Hilary Lewis, a writer, recalls one visit: I was there for a photo shoot, and a photographer went to move a couple of objects on the Barcelona table -- an ashtray and a malachite box -- to better focus the shot on Johnson. David silently walked over and moved them back into their original position. Johnson nodded to the photographer and said, "I think it's better." Just to spell some of my own reactions out: It was Johnson's house and property to do with as he pleased, of course. And the Glass House evidently suited his finicky nature to a T. But... Would such a place suit your nature? How and why should such a peculiar structure have come to play such an important role in accounts of architecture history? Why does our architecture press (and academic establishment) continue to fixate on angles-and-glass modernism? One possible reason: Although it can be hell to live in and work in, glassy Modernism makes for pretty photographs and attractive magazine layouts. Another: Perhaps the people who swoon over glassy Modernism are the kinds of people -- "anal-retentives of the most incredible kind" -- who live for blankness, transparency, and crisp lines. If so, are these people the rest of us should be taking terribly seriously? Philip Murphy blogged -- in informed and down-to-earth terms -- about visiting the Glass House here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 7, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments




More Linkage
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * For those who enjoy being reminded what a filthy game politics generally is, this David Kirkpatrick piece should fit the bill. Alaska's absurd Sen. Don Young -- responsible recently for the infamous $200 million "bridge to nowhere" -- is now earmarking $10 million for a Florida road that no one in its neighborhood even wants. No one, that is, aside from Daniel J. Aronoff, a real-estate investor with Florida holdings that will explode in value thanks to the road. Aronoff happens to have contributed to heavily to Young's campaign. * A fun fact from Heather Mac Donald: "Welfare use actually increases between the second and third generation of Mexican-Americans -- to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households." (Link thanks to Steve Sailer.) * Where our immigration policies are concerned, bleeding-heart types might want to consider the fact that, according to Business Week, even the legendary Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson thinks that Wealthier Americans tend to benefit from the current wave of immigration while poorer Americans tend to suffer. A farmer in California may benefit from the inexpensive labor of illegal immigrants, while a construction worker in Texas sees fewer jobs and lower pay. A well-off suburban family may get lower-priced house cleaning or lawn care, while an engineering student has fewer companies offering positions. Let's not forget Nick Lowe's song "Cruel to Be Kind," eh? Link thanks to George Borjas. * And The Times of London reports a milestone in the making: "Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year." * Clark Stooksbury reviews Bill McKibben's new book. * Agnostic has some thoughts about boys who fancy "exotic" girls. * DVD Spin Doctor reports that MGM's new "Sergio Leone Anthology" is a classily-done production. * Scott Kirsner wonders how fast digital downloading is going to replace DVDs as many people's movie-harvesting mechanism of choice. Is the porn industry -- once again -- showing the rest of us the way? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 7, 2007 | perma-link | (10) comments





Tuesday, June 5, 2007


A 1933 Portrait Painting Lesson
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Want to paint a portrait? The way it was done just before Modernism kicked in? Then click here to link to The World of Painting site where a 1933 portrait painting demonstration by Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937) from The Studio Publications (that appeared in 1934) is reproduced. True, 1933 was nearly three decades after Cubism burst on the scene, so don't take my "just before Modernism kicked in" phrase literally. My justification is that László was trained in the immediate pre-Modern period and he did not adopt a Modernist style, unlike many artists of his generation. So what you'll see is pretty much year 1900 stuff. Below are some photos from the demonstration to whet your appetite. Preliminary sketch of actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies Beginning to paint Blocking in the background The completed portrait I offer no profound thoughts: just enjoy this opened time-capsule. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 5, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Sunday, June 3, 2007


Roger Kimball Gives Art a Big Yawn
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There he goes again, that Roger Kimball -- criticizing contemporary art. This time it's in the June issue of The New Criterion, the magazine he and Hilton Kramer edit. The link to the article is here (thanks to Scott Johnson at PowerlineBlog for providing the initial link). Read The Whole Thing if you can: it's not awfully long. His "hook" is an art show at Bard College, a little ways up the river from New York City. He calls attention to some of the nasty things that are being passed off as "art" these days, but notes that the Dada / Surrealism gangs were doing pretty much the same things to shock people 80 or 90 years ago. Much of Kimball's article covers old ground, but he makes some nice points. Here are two quotes. No, the thing to appreciate about "Wrestle," [the art show at Bard College] about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluise Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and, sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It's outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The "arts" at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary. Leon Botstein described Marieluise Hessel as a "risk giver." . . . Ms. Hessel once enthusiastically recalled her introduction to contemporary art as a young woman in Munich: "It was like entering a cult group." That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of perspective and modeling we have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better) and 2) the right politics. From the way Kimball described it, the show at Bard took the Shock The Audience approach. I agree with Kimball that it's very difficult to shock the art world or even much of the general public nowadays: that well is pretty dry. However I will, out of pure kindliness, offer a modest tip for artists with reasonably strong, but slightly fading reputations to juice up their audacity quotient and get a lot of free media ink and pixels. Do the following: (1) mount a large canvas -- say four feet tall and six feet wide -- and paint it white; (2) get a bucket of black paint and... posted by Donald at June 3, 2007 | perma-link | (29) comments





Wednesday, May 30, 2007


What's Dewing in Washington
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- You can hardly find his paintings anywhere else, but they're thick as lobbyists in Washington, DC. That was the impression I got last week during my mad dash through our capitol's museums and galleries. I'm referring to Thomas Wilmer Dewing, of course. His work can be seen in the Freer Gallery, tucked away amidst all its Asian art next to James McNeill Whistler's famous Peacock Room. Presumably the Dewings here are from Charles Lang Freer's collection, Freer being Dewing's major patron. Another collector who bought a lot of Dewing's paintings was John Gellatly, and his collection forms the basis for a room full of them I saw in the Smithsonian American Art Museum a few blocks north of the Mall in the old downtown area. The following biographical sketch is based on Web material found here, here and here. Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938) was born in the Boston area and, despite family financial problems, was able to study at Paris' favorite art school for Americans, the Académie Julian (under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebre) in 1876-77. He returned to Boston, but moved to New York in 1880 where he married painter Maria Richards Oakey (1845-1927, a student of John LaFarge) whose connections helped him gain entry to its artistic world. One of his pals was architect Stanford White. The Dewings and their daughter went to France in 1895, spending time in Paris and Claude Monet's haunt, Giverny (the town was home to a number of American artists around the turn of the century). But the pull of America and the summer art colony in Cornish, NH was too strong for them to stay long in France. He was 62 when the famous Armory Show introduced modernism to America. But, unlike many younger artists, he refused to be seduced by the movement even though his paintings became less marketable during the remaining 25 years of his life. According to Susan A. Hobbs, in the second reference link above, Dewing was a physically large man with a prickly personality. Yet his favorite subject matter was wispy women, often in psychologically ambiguous poses that give a slight tension to what he portrayed. At the hight of his Tonalist period, he referred to his works as simply "decorations." Perhaps some critics might agree. Nevertheless, these paintings can fascinate. Would I buy one if it were on the market and I had the money? You bet. I'll let you judge for yourself. Gallery Photo of Thomas Wilmer Dewing After Sunset - 1892 In the Garden - 1892-94 Sylvan Sounds - 1896-97 Young Girl Seated - 1896 A Reading - 1897 Lady in White - 1910 The Necklace - 1907 An Artist - 1916 Why do I like Dewing's paintings? Firstly, because they are well-done, and I'm a pushover for technical expertise as most of you know by now. And I admit to liking pretty women, his main subject. Plus, I find his use of color both interesting and satisfying.... posted by Donald at May 30, 2007 | perma-link | (16) comments





Wednesday, May 23, 2007


More Jane Jacobs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's an interview with the great Jane Jacobs that I just stumbled across. Although it's a conversation about mundane-seeming stuff -- the city of Buffalo and its plans to build a convention center -- it got my head vibrating in wonderful ways. Typical passage: INTERVIEWER: If these developments have to arise out of the efforts of individual innovators, what role can the government play in promoting the right sort of conditions to enable that? JACOBS: The government often needs to remove barriers of one sort or another, and certainly not destroy these things. That was the great tragedy of urban renewal, that so much was destroyed, and lots of cities simply haven't recovered from it. It's taken New York a long time to recover. It's healing itself now, New York City. Newark, not at all yet. Cities can destroy themselves beyond a point of no return, if they just become inert and dumb. INTERVIEWER: By trying to copy ideas from elsewhere rather than building on what's unique about them and growing their own ideas? JACOBS: And valuing the ideas of their own people. Small hint for those who have yet to wake up to the fun of thinking about cities: Cities equal consciousness, writ on a very big scale. Which means that when someone as insightful as Jacobs is talking about convention centers and neighborhoods, she's also being a philosopher of mind. And a tart and down-to-earth one she was: Reading this interview, you'll get a taste for how Jacobs saw cities and economies as evolved, organic things. (You may also get a sense of how exciting what was once thought of as "ecological thinking" can be.) Jacobs is forever setting her subjects in larger contexts -- yet she does so without resorting to religion. Not that I have anything against resorting to religion, of course. I wrote an appreciation of Jane Jacobs back here. Zompist does a first-class job of explicating Jacobs' vision of cities and economies. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 23, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, May 7, 2007


Landscapes and Modernism
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is the second posting in an occasional series dealing with the practical limits of Modernism and what the future might bring should it and various "post" mini-movements drive into the ditch. My first post, Portraits and Modernism, introduced itself as follows: A theme I've been edging up to and that I plan to pursue from time to time in the coming months is the question of the future of painting assuming that Modernism and its spawn prove to be an aberration in the long-term history of art. The validity of that assumption can be left for discussion at another time... For now, I simply want to use it as a peg for a series of blog posts. One way of examining this is to look at subject-matter that is comparatively impervious to Modernism and see how artists have been dealing with it. My main conclusion? The lesson to be drawn from this is that portraiture, in any reasonable sense, cannot stray very far from representation in the direction of Modernism without becoming something other than portraiture. The same holds for landscape painting. And for still life painting, historical painting, religious painting -- for any kind of painting that requires some kind of representation. While it's possible for an artist to dash off an abstract painting and title it, say, "View of Toledo (Ohio)" hardly anyone could guess it was a "landscape" absent the title. Let's look at landscape painting to see how it weathered the Modernist movement. Gallery The Stone Bridge - Rembrandt van Rijn Let's start with one by Da Man. Yes, he's especially noted for portraits, but I can't resist a classical Dutch landscape showing ... lotsa sky. English Coasts - Holman Hunt, 1852 This is a Pre-Raphaelite work crammed with carefully-rendered detail. If this reproduction is halfway valid, the detailing doesn't descend to the level of hard-edge visual sterility all too common even today. The Red Roofs - Camille Pissarro, 1877 I suppose I should have used a Monet landscape rather than this Pissarro to illustrate Impressionism. Monet and some other Impressionists used highly visible, discrete brush strokes of fairly pure colors to cover their canvasses. Pissarro went over to such a style later in his career, but I've always found that kind of painting too ephemeral. I like more structure and solidity -- as in the Pissarro shown here. You can see some harbingers of Modernism, most noteworthy the flattening of depth and the "designed" composition. Mont Sainte-Victoire - Paul Cézanne, 1904 This is one of Cézanne's last paintings of one of his favorite subjects. The color blocks and flat brush strokes hint at the Cubism that was to appear a few years later. Landscape With Red Trees - Maurice de Vlaminck, 1906 Sketchy, flattened, almost poster-like (in the French manner). Colors are simplified and mildly Fauvist, being not quite what one really sees in nature. The Sea, Maine - John Marin, 1922 This Marin represents something close to... posted by Donald at May 7, 2007 | perma-link | (30) comments





Friday, April 27, 2007


New Nikos
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Good news for unorthodox architecture buffs: a new journal -- The International Journal of Architectural Research -- that looks to be far more sensible and open-minded than the establishment architecture magazines are. While the IJAR may be a wee bit austere for mere fans, those who enjoy technical and philosophical conundra should find a lot to chow down on. Don't miss "Restructuring 21st Century Architecture Through Human Intelligence" (PDF alert), a brilliant article in the IJAR's first issue by 2Blowhards fave Nikos Salingaros, co-written with Kenneth G. Masden. One of many great passages in their piece: How can anyone believe that a "Dutch Design Demigod" [Nikos and Masden are referring here to the international superstar Rem Koolhaas] could know more about a place than the very people who were born and raised there? How can these starchitects espose to know what is best for the rest of the world? More importantly, how do we combat the aesthetic authority that such individuals now exert over our place in the world? My own preferred answer to this final question is: Hey, how about starting off by making fun of arrogant jerks and their silly buildings? And how about ridiculing the cowardly and slavish critical and academic apparatus that serves them? 2Blowhards did a long interview with Nikos Salingaros a while back: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five. Print and read: It's a mind-blower of a very pleasant sort, if I do say so myself. Nikos' own, very generous, website is here. He makes a lot of his work available for free. Some links for those who find the whole buildings-and-space thang fascinating but who stare in outrage and amazement at the way the topic is typically treated and covered: Whatever you think of James Kunstler's Peak Oil argument, in the unorthodox-architecture world he's a firebrand and a giant. His Eyesore of the Month isn't to be missed, and his books about American urbanism and sprawl (here and here) are rowdy and rousing eye-openers. Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" -- both of them great reads -- played huge roles in helping many people see the truth about modernist architecture. I wrote a links-filled intro to Jane Jacobs back here. Back in the late 1960s, the sociologist William Whyte had an inspired idea: Why not observe systematically how people actually use urban spaces? Whyte brought together much of what he learned about people and urbanism in this very enjoyable book. Here's a substantial article about / interview with him. Two comprehensive and fun introductions to the New Urbanism are Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck's "Suburban Nation" and Philip Langdon's "A Better Place to Live." The New York Times' architecture historian Christopher Gray is a reliably enlightening and informative pleasure; in his company you quickly start to get the hang of what it's like to experience the built environment. It isn't a matter... posted by Michael at April 27, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, April 25, 2007


Stuffy Vs. Po-Mo
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In a couple of good postings, Right Reason's Max Goss notices a connection between consumerism and post-modernism. I pitched in with a comment that I'm allowing myself to gussy up and re-publish here. Two additions to your thoughts? One is that I've known kids with degrees in Theory (ie., French post-modernism) who have gone on to careers in advertising. They've all told me that academic po-mo is in fact pretty good preparation for advertising work. Makes sense to me. The other is ... Well, can I offer a little semi-praise for post-modernism? Not for its academic / Theoretical side, which really is pretty hideous. But for its looser, more informal-attitude side? Academic and establishment views of art prior to the '60s and '70s in America were awfully stuffy -- as in "sneering at movies and jazz" stuffy. These attitudes badly needed shaking up. A looser, more appreciative and open attitude towards our culture was long-overdue. American culture in particular is, after all, not a centralized Official Thing but a kind of makeshift patchwork. It's a hodgepodge, an ever-scruffy, eternal work-in-progress. And our artistic/cultural greatness, such as it is, often arises from folk, oddball, and commercial (not just high-minded) fields and activities. These seem -- to me at least -- to be self-evident facts. Short version: Any account of American art that pretends to be comprehensive and sensible yet that doesn't take into account jazz, the movies, automobile design, Chuck Jones, Bette Davis, and Bo Diddley is a joke, at least as far as I'm concerned. I was in school in the transition years (early '70s), and it was an odd time. On the one hand: played-out, drunken old New-Criticism farts. On the other: dynamic, exciting (but, alas, politically-driven) young Turks who wanted a total revolution. Basically, as far as I could tell, it was about a new generation of young and greedy academics who coveted the tenure that the drunken old farts were abusing. But for someone in the midst of it, it boiled down to a stark A-or-B choice: between blindly defending the old-style loftiness or joining the politically-motivated young careerists in overthrowing it and leveling everything out. The option I favored (don't throw out the stuffy old canon -- it's pretty neat in its own right -- but do open it hugely up) just wasn't available. Proud to say I took the sensible course of leaving academia and never looking back. Anyway, the experience left me wondering about America, and about how we always seem to be generating these polarized, no-win situations. There seems to be an in-the-genes drive in our life to turn everything into a pro wrestling contest. Why do we find it so hard to achieve balance? Why does it always have to be A vs. B? What do we have against A+B? Could it be that we have something against balance? My own guess at an answer to this question is that 1) we're culturally insecure -- we... posted by Michael at April 25, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Monday, April 23, 2007


Seattle's New Sculpture Park
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The red, dinosaur-like object on the left that looks like it's about to attack the Space Needle over to the right is actually an eagle. Well, "Eagle" is the title of the 1971 Alexander Calder sculpture you're looking at. It was donated to Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park (a branch of the Seattle Art Museum) by Jon Shirley, retired Microsoft president, and his wife, Mary. The sculpture park opened in January, not without its share of controversy. Perhaps the most contentious item was the fact that the park wiped out the trolly barn for Seattle's popular waterfront trolly line featuring antique rolling stock from Australia. Until a new barn gets built, trolly riders get the thrill of a free transit bus ride along Alaskan Way and the docks. The site was difficult in that it straddles three sets of railroad tracks and is partly on a hillside and partly on the shore of Elliott Bay. Setting aside the trolly barn issue, my judgment is that the landscaping works pretty well. This is because, when the sky is clear and the Olympic Mountains are visible, visitors get a fine view. As for the sculpture, it's Modernist Establishment pretty much to the core. Let's take a look at some other pictures I took last month. Gallery The setting This is looking north along the Elliott Bay shore. Behind the people in the upper-right are the railroad tracks. Enjoying the view Across Puget Sound are the Olympic Mountains -- in a National Park. Sky Landscape I - Louise Nevelson, 1983 Oh, yeah. The sculpture. I'll show a few starting with this Nevelson. Typewriter Eraser, Scale X - Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, 1998-99 My guess is that it isn't functional. And it's low-tech. Coming next, a giant Delete button. Love & Loss - Roy McMakin, 2005 Below the ampersand, in white, are the other letters in the title. Tom Wolfe was right -- this "art" is literally writing. Wake -Richard Serra, 2004 According to the Seattle Times, this weighs 300 tons and measures 125 by 46 feet. Something familiar Ah, a human figure growing out of sculpted stone ... how interesting! Oops. It's not in the Olympic Sculpture Park. I took this photo by an entrance to Vienna's Stadtpark last fall. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 23, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Wednesday, April 18, 2007


Warhol and Worthiness
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Wife and I recently spent a few days in Pittsburgh where -- with the help of a group of talented and rowdy local actors -- we presented some of our co-written erotic fiction. The reading went well, thanks, and it was a treat meeting and comparing notes with some of Pittsburgh's young-and-creative set. The Wife and I were both struck by what a cool city Pittsburgh has become. (The locals tell us that this turnaround has taken place very recently -- in only the last five or six years.) The old-industrial-powerhouse basics of the city are great: lots of working-class brawniness and pride, and some impressively quiet and spacious, old-tycoonish stretches too. The city is blessed with mucho in the way of geographical variety -- hills, rivers, cliffs -- and is crammed with tons of character-filled neighborhoods, and an amazing stock of gorgeous old commercial buildings and houses. As well as -- of particular interest to Offbeat Us -- a couple of fizzy boho neighborhoods. It's great that housing prices are modest too. An offbeat, slacker-ish person, in other words, could lead a swell life in Pittsburgh. Small musing: As The Wife and I have visited cities in our quest for world erotic-fiction domination, we've often been struck by a big difference between now and when we were setting out. Back in the day, there simply weren't many American cities with lively boho and creative scenes. If that was the kind of life you wanted to lead, you had a very restricted set of places where you might settle. These days, wowee. The damnedest cities turn out to be home to crackling scenes inhabited by sweetly nutty people you can have crazy-fun conversations with. This is a great development, of course -- may a thousand flowers bloom. Do we owe it entirely to the decentralizing effects of the internet? I blogged here about how wonderful it is that we're beginning to see young films and young film-talent arising from places like, well, Pittsburgh. But this discovery has also left The Wife and me stealing shy glances at each other. After all, if it's possible to lead a rewarding creative life in a cheap and friendly place like Pittsburgh -- where people are welcoming, where the scale is human, and where intellectual pretentions don't weigh as heavily as they do in NYC -- then why are the two of us putting up with the trials of life in the Really, Really Big City? Maybe the time has come to move. Too bad I still have a few years to go before I can cash in the micro-pension I've worked so long for ... Anyway, a couple of highlights of our Pittsburgh trip occurred during a pilgramage to the Andy Warhol Museum. Worth doing, I guess, though I say that without much enthusiasm. (I blogged about Warhol here.) Surrounded by his paintings, what mostly struck me was how Warhol's art turns a gallery or a... posted by Michael at April 18, 2007 | perma-link | (18) comments





Monday, April 16, 2007


Are Captions Harmful?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Boston's Isabella Stuart Gardner (1840-1924) could be eccentric and opinionated. But she easily got away with it because she had gobs of money. Her legacy is the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum (also see here) in the Fenway area not far from the Museum of Fine Arts. Gardner was able to ironclad (how's that for making a verb from an adjective, folks!) things so that all works had to remain placed as she had dictated. Moreover, if a work had no caption, no future captioning would be allowed. I can't find a link to support this (sorry!), but I did read someplace that Gardner believed that captions could distract from the viewing and appreciation experience. So, while most works have information plaques, some do not in order to force viewers to appreciate art unaided. I was ignorant of this when I visited the museum a few years ago. I became puzzled and a little frustrated when I couldn't even find out who painted a painting and when it was done. [Pause for reflection] In theory I'm inclined to agree with her. When I'm zipping through the Louvre or any museum with more than half a dozen galleries, I tend to glance at the caption plaques to catch the name of the artist. So if I see "Umbriago"* rather than "Tiepolo," I'm likely to keep on zipping. It's brand-consiousness: an Aston-Martin versus Daewoo thing. (What I just described does not mean that I never pay attention to works by artists I'm not familiar with. A really stunning painting can indeed grab my attention. But it does have to be literally "stunning.") If Gardner thought this focus on the artist distracted from focusing on the merits of the work, then she was right if my behavior is any guide. On the other hand, when there is nothing said about a painting and it's one that I think merits further attention, I would have no way of discovering more unless a museum guard or gallery guide was there to help. Frustrating! (Did I mention that I hate frustration?) So I think there ought to be a caption for each work with name-rank-serial number type stuff: basic facts. Or, failing that, a small guide sheet listing what's on each gallery wall for reference. What can be safely dispensed with are extended captions -- especially interpretive ones. These run a strong risk of imposing invalid concepts in the minds of viewers. This potential for danger is more acute nowadays than in the past thanks to the politicization of the arts and intellectual fads such as deconstructionism in art criticism. See Roger Kimball's The Rape of the Masters for examples of this. Such styles of criticism tend to impute meanings to paintings that might never have occurred to the artist. Not that the artist even needed to know. After all, he was little more than an puppet of the culture and power structure of his time, the theories usually contend. I... posted by Donald at April 16, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments




Moleskine Videos
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Showing off what you've done in your Moleskine sketchbook seems to have become a YouTube genre of its own. This guy has some serious drawing chops. I love this guy's illustration-style images. I wish I could draw like this guy, or paint like this gal. MattiasA is quite a talent. Here's his blog; it's a sketchbook in its own right, and it's full of whimsy and sophistication. His visit to a fondue restaurant gave me a good case of the giggles. Buy your own Moleskine notebooks here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 16, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Sunday, April 15, 2007


Symmetry Preferences
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Hey gang! It's personality-testing time here at 2Blowhards!! I have no idea whether psychologists, pop or otherwise, have done such a thing as I'm proposing below. Moreover, I don't care. Since this is an arts (among other things) blog, I've concocted a visual test. All I ask is that you introspect briefly and decide if you prefer symmetrical architecture to asymmetrical or vice-versa. Here are examples: Symmetrical Vanderbilt Mansion, Hyde Park. Asymmetrical Hill House, Scotland by Mackintosh. Okay? Figured it out? Because we live in an esteem-building, non-threatening age while at the same time favor free expression and candor, I offer the following: If you lean towards Symmetry, you are either... solidly-grounded and organized rigidly compulsive If you prefer Asymmetry, you are either... flexible and open-minded a disorganized mess So there you are! Happy to be of service. Enough fun. I imagine most readers really do have a general preference, though I have no idea if the root is personality or something else -- it's difficult to tease out and probably not very important. I happen to prefer asymmetrical architecture. Symmetry and classical, axis-based planning schemes strike me as being slightly cold. Or perhaps unnatural. I think that, in general, asymmetric shapes better reflect the functions of interior rooms better than symmetrical buildings where interiors are more likely to be contrived to conform to the exterior. And from an evolutionary standpoint, aside from living things that move about, the appearance of symmetry is essentially absent. Therefore I suspect that, down deep, we feel something is "wrong" when confronted by symmetrical, non-movable objects such as buildings. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at April 15, 2007 | perma-link | (14) comments





Thursday, April 12, 2007


Which Culture-Things From Our Era Will Live On?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's a dumb game, it's even a pointless game. But it can be a fun game too. Which culture-things from our era do you suspect will have a long, long life? Will still be in circulation in, say, 2300? Here are the rules: We aren't listing culture-things because we love them, or are rooting for them, or because we feel they're worthy. We're listing the culture-things that we have a hunch will live on for practical reasons -- ie., given what we know of life, given what we sense about how culture is evolving, and where it's going. Hard-headed is good, sentimental is bad. My nominees: Led Zep: "Whole Lotta Love." It'll never stop playing. Jenni from Jennicam, because in 2300 everybody will be broadcasting themselves, and Jennicam will be celebrated as the "Odyssey" of the webcam form. The "For Dummies" books, because in 2300 all books will be books you can use. This kitty vidclip from YouTube, because it'll be recognized as the greatest example ever of the kitty-video genre -- which in turn will have become a major art genre. Screw magazine's Al Goldstein, because by 2300 culture and porn will have become indistinguishable. Pong, because in 200 years culture and games will be synonymous. The iPod and the Nike swoosh, because in 2300 everything will look like either an iPod or a Nike swoosh. Craig Stecyk and Glen Friedman, because everything in 2300 that doesn't look like an iPod or a Nike swoosh will look like a decorated skateboard. The Onion, because sometimes -- even if rarely -- history is just. "America's Funniest Home Videos," because the best-of-vidclip format will be acknowledged as the most influential culture-format that our era came up with. Your hunches? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 12, 2007 | perma-link | (82) comments





Wednesday, April 11, 2007


Underground
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- David Lovelace's "Retarded Animal Babies" represents a lot of likeably rude, "what has that guy been smoking?" skill and imagination. Once upon a time we had underground comix. (My own favorites: Gilbert Shelton's "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," Robert Armstrong's "Mickey Rat," and David Boswell's "Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman." Genius stuff, all of it.) Perhaps today's equivalent is the raunchy and lunatic Flash animation. Here's David Lovelace's own website, where the creativity is beyond-fizzy. There's no question that the man really likes keyboards. Best, Michael UPDATE: Shouting Thomas could use some links. Here's a note from him: I've been searching for good weblogs on a number of topics, but primarily: 1. The Philippines 2. Country Music 3. Blues It's so easy to find political weblogs. Tough to find well written, independent weblogs in other areas. The political stuff is beaten to death. I am fascinated by the culture of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Would love to be informed of well written weblogs that address these cultures. In respect to the music weblogs, I'd like to find those that are intelligent and honestly address the history of cultures of the music... no fanzines. Does anyone have any good blog-tips to pass along to ST? Shouting Thomas' recent posting about how unhealthy being a musician can be is well worth a read.... posted by Michael at April 11, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments




Love It / Hate It
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Francis Morrone takes a look at a poll of the public's favorite buildings. Result: Only one modernist building makes it into the top 20. Even Frank Lloyd Wright doesn't turn up on the list until #29. Otherwise: traditional, traditional, traditional. Yet on the architecture establishment goes, designing and constructing ever-more modernist buildings that the public is going to hate ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 11, 2007 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, April 6, 2007


Installation by Megan and Murray
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I see that Megan and Murray McMillan have created "Channelbone," an installation that will go on view in St. Louis starting today. A big thing -- with a ribcage and video screens -- "Channelbone" sounds somewhere between nifty and spectacular. Here's the gallery's info. But hurry: The piece will only be on display for two days. Megan and Murray blog here, and show off a lot of their art here. Megan wrote a Guest Posting for 2Blowhards here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 6, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, April 5, 2007


More on Thom Mayne's Federal Building
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here I linked to a funny and smart Philip Murphy blast at San Francisco's hideous new Federal Building, designed by the disgraceful Thom Mayne, a favorite bete noir of this blog. What our betters want us to be grateful for... Quick recap of the pertinent points: The building is in a Deconstructivist style that flaunts Green credentials. That might sound attractive on many levels. If Modernism was overly rigid, and all about clean lines, blank planes, and right angles, Decon buildings are wobbly and zigzaggy. Whee! Problem solved! If Modernist buildings -- steel-and-glass cages, after all -- were inefficient users of energy, and were spectacularly inhumane in their treatment of their inhabitants and users, a Green building opens up, filters, and recycles. It returns power and respect to the environment and to the people. Green/Decon is Modernism transcended, in other words. Well, it is if you buy the propaganda. M. Blowhard doesn't buy the propaganda. The M. Blowhard view is that all these claims are (hilariously, tragically) spurious. The design problem with Modernist buildings wasn't just that they were rigid and grid-like, it's that they transformed our living and working spaces into abstractions. Decon's package -- exploding planes and lines -- is every bit as abstract as what Modernism was selling (clean lines and right angles). It seems to be a simple fact of life that many people feel lost and adrift in abstract environments. Many people in fact find the experience of wandering through faceless voids and double-back spaces to be nightmarish. What could be easier to understand? After all, these buildings and spaces offer people nothing for their feelings and their imaginations to nestle into or latch onto. The environmental / human problem with Modernist buildings was less a matter of raw BTU's than it was of top-down arrogance. Thom Mayne talks a good anti-establishment line, but he's as determined to play the genius-visionary, architect-as-god role as any pompous Modernist. You have a problem? He has the solution. And you will live in it. Totalitarian-corporatist environments that wear a coating of populist rhetoric aren't any more palatable than totalitarian-corporatist environments that announce their natures more frankly. Short version: Deconstructivist architecture is Modernism by other means -- it isn't an alternative to Modernism, it's what Modernism has become. As for the Green component ... Well, it's like the chaos-theory claims that Decon often makes for itself. Traditional architecture was already plenty Green; traditional architecture -- if your eyes and mind and imagination are really open to it -- already embodies plenty of chaos theory. Why do we allow our elite architecture world to continue getting us all worked up about attaining what's already ours? But these are generalities. What's the reality of the Federal Buiding like? I'm revisiting these topics because just this morning a comment was dropped on my blog posting by a woman who's actually familiar with the building. I reprint her comment here: Folks, As someone who's actually going... posted by Michael at April 5, 2007 | perma-link | (37) comments





Sunday, March 25, 2007


Dear National Trust ...
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I just wrote a note to the National Trust for Historical Preservation. Somebody's gotta take the hard-reactionary stance, darn it. Dear All -- I'd been under the impression that the preservation movement came about in large part as a protest against what modernism has done to our environment. An anti-modernist stance is certainly why I at least am interested in supporting the preservation movement. So imagine my dismay in recent years as the National Trust has taken it more and more on themselves to speak up for and agitate for preservation of modernist buildings. I notice in your Jan/Feb issue two major articles cryin' the blues about supposed modernist masterpieces, for example. (One of them is here.) I'm very sorry to see that you've fallen for the architecture world's argument that modernism now deserves to be seen not as a disastrous episode in architecture history, but as a worthy-of-preservation moment. The argument the architecture establishment is making is yet another in a series of their endless attempts to legitimize and perpetuate modernism. "It wasn't so bad ... It was well-intended ... After all, some of the buildings were great ... It deserves love and care too ... Why not embrace it?" No no no. The current architecture establishment is the direct descendant of the original modernists, and they're doing what they can to entice preservationists into supporting their awful line of descent. They're doing what they can to co-opt their enemies. Don't fall for it. Insist on the facts: Modernism stank, and was a destructive and totalitarian disaster. We should be fighting these attempts to redeem modernism, not falling for them. Let's be clear: Modernism was a terrible disaster, the worst thing to happen in all of architectural history. The scale of its damage to our shared environment is on a par with what happens when wars devastate cities and countrysides. Well, I guess you already have fallen for the let's-preserve-modernism line, darn it. Would you mind directing me to a truly anti-modernist, pro-preservation-of-traditional-architecture organization? Best, Michael Blowhard (I didn't really sign my note "Michael Blowhard.") I wonder if they'll print it. Any bets? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 25, 2007 | perma-link | (31) comments




San Francisco Defaces Itself
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Philip Murphy cracks a lot of good (and well-aimed) jokes about San Francisco's hideous new Federal Building, designed by the awful Thom Mayne. Gotta love this p.r. passage from the design firm ARUP: The building "will embody a commitment to urban renewal and community spirit while providing a progressive workplace environment." When you hear the words "progressive workplace environment," it's time to run for the hills. Something to remember when you eyeball photos of the building: Those are your tax dollars at work. Yup, these days that's the kind of architecture your government is supporting -- and thus encouraging. 2Blowhards had some fun at Thom Mayne's expense, and set this kind of thing in a bit of context, here. Back here, I proposed calling these glossy new buildings "chic kitchen-appliance architecture." Best, Michael UPDATE: A nice elaboration from GK: "Just want to mention that your headline 'San Francisco defaces itself' isn't quite accurate. The federal government is exempt from having to comply with local zoning and planning ordinances, and it's generally agreed that the Federal Building would not have passed here. More accurately, you should say 'Feds deface San Francisco'. "Some critics, btw, have seen it as a good thing that the visionary federal government was able to bypass suffocating regulation by the people who live around their building." Yet more proof, as far as I'm concerned, that our elites really have it in for the rest of us ...... posted by Michael at March 25, 2007 | perma-link | (25) comments





Tuesday, March 20, 2007


Nudes in Nature
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Just over two years ago I guest-blogged about my lousy art school training. An event I didn't mention was an oil-painting class assignment involving a nude and the grounds of the University of Washington campus. I'm bringing it up now because it makes a nice little hook for some observations. I just lied. That linked article did make passing reference to the model. In introductory drawing classes we had a fifty-ish woman who stripped down to her undies to pose. When we graduated from 100 to 200 or 300-level courses requiring a live model, she went "all the way" wardrobe-wise. The other models weren't much more appealing. Until one happy day when a really fine-looking young lady showed up to pose. Sadly, she wasn't happy with her work and managed to skip quite a few sessions. But we dabbed and smeared away regardless. Later in the term the teacher had us go outdoors to sketch trees, bushes, grass and other springtime backdrops with the idea that the finished painting would feature the nude in a natural setting. Nearly 50 years later, I now get what he was up to. I think. You see, nudes and nature don't easily mix. I suspect that was the Truth we were supposed to winkle out of our experience in this project. I need to explain more fully. If you read the linked article above you'll discover that instructors at the School of Art at the University of Washington towards the end of the 1950s were extremely reluctant to teach us anything for fear that some vital creative spark or another would get extinguished. A few times we got a cursory explanation of the color wheel, but I remember hearing nothing about how to mix skin color or the colors of grass, trees, and so on. I suppose a few students had taken the initiative to buy some how-to books, but silly me assumed that teachers would be teaching us what we needed to know. So I naïvely simply squeezed out green paints from some tubes to deal with foliage. I completed my nu dans la forêt effort and that was that. I finally threw the painting away when I stumbled across it while cleaning out my parents' house 16 years ago. I knew it wasn't very good, but wasn't sure why -- probably personal incompetence coupled with the lack of instruction. All true, but there was more to it. One reason why nudes and nature don't easily mix is because we seldom see naked people sitting on a lawn or wandering through meadows next to a woods. Seeing that in a painting tends to bring everything to a halt while we construct a reason for what we are seeing -- a story, if you will. Classical scenes tend to reduce this mental pause because (if one has a Classical education) the viewer reads the painting's title, says "Aha!" to himself and then takes in the scene. The artist... posted by Donald at March 20, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, March 16, 2007


Philadelphia Doppelgänger
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards-- You probably know about this. I just discovered it. After all, there's never been a curve I haven't been behind. Anyway, behold paintings by two well-known Philadelphia-area artists: An Arcadian - Thomas Eakins, c. 1883 Christina's World - Andrew Wyeth, 1948 Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 16, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, March 14, 2007


Vollard on Art Trends
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- What generates new trends in art? Consider Ambroise Vollard the famous Parisian art dealer who championed (and wrote books about) Cezanne, Renoir and Degas. He also championed (but didn't write books about) Picasso, Rouault, Gauguin and Van Gogh. The Met recently had an exhibit keyed on Vollard. I haven't read the catalogue, but an International Herald Tribune article takes issue with apparent insinuations that Vollard took unfair advantage of some artists. But those are side-issues for this post. I'm interested in a passage I read in Vollard's book Reflections of a Picture Dealer (Souveniers d'un marchard de tableau). The book (1936 English translation by Violet M. MacDonald -- cast in a sometimes mid-30s-slangy Brit tone that might or might not have captured the sense of the original) is an interesting mélange of this 'n' that which included the following (pp. 230-31 of the Dover edition): For painting is not stationary, it cannot escape the urge to renewal, the incessant evolution that manifests itself in every form of art. At the same time it may be said with truth that each of these forms reacts upon the others, with sometimes one, sometimes another predominating, providing the impulse in some fresh direction. As a rule, literature heads the movement, furnishing at once the theory and the example from which music and the plastic arts draw draw their inspiration. But the period of which I am speaking [1894, when he opened his rue Laffitte gallery], music had taken the lead. And what is music? A sort of incantation. It does not define. It does not aim at direct demonstration or description. It captivates precisely by its flowing, vaporous, indeterminate qualities. It feeds at the sources of mystery, on myths, on legends; and with what it borrows from these it creates moods, an atmosphere propitious to passion or reverie. Under its influence, and by way of reaction against the brutalities of realism on the one hand, and cold Parnassian perfection on the other, the writers, and the poets especially, were attempting to capture the almost immaterial charm that resides in the vagueness of the subject. They were endeavoring to induce the same moods, the same enthusiasm, the same transports of sensibility into which they were thrown in moments of musical exaltation. They would no longer describe, they would evoke. They would not state precisely, but suggest. The poet would consider it his mission merely to open up vistas. The poem was to prolong itself in the free and emotional meditation of the reader. The fascination exercised by Wagner's work thus gave rise to the esoterism of Mallarmé, and the "music before all things" of Verlaine. It was the symbolic epoch. In the plastic arts, and particularly painting, the same influence was at work, an influence undergone directly by some, but propagated for the most part through the media of literature and criticism. Vollard was a smarter cookie than I am, plus he was on the spot. Even so,... posted by Donald at March 14, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Monday, March 12, 2007


Arthur Mathews -- California's Best Artist?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I saw the show almost by accident. You see, I bought the book months ago so it slipped my mind that it was associated with the show and I also forgot when the show was taking place. By chance, we had to kill some time before Nancy's daughter-in-law's birthday party Sunday, so I thought we should go to the Oakland Museum of California because I knew that it had a collection of California Impressionist paintings. But its Web page reminded me that California As Muse: The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews was still on (it stared October 28th and ends March 25th). I found the show fabulous and regret that I failed to see it sooner and didn't give California Blowhards readers a timely heads-up to go see it. (A good many of Arthur and Lucia Mathews' works are in the Oakland Museum's collection, along with paintings by California Impressionists. Unfortunately, the museum normally doesn't seem to devote much viewing space to these works, which is why the special exhibit is especially important.) Arthur F. Mathews (1860-1945) was, in my judgment, the best California artist of the pre-Modern era and one of the very best ever. Certainly he was top dog in the Bay Area from the 1890s to around 1920. For many years he was in charge of the San Francisco School of Design. Later, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews operated an Arts & Crafts firm, the Furniture Store that built Art Nouveau and A&C furniture and picture frames for an affluent clientele. Many paintings in the show are framed by the Furniture Company and are works of art in themselves. He also was extensively involved with mural painting in important public buildings; his architectural background was probably of use in this. Mathews was trained in architecture for a while (relatives were in the trade) but then switched to painting at the School of Design. From 1884-89 he studied in Paris at (for Americans, where else?) the Académie Julian. The show included some early paintings with a decidedly Academic tinge, but within a few years of his return he had evolved his flat, muralistic style featuring colors partly neutralized by their complements. Below are some examples of Mathews' work. Unfortunately, image pickings on the Internet are still slim so what you see isn't as good as it should be. My advice is to look for the show-related book linked above at a Borders, Barnes & Noble, museum bookstore or wherever you can find halfway decent selections of art books. It's available in both hardcover and paperback -- same size, different binding. Gallery Youth (circa 1917) Mathews painted many pictures of women dancing. To the general public, these probably represent his "signature" pieces, and this picture is on the cover of the book/catalog linked above. Such dancing (think Isadora Duncan) was popular during the first quarter of the 20th century. If you can, take a look at some college yearbooks from... posted by Donald at March 12, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, March 2, 2007


False Fronts
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- O, th' agony inflicted by architecture! We Blowhards aren't shy about voicing the pain inflicted on the general public by starchitects and hacks alike in the form of eyesores that persist for half a human life-span or longer. What we haven't been doing is empathizing with the visual pains those self-same architects endure when going about the streets and freeways of 2007 America. The poor dears have to look at buildings that are mostly antithetical to the ideals they absorbed during their training. They see garishness and blatant commercialism and [sob] form not following function. We get to see those same things, of course. But, aside from diehards whose minds spin to the sounds of anti-suburban folk-songs of the Fifties, most of us take it in stride -- if not with enthusiasm. What in the world am I talking about? Why, those false-fronts tacked onto strip-mall and big-box store shopping area structures. 'Twasn't always so. When I was growing up and into middle age (mid 40s to the 70s or thereabouts), false fronts on stores were almost unheard-of. The only places I saw them were in cowboy movies, ghost-towns, and places drifting in that direction. In other words, to me false fronts were indicative of really old-fashioned stuff. Virginia City, Montana scene The post-World War 2 retail structures I experienced were mostly simple, architecturally. No ornament aside from the obligatory signs. Basically cheap-to-build structures in a watered-down International Style idiom: clean-looking, but boring. This changed gradually over the last 20 or so years (can a reader pinpoint when it started?). Where once there was a clean cornice-line one began to see false gables and architectural embellishments from previous centuries cribbed and re-proportioned and constructed about a foot in depth. Some of this was on newly built strip-malls, the rest was retrofitted. It has come to the point where clean-lined malls are no longer being built. Old-style strip mall Stores unoccupied when the photo was taken. New-style strip mall Again, the stores are not occupied. Then there are free-standing stores. Just for the heck of it, here are some photos showing how Safeway supermarkets have evolved over the last half-century. Safeway in Seattle's Lake City district, opened 1956. Or thereabouts. I worked there for 2-3 days during the store-opening surge. It had natural red brick then along with the Safeway signs of the day. Safeway moved out decades ago. Note the clean-line style. Bellevue Safeway, circa 1970 I'm not sure when this store was built, but it was quite a while ago. I took this picture yesterday to record it before it gets demolished. That will happen fairly soon, once a new store a block or so away is completed. Its architecture is still in the "functional" mode, though clean-lining is modified by the (functional) arching of the roof. University Village-area Safeway re-habbed circa 2005 Although not a new structure, this Safeway was renovated and contemporary false-front type detailing added to the facade. Did I... posted by Donald at March 2, 2007 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, March 1, 2007


Apatoff on Illustration
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- We Blowhards might not be jacks (some might prefer "jerks") of all trades, but each of us covers more than one waterfront (man, does that last phrase ever date me!). Michael's main beats include movies, book & other media biz, literature, architecture, immigration news and The New York Scene. Among other subjects he's been known to write about are economics, yoga and even sex. His college chum Friedrich specializes in history -- art history in particular -- yet from time to time drops in with solid essays on topics that seem out of synch with the serious persona he often projects here: an article featuring girlie pin-up artist Gil Elvgren comes to mind. And me? Just the usual adolescent drivel about cars and planes along with an interminable series of articles about painters no one with conventional college art-historical knowledge ever heard of. Sometimes I even write about the illustration sub-field of commercial art. I'm very much interested in the subject and really ought to write about it more. But why should I bother when you can always check out David Apatoff's Illustration Art blog. That's because David specializes, unlike we eternal amateurs and arts buffs. As I write this, David's latest post deals with comic book artists who, in his judgment, came up a bit short in the skills department yet produced stuff he finds enjoyable. He comments: I find it is much easier to accept mediocre art when it is unpretentious. Artists such as [Wallace] Wood and [Will] Eisner toiled for decades pouring creativity onto cheap pulp paper. They were under appreciated and underpaid. By contrast, their modern counterparts found early fame and are lauded in deluxe coffee table books from the Smithsonian Institution filled with gushing self-congratulatory prose about how the new generation has elevated the medium... I also like Wood and Eisner and rate their talent higher than David does (Eisner took drawing courses from George Bridgman, after all, and some of it seemed to rub off on him). Plus remember that these guys were cranking out reams of comics, for heaven's sake, and can't fairly be compared to "pure" illustrators such as John LaGatta or Coby Whitmore -- and Apatoff does not make any such explicit comparison. BTW, I'm inclined to agree with the thrust of the above quote. Another article takes on The New York Times' suddend embrace of comics. After listing a number of talented artists the Times ignored in past decades, he observes: The Times seems to have been duped by the currently fashionable "I'm-so-smart-I don't-have-to-draw-well" genre. Many popular comic artists explain that the quality of their drawings is not important except to move the narrative forward. To me, such an art form is closer to typography than comic art. It shrinks from the potential of a combined words-and-pictures medium. Har! Great fun! As one great blogger sage puts it, read the whole thing. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 1, 2007 | perma-link | (2) comments




Our Shared and Planned Future
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- If you want an EZ taste of what our betters have in store for us where architecture and urbanism are concerned, you could do worse than to read this Der Spiegel piece about HafenCity, a huge harborsite development currently under construction in Hamburg. Here's a photo tour of the place. Short MBlowhard verdict: It looks like a daffy, off-kilter, computer simulation of a neighborhood, or maybe a videogame version of a city. Does it look like a place where you'd like to live? Best, Michael UPDATE: Edward Glaeser argues that "Modernism has its place in the panoply of architectural styles, and it is particularly appropriate for large buildings in megacities. It is not well designed for building public buildings or monuments that speak to most people." (Link thanks to ALD.)... posted by Michael at March 1, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, February 27, 2007


Portraits and Modernism
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A theme I've been edging up to and that I plan to pursue from time to time in the coming months is the question of the future of painting assuming that Modernism and its spawn prove to be an aberration in the long-term history of art. The validity of that assumption can be left for discussion at another time (are you there, Friedrich?). For now, I simply want to use it as a peg for a series of blog posts. One way of examining this is to look at subject-matter that is comparatively impervious to Modernism and see how artists have been dealing with it. Today I'll take a first pass at portrait painting, perhaps returning later to hit the subject from another angle. Portraiture can be analyzed in terms of whether or not a particular painting was commissioned and, if commissioned, by whom -- the subject or by an organization or some other funding source. It seems to me that portraits most subject to Modernist influence would be those done strictly at the volition of the artist. The least amount of Modernism is likely to be found in portraits commissioned by the subject or perhaps "official" portraits commissioned by governments or businesses. Other commission sources likely fall someplace between, though probably tending to the non-Modernist end of the spectrum. (I posted on Presidential portraits here.) Here's a selective overview. All or nearly all of the paintings shown were not commissioned and present the artist's free-choice side of the typology just presented. Gallery Let's skip Van Dyck, Reynolds and Sargent on the assumption that you're familiar with traditional portraiture in its various guises, and cut straight to Modernism. "Nude in an Armchair - Fernande Olivier" by Pablo Picasso - 1909 The subject of this early Cubist work is Pacasso's mistress. One would be hard-pressed to identify her in a police lineup if this was your only clue. Still, she's recognizably female. "Daniel Henry Kahnweiler" by Pablo Picasso - 1910 The following year, Picasso painted Kahnweiler, his dealer at the time. I don't know if this was commissioned or not. The point of showing it is that a viewer ignorant of Kahnweiler's actual appearance would have no idea what the man looked like on the basis of Picasso's "portrait." That last word was in quotes because the work is clearly beyond portraiture as it has been known and continues to be known. Picasso asserted that this is a portrait: some will accept it on his authority, I do not. "Tadeusz de Lempicka" by Tamara de Lempicka - 1928 Tamara de Lempicka has become known as the archetypical Art Deco painter. This is an unfinished portrait of her first husband (his left hand still needs work). Although stereotyped to 3-D geometrical underpinnings, one has a fairly good idea what Tadeusz looked like. "The Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti" by Ben Shahn - 1931-32 Some would call this Expressionist -- after all, Shahn was never shy about expressing... posted by Donald at February 27, 2007 | perma-link | (28) comments





Tuesday, February 20, 2007


Easy Motoring Always and Everywhere?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- When traffic-safety rules and aesthetics come into conflict, how to rule? Right Reason's Lydia McGrew and I treat ourselves to a fencing match. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 20, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, February 19, 2007


Recent Reading
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I envy Friedrich von Blowhard. More specifically, I envy his wide knowledge of history and, especially, the history of art. Maybe his Lousy Ivy Education wasn't quite as lousy as had been suggested. Or perhaps he has spent the years since then reading voraciously. I suspect it's the latter. On the other hand, I've been playing catch-up ball -- especially since I started writing for this blog. I've read a lot of history over the years, much of it military history. Military history can't easily be separated from political history, so I know something of that. As for cultural and social history, I'm mostly familiar with France, Britain and the U.S.A. A few years ago I began to analyze how I seemed to learn history best. I recalled that when I was around 20, I would read comprehensive histories of Egypt, France and Russia and afterwards have no real sense of what I had just read. Pharaohs, kings and emperors were mostly a blur. I found that I was more successful when I selected key historical periods, comprehended them, and later filled in the gaps. In the case of France since 1500, say, useful entry points were the reigns of François I, Henri IV, Louis XIII (and Richelieu), Louis XIV, Napoleon I and Napoleon III. And so it has been for art history. I was already somewhat familiar with the period 1915-55. But I realized that previous 40 years were more important for my analytical purposes and knew that I hadn't paid as much attention to the Impressionists as I should have. Worse, I knew next to nothing about their contemporaries who had been ignored or slighted in my art history classes -- academic painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, and so forth. Now that I'm getting 1875-1915 under better control, I'm beginning to study some artists who influenced that period. I've already read some books about Velásquez. And I'm starting to learn more about Courbet. I just finished reading this book on the history of art as related to artists' paints from the perspective of a chemist / physicist. I have to take the scientific bits on faith, never having taken a single chemistry class (though my father had a degree in Chemical Engineering). Still, it was interesting to get a better understanding of what artists had to deal with before the 19th century technical revolution in the area of synthetic colors. It's kind of amazing that they were able to do as well as they did, considering the limitations of their palettes. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 19, 2007 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, February 14, 2007


Real Beauty?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- What to make of Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty"? Virginia Postrel writes in the Atlantic that we shouldn't be afaid of, or lie about, beauty. She expands on her article at her blog. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 14, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments




Taste and Aesthetics: Gay or Not-Gay?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Steve and some others have me thinking about a perennial puzzler: Why do so many American males consider arty and aesthetic matters to be faggy? To get something quickly out of the way: Of course there are in fact a lot of gayguys in the artier fields. I suppose this is a bit of a disincentive for straightguys. But how much does this really explain about the vehemence with which many American males dodge aesthetic questions? Despite the gifts many gay men have shown where aesthetics are concerned, a talent for questions of taste, style, and expression obviously doesn't depend on straightness or gayness. After all, in many other cultures straight guys don't make it a principle to avoid aesthetic matters. Many straight Italian men love (and have a flair for) opera, food, fabrics, and design. Straight Russian men don't consider ballet -- let alone emotionality and expressiveness more generally -- to be strictly for the pansies. Straight Frenchmen are as particular as can be about questions of taste: as La Coquette once wrote, only in France would you overhear five year old boys explaining to their grandma how she should really be preparing the asparagus. Even in the States: Many straight black men are virtuosos of style, dancing, flirtation, and seduction. And let's face it: There are strong reasons why straight men ought to engage with aesthetic matters. One: It's fun and rewarding. Two: Chicks dig guys who show some appreciation for beauty, pleasure, and taste. My theory about this: Chicks feel that the man who demonstrates some knowledge of, receptivity to, and enthusiasm for arty matters is someone who's likely to appreciate the full range of what a woman can be. Art=Woman, sorta. I agree with this view myself, btw. If you can cook or play music -- even if you can merely discuss movies, books, and paintings articulately -- scoring with the ladies becomes much easier. Scoring in fact follows almost as a matter of course: Some shared arty pleasure ... Some flirtatious-appreciative flirtation / discussion ... Some connecting on aesthetic grounds ... And before you know it you're all tangled up with each other in the most delightful way. In cases like this one, what would be the point of distinguishing the aesthetic from the sexual rewards? It's about giving as well as taking, and it's all terrific. As one of Steve's correspondents wrote, it's pretty rich the way American guys consider dance, museums, and design -- all of them activities where many great gals will be found, as well as activities that make men more attractive to gals -- to be for da fags, while we consider hanging out with other guys while watching muscular dudes in tight clothes bash into each other and slap each others' butts (ie., watching sports with our buds) to be the essence of brawny straightness. Where does this aversion to aesthetics come from, historically speaking? My hunch is that it has less to... posted by Michael at February 14, 2007 | perma-link | (31) comments




Emerging Tastes
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- As power continues to slip from the hands of the media-and-art taste-dictators, what will emerge to take its place? An ever-expanding database of self-pleasing niche tastes? A roiling miasma of impossible-to-wade-through, glitzy crapola? A more flexible and service-oriented hierarchy than the absurd house of cards that's been imposed on us through recent decades? Or perhaps all that and more? Me, I'm making the safe bet and gambling on the last possibility. My mind was sent off on this little joyride by a Brook Mason piece for the New York Sun. Mason reports that one of the hottest art genres in the auction-house world is dog art. Paintings, porcelains, and sculptures depicting pooches are hotter than ever; catalogues and books featuring the stuff are being published; and serious collectors of dog art have emerged. A couple of interesting info-kibbles from Mason's good piece: According to one dealer, "portrayals of pointers, setters, and pugs command the highest prices"; and commissions for new portraits of pet dogs can run as high as $35,000. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 14, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, February 12, 2007


Recent Presidential Portraits Are Mediocre?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some people think the United States has been going to hell since Washington's time. That's nothing new. But now there's a new wrinkle. Not long ago in the Wall Street Journal, Catesby Leigh penned this article asserting that the same thing has been happening regarding presidential portraits. Leigh noticed that following President Ford's death, the Washington Post used Everett Raymond Kinstler's portrait as its illustration. Think of presidential portraits and the first that comes to mind is most likely Gilbert Stuart's iconic George Washington, possibly followed by John Singer Sargent's very differently conceived Theodore Roosevelt. Though technically at least as competent as the general run of portraits of postwar presidents in the gallery and the White House, this work by Mr. Kinstler--painted in 1987, a decade after the artist's prominently displayed White House portrait of the same president--is a far cry from Stuart's or Sargent's achievements. Leigh then goes on to compare Kinstler's painting to "a touched-up photograph." It operates at the factual, prosaic level. Absent are poetic evocations of character, such as the virtues required to shoulder the burdens of the presidential office, let alone any symbolic indications of the ties that link Ford to the nation's ideals and destiny. Mr. Kinstler's Ford is just a likeable, smiling, aging hunk of a guy standing next to a table. Gilbert Stuart's 1796 "Landsdowne" portrait of Washington, on the other hand, is richly symbolic, harkening to classical times. The Landsdowne Washington is situated in a pictorially and symbolically complex setting. He is situated, in other words, within the grand tradition of European portraiture. Behind him columns--emblems of order--are arranged on a diagonal, as are a chair and draped table. Symbols of republican principles and ideals, ranging from leather-bound tomes to an exposed table leg in the form of the Roman fasces, abound. Washington loosely grasps the sword of victory in his left hand while beckoning with his right, creating a certain visual tension as he turns slightly to align himself with the dominant diagonal. He beckons not to us but to the future, to an era of promise opened by the constitutional covenant, itself evoked by the rainbow in the background. Hanging folds of rich fabric intensify the aura of grandeur. Sargent's TR has an essentially blank background, but the absence of symbolism is compensated by the portrayal of the sitter's character. Leigh goes on to lament about the quality of Presidential portraits of recent decades. What should be done? Presidential portraiture should bind the national leaders of our time and of times to come to their predecessors, rather than forcing a chasm between past and present. A presidential portrait need not remind you of George Washington--after all, a variety of character types have shown themselves equal to the office--but it should be an inspiring image. Accordingly, the portraitist should also consider incorporating his subject into a pictorially and symbolically complex setting that evokes an enduring national heritage of liberty. This did not sit well... posted by Donald at February 12, 2007 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, February 7, 2007


Elitist Architects vs. The Rest of Us
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Today's Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section has a front-page article dealing with results of a recent American Institute of Architects survey of the general public's taste in architecture. The article's "hook" was that the Bellagio hotel/casino in Las Vegas was 22nd in the favoritism ranking, astonishing some architects who are not exactly fond of it. "The Bellagio is tasteless," according to Edward Feiner of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Washington, DC office. The Harris Interactive polling firm surveyed 2,000 Americans, presenting them with photos of "247 buildings nominated by 2,500 architects in various categories." From the results a ranked listing of the favorite 150 was unveiled, the number 150 chosen because the AIA is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. One reason for the survey was that the AIA wanted to "get a dialog going with the American people." (The AIA Web page referenced in the article is here. In the fine print is a "news" item mentioning the survey; I clicked on it but the link failed. Perhaps your luck will be better.) The article points out that, aside from the Bellagio, no building constructed in the last 10 years made the list's top 30 and of the top 20, only two were built in the last 35 years. The favorite was the Empire State Building, followed by the White House, the National Cathedral, the Jefferson Memorial, the Golden Gate Bridge (apparently it counted as architecture), the U.S. Capitol, the North Carolina Biltmore Estate, the Chrysler Building and the Vietnam Memorial. Feiner pointed out that sentiment and familiarity might have over-ridden aesthetic judgment. While that's likely in some cases, I don't think it negates the fact that the public doesn't seemed to have warmed to architecture of the various Modernist schools. Another tidbit: Some architects are more dismissive. Mark Robbins, dean of architecture at Syracuse University, says the survey "reinforces one's sense that the general public's knowledge of architecture is still limited to things that have columns or have a lot of colored lights." He says the list reminds him a the Zagat guides to restaurants, which rely on customer submissions. "It's only as good as the people who send in reviews. When I lived in Columbus, Ohio, Applebee's was in Zagat's." Architect Richard Meier (who had five buildings on the list) said "many of these things on the list are places people go and enjoy themselves, but I wouldn't consider them works of architecture." He also wondered why buildings such as Van der Rohe's Seagram Building and Johnson's New Caanan, CT house didn't make the final cut. Best line of the article: "Some in the architectural establishment -- whose favorite building is often said to be an ivory tower..." My hope is that architects will finally stop dismissing the public as a bunch of yahoos (lord knows they've been doing so for as long as I can remember) and start to ponder why their buildings are disliked or even hated. Mainstream media... posted by Donald at February 7, 2007 | perma-link | (15) comments





Friday, February 2, 2007


Art and Entertainment, Or Maybe Art Vs. Entertainment
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I ran across this YouTube video showing a talented draftsman making drawings of various YouTube personalities. Fun drawings, fun watching the guy draw. And a fun concept, too: treating YouTube personalities as people-worthy-of-portraits, and then making his own product be 1) the process of drawing, and not just on-paper but as-videotaped; and 2) the YouTube broadcast of the process of drawing. That's a niftier bit of conceptual art than anything I've run across in a gallery recently. But was it even intended as such? Double-fun! I enthusiastically emailed a link to the video to FvB, who wrote me back this email: It is a cool idea. And his stuff is pretty interesting. I just spent a couple hours in a bookstore looking at a big art book on Italian fresco series of the High Renaissance-Mannerist era. Quite entertaining stuff from some people who don't have the biggest reps: Domenico Beccafumi , Il Pordenone, Pellegrino Tibaldi, etc. What intrigues me about it, I think, is that it's technically all about the drawing, and boy were these guys swaggering draftsmen. It wasn't mere realism, although clearly they could have been accomplished realists if they had wanted to go in that direction. It was about "figurative art" -- the nude in action, stylized, anatomized, exaggerated, but always with a sort of goofy energy and lotsa style. They don't have Michelangelo's depth, but they were surely highly skilled entertainers. And, as I saw a year-and-a-half ago in Florence, even slightly goofy stuff can knock your socks off when it covers hundreds of square feet up on a wall -- part of the oddity you get when you look at a book-size reproduction goes away when you see the work full scale and in situ. Always something to be said for entertainment, no? Which got me babbling back to FvB about art vs. entertainment thusly: The aversion that high-minded people have to entertainment always amazes me. Sniff, sniff -- it isn't aaaaaaart. Screw 'em. If I didn't have a weak spot for art myself I'd probably confine my activities (consuming and producing) to entertainment. At least showbiz people like money and sex and glitz. At least they have a sense that (as an actor friend of mine likes to say) they have to "sing for their supper." Art people on the other hand find all that ... well, embarassing. Painful. Humiliating. I kinda like the rough-and-ready, extraverted stuff myself. And I certainly like it much better than sitting around bitching about how vulgar the world is. As for the YouTube video -- I wonder if this combining-drawing-with-video thing is becoming or already has become a kind of genre of its own. I hope so! I love the lightly-edited videoclip thing generally: a dude and his buds practicing hoops, girls doing webcam stuff, kitty videos, that guy who plays songs by squeezing his palms together ... It's casual, anyone can turn a videocam on, and everyone seems to be doing... posted by Michael at February 2, 2007 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, January 30, 2007


Sorolla: Workaholic Painter
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Maybe being a Spaniard had something to do with it. No artist-as-genius posturing from Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923). The man some regard as Spain's greatest painter since Velázquez (others might peg Goya as the previous reference point) was a family-oriented, bourgeois (in the best sense) workaholic whose burn-out took the form of a stroke at age 57 and death three years later. Showy, publicly-egotistical artists were a 20th century commonplace and also could be found in the late 19th century as artists completed their Western social evolution from craftsmen to Independent Geniuses. For example, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), a generation older than Sorolla, played the new rôle to the hilt. Nevertheless, most artists were cautious, pre-1900. The ideal career path led from training at a reputable academy to winning prizes allowing a few years' study in Italy soaking in the masters to getting works hung in Academy displays to making contacts with people rich enough to commission portraits -- a painter's most reliable meal-ticket. Separated from mainstream artistic, cultural and political Europe by the Pyrenees and western Mediterranean, Spain was a conservative place well into the 20th century. Flamboyant Spanish artists such as Picasso and Dalí made their reputations in France rather than in their homeland. Aside from student years in Italy and business-related trips plus the occasional vacation, Sorolla dwelled in Spain his entire life. A fine new Sorolla biography by his great-grand-daughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla is a good place to familiarize yourself with the artist. I used it and an earlier (out-of-print) book by Edmund Peel containing an essay by grandson Francisco Pons Sorolla as source material for this post. Fortunately for art historians and Sorolla devotees, Sorolla left a considerable paper-trail in the form of letters to his beloved wife Clotilde who, unlike other spouses of the famous, saved rather than burned the correspondence. Since Clotilde's job was maintaining the household and raising their three children, she remained in Madrid, aside from family trips to the seashore, while Sorolla was away in various parts of Spain painting plein-air, his preferred method. And while away, he wrote his wife as often as he could, describing the sights that inspired him, telling her how much he missed her and, in the half-dozen or so years before his stroke, expressing worries about his health and stamina. The book includes many snippets from those letters. Sorolla was born in Valencia, which remained his favorite part of Spain. Orphaned before his third birthday, he was adopted by his mother's sister. He began formal art instruction as a teenager and began to win prizes before turning 20. By the time he was turning 22 he had been awarded a study grant and was off to Rome and elsewhere in Italy for the next four years with interruptions for visits to Paris and home. On one visit home he married Clotilde García del Castillo, daughter of photographer Antonio García Peris, Sorolla's patron while in his late teens. Sorolla... posted by Donald at January 30, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments




Molly and John
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Can we call 'em or what? Long ago 2Blowhards featured irregular bulletins from the young artists John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple. John wrote about art-school shenanigans and sillinesses, while Molly told tales about her day job as an artist's model. So it's fun to see that John and Molly -- close buds, btw, in addition to being gifted and mischievous artists and writers -- haven't confined their activities to the blogosphere. Instead, they're entrepreneurial dynamos who have taken their acts on to bigger venues. Let's hear it for resourceful, cheeky, and open-minded kids. Have you read about Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School? Molly and John reacted to conventional figure-drawing classes as students often do, thinking "Wow, nude models! This is hot! Why's everyone pretending it isn't?" But instead of shrugging the question off, Molly and John kicked off their own monthly, open-to-the-public session that plays up the sexiness of the figure-drawing experience. They do this mainly by employing neo-burlesque artistes as models -- gotta love the stage names: Clams Casino, Little Brooklyn ... -- encouraging irreverence, laughter, and conviviality, and setting the hours spent drawing to funky music mixes. Figure-drawing sessions don't get more alternative than Dr. Sketchy's. Molly and John have had themselves a big hit. Dr. Sketchy events take place regularly in NYC, are popping up in Detroit, L.A., San Francisco, and have even started to crackle in Melbourne and Scotland too. And recently Molly and John have even turned their Dr. Sketchy concept into a book. You can read about it here, and buy it here and here. Check out the enthusiastic customer reviews on the book's Amazon page! Here's Molly's website. Here's John's. You can read Molly's columns for 2Blowhards here, here, here, here, and here. John wrote for us here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Here's the very lively Dr. Sketchy blog. Here's a New York Press article about the Dr. Sketchy phenomenon. Here's a videoclip from a Dr. Sketchy's event. Molly and John celebrate the publication of their book at the great NYC comic book store Jim Hanley's Universe. Those in the mood for a daydreamy few minutes should enjoy gazing on this page of modeling photos of the lovely and graceful Miss Molly. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 30, 2007 | perma-link | (0)

Monday, January 22, 2007


Blogging Note
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- While the title of this post is "Blogging Note" the subject is more of a bleg. (For those of you lucky enough not to have encountered that word yet, "bleg" is cutesy blog-speak for begging for information via a blog.) From time to time such as here I mention a Modernist-centered art-history narrative that originated at the Museum of Modern Art. It was pretty close to what I was taught in art history classes back in the late 50s, and I still find it hard to shake the concepts fed to me when I was 19 or so. The course, once it departed the Middle Ages, became a who-invented-this-first narrative akin to Biblical "begats" with the begatting ending once art emerged from the sludge of academism and realism to reach the shining heights of Pure Abstraction. Now to confess sloth and ignorance. Because I find Post-Modern art generally not very interesting (there are exceptions), I don't bother to study it nearly as much as I do other art. My impression is that the historical "thrust" posited in the MoMA narrative shattered into a collection of mini-movements fueled by painters and sculptors desperately trying to be innovative. Although I did buy a book that attempted to list the noteworthy movements from the 19th century to the 21st, I'm still semi-clueless regarding the "narrative" angle. What I would like is for some of you to pass along references to any historical narratives that cover the period since 1960 or thereabouts. Especially welcome would be a narrative that proposes "thrust" rather than the apparent chaos of the mini-movements. And apologies if you mentioned such narratives in comments to previous posts -- please pass along the info again. Why? Because, after months of fruitless head-scratching, a possibly viable concept of a non-Modernist narrative just popped into my head. Something blindingly simple. So simple that it might be simple-minded. In any case, I'm ready to do some work on this to see if I can come up with anything worth posting. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 22, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, January 18, 2007


Stacked
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back here I noted some similarities between an expensive blender the Wife and I had just bought and a trendy new building. Wittily, or so I hoped, I proposed referring to this new style of building as "high-end kitchen-appliance architecture." Out for a walk in the East Village the other day, I noticed this godawful thing under construction: Glass ... Steel ... Grids .... The East Village ... In other words, stack-it-up Modernism is what contemporary architecture sees fit to contribute to the lowrise neighborhood whose hominess, eccentricity, human scale, and living texture were celebrated by the great Jane Jacobs. Yet, bizarrely, the architecture profession regularly claims to have learned Jane Jacobs' lessons. Hmm. A bit of info for those who haven't yet stumbled across it: Modernism is on the offensive once again. Oh, perhaps you thought that the style had finally received its well-deserved stake in the heart? No such luck. These days, glassy cubey things barely distinguishable from the U.N. are going up all over New York City. How about our well-founded worries that this kind of building will have the same alienating and destructive effects that it had the last time around? Y'know, like in the '50s and '60s, when neighborhoods went to hell and people left cities in droves. Not to worry! The New Modernism isn't the same authoritarian thing at all! No, this time around it's cool, it's fun. Why, don't you know that the chic people now consider Modernism to be nothing but a kicky retro historical style in its own right? Which means that it isn't a disaster and a landmine. No, now it's a toy! We get to play with it and mix and match it just as we do every other style! Whee! Now let's get on with destroying another neighborhood! Er, I meant, Now let's get on with celebrating diversity! You can call me a sourpus, but I'm not joining this party. Hearing these sales pitches, er, rationales is something I find analogous to listening to some New Marxists arguing, "Dude, chill, it's just in fun! What's the big deal? What's the point in getting worked-up about it?" Er, fellas: Not that long ago we gave Modernism a serious try. It didn't work out real well. In fact, Modernism may have been the single most misguided and destructive movement in the history of architecture and urbanism. Modernism's champions have been so successful in re-branding their beloved style that they have even persuaded the National Trust for Historic Preservation to get on board their bandwagon. Now, I think it's safe to say that the National Trust is an outfit that many people join quite specifically as a way of protesting Modernism and what Modernism has done to our towns, cities, and landscapes. Nonetheless, recent articles in Preservation, the Trust's generally good magazine, have approvingly celebrated dreary old glass boxes, and even such widely-loathed Modernist horrors as Brutalism. The people behind the New Modernism are the... posted by Michael at January 18, 2007 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, January 16, 2007


Nasty Artist
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As an ex-skiier on a skiing vacation, I have plenty of time on my hands. One use I'm making of that time is catching up on my reading. I just finished this biography of painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The book had been laying around half-read for a number of months, and it was my first crack at learning about Whistler's life. My sluggish process of acquisition and reading likely stems from an ambivalent take on his art: I don't really dislike it, but I'm not really enthusiastic about it either. But I'll save that matter for another time. What the book repeatedly had to deal with was Whistler's tendency to turn on friends and associates, surprisingly often in the form of litigation. By his lights he was often simply defending the rights of an artist as he saw them. Among those he turned on were: Sir Francis Haden, husband of Whistler's half-sister; one-time studio assistants Walter Greaves and Walter Sickert; author and playwright Oscar Wilde; and Thomas Way, his long-time lithographer. And he sued art theorist John Ruskin, who was not in his circle. Some of Whistler's spitefulness would simply take the form of a cry of "betrayal!" regarding some greater or lesser slight, followed by ostracizing the wretch who crossed him. At the other extreme were the lawsuits. In the middle range were public squabbles in the form of letters to newspapers, journals and other publications. Over the course of his 69 years and one week of life, only a few failed to enter Whistler's sh*t list. Those included French writer Stéphane Mallarmée, painter Claude Monet, collector Charles Lang Freer and various members of his wife's family (sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip became his heir and executrix). No doubt a few instances of Whistler's public touchiness might have been related to self-publicity in the new age of mass-media. But his flare-ups were so continual it's hard not to believe that his personality was fundamentally testy. The book didn't mention other important artists who were as nasty as Whistler, and I haven't attempted to do the research. Perhaps Friedrich and art history buff readers can offer pre-20th century candidates. I do know that other important English-based artists of his era were comparatively mild-mannered, examples being John Singer Sargent, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadama, Sir John Millais, Lord Leighton and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. If the book is any guide, Whistler's temperament did him more harm than good. But there are lots of books about him, and some of them might lead the reader to the opposite conclusion. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at January 16, 2007 | perma-link | (1) comments





Wednesday, January 10, 2007


The Invisible Hand Is Back
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Now here's how architecture criticism ought to be written! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 10, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments




Eeeek
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Enjoy some heart-stopping photos of the most dangerous roads in the world. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 10, 2007 | perma-link | (10) comments





Sunday, January 7, 2007


Yet Another Vienna 1900
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Try it. Link to Amazon.com, select Books and then the "advanced search" tool. Once there, type Vienna 1900 into the "Title" edit box and click the "Search now" button. I got 37 hits a minute ago, the top one being this . Vienna 1900: Art, Life & Culture edited by Christian Brandstatter. (German language purists should note that the second "a" in Brandstatter actually carries an umlaut. I didn't write it "Brandstaetter" because American search tools are likely to recognize only the simple "a.") I bought a copy recently, even though I already have several books on the subject. Why did I blow money on something similar to what I already have? Mostly because the book seemed well-illustrated, particularly by photographs I wasn't familiar with. It treated (briefly, admittedly) a spectrum of subjects, including: Jugendstil and Symbolism, The Secession, The Klimt Group, The Artist-Designed Dress, Furniture, The Wagner School, Theater and Cabaret, Music, Philosophy and Science, The Secret of Dreams (concerning Freud) and a number of other topics including individual artists such as Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. Clearly the "team of Austrian and German historians, critics, and writers" (so says the jacket blurb) assembled by the editor didn't have room to do more than hint at their subjects, given the amount of space devoted to illustrations. But those hints were useful starting points for unfamiliar topics. I haven't read the entire book yet, but let me mention a couple of quibbles. One is that there was no obvious identification for the contributors aside from their names, none of which mean anything to me. My second quibble is that Marian Bisanz-Prakken, in her article on Gustav Klimt, botched his birth date, calling it 1848 rather than 1863. And why are there so many books dealing with Vienna and the period around 1900? Because there truly was a lot of important artistic and intellectual activity at that time and place. This wasn't clear for a long time so far as painting was concerned, mostly because Klimt and the others didn't neatly fit the standard art history narrative developed by champions of Modernism. As a matter of fact, I hadn't even heard of Klimt until I read Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna in the early 1980s. (My excuses are (1) Klimt wasn't mentioned in my college art history course and (2) I was focused on demography and computer programming for many years.) The period centered near 1900 is pivotal for most major arts because Modernism in its various forms was emerging. True, folks tend to seize round-numbered years as focus points, but 1900 truly was one, provided that one really means the 10 or 20 years that straddle it -- one sees comparatively little about art in 1800 or 1700, for instance. Unlike Friedrich von Blowhard, I feel uncomfortable with Grand Theory so far as art is concerned. I hesitate to relate artistic trends to, say, trends on economic or religious beliefs or practices. Nevertheless, I seem... posted by Donald at January 7, 2007 | perma-link | (6) comments





Thursday, January 4, 2007


Private Pleasure, Public Vulgarity
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few visuals to kick this posting off: And something I wish I had a visual for but, well, it would have been awkward: Over the holidays, I noticed two pre-adolescent girls who -- in the company of adults giving every indication of being their parents -- were wearing stretchy-glittery terry workout clothes. Victoria's Secret leisure-wear, basically. Across the butt of one girl was stitched the word "Juicy." Across the butt of the other girl was stitched the word "Pink." (Note to oldies not in the fashion know: I'm pretty sure that "Juicy" refers to a popular girls' fashion outfit called Juicy Couture. It also, of course, suggests "ripe and appetizing." Note to youngsters who didn't live through the '70s and '80s: the word "Pink" can make oldies give a start because the word was once used to signify hardcore, or near-hardcore, pornography. An extreme sex magazine didn't show pictures of girls who were just naked. It "showed pink" -- ie., it displayed images of exposed vaginas and anuses.) Looking at these two girls, I had -- I confess it -- a brief moment when I found myself thinking about their pre-pubescent butts in sexual terms. Which is bizarre, because I've never had the slightest sexual interest in pre-pubescent girls. But with all those hotsy signifiers a-glow -- St. Tropez fabrics, look-at-me buttpatches, provocative words -- perhaps it wasn't really that bizarre. With "Juicy" and "Pink" twinkling at me, how could the carnal part of my mind not switch on? Repeat after me: What were their parents thinking? Speaking of which ... The New York Times' Lawrence Downes recently attended a middle-school talent show. (Link thanks to Rod Dreher.) And what Downes found himself witnessing were 6th, 7th, and 8th grade girls doing half-clad, gyrating, booty-shaking imitations of the lascivious dancers in rock videos. Downes writes: What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society's march toward eroticized adolescence -- either willingly or through abject surrender. And if parents give up, what can a school do? The discussion topic I'm proposing is obvious, I hope: What do we make of how trashy, flashy, and vulgar popular culture has become these days? My own first contribution is a qualifier. I often enjoy vulgarity and funkiness. Back in his brief heyday, for instance, I was a fan and a defender of Andrew Dice Clay. I also like more in the way of flirtatiousness and mischief than many Americans seem comfortable with. What can I say? Affable sexual banter gives the day a sparkle, and it puts me in a good mood. My general attitude: Why not enjoy whatever it is life has to offer in the way of pleasure and delight? I mean, so long as it doesn't lead to personal collapse and social decay. So what makes me wince in the examples I provide above isn't the earthiness, the carnality, or the provocation. I'm... posted by Michael at January 4, 2007 | perma-link | (26) comments





Tuesday, January 2, 2007


Nine Heads Tall
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some commercial art careers are like meteors -- a brief streak of brilliance followed by ... nothing. Most commercial artists toil in the obscurity of the big side of the 20-80 rule, at best finding local notoriety. That prospect and a distinct lack of talent led me, after college, to totally different fields. For those on the 20 side of the split (actually more like the 2 side of a 2-98 "rule"), the best and likely worst thing that can happen is to become fashionable. The artist will earn buckets of money. He'll exhibit the distinctive style that viewers expect from him. Eventually his audience will tire of his schtick, commissions will dry up and he'll be fortunate if he didn't spend all those bucks he used to earn. John Held, Jr. was a "meteor." Famed for his "flapper" cartoons of the 1920s Jazz Age, his career slumped dramatically in the 30s and beyond. Not so the career of another flapper-monger, Russell Patterson (1893-1977). "Short skirts went out, long skirts came in. John couldn't draw long skirts so Russell Patterson took his work away from him." So said Al Hirschfeld. I had largely forgotten about Patterson in recent years (though I was familiar with his work) and was pleasantly surprised when I spied the following book at the downtown Seattle Barnes & Noble. (An oddity: I found links to an Amazon listing via Google, but could not locate it using Amazon's search tool.) Patterson was born in Iowa, raised in Canada, studied art for a while in Chicago and Paris, and at age 30 found himself doing commercial art drudge work while flopping as a Fine Artist. Seeing the success of Held and other cartoonists and recalling a certain Parisian model, he used her as the prototype for a different take on flapperdom. Success was rapid and long-term -- continuing at a high level for 20 years before tapering off in the 50s and early 60s. Long-term success in commercial art usually requires adjusting to stylistic modes. In Patterson's case, he switched from using pens for line-work to the brushwork that seemed nearly universal in the late 30s and into the 40s. One thing that didn't change was his subject-matter -- leggy women. His approach was to stretch the female form to 8 1/2 or 9 heads tall from the normal 7 1/2 or so -- proportions typically used by fashion illustrators. Another Patterson trait was using blocks of black to aid composition, tying the bits tighter. This was aided by the fact that, in the 20s, men often dressed in formal wear -- their dark clothing serving as the binder. I couldn't find a really good example on the Web that was shaggable, so here is a link to a picture associated with many dire warnings dealing with copyrights. True, Russell Patterson's work isn't in the same class as etchings by Duerer or Rembrandt. But I like his stuff. It's fun!! Gallery Patterson... posted by Donald at January 2, 2007 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, December 18, 2006


Not All Suburbs Are Alike
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- During our semi-regular yaks here about urbanism, sprawl, suburbs, and towns, it's likely that many of us allow stereotypical images to dominate in our minds. I know I do. For instance, where the 'burbs are concerned: Kris writes in to remind us that reality ain't always so simple, and to share a few snapshots of what the living is like in Carefree, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix: Kris informs me that the beastie in photo #4 is a bobcat. (!) A few more eloquent words from Kris: I'm an urban escapee, retooling my thoughts in the aloneness of dry mountains. I can't imagine serious thinking in a city. Cities turn thoughts inward, or toward human society/culture. Here, where the horizon expands, I ponder my future, the beneficence of God, love, what I'm going to write next, etc. You know, biggies. Many thanks to Kris for the lovely pix, as well as for the valuable corrective Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 18, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, December 14, 2006


Francis in Public
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Hey, I only just now woke up to the fact that The NY Sun maintains an archive of Francis Morrone's articles and reviews. Francis, dude, why were you keeping your stash a secret? My fave is Francis' account of New York's glorious Frick house. Francis blogs charmingly about Marianne (Katrina Cottages) Cusato here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 14, 2006 | perma-link | (0)
Sad News / Good News
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- John Massengale writes an eloquent eulogy for his recently-deceased mom. John also brings welcome news: that Boston's atrocious City Hall -- a mid-'60s Brutalist structure hated by the public from its debut but (surprise surprise) much-celebrated by the architecture establishment -- looks likely to be sold and demolished. The building was proudly featured in the architecture-history classes I took in the '70s as one of the recent glories of modernism. Wikipedia quotes a contemporary review from the august (cough cough) Ada Louise Huxtable: "What has been gained is a notable achievement in the creation and control of urban space, and in the uses of monumentality and humanity in the best pattern of great city building. Old and New Boston are joined through an act of urban design that relates directly to the quality of the city and its life." Wikipedia then goes on drily to note: City Hall is unpopular with Bostonians, who see it as a dark and unfriendly eyesore, and with workers in the building. The structure's complex interior spaces result in cavernous voids, a confusing floorplan, and the building is expensive to heat. City Hall Plaza has long been cited as a failure in terms of design and urban planning. In 2004 the Project for Public Spaces identified it as the worst single public plaza worldwide, out of hundreds of contenders. But we wouldn't want to hold critics -- let alone architects (in this case: Gerhard M. Kallmann, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles, three Columbia University professors) -- responsible for their mistakes, would we? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 14, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments




Self-Painted Pole
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I saw a number of nicely-done, interesting paintings when I was in Poland in September. The most intriguing work was done by Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), an artist categorized as a Symbolist. One of Malczewski's conceits was making numerous self-portraits where he placed himself in unusual costumes or settings -- not the quotidian surroundings we expect. I haven't been able to find much biographical information on Malczewski in English, so what follows is sketchy in the extreme. He was born in Radom and spent much of his childhood on an uncle's estate at Wielgie where he witnessed events in the 1863 uprising against the Russians. He was trained in Krakow (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) where he eventually became a professor. At the outbreak of the Great War, he moved to Vienna, probably because Krakow was only a few miles from the Russian border. He spent his final years in Krakow, by then in the reconstituted Poland. Roughly speaking, his earliest work featured historical and patriotic themes. At the peak of his career he did allegorical and symbolic works. In later life he did a number of paintings based on his childhood (in my opinion, the weakest of the lot). The paintings I saw in Warsaw and Krakow tended to be thinly-painted: little or no impasto. Malczewski Gallery Melancholia, 1890-94. A rumination about partitioned Poland. Death, 1902. Self-portrait, 1892. Harpia We Snie, 1907. Another self-portrait, but with Symbolism. Self-portrait, 1918. Sel-portrait, 1919. Conclusion? I think Malczewski needs to become better-known outside Poland. And I hope a big, splashy museum show gets in the works soon. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 14, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, December 11, 2006


Santa Barbara Biltmore Re-Do
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Actually it's in the town of Montecito, adjoining Santa Barbara to the east. And, technically, it's now a Four Seasons Resort. (The Web page is here, and has a link to more photos than I provide below.) To me it's the Santa Barbara Biltmore and will remain so even if they put up a Motel 6 sign in front. Nancy and I drop by the Biltmore nearly every time we're in the Santa Barbara area. Sometimes it's just to see the place, but we've also done lunch and dinner there and once went to a New Year's Eve party the hotel put on. The hotel was designed in the Spanish style by architect Reginald D. Johnson and opened in 1927. Since then it has been modified, but for the most part, changes have been modest. Perhaps the greatest change to the main building was the conversion of the South Patio to an enclosed dining room, albeit with lots of glass to provide some sense of being outdoors. The Biltmore was re-done again over the winter of 2006. The patio dining room was altered to make it more outdoorsy and the bar was re-oriented to the lounge area, largely returning that area to its 1927 dimensions. So far as I noticed, other changes were comparatively minor. Here are two photos I took early in November. Gallery View across the lobby. Registration desk to the right. The latest incarnation of the former patio. The Biltmore's a lovely place. Now if I only could figure out a way to afford a room for a night... Later, Donald... posted by Donald at December 11, 2006 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, December 7, 2006


Graham Nickson
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Graham Nickson is an interesting figure: an English-born painter deeply committed to figurative painting, yet attached as well to many of the values of modernism. The New Criterion's David Yezzi interviews Nickson, who's articulate, thoughtful, and cheerfully contrarian. Nickson also directs the New York Studio School, a fab (if ever-so-slightly cult-like) downtown art school where I've taken a couple of intro-to-drawing classes. The NYSS is legendary for their "Drawing Marathons," intense sessions of eyeballing, scribbling, and erasing -- and, believe me, the NYSS is very big on erasing and doing-it-over -- that leave artists feeling exhausted and exhilarated. I've always wanted to participate in a Studio School Marathon but haven't yet gotten around to it. A couple of Nickson's own paintings can be eyeballed here. They make me think a bit of the work of another Brit who was into heavily-pondered, on-the-verge-of-abstraction representationalism, Euan Uglow. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 7, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, November 28, 2006


Contrarianism Is Creative?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- [The setting: Army barracks, South Korea, 1964] One of the more artsy guys in Seventh Logistical Command's headquarters company was showing us the new suit he had custom-tailored in Taegu. Since we GIs couldn't easily hop over to Hong Kong (at the time, a place noted for nice made-to-order clothing at reasonable prices), we had to make do with local tailors. This was when South Korea was a largely isolated country, commercially -- not quite yet having signed a normalization treaty with next-door Japan. Although Koreans struck me as being hard-working, what they produced seemed shoddy because they didn't often have the chance to see what world-class products were like. For example, I had two Harris Tweed sport jackets made, one of which had a botched collar. To return to the subject, the dark brown suit had a "creative" cut. The trousers had no cuffs ... but the sleeves did! Cuffed sleeves were hardly innovative; check paintings and artifacts from the 18th century, for instance. Unlike the large, showy cuffs from 200 years earlier, the sleeve cuffs we witnessed were just like contemporary pants cuffs. In other words, this guy's concept of creativity was to pull The Old Switcheroo. Yes, yes, styles can evolve via a contrarian dialectic. Skirts begin skirting the floor? ... then raise 'em (perhaps gradually) above the knee. Nevertheless, I sometimes think that many post-1900 artists strive too hard for creativity (and not quality). When being "creative," they often simply produce something that opposes what The Establishment favors. Never mind that it's often the Establishment of 1910 that they're still rebelling against. Blockhead that I am, I don't believe that art has to be creative to be good or even great. I think current art would be much better if artists placed creativity towards the bottom of their lists of objectives. Even if creativity is the top priority for a given art project, being blindly contrarian isn't a guarantee of success. And how did we react to that suit with cuffed sleeves? With mumbles of "Hmm. Interesting." Along with other noncommittally polite sounds. Far be it from us to stifle Genius. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 28, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments




Them and Me
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's an interesting one to suck on: a review of an expansion at the Museum of Modern Art. What do you make of it? I find it interesting in only one way: the writer's total willingness to accept 1) that modernism is / was not just an art development but a genuine religion-replacement wannabe, and 2) that the International Style in architecture isn't just an attempt at a complete architectural language, but a potentially still-valid one. I find myself speechless in the face of this kind of thing. How can you accept these notions without digging into some other questions too? For example: Was it smart and / or productive for modernism to try to function as a replacement religion, and for people to look to it as such? For another: How about a simple acknowledgment that the International Style was the most destructive movement in all of architectural history? Me, I'd finally try to say something more or less along the lines of, "Well, if you're curious about this modern-art-as-religion thing, and if you want to see and experience yet another talented guy attempt the impossible, namely to redeem the International Style, you might consider visiting MOMA, the monomaniacally rectilinear, white-and-light high church of modernism. What a curious historical phenomenon, eh? And patooie on it." But that's the diff between me and a real art-world pro, I guess. They look at at modern-art-as-religion and think, "Gosh, what a great idea! I still share the dream ... " I look at it and think, "Well, I'm sure glad we've awakened from that particular self-delusion. Maybe, despite all the inevitable flow back and forth between them, it makes more sense to think of art and religion as separate if related things. And maybe it would be wise to remind ourselves that it's usually a mistake to displace our religious yearnings onto art and culture." The artworld pros look at the International Style and think, "Wow, abstract geometricism was so beautiful that it's worth sacrificing ever more humanity in order to make it work." I look at the International Sytle and think, "Lordy, what a misguided and disastrous experiment that was. Best to set it aside, and maybe even to put it under lock and key. The time's long overdue for us to get back to going about our building-and-culture schemes in far more modest and time-tested ways." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 28, 2006 | perma-link | (21) comments





Thursday, November 16, 2006


Dumping Classical Art
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Why on earth should a well-known art museum keep a bunch of fusty old Greek and Asian objects cluttering their galleries when they can trade the junk in on shiny new stuff by ... oh, whoever seems hot his week. That's pretty much the subject of an article that appeared in yesterday's (15 Nov.) Wall Street Journal Personal Journal section by Tom L. Freudenheim titled "Shuffled Off in Buffalo." Freudenheim is identified as "a former museum director who serves as assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution." Since I probably can't link to the article, I'll have to quote and paraphrase more than I like: bear with me. The museum in question is the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, Freudenheim's home town. He notes that as a child and youth he became inspired to enter the world of art history and museums by the many times he spent roaming the Albright Art Gallery (its name then). It seems that the Alright-Knox recently "announced it plans to sell some 200 objects from its permanent collection." Included on the hit list are a Greco-Roman bronze statue of "Artemis and the Stag," an ancient Chinese bronze wine vessel that the Buffalo News reports is one of only a handful in existence, and a 10th-century life size statue of the god Shiva that a Sotheby's specialist told the Associated Press is "without question the most important Indian sculpture ever to appear on the market." In addition, African, Pre-Columbian and Egyptian objects and Old Master paintings are to be sold. The sale, which Sotheby's will hold next year, is expected to bring in more than $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. The museum is best known for its collection of seminal works by Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos argues that the works to be sold fall outside the the institution's historical "core mission" of "acquiring and exhibiting art of the present." Grachos' point does make some sense. And the items sold won't vanish from the face of the earth (though they might not be available for public viewing for a time). Moreover, it's not likely that every single one of those 200 objects is top-notch. So what's Freudenheim's problem with the sell-off? It's a problem that's become endemic to the [museum director] profession. Museums are devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history--supposedly what museums are all about--is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for the work of the present. Ironically, this plan is driven by perceptions about the notably erratic and currently inflated contemporary art market, rather than by any dire financial crisis. He notes that there was an advisory committee on... posted by Donald at November 16, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Saturday, November 11, 2006


Camille's Girly Side
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Dave Lull points out a sweetheart of an interview with Camille Paglia. I've spoken to Paglia twice, and I was struck both times by how giggly and flirty she was when she was talking off the record. Her famous Warrior Woman routine didn't kick into gear until the tape recorder went on. The Bright Lights Film Journal interview captures some of this softer, less-determinedly-assertive Camille. Me, I dig both Camille-the- Warrior-Woman and Camille- the-girly-girl. Don't miss the interview with Bruce LaBruce that's linked-to in the Paglia interview either. I'm a Bruce LaBruce fan myself. Amusing, flamboyant, and sensible (in a hyper-perverse kind of way), he's like a Canadian cross between Larry Clark and John Waters. I wrote an appreciation of LaBruce here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 11, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, November 9, 2006


Goodhue's Spanish Ornamentation
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Architectural ornamentation. Should it be verboten, as Bauhaus and other International Style purists would have it? Or should inhibitions be cast away for us to wallow in it, Rococo-fashion? Of course there's the vast middle-ground between these extremes, and that's where things get interesting. For example... A must-see stop on my recent visit to San Diego was the Fine Arts Building-California Building (it's now called the Museum of Man) designed by Bertram Goodhue, located in Balboa Park. He was supervising architect for the 1915-17 Panama-California Exposition, set in Balboa Park, and took that opportunity to do some designing in the Spanish or Spanish Colonial / Spanish Revival manner. Goodhue (1869-1924) had a spotty formal education and suffered mood swings, yet managed to have a successful career (including 25 years in partnership with Ralph Adams Cram). Above all, he was a master designer. That's my opinion, anyway, considering that he designed St. Bartholomew's Church on Manhattan's Park Avenue, the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, the Los Angeles Public Library and the Nebraska State Capitol, among other important buildings. And on the side he did publication and typography design. The Fine Arts (as I'll call it here) building has interested me for many years and I find it odd that, even though I've only been in San Diego (briefly) a few times, I never took time to visit Balboa Park until now. Here are some photos I snapped. Gallery Facade view. Tower detail. View of east side. The part of the Fine Arts that interests me most is the facade. Note how plain many of the surfaces are, yet where there's ornamentation, it is intensive. I find this combination of extremes strangely appealing, though it's hard for me to explain why. Maybe that's the nature of aesthetics. It goes far beyond description and analysis, which is why I normally can't be bothered by books or even short articles that are attempts to analyze works of art; a few brief calls to attention normally are good enough. Even so, let me hazard that, arrangement of elements aside, an important factor in Goodhue's design is the ratio of ornament to plain-surface. That too is a kind of balance the designer should strive for. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at November 9, 2006 | perma-link | (6) comments





Sunday, November 5, 2006


SoCal Art Museum Notes
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There wasn't much blogging from me last week because I was -- what else is new? -- on the road. Down the California coast to Santa Barbara, San Diego and points between. I might choose to subject you to accounts of the Del Coronado Hotel, the aircraft carrier Midway and other items I found interesting. But let's focus on the museums I encountered. I'm not all that big on museums, zipping through the galleries faster than Nancy would like. If I go into a museum at all, I normally have a goal in mind. The Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach was a counter-example. I had nothing in mind aside from the fact that it has a collection of California Impressionist art. We had simply stopped at Laguna Beach to take a look at the town, so I peeked inside the museum's front door. Time was short and the main displays didn't interest me much, so I bought a book at the museum shop that, as it turned out, I could have purchased elsewhere for half the price: bummer. Two days later we toured San Diego's Balboa Park, partly because I strongly desired to view a particular Bertram Goodhue building in person. Not far away from the Goodhue was the San Diego Museum of Art which had (OhMyGawd!!) a prime example of the work of Joaquin Sorolla (see below). "Maria at La Granja" by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, 1907. This was in the San Diego Museum of Art's 1926 inaugural exhibit and later presented to the museum by Archer M. Huntington. Plenty of free brushwork and impasto; almost a (huge) sketch, but it is very nice. Of course I slapped down the cash and took in the museum. The Sorolla was, in my feeble judgment, the star of the place, which wasn't currently showing much that impressed me otherwise. Worse, their nice Bouguereau was on tour, so I missed seeing it. The museum I definitely wanted to visit was the Irvine Museum. It's tucked away on the ground floor of an office building not far from the Orange County airport. But it features California Impressionists, a long-ignored group of painters that I find increasingly interesting. The exhibition area is fairly small, yet contained a good representation of the movement. The tiny bookstore had an excellent selection, and it was hard for me to restrain myself from buying more books than I did. Even though I get to Santa Barbara once or twice a year, I've never visited the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Well, I always go into the museum store. But the museum never had exhibits that turned me on -- until now, with its Artists at Continent's End exhibit dealing with late 19th century painting from the Monterey Peninsula art colony. Some of the work shown at Santa Barbara pre-dated the California Impressionist period. And the exhibit featured a part of California that is foggier and more coastal than many of the... posted by Donald at November 5, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Saturday, November 4, 2006


Nikos' New Book
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm delighted to pass along the news that a new book by my friend and intellectual hero Nikos Salingaros is now available. For people who have begun visiting this blog only recently, a word of explanation. A conviction that I think all Blowhards share is that the fine arts in America have gone badly off the rails in recent decades. Though I "get it," though I enjoy occasional examples of it (Joe Brainard! Jeff Koons' puppy!), and though I'm often eager to endorse weirdo-ness and experiments, it's just plain bizarre how specialized, antagonistic, and off-kilter fine-art-making generally has become. Who but brainwashed insiders can care about much of this stuff? And why shouldn't civilians throw mud while muttering bitterly about turncoat elites? How did this state of affairs come about? After all, the usual thing is for the fine arts to crown, extend, and complete culture more generally, not to outrage and betray it. One of many plausible explanations is that the fine-arts world has been led astray by politically-motivated thinking and theory, much of it of a seductive, French-derived, chic-academic, wheel-spinning nature. So one of the things we like to do at this blog is to celebrate the contemporary thinkers who seem to us to put the fine arts back on more solid footing -- from philosophers like Denis Dutton to literary types like Frederick Turner to anthropologists like Ellen Dissanayake to evo-bio cats like Steven Pinker to architectural thinkers like Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier. Even among this high-powered crowd, Nikos Salingaros is a standout and a special case. He's a University of Texas mathematician who has worked closely with Christopher Alexander and who has become a major architecture-and-urbanism thinker in his own right. A hyper-civilized guy, responsive to and knowledgeable about the arts, he's appalled by fraudulent and destructive culture-thinking. Nikos is urbane and witheringly funny when he examines what passes for contemporary architecture theory, for example. How can such utter nonsense possess and transfix so many? He has an intriguing theory about that too. But Nikos isn't just a devastating critic of folly. He has also made profound contributions. Though he's aligned in many ways with the New Classicists -- his book has an introduction by the New Classicism fan, the Prince of Wales -- Nikos's own urgings are, like those of Christopher Alexander, style-independent, and should be of great use to any designer, patron, or township. How can ornament be justifed, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature -- perhaps even about the nature of matter itself -- that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? "A Theory of Architecture," Nikos' new book, is on its most basic level a textbook for architecture students. Slim, witty, and thorough -- as well as sophisticated-yet-accessible (a favorite combo of mine) --... posted by Michael at November 4, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments




Francis on Manship, Columbia
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Some visitors may not know that occasional Blowhard Francis Morrone has a regular gig at The New York Sun, where he covers architecture, neighborhoods, and, occasionally, art. It's always worth searching out Francis' work, of course; he's one of the very best out there. But he's in especially good form in the current issue of the Sun. Here he writes a clear-eyed appreciation of the mid-century, kinda-modernist / kinda-traditionalist sculptor Paul Manship; and here he's eloquent and informative on the contributions of architect and planner Charles Follen McKim to the campus of Columbia University. Francis also writes for The Classicist, the blog of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America. In a current posting, he reviews Time Out's recent guide to the Best Blocks in New York City. A first-rate passage: What stands out is that the Time Out kids' choice of the best blocks included not one that is identified by modernist buildings -- indeed, scarcely one that even has a modernist building on it. This article was not written by architectural ideologues. In fact, the people who wrote it may very well think Zaha Hadid is cool, or they may very well, had they ranked 50 buildings rather than 50 blocks, have included plenty of modernist stuff. But the striking thing is that this is an article about where people actually, truly want to live. And isn't that a beautiful example of the kind of approach to the arts that welike to promote around here! Forget the eager fools who write propaganda for the chic-starchitecture industry, and for whom architecture and urbanism are little but excuses for "I'm more radical than you" design-chat. On a regular basis, Francis offers generous and rewarding heaps of the real thing. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 4, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Friday, October 13, 2006


The Reviver?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In yet another bit of wishful thinking, er, in yet another attempt to revive its ailing downtown, Rochester, New York is investing $270 million of taxpayer money in a gigantic Moshe Safdie-designed complex. (You can explore the project further here.) Offhand design critique: too white, too many swoops, too much glass, and 'waaaaay too big a helping of that modernist obsession, "natural light." (Modernists seem to dislike the idea of buildings as shelter. Too traditional, I suppose.) Whiteness, swoopiness, glassiness, excess dazzle ... There's a lot of that particular combo around these days, isn't there? Fast hunch about the complex's prospects: Ain't gonna work as planned. Quick question: Does it really make sense to be spending 270 million public dollars on this kind of thing? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 13, 2006 | perma-link | (23) comments




Ever-Expanding, Ever-Contracting
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Uncle Patrick sees some virtues in hippie music. Nice, and suggestive, sentence: Jethro Tull "introduced me to jazz, classical and rock music all at once." That's something pop culture doesn't do any longer, it seems to me. Pop culture has grown more various, expansive, and inclusive than it once was -- no denying that. But at the same time it has also become more all-engulfing. A far-out piece of pop music isn't likely to lead an adventurous listener to the worlds of jazz, folk, or classical these days; it's much more likely to lead to other far-out pop music instead. Same in other fields. Time magazine once treated pop culture condescendingly and inadequately, for example, but did an OK job of providing glimpses of and intros to the worlds of classical music, dance, poetry, and fine art. These days -- though it's much more open to pop culture than it once was -- acknowledgment of other forms of culture can be hard to find in Time's pages. Sigh: does it always have to be one or the other? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 13, 2006 | perma-link | (19) comments





Monday, October 9, 2006


More Glass
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Stop the presses: Architecture critic praises glassy geometrical building-thing! The whole piece is a not-to-be-missed, unwitting and rich self-parody. But here's one especially hilarious passage: Minimalist architecture deserving of the name pares itself down not in the pursuit of style points but in an effort to frame the relationship between solid and void, nature and culture, and color and its absence -- and to explore how the eye sees and the mind understands those differences. I'll have two of those, fried and over easy! Where do these people get their brainwashings, er, educations? And what is it about a certain kind of architect (and architecture buff) that finds the idea of living in a department store's sparkly perfume-bottle counter so thrilling? More pix here. I wrote here about the kinky relationship many architects have with glass. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2006 | perma-link | (9) comments




Queen Nefertiti Was ... Dumpy?!?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Any of you guys dig older women? Especially those you met in an art history class? A few trifling Greek statues aside (that Venus de something-or-other, etc.), the unquestioned (for me) pre-1400 A.D. Art Babe is Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, 18th Dynasty, circa 1340 B.C. Here are some views of the famous bust from the workshop of Tuthmosis. The current consensus is that the bust was created as a reference for stone statues and other, more permanent representations of her. Hence the missing left eyeball. Nefertiti (the bust) has been living in Berlin for the past 90 years or so, and I finally got the chance to meet her there last month. She was as stunning as I anticipated she would be. A group of students was surrounding the bust and taking in a lecture when I arrived at her gallery in the Egyptian Museum, so I strayed 30 or so feet away to other displays to wait for them to move along. There I noticed a case containing a statue of her. It was small -- 40 centimeters -- but a full-length, nearly nude figure. And my beloved Nefertiti looked -- how can I put this delicately? -- ready for a size 16 skirt at a Talbot's sale. Here are some photos of that statuette. I couldn't find a side-view via Google (perhaps a reader can do better: check the Comments) so you'll have to use some imagination. But my take of the statuette in profile was that she had a pretty large butt and tummy, not to mention the heavy legs you can see in the photos. This was disappointing. You see, from the bust alone I extrapolated the rest of her to be basically lean, yet sensually shapely. But she was what she was, and the artists depicting her added a good deal of individuality, going beyond the stylistic conventions we associate with Egyptian art. Furthermore, as a book I bought at the museum pointed out, even the bust showed Nefertiti as a mature woman. Note the incipient bags under the eyes. I'd take her for early 30s or a well-preserved 40. The statuette was probably made later because, if you look closely, you can see wrinkling at the corners of her mouth. My guess is that Nefertiti always had a stunning face and thin upper torso while being at least a little thick in the thighs and ankles. So she wasn't perfection after all. [Sigh] Later, Donald P.S. For general info on Nefertiti, click here.... posted by Donald at October 9, 2006 | perma-link | (19) comments





Wednesday, October 4, 2006


Art? ... Who Sez So?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A while ago I posted on "sound-effects art" and one commenter claimed my "posting seems to be another salvo in a regular 2 blowhards series that follows the syllogism: "I do not consider this to be art, therefore it should not be considered art." The commenter has a point because I find it hard to consider sound effects as art. This raises a larger issue: Just who determines what is art and what isn't. I get the impression that, nowadays, "art" is often what the "artist" claims is "art." Though it helps if a journalist or some other party with a smidgen of respectability buys the claim. (And who defines who is an artist? Seems to me that these days this can be simple self-identification -- "I am an artist and who are you to deny my greatness?") But if seemingly just about anyone -- including the creator of an object or gallery owners who clearly have a strong self-interest in having that object considered art -- can claim things as art, then why can't just about anyone deny that something is art? It only seems fair. Ah, but that's no good because any old blowhard (or Blowhard) might well be a drooling ignoramus unfit to to pass judgment on anything, let alone art. But if it can't be just anybody, then: Whee!! We're on the edge of the slippery slope of credentialism! I don't want to go there. Not in this post, anyway. But I'll note that self-appointed establishments make me a little nervous. So how about this innocent li'l ol' talking point? -- Let the "market" (the gallery scene, public opinion, whatever) decide what's art and what's not. Yes, this can be a messy process and the results hardly clear-cut. Yet it seems to be roughly how art has been defined in practice in our mass-media age. The guy who makes something can call it "art." A writer for The New York Times can agree. A Blowhard can beg to differ. And innocent bystanders might sort it all out, eventually. Is this better than leaving things up to "experts?" Where do you stand? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 4, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments





Wednesday, September 27, 2006


Andy and Me and Joe and Don
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Did you make it through the recent Ric Burns / PBS documentary about Andy Warhol? What a logy and dismal piece of filmmaking. Pacing-wise, Ric Burns makes Ken Burns look like an action-adventure specialist. And the apparatus that PBS loads on top of so many of their prestige documentaries drives me nuts. The mournful music is a particular annoyance. That noodling solo piano (or solo violin) seems meant to convey, "When did America go so wrong?" In "Andy Warhol," two hours passed before music with a discernable beat could be heard in the background -- and this in a film whose subject was a fantastically successful '60s pop artist. The surfeit of pointless, standard-issue PBS verbiage about what it means to be an American can drive me up a wall too. Warhol, you'll be shocked to learn, was "the most American of artists." In him and in his work, "we see ourselves." Actually I was too stunned by the banality of the narration -- delivered in the most banal way by Laurie Anderson -- to rush to my notebook to transcribe passages verbatim. Trust me, though: They were worse than anything you or I could invent on our own. (Long ago -- here and here -- I had some fun at the expense of what I called "the church of PBS.") But, y'know, documentaries ... Real subject matter, decent footage, interesting interviews, etc. I stuck the film out, all four hours of it. Although I've never been drawn to Warhol's work (rather the opposite), I did live through the '60s and '70s -- and what the hell was all that about? (Not as settled a question as it's sometimes made out to be!) Also, watching the film, it dawned on me that Andy and I have our own little history together. At college in the '70s, one of my suitemates was an arty Warhol worshipper. He painted affectless paintings; he spoke in a light, flat, odd voice; and he had a posse of outrageously camp friends from New York City -- he ran his own mini-Factory, in other words. In the '80s, The Wife and I did some writing for Warhol's Interview magazine. We've been to the Warhol Museum. I've read "Edie," as well as a couple of Warhol's own books, and I've gone through many essays about his work. I've watched a few of the movies and seen many of the paintings. The Wife and I live about six blocks from where Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas. As the credits on the PBS show came up, it didn't come as a total surprise to learn that one of the film's producers is someone I know, if in a very-long-ago sort of way. So, although I'm not a fan and I'm not a scholar either, and though I never encountered Warhol in the flesh, Andy and I have some history together. Interesting! If -- given what a smalltown hetero rube I am at... posted by Michael at September 27, 2006 | perma-link | (23) comments




Visual Memory
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Good lord: Talk about a visual savant! The wonderfully-gifted autistic Londoner Stephen Wiltshire is taken for a helicopter ride over Rome, and is then asked to draw what he saw. One helicopter ride over Rome! All I'd have come away with is a wowed general impression, wobbly knees, and a hunger for some good Italian food ... Here's Stephen Wiltshire's website. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 27, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, September 23, 2006


Glassy NYC
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Prairie Mary and Dave Lull for turning up this good A.A. Gill piece for Vanity Fair. New York is in the midst of a chic-building boom: ripply glass, acute angles, perfume-bottle shapes, etc. Is this an exciting and innovative development (the usual design press)? Or are we being subjected to a tragic repeat of our disastrous '50s adventure with glass boxes, as we Real Folk may tend to think? Bless his heart, Gill comes down on the side of the Real Folk, and does so with some much-needed verbal flair. Here's a good passage: What they all seem to have in common are their vast expanses of glass. Over in Europe, we're all a bit fed up with the answer to every urban architectural problem being a sheet of textured glass wrapped around steel. We've grown cynical about the metaphor of transparency, openness, harmony, and light. It's not like floating in the sky. It's like living in Pyrex. Like being the ingredients in some glutinous civic fruitcake. It's not that these new Manhattan buildings don't look very good. It's that they look lazily derivative, and they'll make New York look like every other grubbily transparent financial hub in the world. It's a fiasco for the city, in other words. Yup: International Modernism is back, only this time around all that glassy graph paper has got the wiggles -- big improvement! Problems now solved! Baloney to that. It's heartening, though, to see Gill's refusal-to-be-impressed appear in a mainstream magazine. Let's hope that the official discussion about architecture-and-urbanism is finally beginning to open up to some dissenting voices. Related: I wrote about some recent developments in architecture here and here. At the bottom of this posting, I went out on a limb and called the steel-and-glass specialist Richard Meier "an asshole." I can't see any reason to take that judgment back. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 23, 2006 | perma-link | (19) comments





Friday, September 15, 2006


A New Head Architect
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- John Massengale relays the announcement that new-Classicist Thomas Gordon Smith has been named chief architect of the General Services Adminstration. The appointment seems a virtual guarantee that official US building programs will be taking a more traditional turn. Given how bizarrely chic, spikey, and soon-to-be-embarrassing recent government projects have become -- "Design Excellence," my ass -- this is a very pleasing development. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 15, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, September 14, 2006


Wabi Sabi
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A Fred link to a good Wikipedia entry on the Japanese aesthetic known as Wabi Sabi has reminded me that I've long wanted to pass along ... Er, dammit, where are those notes? ... OK, got 'em. Anyhoo, I was struck by a conversation between a couple of Japanese art curators, Shiji Kohmoto and Fumio Nanji. Sorry to supply it source-less: I copied this passage out and set it aside a couple of years ago, and I no longer recall where I found it. Still! Shinji Kohmoto: The Western concept of art, based on notions of individualism, was introduced to Japan only a hundred years ago ... [Japanese] art works operate as elements which create a particular space and mood -- they were not personal artistic statements and they were not a method of defining meaning and ideas. Our main concern was not to produce or have objects, but to experience daily the different stages of the mind. Fumio Nanji: We didn't have the concept of art in a modern western sense; we had craft, the main concern of which had to do with techniques, materials, and decoration in relation to space, architecture, and lifestyle. SK: All (pots, chairs, scrolls) were elements equally capable of giving people an opportunity to reflect on or feel something else behind the visible. FN: To talk about identity you need someone else -- to make you think objectively about yourself, of your identity. But we in Japan never had that chance. SK: The Japanese language is very suggestive rather than reductive. Japanese is a verb-dominated language while English is noun-dominated. Japanese has a limited vocabulary of adjectives; it is not analytical in nature ... If the essential character of the post-modern condition can be defined as an awareness of pluralism and relativism, I think Japan has been ready to accept that condition. Wabi Sabi: It's all about the appreciation of impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness. Yeah, baby! I don't know about you, but Asian art theory often stirs me far more than Western art theory does. I enjoyed and learned from this book on Wabi Sabi. Wikipedia links to this good article about the Wabi Sabi aesthetic. Fred has recently put some music he has composed online. It's rousing stuff -- equal parts eerie and rollicking. Fred clearly isn't a stranger to the magic of empty spaces, suggestion, the marks the hand (and the soul) make, and mood either. * Related: I blogged -- cluelessly, heedlessly, enthusiastically -- about Hindu aesthetics here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 14, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Saturday, September 9, 2006


Classical Art Training
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Exciting news from The Classicist: the arrival of a new new-traditionalist fine arts academy in Manhattan, The Grand Central Academy of Art. The GCAA is the creation of the wonderful ICA&CA (Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America); its operations will be directed and overseen by the brilliant painter Jacob Collins; and its core program will be an intense three-year training period in classical and realist techniques. I'm thrilled to note that the GCAA will also offer weekend and evening classes for amateurs and duffers -- that would include me! James Panero interviews Jacob Collins here. "I have a lot of respect for French academic painting," Collins says daringly. Another nice passage: It seems that, in the twentieth century, a lot of energy went into dismantling traditional art forms. I don't particularly love that. Whether it was good or bad, this spirit has definitely wound down. So much of the energy of Modernism came from the electricity of breaking the pieces of the art object apart. I'm certainly not claiming that there are no pieces, but that now, in Traditionalism, it's about putting the pieces back together. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 9, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments




The Zaniness of FLW
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Prairie Mary for pointing out this fascinating Christopher Hawthorne article about "The Fellowhip," a new study of Frank Lloyd Wright. The authors did their best to discard the Eternal Genius lens through which Wright is usually seen, and to consider him as a mere mortal, if one with enormous talent. That's something I tried to do myself -- in a much more modest way, of course, and confining myself entirely to his work -- back in this posting, which I wittily entitled "Frank Lloyd Wright Is Not God." It generated some controversy, to say the least. Mary has put up a wonderful posting of her own about how she learned to write. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 9, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, September 7, 2006


Sound-Effects "Art"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Public art comes in many forms, noises included. You might have experienced one example if you've ever flown into Seattle's airport and were in either of terminals B or C. And you really would have noticed it if you had operated one of the water fountains. When the water lever is pushed, besides the expected stream of water, out come loud gurgling noises ("glup, GLUMP, gurgle, GLUMP!!). I find the experience so awful that I head for one of the other terminals to slake my thirst. How do I know this is "art?" Because by each sound-effects equipped drinking fountain is a small plaque proclaiming the name of the "artist" (a guy named Jim Green). These noisy fountains have been in place for years and it's hard to believe that no one has ever complained. Apparently the only thing complainers can be sure of is that their complaints carry next to no weight with public authorities. ...How many years did it take to remove the "wall" sculpture by the municipal office building near New York's City Hall?... It'll probably be a long time before SeaTac airport is gurgle-free. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at September 7, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Monday, September 4, 2006


Separating Artist and Art
Donald Pittenger writes Dear Blowhards -- So Guenter Grass was in the SS in World War 2. Not the part of the SS most people think of, where SSers wore tight-fitting black uniforms and got to wave Lugars around while sneering at members of lesser races. You see, as the war ground along, the SS became a military arm of the National Socialist German Workers Party. There were even SS divisions, which didn't amuse the Wehrmacht generals, I would think. Anyway, Grass was in the military part of the SS. The revelation touched off a fair amount of fuss in both the traditional media and the Blogosphere (see here for info on Grass and here for a report on the controversy). Besides the not-so-trivial matter of Grass' decades of hypocrisy, the issue of separating artist and art came up from time to time. And that perennial issue is what interests me more than Grass who, to my mind, spent his career backing the wrong political horse. Okay, I understand that we are supposed to focus on the quality of the art and not the merits or failings of the artist. Fallen, fallible creature that I am, I don't seem to be able to live up to that standard. If I despise an artist's lifestyle, personality, morality or politics, I can find it hard to like his art. This isn't universal, mind you; my reaction varies by case. Let me focus on politics for now. I am an anti-communist (gasp!!). That makes me seriously unwelcome in many artistic circles, but so be it; "I yam what I yam" as Popeye the Sailor succinctly put it. But I fancy myself a reasonable anti-communist. I tend to give slack to people who fell in love with socialism and communism back in the days when those schemes were theoretical, untried. I give a lot less slack to those who persisted in loving communism after the period of Stalin's trials and the August 1939 pact with Hitler. And I pretty much totally write off anyone who was a communist or sympathizer after the mid-50s uprisings in East Germany, Poland and, especially, Hungary. Now that I've established myself as a vile, closed-minded, imperialist warmonger, let's turn to art. Even if an artist was as red as the "meatball" on the flag of Japan, I can overlook his politics so long as the subject of the art is non-political. Obvious examples are artists who were Abstract Expressionists. Other artists favored political themes. George Grosz is an artist whose art and politics I don't like. Ben Shahn also was a lefty who sometimes dealt with political subjects, but I tend to like his work thanks to his interesting technique. In particular, I was intrigued by his pen-an-ink work back in the 50s when I was a student. Frida Kahlo is an artist whose popularity has inexplicably (to me) risen greatly over the last decade or so. She and her sometime husband Diego Rivera were reds, but a quick... posted by Donald at September 4, 2006 | perma-link | (15) comments





Thursday, August 17, 2006


Classicism Links
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Classicism nuts have another essential websource to explore: Greg Shue's beautiful Grand Tradition. Greg's site offers many hours' worth of browsing possibilities, and the material that's on display can really make the head and the senses swim. I loved, for instance, running into this image of Oslo's warmly-colored, distinctively-proportioned National Theater. And the site's links page is a one-stop guide to the online Classical-architecture world. I'm hoping Greg starts blogging soon. * Francis Morrone takes a look at Renzo Piano's addition to New York City's Morgan Library and somehow manages to be very informative, quietly impassioned, and drily amusing all at the same time. I haven't been inside Piano's addition yet, but when I walked by it the other day I was stunned by how banal the exterior is. It all but screeched "bad American embassy in Abu Dhabi, 1962." In the comments on Francis' posting, Tatyana aptly compares Piano's creation to a "plane hangar." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 17, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments




Some French Illustrators
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards As anyone who saw "The Triplets of Belleville" can testify, the French have their own way with cartooning and animation. Not for them the perennial (and to my mind often tiresome) American war between the commercial/superhero scene and the indie/slacker scene. French illustration art often manages to be adult, poetic, full of charm and personality, and unapologetically handmade-looking even when it isn't actually handmade. Here's a site where you can sample the work of some young French illustrators. I especially like the girlie-but-funky stylings of Adolie Day, and the fluid, wittily incisive doodles of Le Vilain. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 17, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, August 12, 2006


Winning Artists
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe became so much of a political cause that the question of how good an artist he was rarely came up. (FWIW, I was never much of a fan myself.) Serena Davies pans his work, and shares a few unpleasant facts about his personality too. * The painter Amedeo Modigliani wasn't in the running for a "Best Personality" award either, it seems. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 12, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments





Friday, August 11, 2006


The Marketplace or the Theater?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Frederick Turner wants us to see Shakespeare as the poet of capitalism. Nice passage: Shakespeare's reasoning endorses the tweaking and readaptation of natural processes for human purposes. Those natural processes, however, are but precursors and simpler versions of the much more deeply self-referential and multi-leveled processes we find in the human world. The market is just such a complex system. The market is the drama of concrete human interaction, the theater of the world. Only highly nonlinear, turbulent, and far-from equilibrium processes, as the market is, could produce such complex and individuated entities as human personalities and cultures. As a huge fan of Turner's work both as a poet and a critic, I take him seriously. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 11, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, August 9, 2006


Architecture by Braun
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Wife and I recently threw financial sanity to the winds and bought -- no, we invested in -- this gorgeous hunk of high-end blender. Although it whips up a darned good pesto sauce, its main role is to class up our kitchen. There it sits on the countertop, cool, stylish, and Euro-handsome. What gravitas. What dignity. That heavy, cast-steel gray ... That industrial-sculpture quality ... It's the BMW of blenders, both retro and forward-looking. Putting it to use as a mere smoothie-making device seems like a desecration of the higher aesthetic values. Our snazzy new blender has got me remembering another object too -- but which one? An object that I ran across not in a kitchen but on the street ... Ah, I recall now what it is: it's that Gwathmey Siegel condo building on Astor Place at Cooper Square that advertises itself as "Sculpture for Living." (Translated from the real-estate-ese, that means "overpriced housing for easily-gulled trendoids.") Here's how "Sculpture for Living" sees fit to meet the sidewalk -- ie., how it condescends to address passersby. (That would be you and me.) How lovely and thoughtful, the way it detaches itself so completely from its surroundings. (Scorn is pouring from my voice here, of course.) "I am no mere building," it says. "I am a work of art. Take me on my own unique terms. After all, I'm not meant to fit in. I aim for higher things. I aim to stand out." David Sucher likes to call this approach to buildings "precious-object architecture" -- the making of stylish buildings that sit there by themselves, turning their backs to their surroundings, insisting on being appreciated as self-sufficient objets d'art. Looking at these buildings, I often feel like someone moving among counters of ritzy, avant-garde perfume bottles. Sad to say, but new glassy/metallic objets are going up all over New York City these days. As John Massengale says, our builders seem determined to turn Manhattan into "Houston on the Hudson." I haven't snapped many of these atrocities yet, but here's one I did catch. It opened recently not far from where I live in Greenwich Village.: Full of character, no? The architecture class thinks that we should be thrilled with the projects they're foisting on us, by the way. A great and exciting new era in building is underway, etc. Me, I experience most of what our architecture class gets up to as vicious and unwarranted assaults on much-loved friends. In fact, part of me is convinced that what we're witnessing now -- the erection of acres of ripply glass, Gehrys everywhere, etc -- is going to prove as devastating to our cities as were the rectilinear corporate-modernist behemoths of the 1950s and the concrete-brutalist bunkers of the 1960s. The newfangled angles and surfaces may be a little zanier, and (perhaps) a little more beguiling. But the results -- ie., alienation, chic that quickly becomes Ugly, people losing interest in urban life... posted by Michael at August 9, 2006 | perma-link | (13) comments





Monday, August 7, 2006


Dan Mieduch: From Cars to Cowboys
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Cowboys 'n' Indians interested me greatly when I was a kid. No longer. I'm not saying I dislike 'em, mind you. It's more a matter of indifference due to having gone on to other interests. So when I look at "cowboy art" nowadays, I don't pay much attention to how well the artist got details such as clothing, equipment, weapons and so forth. Instead, I react to how well painted the depiction is. And some of it is very good, in my judgment. That's why I thumb through each issue of Art of the West magazine when it turns up on the newsstand and wind up buying around two issues out of every three published. The current issue (July/August 2006) has a really flash cover. Which is saying something, because the majority of their covers feature paintings that are pretty flash. The cover guy for this ish is Dan Mieduch, a fellow I had never heard of even though he can command five-figure prices at auctions. (Lordy Lord -- there's a whole lot of art out there that I'm still ignorant of! Now that I'm about to retire, I should promise myself to use some of that time to visit more galleries.) One reason I find Mieduch interesting is that he was trained in Industrial Design and worked for General Motors for a while. ID students don't need to be able to illustrate humans convincingly; they basically need to do a good job on a product rendering. In some of my reference files I have examples of car design visualizations that included people, and in many cases the artists did a worse job then even I could have. But some ID guys, Mieduch included, are real artists and not simply designers. The magazine article goes into more detail, but here's the biographical blurb on Mieduch's web site to give you a little scene-setting: Cowboy artist Dan Mieduch was born July 18, 1947, in Detroit, Michigan. When he was ten, his family moved to the small town of Clinton, Michigan, where his father bought and ran a tavern and motel. In that farming community, Dan came to appreciate the beauty of the land around him, the abundant wildlife and especially the light of early morning and the deep hues of a summer sunset. Dan attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, graduating with a degree in Industrial Design in l969. He was drafted into the United States Army, where he served as Command Artist for the Southern Command, United States Army, Panama Canal Zone, Panama. While in Panama, he did several historical paintings for area museums. Returning to the States, he worked in several major commercial art studios in Detroit. There, he learned the discipline needed to succeed in the art business and met his wife, Rhonda. In l975 the Mieduch's decided to move west, settling in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dan's career has garnered a following all over the country as his art has been... posted by Donald at August 7, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments





Sunday, July 30, 2006


The WSJ's Big-Bucks "Mall Artists"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Know of any below-the-salt artists who live well? The Wall Street Journal's 14 July Weekend section front-paged Kelly Crow's article "Shopping-Mall Masters" to help answer that question. The "Shopping-Mall" term in the title isn't strictly true, but the artists featured in the article tended to have modest starts and make a lot of their money from reproductions rather than from sales of original works. I'm pleased that the Journal published the piece because there is a "hidden" art market out there -- a market "hidden" to those who get their art news from the likes of The New York Times or art magazines that focus on the big-city gallery scene. One thing I don't know is how the artists mentioned in the article were selected. It might have been by the writer alone. Or perhaps the writer sounded out some art dealers. Despite the theme of the piece, there is a fairly wide range of top prices commanded (see captions below). Although lower top-prices supposedly are somwhat balanced by high sales of reproductions, annual sales totals from all sources aren't included in the article. As it happens, I don't care for much of the work by the artists presented in the article. Nor do I care much for the art that's considered "hot" in New York, London and San Francisco. Remember the 80-20 rule which, for painting, could be more like 95-5 -- 5 being the percent that's even halfway okay. Nevertheless, where seriously large (to me, anyway) numbers of dollars are being spent on art, attention should be paid. No, I'm not saying that attention should be paid because the art is good. My meaning is that it would be worth our while to think about Who is buying that art. Why they are buying that art. (And, perhaps, not buying other kinds of art.) The subject-matter of the art. The techniques used to create the art. The "meaning" of the art (if any). And so forth. In other words, we might learn something, though I can't predict what in any given case. Here are examples of art from the artists featured in the article along with reported top prices for their work. Gallery Howard Behrens Top price: $50,000. Peter Brent Top price: $5,000. Christian Riese Lassen Top price: $300,000. I saw some of his stuff in Honolulu last December. The images were large and had striking colors, so visual impact was high. But I don't care much for his subject-matter and for hard-edge realism in general, so I'd probably never buy any of Lassen's work for hanging on a wall of my house. Bill Mack Top price: $75,000. Thomas McKnight Top price: $45,000. Steven Meyers Top price: A $30,000 order for 23 prints, or just over $1,300 per item. Meyers' does print images based on X-ray (and perhaps other) technology. Diane Romanello Top price: $11,500. Discussion Other artists cited in the WSJ article were Thomas Kinkade (top price: $4 million for a... posted by Donald at July 30, 2006 | perma-link | (25) comments





Friday, July 21, 2006


Now It Can Be Told
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- FYI, the blogger behind most of the superb postings at The Classicist is none other than former/current/we-hope-future Blowhard Francis Morrone. Perhaps if we clap loudly enough, Francis will decide to indulge once again in some posting at this site. Meanwhile: go, enjoy, learn. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 21, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, July 18, 2006


Lakeshore Luxe
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- House owners and 20th century design isms normally don't mix. A drive through almost any neighborhood with detached houses should confirm this generalization. But generalizations have a way of having exceptions. One important exception is expensive housing built since the end of the 1920s. If you want to find a Modernist or PoMo house, ritzy neighborhoods area good place to start looking. Lakefront property almost always (hmm ... generalizing again, am I?) commands a price premium. Seattle and suburban communities have more lake frontage than most cities. When I was a kid, much lakeshore land on the east side of Lake Washington and on Mercer Island (a large island in the lake) was undeveloped. That happy state had pretty well ended before the 1980s and today it's expensive indeed to own a lakefront house. This post has photos I snapped on a tour cruise. The houses pictured are all on the east side of the lake and not in Seattle proper, where lakeside real estate was gobbled up by the 1930s. I don't know who the owners of these houses are, and I'm not going to research and report addresses and so forth out of respect for privacy. Neither Bill Gates' (Microsoft) nor Howard Schultz's (Starbucks) places are shown, though we cruised past them. Gallery This one looks like it was snatched from Brno in Czechoslovakia (circa 1928). Similar. At least the left part of the facade isn't totally squared-off. Sorry that this shot is a bit blurred, but [whine] I was on a boat, after all. Anyhow, this house has gables and other pre-Mo features. What I find hard to judge from the photo is whether it's a new house or an old one that might have been modernized. A pair of houses. The one on the right is more classical Modernist. Its chimneys give this house a whiff of ante-bellum South. And there is a hipped roof. Interesting pairing here. The building on the left looks to be a classical Northwest Style house of the 1950-70 era -- low gables, vaguely Japanese, but with huge windows. The one on the right might be called Nouveau-Industrial Post-Modern. Finally, still another PoMo palace. Might be an interesting place to visit, but I don't think I'd want to live there. Commentary The houses shown above are not a statistical sample. I was simply snapping away at whatever struck my fancy that day. Plus, I was taking pictures of what could be photographed. Older houses tended to be more shielded by trees and other vegetation than newer ones. A question I can't answer is who the owners are. Clearly they have plenty of disposable income. So let's hypothesize that they're Microsoft Millionaires or that ilk. (There's lot of other money in Seattle thanks to Boeing, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Amazon.com, Weyerhaeuser, etc., etc. -- not to mention lawyers, physicians and owners of prosperous smaller businesses. But let's pretend the owners are techies.) A rich techie probably has a... posted by Donald at July 18, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, July 14, 2006


Uninhibited
Michael Blowhard writes: Daer Blowhards -- For all the thigh, tummy, tattoo-ink, and buttcrack they put on display, today's mid-American girls are apparently as prim (or almost as prim) as ever. A fun recent article in the NYTimes (not online) reports that -- although many middle-class girls get a kick out of dressing "skanky" and calling each other "slut" -- they worry as much as ever about how far to go, and about their reputations. But if the Anna K./Britney mall crowd is one thing, the bohemian set is another -- far more determined to explore possibilities, and much more eager to live their fantasies out. What with computers making porn well-nigh inescapable ... What with popular culture being as lewd as it has become ... What with everyone having grown tired of joyless, partyline feminism ... What with, in short, life having turned into one big sexual cornucopia, many of today's downtown arty kids are responding by pressing pedal to the metal. A few examples: The neo-burlesque scene. (Here's the website of Nasty Canasta, one of my fave neo-burlesque performers.) Natacha Merritt's photo project "Digital Diaries," which chronicles her sex life. Burning Angel, an outfit that makes boho, alt-porn movies. The alt-porn outfit Suicide Girls showcases self-motivated naked girls sporting tattoos and attitude galore -- 2Blowhards' very own Confessions of a Naked Model correspondent Molly Crabapple was a Suicide Girl for a while. (Here's one of Molly's columns for us; here's another.) Molly also takes part in the burlesque scene as a performer, and she sponsors a series of life-drawing evenings where no one pretends that the model's nakedness isn't hot. The main ideas behind a lot of this activity are 1) It's fun to be sexual, 2) Mainstream porn is borrrrrrrring, and 3) So long as I'm making my own choices, no one is being exploited. Setting aside worries about whether this activity represents a good or a bad development, I've often found myself thinking that some of today's most provocative edgy art comes from these fields, perhaps especially the post-camp performance-art/reality-video webprojects. The trailblazing webcam girls -- JenniCam, Anna Voog, and (my own favorite) Isabella@Home -- created happenings that raised many interesting (and maybe unanswerable) Warholian questions. The more recent Beautiful Agony is a fascinating project too: an ever-growing collection of videoclips of people (mostly young and pierced) masturbating to orgasm. Nothing is on explicit visual display -- the camera focuses on head and shoulders, no more. And -- since the self-pleasurers are videotaping themselves and there's no cigar-smoking smut-mogul around to make your skin crawl -- you watch the show feeling free to enjoy the eye-and-ear candy, and to let your brains play with arty questions. Can we call what these people are creating avant-garde art? God knows they're expressing themselves, and god knows they're creating something. But perhaps the "art" is more in the concept? ... Here's an interview with Richard Lawrence, the brains behind Beautiful Agony and its (equally brilliant, IMHO) sister sites, I... posted by Michael at July 14, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments





Sunday, July 9, 2006


Peripheral artists (6): George Henry and E.A. Hornel
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Continuing my series on artists at the edges of both Europe and the Paris-centric narrative of art history, we jump westward from Finland and Russia to Scotland. (For some reason, the phrase "peripheral artists" drives some readers nuts. My feeble defense is here.) Around 1885 (plus/minus 10 years or so) there emerged a group of artists with ties to Glasgow who tended to be anti-establishment [yawn] and influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84), about whom I wrote here, and J. M. Whistler. These artists became known as the "Glasgow Boys." I plan to write about more of the Boys, but will start with two comparative latecomers to the group. Why two? Because they jointly worked on a painting that greatly interested me when I first spotted it in a book about architect Charles Rennie Macintosh and his milieu. I was so impressed that it became a reason to visit Glasgow a few years ago (the prime reason being to see Macintosh's Glasgow School of Art building). The artists are George Henry (1858-1943) and E.A. (Edward Atkinson) Hornel (1864-1933). Henry was born in Ayrshire, but said little about his early life. He went on to study for a while at the Glasgow School of Art. He met Hornel in 1885, Hornel convincing him to spend time at Hornel's Kirkcudbright, Galloway haunts. There they did a good deal of work including two paintings that were done jointly. Henry and Hornel visited Japan for a year and a half in 1893-4, subsidized by an art dealer. Unfortunately, most of Henry's oil paintings, not yet dried (the curse of working in the medium), were ruined aboard the ship on their return trip; his watercolors survived, however. After 1900 Henry moved to London and became a portrait painter. Hornel was born in Australia while his parents were briefly living there before returning to Kirkculbright. Not satisfied with his art school training in Glasgow, he went to Antwerp to study under Karl Verlat. Following his association with Henry, noted above, Hornel found prosperity painting increasingly innocuous pictures of young girls in woodland settings. For more details on his career and work, see here. The following observations are by Roger Billcliffe in his book The Glasgow Boys. In reference to a 1887 Hornel painting, Billcliffe states (p. 194): There is a stronger sense of design and pattern in the composition and the beginnings of Hornel's fascination with an enclosed subject. There is no indication of a horizon but a strong feeling of the claustrophobic enclosure of a dense wood. ... It is the beginning of a Glasgow School concern for pattern, colour and design in composition that was dubbed by several London critics in the 1890s 'the Persian carpet school'. On pages 236-37: ...the most common factor in their work of those years [Henry and Hornel, about 1885-86] is the creation of a confined space within which the figures and animals in these paintings exist. Using a woodland setting both artists dispensed... posted by Donald at July 9, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, July 5, 2006


Modern vs. Modernist
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards-- John Massengale shows off a hilarious (and fast) Paris Hilton slideshow -- how much time do you suppose that girl spends rehearsing herself in the mirror? Then he points out that the Institute for Classical Architecture has begun its own blog. Don't miss this gorgeous posting about the fabulous American architect Arthur Brown Jr. A little Michael Blowhard input here: Feast your eyes on Brown's buildings (as well as others by such underknown giants as Paul Cret, Bertram Goodhue, and Bernard Maybeck), then remind yourself that these structures were all built in the 20th century. Where architecture-history is concerned, the establishment wants us to think of the 20th century as the era of glass, steel, concrete, and geometry; as far as they're concerned, anything else simply isn't modern architecture. Yet Brown, Cret, Goodhue, and Maybeck didn't do steel and geometry. Instead of glass boxes, these architects gave us what high-end architects have always given us, at least until the modernists (patooie) came along: pillars, domes, clocktowers, arches and arcades, etc., as well as ornaments galore. That's glorious -- as well as likable, comprehensible, and accessible -- stuff. Takeaway lesson: There's an important difference between "modern" and "modernist." Modern means nothing more than "current or recent." Modernist means "buying into the ideology of modernism." In the foreground, modern architecture (Goodhue's 1919 St. Bartholomew's); to the left, modernist architecture (who cares?) Do you need to know the theory behind it to be wowed and moved by Goodhue's modern church in the pic above? Yet what kind of sense does modernist architecture make -- except as Darth Vader-ugly -- if you aren't familiar with the justifications its apologists and propagandists have dreamed up for it? In any case, say hello to the kind of "modern architecture" that the schools and the critics don't want you to know about. Why? Because if too many of us woke up to the fact that we have the choice -- that we're under no obligation to love cold surfaces and sharp edges -- we wouldn't put up with modernism. Thought for the day: Traditional architecture is like tonal music -- instantly comprehensible and accessible to everyone. (And, yeah, sure, as with tonal music there's a lot of crap traditional architecture around.) Meanwhile modernist (and modernist-derived) architecture is the equivalent of atonal music. Each work is supposedly unique, each one is a closed system, and each one demands to be decoded on its own terms. Because they're all partaking of the same open language, pieces of traditional architecture tend to come together in harmonious, interrelated, and organic wholes -- ie, neighborhoods, blocks, towns. Because they speak only to themselves and/or insiders, when pieces of modernist architecture cluster, they almost always result in spikey chaos. The Classicist also points out a wonderful -- a typically wonderful -- Christopher Gray article about an architect completely new to me: Gaetan (sometimes Gaetano) Ajello, a Sicilian immigrant who designed many New York City apartment buildings. (Christopher Gray's... posted by Michael at July 5, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Monday, June 19, 2006


Popular Artists (2): Mian Situ
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This Popular Artists series deals with painters whose work sells well and who have the potential of being rated as artists of note, if not lasting fame. The first subject was Pino and another is Jack Vettriano, but through oversight, I failed to use "Popular Artists" as part of the title of the Vettriano post. The present subject is Mian Situ. He has been featured on the cover of Art of the West magazine, and the biographical information below was culled from the March/April 2005 issue. Mian Situ. Situ was born in a small town in southern China in 1953 and didn't get involved in art until he was a teenager. The Cultural Revolution made it hard to learn about Western art or to get training. Eventually the Guongzhou Institute of Fine Art reopened and Situ was able to take classes from some instructors who had been trained in Russia. His training was in the classical academic vein, starting with intensive drawing. Following Chairman Mao's death, Situ was able to complete an MA in art. While working on this degree he decided that he was better at realism than abstract art, and dropped the latter. MA in hand, he continued at the school as an instructor. Caught up in the get-outta-China fever of the time, he moved to Los Angeles and, later, Vancouver BC where he worked as a street artist, thence to Toronto and finally back to the LA area. During this period his paintings began to win prizes. Now he is well-established and, from gleanings I find in art magazines, respected by his peers. Here are some examples of his work. Gallery What's Next The Word of God 1865 The Golden Mountain: Arriving in San Francisco John Chinamen in the Sierra Second Helping Evaluation Let me begin with my standard disclaimer that I tend to be a pushover for displays of technical (as well as artistic) skill. Mian Situ displays skill in spades. Besides being an excellent draftsman, his brushwork and use of color are impressive. All things considered, I believe that his color work is his strongest suit. Rather than using mostly pure colors, he often tones down much of a painting's surface by mixing in large proportions of complementary colors, this to help frame the areas of focus. And he maintains good overall color-key discipline. So far I've only been able to examine one of his paintings in person (at a gallery in Santa Fe). What struck me was his skill in defining objects using just the right colors in the right places. Linework is essentially absent in his paintings which are built using color in a kind of Post-Impressionist manner. As for subject matter, the Situ work I'm aware of falls mostly into three categories: (1) landscapes, (2) pictures of Chinese in rural Chinese settings, and (3) historical western American scenes wherein at least one Chinese is in view. The paintings featuring people tend to be "illustrations" in that... posted by Donald at June 19, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Sunday, June 18, 2006


Modernism
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Modernist buffs -- and modernist haters too -- should enjoy this package of stories from The Guardian. It's pegged to a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Robert Hughes is as full of caustic, blunt good sense as always. He visits Le Corbusier's legendary Unite d'Habitation (much doted-on by art-history and architecture profs when FvB and I were in college), and finds it to be anything but a modernist paradise: It was in pitiable condition. Corbu's beton brut couldn't be cleaned, the metal-framed windows were hopelessly corroded, the electricity kept shorting out, the brise-soleils or concrete sunscreens were permanently foul with pigeon shit, the "shopping street" halfway up inside was locked and shuttered because ordinary French people prefer to do their marketing on real streets (an obvious aspect of social behaviour that eluded the intellectual grasp of the formgiver, who believed that folk ought to behave in accordance with the dotty authoritarian notions of idealist philosophes like Saint-Simon and Fourier). Deyan Sudjic sneers at those who aren't enraptured by modernism's purities and austerities but has the grace to run a lengthy statement by the British New Classicist Robert Adam: Modernism was founded on a frighteningly arrogant idea that an elite group of people could remake society into something supposedly better, regardless of what the general public actually wanted. It was labelled 'true architecture' by people who believed they had found the gates to heaven ... Paradoxically, Modernism is still around today and in fact it completely dominates the architectural profession. So much so that if you meet an architect, you expect him to be a Modernist. Modernism ... can be seen as a style but I believe it is more than that: a historical theory, based on the idea that only the things that are different in each period are important. So in the engineering era of the Twenties and Thirties, everything had to conform to what was new in engineering, otherwise you weren't being modern. It's like saying that because we have the ability to produce blobby things with computers today, that's all we can do. In architecture courses now, if you do traditional work they fail you or recommend you go into conservation. It's like a cult and if an architect is to be recommended or chosen through a competition, you will invariably end up with a Modernist building. Simon Jenkins found the V&A's show "the most terrifying exhibition I have seen." The modernists were the neocons of 20th-century art. They took a sound methodology -- the questioning of conventional wisdom -- and made it a dogma that brooked no opposition, even from reality ... Modernists approached the past not as an aesthete does, respectfully building on it, but as an autocrat, destroying it and substituting his own values and rules. And ain't that the truth. All the best, Michael UPDATE: Thanks to Mr. Tall, who points out this hilarious, sensible, and well-illustrated James Lileks visit to Minneapolis' avant-garde, Jean Nouvel-designed,... posted by Michael at June 18, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, June 13, 2006


Aesthetic Ivy
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I am very, very sorry. We Blowhards (Michael, Friedrich and I, at least) are wretched non-egalitarians if for no other reason than several years of our dark pasts were spent in ... in ... Lousy Ivy Universities. One small way for me to atone for this sin is to initiate a Comments Pile-On. Subject for today is Ivy League campuses. For those suffering the damnation of getting an elite education, who is drawing, so to speak, the long and short straws? I'll start things off in a sec -- but first a (not necessarily representative, given what I could find via Google) set of pictures, one per school. Ivy Gallery Brown Columbia Cornell Dartmouth Harvard Penn Princeton Yale As for setting, I'd say Cornell's is most spectacular, being "high above Cayuga's waters" and all. Next would be Dartmouth, nestled next to not-very-large Hanover in the New Hampshire hills. Then comes Princeton, partly in the town, yet facing a greenbelt to the east that gives it some separation from the U.S. 1 commercial/office strip that has been a'building since the 1960s. The other Ivies are in cities, and that limits possibilities. Columbia in New York City fares worst, being crammed into its site with little expansion prospect except upwards. Yale does reasonably well in an urban context because its campus forms a sort of transition zone between downtown New Haven and a residential area. Penn wards off its city surroundings by virtue of having lots and lots of trees; the place strikes me as being lush twixt early April and the end of October. Architecturally I say Yale wins, hands-down. The quadrangles and their (mostly) Collegiate Gothic architecture using similar stone provide both structure and visual unity. Princeton comes close if you consider only its dormitory area and perhaps the Firestone Library, but the rest of the campus is a hodge-podge of shapes and styles. Penn has a variety of architectural styles, but imposes some unity by having many buildings faced with wine-colored brick and grey stone or concrete accents. Dartmouth, like all colleges built over a span of many decades, has more than one style, yet manages the aura of a New England town. Cornell has a number of nice buildings enhanced by a park-like setting. Otherwise, I say Columbia is the least-distinguished Ivy from an architectural standpoint. Harvard, having been through centuries of development, strikes me as non-descript. I'll withhold comment on Brown. I gave it a look-see back in 1965 when I was considering going there, but haven't visited since. Overall I rate Yale, Dartmouth and perhaps Cornell tops for a student seeking an aesthetic Ivy experience. Then come Princeton, Penn and Harvard (in that order) to form the middle range. Columbia rates last on all counts and Brown, as just mentioned, cannot be fairly rated by me. I have spoken. Now Pile On. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at June 13, 2006 | perma-link | (13) comments





Monday, June 12, 2006


Best?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards - Have a look at what the American Institute of Architects deems the top buildings of the year. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 12, 2006 | perma-link | (21) comments





Friday, June 9, 2006


Manny Farber
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- As a big fan of both Manny Farber's paintings and Manny Farber's film criticism, I was thrilled to read that a new show of his visuals was recently on display in La Jolla, and that a new collection of his writing about movies will be coming along soon. (He has often co-written with his wife, the artist Patricia Patterson.) Duncan Shepherd's memoir of being a student and a friend of Farber's is a bit scattershot, but I also found it touching, as well as very good on the kind of boho, freeform lives many filmnerds and artnerds lead. Hard to believe that Manny Farber will soon turn 90 ... Best, Michael UPDATE: I just this minute stumbled across the blog of David Chute, one of the very best of the Boomer film critics. As a reviewer, Chute is supersmart and perceptive about movies; as a blogger, he's all that, plus frank about the pleasures and travails of the critic life. A few good passages: I've found myself wishing many times over the years that there was something else I had learned along the way that people were willing to pay me to do. (Folding socks? Reading detective novels?) ... If the day ever comes when I cobble togethr 40 whole hours of remunerative employment I imagine it will be sweet to pursue writing, if I decide to do so at all, strictly as an amateur activity in the best sense, as a labor of love. When I changed the course of my life in the mid-1980s by leaving a full-time job as a critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner I was moved as much as anything by disgust at the level to which second-string critics have to stoop, writing for weeks on end only about the purest, dullest trash. One's job in a case like this becames a mad tap-dance, trashing the film as entertainingly as possible so that at least the experience of reading about it wouldn't be a total loss ... I think only a bully could sincerely enjoy doing this work week in and week out. And there is likely some connection between the state of mind required to feel self-righteous while humiliating people, and how notoriously thin skinned many critics are when they find themselves on the receiving end.... posted by Michael at June 9, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, June 6, 2006


Fave Fairs
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- What ever happened to world's fairs? Well, they're still happening. I didn't realize that. Once upon a time, I thought world's fairs were a Big Deal. But I haven't paid much attention to them in many years and assumed most other folks didn't either. Nevertheless, enough people care about them that more are in the works: a big one is coming up in Shanghai in 2010, for example. Here is a web site with fair info, including dates and location of fairs going back to the 1851 London fair in Hyde Park that gave the world the Crystal Palace iron-and-glass structure that became a design cliche for several 19th century fairs. Without going into details, there are flavors of world's fairs: big and small basically, the smaller ones often having a regional or thematic focus. The big ones come along every decade or so and are the ones you're likely to hear about in the national news media. Large fairs are sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions (the major exception being the 1964-65 New York World's Fair). If you want more details, click here. I have visited four fairs: Seattle, 1962; New York (in 1965); Spokane, 1974; and Vancouver, 1986. It was the Vancouver fair that finally got me turned off on world's fairs. Plenty of exhibits -- but not all -- were the multi-media kind where viewers became packaged meat on moving walkways. Once en route one is trapped, having to look at whatever the exhibit designer wants one to see in the designated sequence with music and a carefully-scripted voice-over blaring in one's ears. I found I could take one or two of these exhibits, but after that I felt I was being driven crazy. Upon reflection, I think all the fairs I saw lacked the excitement of some previous fairs that I never had the opportunity to see. In my book, the "golden age" of world's fairs ended in 1939. Why haven't post-World War 2 fairs measured up? In part because architectural themes seem to be lacking; the buildings tend to be a hodge-podge of "Look at me!!" structures that cancel each other's impact. Another likely fair-killer is the demolition of distance caused by air travel and satellite-based communications. Much of the stuff displayed in fairs is already known to us via television, the Internet or personal travel, thus reducing its impact. Or so I think. I hope to blog about individual fairs, so for now I'll simply list the ones I wish I could have seen and suggest why. 1893 Chicago, for its architectural impact. I'd love to be able to personally assess the notion that it set back Modernism -- as historians have claimed. 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. This was not a sanctioned world's fair, but I think it was hugely important for the fields of Architecture and Industrial Design. 1933 Chicago. Another design-theme exposition of interest (like the 1893 fair and... posted by Donald at June 6, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Saturday, June 3, 2006


American Cities
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In his interview with Michael Phillips, Bernard Frieden conveys a lot of essential social history in a very short space. Cities, suburbs, "urban renewal," shopping, the interest in history, food ... It's a trustworthy and compact picture of what America has made of its cities since World War II. Key passage: In the course of knocking things down to try to rebuild the cities, the planners and the public officials were also very careless about other people's interests. They tore down a tremendous amount of housing, booted out hundreds of thousands of families around the country, evicted at least tens of thousands of small businesses, many of which never recovered from the move, and, in an effort to cure the city, many of these programs really made cities worse. They kicked out the people who would have stayed longer and the businesses that might have stayed longer, in order to create the makings of that clean slate. That's the way it was in the '50s. Frieden is the author of "Downtown, Inc.," which I've just put on my Amazon Wish List. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 3, 2006 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, June 2, 2006


Provincial Gallery Scene (1): Kal Gajoum
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There are parallel universes in the art market. For example, there is the tourist market. I've seen this along the Seine in Paris, in St. Petersburg in Russia and on Greek islands such as Mykonos. The artist (or someone representing himself as an artist) sells (often unframed) oils, watercolors or engravings directly to passing tourists. Then there are artists who motorhome around the country, flitting from shopping mall to shopping mall where a group of them will clutter the main aisle offering everything from hyper-realistic depictions of waves crashing on a beach to portraits of Elvis on black velvet. At the opposite extreme price-wise, if not necessarily in terms of artistic quality, are the ultra-fashionable galleries in New York and a few other cities where works are sold for prices in the six-and-up-digit dollar range. The "Provincial Gallery Scene" in the title of this post refers to none of what I just mentioned. My "parallel universe" of interest is the gallery that caters to clients willing to drop, let's say, five-digit dollar amounts for a painting. Such clients are probably fairly well-educated, though I'm not sure what proportion buys art based on their personal taste as opposed to relying on consultants, art critics or gallery staff to advise on purchasing. By "provincial" I mean that these galleries tend to be located away from New York. I have seen them in places such as Carmel, California, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Scottsdale, Arizona. My plan is to report from time to time on artists whose work I find in such galleries. This is art flying below the radar of the publicity/investment-driven gallery world noted above. But not far below. I consider this art to be more in tune with the tastes of educated Americans in general. Moreover, some of it might prove to be more enduring than what's currently hot in New York. This series differs slightly from my Popular Artists series in that these artists are less well-known. I need to add that I won't necessarily enthuse over what I'll write about, as you will see below. My self-appointed task is to report art that I find interesting, if not something I would buy. * * * * * Paintings by the subject of the present post were seen at a gallery in Whistler -- British Columbia's posh ski resort area that will be the site of outdoor events in the 2010 Winter Olympics. The blurb on a handout I grabbed at the gallery states: Born in Tripoli, Kal Gajoum lived for extended periods of time in Malta, England and Paris, France before moving to Vancouver, British Columbia. During these periods Kal earnestly studied fine art at the knee of some of the greatest teachers in Europe where he fell in love with the postimpressionist style. Painting in a style reminiscent of the postimpressionists, the master, Kal Gajoum paints with a passion. His unique and graceful style is refreshing. It embraces a warmth and... posted by Donald at June 2, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Thursday, June 1, 2006


Visual Delights
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Edmund Leveckis' near-monochrome photographs are moody, evocative wonders, with a kind of dense, slow-you-down presence that's rare in photography. In any visual art, come to think of it ... (Thanks to Howard Linton for the link.) * I linked before to Hugh Symonds' remarkably rich cellphone photographs. Who'd have thought that cellphone lenses could generate such a lot of otherwordly beauty? I was happy to notice that Hugh recently put up some new photographs. Check out this gorgeous micro-triptych for a quick example. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 1, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments





Sunday, May 28, 2006


What Are You On, Anyway?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- This endless photograph reminds me of bleary, long-ago hours with foreign chemicals goosing my brain. Is there any way the traditional arts can compete with this spacey cyberenvironment, at least on its own druggy terms? Did you know that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both took LSD trips>? And doesn't this just blow your mind? Conlon Nancarrow, look out. (Sample some of Nancarrow's music here.) Long ago, I ventured the thought that a good way to think of the contrast between post-'60s American art and earlier American art is in terms of the intoxicant that was currently in vogue. Much post-'60s American art -- with its emphasis on conceptual hijinks and wipe-me-out sensory overload -- is basically trying to recreate a drug experience, while a lot of earlier American art (cocky/depressive, fizzy/grandiose, gallant/pugnacious) reflects the influence of booze. John Markoff's book about how the counterculture influenced and shaped the computer revolution can be bought here. Here's a list of well-known people who have spoken publically about taking LSD. Here's an interview in which Gates pointedly doesn't deny taking LSD. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 28, 2006 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, May 25, 2006


Performance and Art
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I always enjoy comparing notes with the brash evo-bio brainiacs at GNXP. Agnostic especially is drawn to mulling over culture-and-art matters, and he unfailingly comes up with interesting thoughts and provocative research. Recently he has been thinking about G and creativity. With no research to back me up (but with several decades in the arts and the media), I love following his arguments and then throwing pebbles in his path. I was pretty pleased with my latest comment on his latest posting, so I'm treating myself to re-running it here: Let me give you a few more things to chew on. The main flaw with your theory, it seems to me, is that it obliges you to exclude tribal, folk, popular, and commercial art. Yet almost certainly 80% of the art that has ever been made has been tribal, folk, popular, or commercial. There are entire cultures that have no "high" culture whatsoever, and there are immense cultures (the US for instance) where high culture is a spotty thing, but where commercial and folk culture are hyper-dynamic. Subtract rock, blues, c&w, automobile design, fashion, movies, sci-fi, magazines, TV, pulp fiction, etc from "American culture" and you don't have a lot left. Something, but not much. Your notion that most performers don't qualify as artists strikes me as an almost-equally major flaw. For one thing, there's a "performance" aspect to all the arts -- a novel is a kind of performance, after all, and so is a painting. There's the blurriness of categories of performance, for another. Standup comedians often come up with their own material, improv actors and clowns do too, and how about singer-songwriters who perform their own stuff? There's a practical, on-the-ground matter: many composers will tell you that such-and-such a performer of his/her stuff is a "great artist." During her great years, the ballerina Suzanne Farrell never did anything but execute Balanchine's steps -- yet if you were to go to Lincoln Center and say "For the sake of my theory, I have decided that Suzanne Farrell wasn't an artist," you'd be hectored out of town. She was a great star. There's the cultural problem: the division between "composer" and "performer" is clear-cut only in a limited number of art forms, and in a limited number of cultures, and even then you have to take it case by case. And then there's the historical problem, which is that art probably originated in pre-history as performance: storytelling, dancing, drumming, singing, etc. All that preceded "composition." In other words, performance isn't tangential to creativity. It's central, essential. "Composition" came along later. Happy to agree that there are degrees of creativity, but I really think it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. A song might be a stinker (ie., non-creative), yet a performer might make something memorable out of it (ie., execute a real act of creativity in performance). This is a common occurrence, btw. If you're a theater-goer, for instance, one... posted by Michael at May 25, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Wednesday, May 24, 2006


Don Bachardy
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of my favorite contemporary figurative artists is the Californian Don Bachardy, most of whose career has been spent making pencil drawings of friends and visitors. Bachardy, who is also known as the younger partner of the writer Christopher Isherwood, has style and elegance to burn, as well as an eerie ability to capture a likeness -- and then something more. His work is (to my mind) an entrancing combo of the exacting and the informal. There's a little bit of the classicist in him, a little bit of the celebrity portraitest, a little bit of the California party host, and a whole lot of insight. Christopher Isherwood by Don Bachardy Pencil drawings, alas, don't reproduce on computer screens as well as many of the more colorful and harder-edged media do. But there's still some Bachardy on the web that is well worth searching out. Here are some links: link, link, link, link, link, link, link. Armistead Maupin visits with Isherwood and Bachardy; Carolyn See does too. Here's a David Hockney portrait of the couple. I wrote about Christopher Isherwood, one of my favorite writers, here. Eager to hear how the figurative-art fans respond to Bachardy. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 24, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments




More G and the Arts
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Agnostic thinks that G (or at least a subset of G) can function as a measure of creativity. I disagree, but I sure found his case a fun one to wrestle with. I wrote about G and the arts back here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 24, 2006 | perma-link | (6) comments





Friday, May 12, 2006


Margi Young 4
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few days ago I introduced Margi Young, a wonderful yoga teacher who, before turning to yoga, was a dancer and a choreographer. In Part One of my interview with Margi, we talked about how Margi found her way from dance to choreography to yoga. In Part Two, we discussed yoga and exercise. In Part Three, we chatted about living the yoga life. Today, we talk about yoga and the arts. *** AN INTERVIEW WITH MARGI YOUNG Part Four 2B: I'd like to ask you to compare the various roles you've played. What was dancing for you? Physical bliss? Fun-fun-fun? MY: I think it was fulfilling a dream. 2B: You had ballerina dreams? MY: A lot of little girls do. Something about the physicality and the openness of their bodies and being able to be on tippy-toes ... And I loved the music. I always liked people who were interested in dance, so I loved my dance friends. The people for the most part are good. You spend a lot of time kvetching about the choreographer, and how rough your life is. (laughs) So you bond over that. 2B: How about the artistic and expressive things? MY: I just always thought it was really superduper fun. 2B: What's it like being a dancer by comparison to being a choreographer? MY: When you're a dancer -- well, dancers are like the paints. And the choreographer is like the painter. 2B: What's the experience like of being the paint? MY: In the beginning, for many years it was just great to be told what to do. I had so much respect for the people I worked for. And the more physical the dance is the more exciting the experience is. But I got to the point where I didn't want anybody to tell me what to do anymore. I felt my ideas were far better than anyone else's ideas. 2B: "I want to be in charge!" MY: Exactly. That's when I decided I wanted to be a choreographer, because I wanted to put out my own ideas. It's a really different ballgame. 2B: A lot of actors like lending themselves to a project, and almost blinding themselves to everything else happening around them. Was that part of your enjoyment? MY: I did enjoy it. It's almost the same thing as when I go to a yoga class. When the teacher says, "Do you have any requests?", I never have any requests. I'm more like, "Tell me what to do." There's something so relaxing about that. As far as being a dancer, you're told when to be where. It's relaxing, it's easy. 2B: Someone else is taking care of all the grownup stuff. MY: Yeah. It was fun until it wasn't fun. 2B: When you started making dances did you miss the dancing? MY: No, I sort of lost my desire to dance. Though not to perform! There was so much satisfaction watching your work onstage --... posted by Michael at May 12, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments




Margi Young 3
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A few days ago I introduced Margi Young, a wonderful yoga teacher who, before turning to yoga, was a dancer and a choreographer. In Part One of my interview with Margi, we talked about how Margi found her way from dance to choreography to yoga. In Part Two, we talked about yoga and exercise. Today, we talk about living the yoga life. *** AN INTERVIEW WITH MARGI YOUNG Part Three 2B: You're flexible, you're in touch with your body, and you're strong. Most of us aren't in that kind of state when we come to yoga. Yet you seem to know exactly what's going on inside another person's body, even one that isn't remotely like your own. How do you do that? MY: Past lives? I don't know. 2B: Do you recognize it as a strength? MY: I do recognize it's a strength, and I can sense that I'm intuitive like that. But I don't know how I do it. I just feel like ... I don't know. I see it. I see people. I understand that they're trying, and that there's a limitation there. And I have a tool bag of ideas to help people. 2B: Were you super-empathetic as a dancer and choreographer too? MY: It's a different mind-frame. If you aren't good at dance class, then you really are a loser. But I do feel good at knowing what yoga students are experiencing. My boyfriend, for example, is very physical and very good in his body. But he can't imagine that someone else wouldn't be. He can't imagine that you couldn't fold forward and touch the ground like he can. 2B: I'm struck by the way your classes have a theme and they take on a shape. But it doesn't feel like you come into it with a script. MY: I think it may come from my dance training. I can very easily put together a basic yoga-class sequence. Once in a while I might plan something. But mostly I see who's there, and I take in the vibe of the room, and stuff comes out of my mouth when I open it. 2B: You're very verbal, and many dancers aren't. MY: To be a good yoga teacher you have to be verbal. It's not about showing, it's about guiding. It's about language. 2B: There's a lot of cuing. MY: A lot. One of the exercises you do in teacher training is write down the alphabet and write down verbs. A, ascend. B, blossom. And then use those words in teaching a Sun Salutation. It's very much about developing language. We would bore ourselves to tears if we didn't come up with fresh language to describe things. A teacher trainee watching my class asked me, "Do you get sick of saying, 'Deepen your breath, roll to your right side'..."But there are different ways to express it. 2B: Yoga language is a hoot too. "Invite yourself to..." It's kind of corny, but... posted by Michael at May 12, 2006 | perma-link | (5) comments





Wednesday, May 10, 2006


Margi Young 2
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yesterday I introduced Margi Young, a wonderful yoga teacher who, before turning to yoga, was a dancer and a choreographer. In Part One of my interview with Margi, we talked about how Margi found her way from dance to choreography to yoga. Today, we talk about yoga and exercise. *** AN INTERVIEW WITH MARGI YOUNG Part Two 2B: What would you say your own greatest physical challenges are? MY: Every day is different. Naturally I'm weak and a little tight, but I've been working on it for so long. 2B: Are you naturally slim too? MY: Yes. 2B: Do you have to work at being slim? MY: I have a slim mother. People ask me if I'm so slim because I do yoga, and I have to answer, "No, it's because of my genes." 2B: Any special diet? MY: Just born this way. I got heavy as a freshman in college from pizza and beer. 2B: You developed the freshman-girl waddle! MY: I was shocked when I was dating this guy and he said, "I think you could lose five pounds." (gasps) I always thought I was thin! 2B: When you do athletics, how does the feeling compare to when you do yoga? MY: It's miserable. (laughs) Really, I have a fight to do any exercise if it's not yoga. And yoga isn't exactly exercise. Yoga and exercise do not go hand in hand for me. The more yoga you do, the easier it gets. I'm good at relaxing in stressful times. I'm good at doing challenging yoga poses and staying relaxed. But I feel like I should do something more. 2B: Being in superb yoga shape isn't good enough for you? MY: I feel like I should do something to get my heart rate up. 2B: I've lost interest in gym exercise since I started yoga. MY: When I do yoga, my heart rate lowers. For me, yoga is the opposite of cardiovascular. When I practice yoga these days I'm really quite relaxed. I don't even get near sweating unless the weather is really hot. So I feel like it's necessary for me to do cardiovascular exercise. I just should. It keeps you healthy and helps you live longer. 2B: Yet a lot of yoga people seem to live forever. MY: That's true. Maybe yoga's enough. 2B: Were you ever a gym-goer? MY: No. I'm trying to be more of one. 2B: What are you doing these days? MY: I go swimming. I swam for about ten minutes today. But I get tired and bored. I'm not inclined to do very repetitive action. 2B: Do you ever consider using weights and treadmills? MY: I consider it almost daily. 2B: What's it like for you when you do manage to do some gym work? MY: I try to get into a meditative state. But I'm just not very oriented that way. 2B: What does gym-going look like when you're a dancer? MY: I was... posted by Michael at May 10, 2006 | perma-link | (20) comments




Margi Young 1
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's been three years now that I've been attending yoga classes regularly. Although I'm still an achey 50-something, I'm a considerably happier, more easy-going, and less-achey 50-something than I was before taking up yoga. FWIW, I'd say that studying yoga has been one of the half-dozen most valuable things I've ever done for myself -- a lot less valuable than lassooing and marrying The Wife for sure, but far more worthwhile and rewarding than, say, going to college, let alone talking to a shrink. One of the biggest yoga-related surprises I've had is the way that yoga has affected my experience of the arts. I look to them for less than I once did; I seem to feel that they're under no obligation to deliver anything in particular. (How odd: I guess I once did think of them as owing me something ...) Why should it be that I'm easier on the arts than I once was? As far as I can tell, the answer is simple: I get something very directly from doing yoga that I once looked to the arts for. I'm not entirely sure what that is, though. Physical pleasure? Sensual ravishment? Aesthetic bliss? Spiritual refreshment? All the above and more? Of the many good and inspiring yoga teachers I've studied with, my favorite has been Margi Young, who teaches at Om Yoga in Manhattan. (Margi's name is pronounced with a hard "g", as in "margarita.") Margi is an elegant, creative, and generous teacher, full of spirit and appreciation. She's amazingly "present," in the sense not just of never-tuning-out but also of always-being-kind-and-alert-and-reponsive. She has a deep knowledge not just of how bodies work but of how they interact with emotional systems. Luckily for the likes of me, she seems to get a genuine kick out of teaching beginners. I'm a fan as well of Margi's impish and mischievous streak. But perhaps her most remarkable gift as a teacher is a "Sixth Sense"-like intuitive feeling for what people in the class are struggling with and experiencing. I once took a friend to a Margi class. Afterwards, he shook his head in amazement. "It was like she was inside my body and my head, knowing exactly what I was feeling and thinking! It was weird! It was great!", he marveled. Over the years of attending her classes, I learned that, before she became a yoga teacher, Margi was a dancer and a choreographer who worked on both the East and the West coasts. It occurred to me one day ... Since I'm interested in both yoga and art ... Since Margi has extensive experience with both ... Since she's verbally-gifted too ... Well, suffice it to say that my blogger's resourcefulness kicked in. So I asked Margi to sit down for a 2Blowhards interview. To my delight she agreed. Over the course of a few meals, I asked Margi about her experiences as a dancer, as a choreographer, as a yoga student,... posted by Michael at May 10, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Monday, May 8, 2006


Art Innovation Bleg
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A "bleg" is a case of begging for something via a blog post. Well, I've come a'blegging. One major source of the blogosphere's power is its ability to quickly marshal information from knowledgeable sources. So here I am, tin cup in hand, to ask about artists who are considered to have made innovations in painting. I took a year of art history classes back in the days when cars had tail fins. One of my main memories of those classes was that the instructor cast art history in terms who who innovated what. Alas, my memory is now hazy regarding just who all those who's were, as well as which what's were whose. For the last year or so I've been focusing my reading on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the period when art began its transformation to what we have now. My knowledge of art history before that period, while okay, is less solid than I'd like. But I have a full-time job plus a wedding coming up soon, and don't have the free time to read half a dozen books on art history to dredge up the needed details. I won't tip my hand as to where this will lead (though some of you will guess correctly), but I assure you the information I need is important to me. Okay. The scene is set. Now to refine my request. I am not interested in painting innovations since the time the Impressionists got going -- call it 1870, in round numbers. Nor am I interested in art created before, say, 1370 or thereabouts because documentation tends to be too sketchy. Call it the 500 years 1370-1870, though you have my permission to fudge on either end if you have something really important to mention. Rediscoveries of Greek/Roman innovations are okay to include. Another thing I'm not really interested in is technological innovations such as the introduction of oil paints. Innovations in subject matter are of interest, provided such can be strongly linked to one or a few artists. To get the ball rolling, here are some innovations I'm interested in. Others are welcome. One-point perspective. Two-point perspective. Three-point perspective. Atmospheric perspective. Chiaroscuro. Conscious use of scientific color theory. Also welcome are citations of books or articles. Bookwise, I'd probably be most interested in one whose focus was similar to that of my art history classes -- who did what first. All contributions will be studied, though I can't promise that all will be used when I get around to writing the post(s) based on the information gathered. Thank you for your interest in this matter. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 8, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, May 4, 2006


How Much Would You Pay for a Picasso?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards: Today's hottest art news is that Picasso's 1941 portrait of Dora Maar was auctioned at $95 million. Here's what this masterpiece looks like: "Dora Maar with cat" Maar was his mistress when Picasso made the painting. According to a Reuters report, Sotheby's expected it to go for around $40 million. The report does not mention who bought the painting, but notes that another Picasso, "Boy with a pipe" holds the auction record at $104 million. Now for the fun part, art fans. Pretend that the artist wasn't Picasso -- actually, an unknown. Assuming you were rich enough that buying any painting involved pocket change, just how much would you pay to have it hanging on your living room wall? Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 4, 2006 | perma-link | (21) comments





Tuesday, May 2, 2006


More Art Metrics
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Yes, yes, I know they don't tell you everything. And they can mislead you. Still, if it's possible, I like to see things reduced to numbers: even arty stuff. Not long ago I wrote a post based on data collected by Charles Murray in which I hypothesized that Murray's citation-ranking of Western artists was a proxy for the views of the Art History Establishment. While I was working up that post I was reading a recent book by University of Chicago economist David W. Galenson that also attempts to quantify art. In Galenson's case, it's the age at which an artist attained peak excellence (he used the word "creativity") along with the related matter of the lifetime quality profile of the artist. The book in question is "Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity" (Amazon listing here). A review by Kyle Gann, which gives you the flavor of Galenson's research is here. Galenson has written extensively on his topic; two related books are "Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art" (see here) and "Artistic Capital" (see here). Galenson measures "creativity" by looking auction prices of art, art included in retrospective exhibitions, and art otherwise exhibited by museums. Galenson finds that these alternative measures tend to agree in terms of the age of the artist at the time the highest priced, most frequently displayed works were created. From his data Galenson denotes two types of artists, those who innovate at a comparatively young age and those who slowly improve their skills over their careers. (He used Picasso and Cézanne as prime examples. For instance, paintings Picasso did in his twenties are worth more than those done thereafter, and the price curve falls off steadily with age.) Having set up his classification, Galenson then goes on to enumerate working practices and other characteristics of the artists (some of this analysis is based on the work of art historian Robert Jensen). See Gann's review for more details. The use of exhibited paintings as data is akin to what Murray did. But expressing art in terms of auction prices was something that I though was nifty. Well, Galenson's an economist, for heaven's sake, and reducing things to dollars is what they do. This interests me because, for some time, I've been mulling over the idea of using prices to measure how currently-active artists taking the representational, abstract, and PoMo routes are faring -- espcially when location of the gallery or buyer is taken into account. For instance Carmel, California is loaded with galleries and representational art seems to predominate there. But I see proportionally more PoMo up in San Francisco. It would be nice to quantify this, though I haven't yet looked into just how I might do that. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at May 2, 2006 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, May 1, 2006


CDG Terminal 1: Futuristic Gone Sour
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- March, 1974. It was the airport of the future ... today!! Passengers whisked from level to level on moving walkways enclosed within plastic tubes. Underground moving walkways from the central terminal building to seven satellites. The multi-purpose central building with shops, parking, rental cars, check-in counters, luggage pick-up -- everything under one roof save the gates in the satellites. Pride of the nation: its gateway. Symbol of its technical prowess. Its design embodying la logique and l'égalité. I'm talking about the original terminal (Terminal 1) at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG). I hate it. Background First, some links. The Wikipedia entry on the airport is here and its entry on its architect, Paul Andreu, is here. A PDF link with diagrams of what's on various floors of the terminal is here. Another PDF link, here, contains background information written by a Frenchman (Jean-François Onnée) in a term paper for an MIT class; I used it as the source for information on the intent of the airport planners. Paris' first airport was Le Bourget, northeast of the city not far beyond the Périphérique (beltway). It's best known to Americans as the place Lindbergh landed at the end of his famous 1927 New York-to-Paris flight. It still handles traffic including business jets and is where the national air/space museum is located. After the Second World War, the airfield at Orly, south of the city, became the main airport for Paris. But the advent of jet travel and rapidly-increasing numbers of passengers produced trends indicating that yet another airport was needed. The planning requirements of limited distance from central Paris, sparse population and the availability of, or potential for, ground transportation links to the city pretty much determined that the new airport would be located at Roissy. Roissy is roughly on the same axis from central Paris as Le Bourget. Planning for the new airport and design of the terminal were carried out in the early 60s. Construction began in 1966 and the airport opened 8 March 1974. (Air traffic continued to expand to the point where yet another airport was considered. The proposed site was near Amiens, north-northwest of Paris. The most obvious disadvantage of this site is its distance from Paris, a seriously long commute unless a special TGV high-speed train line were built. In any event, a change in the French presidency brought a halt to the scheme.) The MIT article goes into details of the planning of the initial terminal. Alternative schemes were evaluated, and the one chosen (1) concentrated support facilities and (2) "equalized" walking distances for passengers, especially those making flight connections. As can be seen in the linked diagram, the centralization concept forced the terminal to be tall -- the functional areas being stacked rather than spread out as in most air terminals. The main public areas are in the form of stacked rings resulting in a doughnut-shaped structure. The tube-enclosed moving walkways within the structure send passengers between... posted by Donald at May 1, 2006 | perma-link | (21) comments





Thursday, April 27, 2006


Letter to Nikos
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The other day I had the chance to catch up with a 2Blowhards favorite, the mathematician and architectural/urbanism theorist Nikos Salingaros. I was thrilled to learn that "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction," his dazzling expose of chic French philosophy and its tragic impact on the built environment, has recently been published in French. When I asked Nikos how responses to his work have been going recently, he talked enthusiastically about a fascinating letter he'd received from Paul Grenier, director of The Common Task. A little nudging ... A few requests for permission ... And, voila, I'm able to reprint Paul Grenier's letter. Here it is. *** Thursday, 20 April 2006. Dear Nikos, I finished reading your book "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction" some time ago, and have been meditating on it ever since. It was quite fascinating! At times heartwarming, at other times frightening. I hadn't ever read this kind of stuff that you found in Tschumi (and others of his ilk). It reads like something from a fictional anti-utopia; say, George Orwell's "1984", or C. S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength". The anti-heroes of C. S. Lewis's brilliant novel were also opposed to organic life. I can't help wondering now whether Lewis hadn't already read (in 1947) the works of men like Le Corbusier. *Quelle horreur*! It was also a relief to read your critique of the way such architectural writers as Charles Jencks use words like 'fractal' and 'chaos theory' and so forth. Jencks seems a nice enough guy, well-meaning, etc. But when I skimmed a few of his essays not long ago, I found myself wondering why his use of these words seemed so odd, so ... incomprehensible. He's supposedly an authority ... was I missing something? Well, it turns out I wasn't. He just wasn't making any sense! Sad. Regarding post-modernism. I have long known of course that, as a stick-in-the-mud traditional Christian, I was guilty of the sin of logo-centrism; but, because my friends and I usually discuss post-modernist-related theory in the context of theology or literature or philosophy of language, I hadn't focused so much on the implications of deconstructive thought for the exact sciences. They are very liberated persons, these ultra-moderns -- liberated from logic, reason, nature. I think you are exactly right that this is all ideology, but I also think that underlying this ideology are two hidden ruling ideas: absolute freedom as the only value; and absolute despair. In other words, a spiritual crisis, even spiritual death. To understand where post-modernist ideology got its start, and from where it derives its power, one can do far worse than to read the great philosopher-theologian-chemist Pavel Florensky (especially the first few chapters of his masterpiece "The Pillar and Ground of Truth", written circa 1920, long before these young whippersnappers started spouting). If I were to interpret post-modernism in the light of Florensky's understanding of truth, I would say that its proponents see in language either *only* a rigid *order* (a self-enclosed definition... posted by Michael at April 27, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, April 26, 2006


Jane Jacobs R.I.P.
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- You've probably noticed that the great Jane Jacobs has died at the age of 89. The web is full of intelligent and appreciative tributes: A Google News search on her name will turn up a lot of them. An obit by the LA Times' Mary Rourke is a good starting point. Martin Knelman writes a touching character sketch. Interesting to learn in Counterpunch that Jacobs, a Canadian resident since the 1970s, favored the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada, and thought that the Euro was a dumb idea. Curbed is sweetly running a "the most Jane Jacobs block in New York City" contest. Gothamist supplies many links. I recently wrote a long intro to Jacobs and her work. Don't miss a couple of wonderful interviews: one from 2000 conducted by James Kunstler; and one from 2002, done by Blake Harris. A final question: Why on earth was she never awarded the Nobel Prize? Best, Michael UPDATE: David Sucher has been blogging up a storm about Jane Jacobs. Mr. Tall brings Jane Jacobs-style thinking to bear on Hong Kong.... posted by Michael at April 26, 2006 | perma-link | (12) comments





Sunday, April 23, 2006


Standard Art History Narrative ... As Statistics
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Once every two or three blue moons or so, we Blowhards might grumble about something or other. One of the things we grumble about is Art History as Revealed by the Art Establishment. And when we do so we're sometimes inclined to shout and wave our arms and assume that you readers know why we're ranting. As someone with "social science" training, I sometimes think it would be nice to quantify what we're talking about. Now it can be done. Maybe. A few days ago I stumbled across of copy of Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment on a bookstore's remaindered table and scooped it up for $6.98, hardcopy. Murray selected several fields of endeavor including Astronomy, Chemistry, Mathematics, Western Literature and Western Art and sought what were thought to be authoritative books on the subjects that contained plenty of names of people prominent in the fields. He limited his coverage to people whose productive peak was before the year 1950. Combining citations from these sources and performing some other manipulations, Murray came up with indexes of prominance where the top-ranked person was given a score of 100 and others were assigned ratios to that 100 (i.e., 78, 41, 12) based on their number of citations. Then he went on to ask some questions about the settings in which accomplishment might be found. But that doesn't concern us here. (2Blowhards' friend Steve Sailer has a review of the book here and an interview with Murray here.) What interests me is that the scores for his Western Art category are based on authoritative accounts which, because they are considered "authoritative," in theory reflect the Art Establishment version of history. This notion can be tested by examining the scores for artists active during the final decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. (Most sources were 1990s editions and can be presumed to reflect late-20th century views.) Here are the top five artists regardless of era. Index Artist 100 Michelangelo 67 Picasso 63 Raphael 51 Leonardo 51 Titian We see that Michelangelo is top dog, so his index score is 100. Picasso is No. 2 with a score of 67, indicating that, after Murray's data manipulations, Picasso got just two-thirds as many citations as did Michelangelo. Now let's look at the top-ranked artists from the time of Impressionism to 1950. Thirty artists in that era had scores of 10 or greater. Index Artist Index Artist 67 Picasso 19 Seurat 44 Cezanne 17 Munch 35 Monet 16 Pissarro 34 Van Gogh 16 Toulouse-Lautrec 33 Gauguin 16 Whistler 33 Matisse 14 Ernst 29 Manet 13 Brancusi 27 Kandinsky 13 Leger 26 Degas 13 Malevich, Kasimir 25 Renoir 12 Dali 24 Braque 11 de Chirico 24 Duchamp 10 Chagall 23 Rodin 10 Kirchner, Ernst 20 Mondrian 10 Rousseau, Henri 19 Klee 10 Tatlin, Vladimir And here are scores for some other artists of the same period. Index Artist Index Artist 8 Klimt 3 Cassatt 7 Rossetti... posted by Donald at April 23, 2006 | perma-link | (27) comments





Wednesday, April 19, 2006


"Fast Food Nation," Part 1
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was staring at a posting I'd been laboring over ... I'd read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation." While I have many reservations about the book, it had sure got me remembering, musing, and thinking -- to the point where the resulting blog-posting had grown much too long. Then it occurred to me: Why not break the posting into parts and run it as a series? So here it is: Part one of a series of postings prompted by "Fast Food Nation" -- the (whee!) thinking-about-myself part. I divide the story of my relationship to food and eating into three chapters. Chapter One: The Unconscious Years. The world of food-and-eating that I was born into was mid-America in the '50s-and-'60s -- a world of breakfast cereals, Cool Whip, packaged pancake mixes, Pop Tarts, Baco Bits, new supermarkets in new shopping malls, canned cake icing, Jello, Tang ... Funny how some of these tastes stay with you, isn't it? A for-instance: "Soft ice cream," no matter how suspicious I am of it these days, still makes me feel as happy to eat as it did when I was a kid. Despite the era, Western New York State offered some heavenly fresh bounty too, at least as far as produce went, and at least for some months of the year. Apples, corn, strawberries, lettuce, watermelons, and tomatoes were all plentiful and tasty. Farm stands were numerous, fun to visit, and a pleasure to patronize. The food-and-eating habits of my family had their own quirks. My dad was a congenial charmer, a salesman who enjoyed company, food, alcohol, and a modest expense account. His idea of the good life included plenty of beer, a big wooden bowl full of salad, steak with A-1 Sauce, and potatoes. He cared not a whit for sweets until he developed diabetes and was forbidden them. In his declining years, food-pleasure became even more important to him. Food and eating seemed to be -- by far -- his biggest remaining pleasure. During his retirement, it wasn't uncommon for my dad to spend a meal's conversation-time discussing past meals and speculating about future ones. My Mom was a different kind of creature. A loving person but also something of a robot, she was no fan of organic nature. If food needed to be consumed, then let it be as little trouble as possible. My mother dreamed of a day when people would subsist on astronaut food (pills, and paste in tubes, basically). She really did. Until then, as far as she was concerned, canned and frozen nourishment would have to do. Was it tasteless? Mushy? Oversalted? A small price to pay. Remember the restaurant dramedy "Big Night"? After the showpiece dinner, the camera tracks over blissed-out guests, groggy from rich food. One girl is whimpering and sobbing. She finally blurts out, "My mother was such a bad cook!" I can relate. Chapter Two: The Awakening. Well, actually two awakenings. One was triggered off... posted by Michael at April 19, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments





Sunday, April 16, 2006


Overrated Paintings (1): Picasso's "Guernica"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- There are paintings you are expected to like. No, you won't "get disappeared" or be sent to a "reprogramming" camp if you don't toe the line. Though there seem to be some colleges and universities that place a high premium on Groupthink and things might get a tad dicey there if you express some of the views that I'm about to present. For as long as I can remember, Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" has been described as "a masterpiece" that is an indictment of war and its horrors as exemplified by the evil Nazis, Fascists and Falangists of Nationalist Spain in the 1936-39 civil war against innocent, peace-loving, democratic, progressive Republican Spain. (For a personal report by someone who fought on the Republican side and barely escaped the Reds with his life, read George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia." Both sides were pretty bloodthirsty during the war and the Falangists carried this forward into the aftermath, for which they have been properly criticized. What's unknowable is the size of the post-war bloodbath the Communists would have inflicted had they won, for there surely would have been one. To Franco's credit, for whatever his motives, he kept Spain out of World War 2 and established the conditions that led to Spain becoming a democracy following his death. I'm pointing these things out because most reporting, commentary and even literary accounts of the Spanish Civil War were heavily slanted toward the Republican side at the time and since. The Republic wasn't as wonderful as has been depicted. And Franco, dictator that he was, paled in comparison to the evil of Hitler and Stalin -- whose minions had effectively highjacked the Republic before the war ended. A story: At a cocktail party in Spain back in the 60s an American asks a Spaniard what he thinks of Franco. The Spaniard places a finger to his lips and with his other hand beckons the American to follow him. They silently cross the lawn and climb into a rowboat. The Spaniard rows the boat to the middle of the lake and stops. He carefully scans the horizon, then leans close to the American and whispers, "I rather like him.") It's often stated that we art consumers should ignore the politics of the artist and focus on the work of art. Well, I'll do my very best to do just that in the rest of this post. But it might be hard, since "Guernica" is a political painting given the context of its creation. (Though not as political in its content as was the case of Diego Rivera's inclusion of an image of Lenin in a Radio City mural. The Rockefellers paid Rivera off and had the mural destroyed.) For some sympathetic background, here is an article on "Guernica" on the PBS web site and here is the Wikipedia entry about the painting. Let me add that I've seen "Guernica" several times. I saw it when I visited the Museum of Modern... posted by Donald at April 16, 2006 | perma-link | (45) comments





Wednesday, April 12, 2006


Mike Slack's Polaroids
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The web continues to divulge terrific visual talents. I recently loved spending time with the Polaroid photographs of a young, L.A.-based photographer, Mike Slack. Mike is a fan of Tarkovsky, Lynch, and Herzog, and it shows. But his work has its own distinctive qualities too. His shots are weird and disconcerting, but they're also approachable and open. And what a fab eye for color he has. (I also like the title of a book he made of the photographs: "OK OK OK.") Mike presents his photographs very cleverly here. Here's an interview with him, along with another large selection of his Polaroids. Nice passage: Limitations are good. The 680 [Polaroid] camera, for example, forces me to pay closer attention to what immediately surrounds me, even if it's totally nondescript. I get into this headspace sometimes when even the most familiar, mundane objects seem utterly profound, and I think my best pictures capture that weird profoundness. It's almost like the camera has taught me how to look at things in this way... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 12, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments




Bracket-Mania [Update]
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Nonsense-brackets continue to captivate graphic designers. Texas Monthly sees fit to use brackets on its cover, putting the title of one the articles it's featuring between gray parenthesis marks. Cute, the way the designer has made the gray of the parentheses match the gray type used in the word "at"! Meanwhile, book titles are beginning to appear framed by brackets. The title seems muffled, like the two characters in the cover image. Cute! To the 20th century, logocentric guy that I usually am, a gesture like this one raises a question: Do brackets used this way become part of the book's title? After all, brackets are generally taken to be typographic symbols. (The period at the end of this sentence is understood to be part of the sentence. And the parentheses around these two sentences are understood to contribute to their meaning.) Do we take the title of the book above to be "The Way We Are," or "{The Way We Are}"? (I wonder how the author would answer this question.) Or do we understand brackets flanking a book title as "groovy decorative visuals" and nothing but? What the two examples above suggest to me is that the brackets-thang has become such a standard move that it's threatening to transcend its original coolness and attain complete and utter squaresvillehood. As far as I can tell, brackets could attain squareness any day now. Initially, brackets-as-visuals were used to give a layout an off-center, deadpan/ironic quality. We were being signaled: "This isn't some flat-out, dumb statement. No, it's indirect -- an offhand, muttered aside. It's a comment on something, and not the statement itself." It also evoked chic post-modern philosophizing. Remember when wannabe-swinging academics were giving their indecipherable papers titles like "Coming of Age: [Mis]Representing Womyn's Writing"? Brackets used as visuals meant: deconstructed, unstable, zigzaggy, subversive. These days, the brackets-move has become almost as much of a staple instrument in the graphics toolkit as the basic headline-subhead-text hierarchy. And now it has begun to lose its progressive flavor. It has begun to look as square as what it replaced (boxes, mainly). Looking at the images above, for example: I take the book jacket to be aiming for a modern, distanced, hip/sad note. (Doug Sundseth will no doubt come up with a more evocative and precise way of describing the tone.) But I take the Texas Monthly brackets to be mere highlighting -- to be new-style dumbass neon. Your own impression may vary, of course. Small question for the day: How long will it take brackets to evolve one more step in this direction, and to take on overtones of "giving dignity to the content they enclose" -- creating a set-in-marble feeling, the exact opposite of what the move initially conveyed? It seems to me that, as they're being used now, brackets are starting to suggest this kind of squarest-of-the-square gestalt: Things move fast these days, don't they? What graphics-gesture is likely to replace the brackets-thang as... posted by Michael at April 12, 2006 | perma-link | (14) comments





Saturday, April 8, 2006


Upscale Book Jackets
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back when upscale fiction took the form of minimalist stories and novellas, the factor about a fiction-book that signaled "literary" most unmistakably was usually the title. It sometimes seemed as though the titles of all these books featured pleading variations on the word "I": "Why Do I Ever." "What Was Mine." "Where I'm Coming From." When you read titles like these, you felt pretty certain that you weren't looking at the Thriller shelf. These days, it seems that the standard way for a book to announce its literary bona fides is with its jacket art. I'm overstating matters, of course. A lot of elements go into creating a book's aura: the typefaces, the paper quality, the blurbs, the jacket copy, the title, even the amount of white space on a typical page. Even so, a contempo literary book's aura often seems to be mostly created by its bookjacket. Makes sense: We live in a hyper-visual, make-an-instant-impact era. Literary-book-jacketwise, something that has caught my attention -- as in "amused and annoyed me" -- is a tonal thing. An awful lot of literary book jackets seem to want to hit the same tone these days, don't they? Let me offer some examples of what I'm thinking about. Whatever the differences between these jackets, they all hit the same emotional note -- an off-center, almost-discarded-snapshot tone. Looking at these designs, I'm reminded especially of today's girl folk-rock singers: all those tough-cute chix with girlish-gargling voices -- half-bawling, half-teasing, sorrowful-sexy descendents of Rickie Lee Jones and Liz Phair. These bookjackets radiate: I'm recessive yet exhibitionistic. I'm far too classy (not to mention too wrapped-up-in-myself) to extend myself for your sake, let alone belt out a melody or dance the boogaloo. I'm expressive, but reluctantly expressive. I'm expressive because ... well, being expressive is my sad-sexy fate. Thinking of all these bookjackets as one great big group, I find myself noticing two main subgenres. The minor one shares a theme: "Horsing-around in someone's backyard, though I can't remember exactly when or where." But the main subgenre -- by a huge, huge margin -- is "bits and pieces of girls." A few examples: What do these bookjackets say to you? I mean, besides "I'm fashionable." My own take runs along these lines: "My fiction is a little piece of me, and I give it to you compulsively if reluctantly. I'm part Tori Amos, part Hemingway." Thwarted-desire, falling-off-the-table-ness has become such a standard-issue motif (or visual strategy, or something) that even the brassier cover muchachas are often presented in lopped-off ways. Book-jacket designers really don't know where to stop, do they? They've even taken to chopping up children. Call the cops! Quark-violence is being inflicted on the underaged! The question arises: Why stop with just one off-center image? Why indeed? Here's the book jacket that strikes me as the ne plus ultra of the moment. You know how you can sometimes look at a provocative, s&m-themed fashion image and wonder, "What... posted by Michael at April 8, 2006 | perma-link | (19) comments





Thursday, April 6, 2006


William Whyte
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A while back I wrote an intro to the great Jane Jacobs. Another giant figure in the field of thinking-about-cities-and-towns who deserves similar treatment is William Whyte. Best-known for the classic volume of '50s sociology "The Organization Man," Whyte (who died in 1999) spent years observing and recording the ways people interact with the spaces around them. How do people behave at crosswalks? Why do some parks work while others don't? He asked sensible, basic, humane questions -- and then did his best to find out the answers to them. Why do I suspect that few of today's starchitects are familiar with his work? I'm sorry that I don't have the time or wherewithal at the moment to pull together something elaborate about Whyte. Still, why not pass along a few links? Here's an interview with Whyte. The best look at his life and work that I've found online is this Project for Public Spaces bio of him. You can dive deeper into Whytes ideas and observations about urban life by reading his mega-wonderful book "City: Rediscovering the Center." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 6, 2006 | perma-link | (1) comments




Photographic References in Painting
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Friedrich's recent post on photography and its use by painters raises some interesting points. Enough interesting stuff that I decided to forego commenting to write this post on the matter. I want to consider use of photographic references from the point of view of the artist. To my way of thinking, the important thing is the resulting painting. The goal of the artist is to produce the painting and how he goes about it is his business. Actually, things aren't so simple. For example, there are certain expectations that affect the marketing of the art; a commissioned portrait normally is "understood" to be done in oils and not to include, say, collage elements (unless negotiated by artist and client before work begins). Then there informal expectations. I can't say where it came from, but as an art student I absorbed the idea that use of a live model as reference was good and basing the work on photos was bad -- cheating, really. And I can't be alone on this because I've come across many instances of artists trying to avoid going on record as users of photography or making elaborate justifications when found out. Nevertheless, I now happen to think using photos is just fine in many cases if not all. A few words about camera lenses What the artist needs to understand is how camera lenses influence the look of the photograph. If I remember my photography lore in the 35 millimeter world, a moderate telephoto lens (105mm for my Nikon F, for instance) is considered best for portraits. Telephoto lenses tend to "flatten" depth. When an activist wants to campaign against cluttered streetscapes, he'll dig out a photo taken with a 200mm or stronger lens sighted down a commercial strip with lots of signs. The photo will show nothing but a huge gaggle of signs and this will horrify voters, hopefully for him. A "portrait lens" also flattens the face of the subject, but to a lesser degree. The nose is shortened, for one thing. Telephoto lenses also have a smaller depth range ("depth of field" is the term of art) for sharp focus than a "normal" or a wide-angle lens (extreme wide-angle lenses show nearly everything in focus). So the portrait lens has the added virtue of blurring the background (and possibly some foreground) while leaving the subject sharply defined. A portrait painter, knowing this, might choose to compensate by having the nose stand out just a little more than the photo indicates. For the record, a "normal" lens for a Nikon F is about 50mm and a moderate wide-angle is 35mm. How artists have used photography This is unprovable, but I believe that most pre-photography masters would have jumped at the opportunity to use photographs, had they been available. They had to make a living by pleasing the clients they managed to scare up and by cranking out as much art as possible as quickly as they could without... posted by Donald at April 6, 2006 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, April 5, 2006


Vettriano Redux--Art & Photography
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards: Donald's posting on the painter Jack Vettriano, who works exclusively from photographic reference, got me thinking about the whole topic of the respective roles of photography and art. This relationship has been somewhat fraught since photography was invented, but it seems trickier to me today as we are in the midst of an attempt to revive representational painting as a serious approach to art making. In the 19th century the situation was somewhat less unstable, because painting was the inheritor of an many-centuries-old high art tradition and photography was a modern 'mechanical trick', so the use of photographs by Degas or Delacroix or Courbet in creating art was viewed as not very different from using other such aids, such as the camera obscura or a visual grid or the lay figure (a dummy on which clothes were draped so they could be painted), all of which had a pedigree stretching back to the Renaissance. (All pictures are of course pop-ups.) Muybridge, E., Animal Locomotion: Horse and Rider At Full Speed, 1887 Degas, E., Horse with Jockey, 1890s Today, however, that tradition can no longer be taken for granted, as it was broken by many decades of art-making during which only abstract/aggressively stylized representation could claim the mantle of high art. In those same decades, meanwhile, photography got the upper hand over 'handwork' in mass media commercial art (advertising and illustration). This gradual rise of the prestige value of photography tainted representation in painting as something intended for a middle or lower brow audience. Rockwell,N., Freedom From Want, 1943 Beyond the questions of high and low in art (which, granted are really class tensions, but whoever said that art doesn't swim in the waters of social class?)there is also the simple fact that most 'realistic' art today has clearly been mediated through photography. Mary Scriver in a comment to Donald's posting brought up Western art. This reminded me of a visit I paid to a show of Western art (containing the work of 40-50 artists) a couple years ago; I was dumbfounded at how ubiquitously the art was based on photographs rather than live models. I bet less than 10% of the art in that show was painted or sculpted directly from life. The idea that art-making involves photography somewhere along the way was an absolute cultural given at that show. The same is true of contemporary animal art, especially that which uses 'tight' hair-by-hair rendering; it is likewise overwhelmingly dependant on the use of photographic intermediation. To round out this survey, I doubt if even 10% of even high-end contemporary portraiture is painted exclusively from life; at least from what I see on the Internet as well as what I've heard from working portrait painters, nobody today has time for the ten or twenty 3-5 hour sittings that John Singer Sargent’s portrait subjects routinely endured. (Lucien Freud has built his whole ouvre, in a sense, by obstinately fighting this trend, which I suspect is... posted by Friedrich at April 5, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Tuesday, April 4, 2006


Jack Vettriano
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I failed. I just could not come up with a title for this post that was wry, catchy, ironic, revealing or any of the other tricks I'm so fond of. No doubt it's because Scottish painter Jack Vettriano is a sometimes elusive, complicated and controversial subject. The Art Establishment in Britain (Scotland, especially) seems to alternatively hate him and ignore him -- museums are last in line to buy his paintings. On the other hand, his iconic "The Singing Butler" was sold for £744,500 (nicely more than a million dollars) at an auction in 2004 whereas in 1992 it was rejected for a Royal Academy show. It's estimated that he annually earns around £500,000 in royalties from print sales. Then he creates original paintings that can go for around $60-75,000 each. Oh, and he was awarded the OBE and also picked up an honorary doctorate from Scotland's St. Andrews University. Resources What follows is largely based on information from the following links which should be consulted by interested readers. The most recent book about him can be found here. This is a fairly recent New York Times article (registration required) about Vettriano. Edinburgh's newspaper The Scotsman has an art critic who states here that Vettrianos' "pictures very often look grotesque. Just like the prices they command." An Irish defense of his work and a discussion of the criticism can be found here. Then there's last fall's controversy about the source for the dancing couple image in "The Singing Butler" (more on that below). Here is The Scotsman's take just after the story broke. To get a better taste of Jack himself, read the Q&A here. Narrative Vettriano was born Jack Hoggan near Kirkaldy in Fife, Scotland in 1951. His father worked in mines as did Jack as an apprentice before moving on to other working-class jobs. As a child he became interested in drawing and kept at it. When he was 20 he encountered Ruth McIntosh who saw enough promise in his work that she bought him a watercolor set. This modest encouragement gave him enough confidence to begin to study painting from how-to books and museum visits. He ended up in Edinburgh with a white-collar job, a wife and a mortgage, but the weekend painting continued. In 1988, by then in his later thirties, he had two paintings in a Royal Scottish Academy show -- and both sold. Around this time Vettriano, for professional reasons, dropped his last name (Hoggan) and adopted his mother's maiden name. (Maybe "adapted" might be a better term -- one source says her name was actually "Vettrino.") Finding demand for his work, Vettriano contacted some dealers who exhibited his paintings to indifferent results. His breakthrough came in the form of his contact with Tom Hewlett's Portland Gallery in London, a specialist in Scottish art. Hewlett's promotional efforts led to a rapid commercial rise for Vettriano which he repaid by remaining loyal to Hewlett: Portland Gallery is his exclusive... posted by Donald at April 4, 2006 | perma-link | (17) comments





Friday, March 31, 2006


Alexandra's Blogging Again -- or Still
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Alexandra, of the blog Out of Lascaux, was one of the earliest of the art-history bloggers, perhaps even the first. She put up a lot of fully-felt, informative, and wonderfully clear cultureblogpostings. But by the time blogging really took off, Alexandra seemed to have grown tired of blogging. Until tonight I hadn't checked in with Out of Lascaux for a long time. But I just discovered that Alexandra is in fact back to to putting up first-rate postings with a lot of first-class reproductions. Here are two about Mary Magdalen as a subject in art. If you haven't visited Out of Lascaux yet, please do. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 31, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, March 30, 2006


Ionarts on Bonnard
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- As long as FvB has all our minds on French art ... Don't miss Charles Downey's beautifully-written and lavishly-illustrated visit to a show in Paris of the art of Pierre Bonnard. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 30, 2006 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006


Digi-Photo Links
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * Hugh Symonds makes what are without doubt the most beautiful cellphone photographs I've ever seen. Talk about a whole new aesthetic ... * What's real in the age of Photoshop? And does even National Geographic know for sure? Steven Kapsinow muses about some funny goings-on. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 29, 2006 | perma-link | (8) comments





Monday, March 27, 2006


Enough Rope: the Creativity Paradox
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The "bottom line" to this post is nothing new. But how I got to it might interest some of you, especially if you've had to do "creative" work at one time or another. Countless years ago when I was a commercial art student, our instructor always gave us assignments that included various restrictions. One time it might be the size ("two columns wide and seven column-inches deep"), another time color ("assume a two-color press run") or something or other else. After months of this, the class became restless. We began to badger Mr. Wellman to cast aside those pesky restrictions, to let us cut loose and be creative. And one day he did. We could do whatever we wanted for the next assignment. The only restriction was that the due-date was two weeks away. As you might expect, I soon found myself paralyzed. I found it very hard to come up with a subject and then had trouble deciding on how to do the art work. I met the deadline, though I've forgotten what I produced. I do recall that I wasn't pleased with what I had done: it wasn't very good. I might have done better if I'd had a fantastically great idea bubbling within me that would have burst forth when Wellman finally turned us loose. But I didn't, and that was a good thing indeed. Because what I got out of the assignment was a vital object lesson: The path to real creativity is usually shaped by constraints -- without restrictions there likely will be no path at all. Best of all was that this revelation hit me -- strongly -- then and not later. I didn't try to rationalize my way out of it. I knew that I produced a piece of junk and I knew why. This experience would not have happened to an Engineering student. They know from the start that everything they create is subject to various constraints, including economic ones in most cases. Liberal Arts students -- especially those in so-called "creative" fields such as writing, musical composition and art -- might think they are able avoid constraints or else simply do what they do without really being conscious that they are being constrained. An example of the latter might be painting in oils as opposed to watercolors. Most artists recognize that watercolor is a difficult medium whose constraints must be fought at every stroke of the brush. Oils, on the other hand, are much easier to use, their most obvious restriction being variability in drying time of different colors. Most experienced painters treat the properties of their medium as background factors rather than the constraints they are, and are mostly conscious of constraints exogenous to the tools of their trade. When I became a computer programmer I found myself developing an "engineering mentality." Constraints were everywhere and I found that I had to use a good deal of imagination -- and, yes, creativity -- at... posted by Donald at March 27, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments





Saturday, March 25, 2006


Cecilia Beaux: The Almost-Sargent
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The rediscovery of late-19th century artists continues. One of the latest instances is a well-illustrated new (2005) biography of portraitist Cecilia Beaux by Alice A. Carter. This book is the basis of what follows. Beaux's father was a Frenchman who married into a Philadelphia family situated on the fringes of that city's deeply-rooted Society. For example, her uncle (by marriage) was William Foster Biddle. Although he was a Biddle, he wasn't one of The Biddles -- a slightly different branch of the family. One of Cecilia's nieces was Catherine Drinker Bowen, the author (Drinkers are another old Philadelphia family). Cecilia did not consider Catherine attractive enough to be the subject of any of her con amore family paintings. Instead, Cecilia favored Catherine's charismatic sister Ernesta Drinker, and in return was hated by Catherine. Cecilia was born in 1855, died in 1942, and lied about her age for much of her life. She even wrote an autobiography that included no dates whatsoever. She played this game -- and usually got away with it -- because she was attractive and aged more slowly than average. Snapshots taken of her in her fifties show little sign of sag around the chin and neck, usually the first places where aging shows in women. He birth was marked by the death of her mother days later. Her father was not too successful in business and eventually returned to France, leaving what was left of his family in Philadelphia. Family members had to scramble to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, but at least the family had practice, thanks to difficulties experienced by previous generations. Cecilia discovered art when a teenager and received some training. She practiced various kinds of commercial art including dish-painting and highly detailed scientific drawings of bones and seashells. By this point, she was both meticulous and driven to succeed as an artist though it was a while later that she decided that portraiture was her métier. She took up oils and developed such competence that her "Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance" (see below) was a prizewinner that launched her career. After saving enough money, she went to France early in 1888 to study art at the Académie Julian, returning a year and a half later. She had paintings accepted by the Salon while in France and after she returned to Philadelphia. During the 1890s Beaux established herself as a major portrait artist. By the end of the decade the well-known painter William Merritt Chase was able to state "Miss Beaux is not only the greatest woman painter [of modern times], but the best that has ever lived." Her career flourished in the early part of the 20th century, at which time she built a house near the shore in Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, she had no interest in the new kinds of painting revealed to Americans at the famous Armory Show of 1913, believing that such art was simply a fad. In 1924 while visiting Paris, Cecilia fell and... posted by Donald at March 25, 2006 | perma-link | (16) comments





Friday, March 24, 2006


Architecture and Urbanism Buzz
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * John Massengale links to this excellent context-setting discussion of modernism. Robert Hughes adds to the discussion here. * John himself will soon be teaching what sounds like a terrific class on the Elements of Urbanism. Sign up now. * The whackily post-postmodern -- the word always used vis a vis his work is "fun" -- British architect Will Alsop has had to close up shop. Given Alsop's tastes and talents (check out this honey), I'm not feeling too sorry for him. * A new issue from the Project for Public Spaces is online, and its very interesting theme is "the public square." Why do some work while others flop? (A couple of small tips for those just getting into architecture and urbanism: The spaces between the buildings count for at least as much as the buildings. And parks and squares require just as much care and skill to create as concert halls and office towers do.) Here's a list of the best public squares in North America. Does your city rate? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 24, 2006 | perma-link | (19) comments





Wednesday, March 15, 2006


Decline and Fall of the Classical Face
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Once upon a time painters had this crazy notion that their goal was to create beauty. That was back in the 19th century. Today many painters think their goal is to create "edginess," but that's a post for another time. Let's say it's 1840 and you're an academic painter planning your next submission to the Salon. The subject matter will be historical and, if possible, uplifting. And the whole thing should be beautiful and "finished" (worked over so that brush-strokes are invisible, or nearly so). You want to include images of young women, nude or partly nude, because that will be fun to do and because it should please most viewers -- who don't mind a skin-show so long as the rest of the enterprise has a high moral tone. Of course those women must have beautiful faces. It's a virtual no-brainer regarding the general appearance: you will borrow from Greek and Roman sculpture. Why? Because such sculpture was Beautiful, and if the Academy and the public want beauty, then use a proven example. The fact that your subject might be a Classical theme is a further consideration. I should add that not all women in paintings looked like Greek statues, but it was a common enough practice in those days. Okay. I haven't exactly researched this using primary documentation and all that. But the expedient of simply looking at such art makes it hard to come up with a more convincing explanation why women in academic paintings of that era look a lot more like classical statuary than northwestern Europeans in 1840 -- half a dozen short generations removed from us. What interests me is that painters slowly abandoned Classical faces over the second half of the 19th century, even in paintings with Classical subjects. I have no solid explanation why this happened and will just wave my arms and shout something about zeitgeist and the progressive forces launched by the Industrial Revolution pushing aside previously held beliefs that Greece and Rome were unsurpassable. Friedrich von Blowhard's insights on this point are welcomed. Enough talk. Let's have a look. Gallery Venus de Milo. What could be more Classical than this Venus? Note the high nose and strong chin. "The Farewell of Telemachus and Eurcharis" by Jacques-Louis David, 1818. One of David's last works. Very Classical face on the woman. "Girl with a Basket of Fruit" by Frederic, Lord Leighton, 1863. Here the nose isn't so high, but the chin is strong. "A Vision of Fiammetta" by Dante Rossetti. Rossetti liked his models to have a Classical look even though he was a Pre-Raphaelite, not an academician. "Nymphs and a Satyr" by William Bouguereau, 1873. A Classical subject, but Bouguereau paints the Nymphs as though they were French. Note the facial expression on the nymph near the center. "Circe Invidiosa" by JW Waterhouse, 1892. Classical mythology, but Circe's face isn't very Classical in this late 19th century work. "Destiny" by JW Waterhouse, 1900. A... posted by Donald at March 15, 2006 | perma-link | (16) comments





Friday, March 10, 2006


Peripheral Explanation
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is part of a comment-reply to this recent post. I decided to elevate it to post status because the same issues keep popping up in Comments. I (foolishly?) hope I can avoid endlessly repeating myself in comment replies by giving my position more prominance. Here goes: One reason I'm doing this "Peripheral Artists" series and gave it that name is because I got what was probably a typical late-1950s American art history education. Huge chunks of late-19th and early 20th century painting were ingnored if they weren't held up to ridicule. In recent years I've been coming across some of that work and realize that it can be very good indeed. Had I only known! That's the problem. I didn't know because no one taught me. And I suspect that a lot of art history courses since my time haven't been a lot better regarding representational art. So I've launched this little educational project here at 2Blowhards highlighting artists I used to know nothing about, yet on discovery are worthy of appreciation and study. The word "peripheral" (as I keep trying to make clear) is sort of a pun. Artists mentioned are peripheral to the history of painting as I (and others) received it in college. And it happens that these same artists (so far) come from what might be seen as Europe's geographical periphery. This does not mean that I regard them as lesser artists: in nearly all cases, quite the opposite. The artists I've dealt with thus far are famous in their home countries for good reason. Some were well-known elsewhere in Europe when they were alive, before Modernism in its various guises made its march from Paranoid Victimhood to Paranoid Establishment. I don't regard this as some sort of "national character" issue: it's really more of a power politics thing within the art world. Still, the fame of the Russian artists I've been featuring undoubtedly was held back by the Cold War. Many Americans were leery of all things Russian and the Soviet Union kept itself pretty well sealed off from Westerners and foreigners of all kinds save Party members and prominant fellow-travelers. (Yes I know there were plenty of exceptions to that sweeping statement. But the gist is true: think Intourist.) Nor do I think it fair to fall back on a kneejerk notion of "American insularity" to explain our relative ingnorance of the likes of Gallen or Vrubel. In fine arts, Americans strike me as being quite the opposite of insular. In fact, for much of our history, we've had a self-image of being second (or worse) rate in all forms of culture. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but let me assert that, for almost any museum, shows featuring Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and Rembrandt will draw larger crowds than shows featuring home-grown Pollock, Motherwell or Warhol. As I said, the problem lies in the art world itself. Its history had become... posted by Donald at March 10, 2006 | perma-link | (14) comments





Wednesday, March 8, 2006


Peripheral Artists (5): Mikhail Vrubel
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Far from Paris, far from the mainstream art history narrative of the 19th and 20th centuries are what I call Peripheral Artists who, I think, deserve recognition beyond their native lands. Last September I was in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and found a large, purpose-built room containing striking romantic-expressionist paintings and panels/murals by Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910). Vrubel was born in Omsk, Siberia to an army legal officer and himself completed law training at St. Petersburg University in 1880. After that, he went over to the Imperial Academy of Arts where he studied under Pavel Tchistyakov. He was commissioned to paint murals and do icon-related work for the St. Cyril Church in Kiev and visited Venice to study early church art as part of the project. His mural designs for Kiev's St. Volodymir Cathedral suffered rejection, however. During his Kiev stay he became interested in Mikhail Lermentov's poem, Demon, for which he began working up illustrations. Vrubel returned to Moscow in 1890, completing "Seated Demon," one of his most famous works. Although it raised controversy, the painting led to a commission from Savva Mamontov to decorate buildings. He also designed ceramic objects and was involved in stage design. Vrubel met and married opera singer Nadezhda Zabela in 1896 and they had a child who died in 1903, an event that further destabilized his mind which had been tormented by childhood deaths of a brother and sister (he was briefly institutionalized in 1902). But he continued painting until 1906 when he was losing his eyesight. According to one source, he finally became so depressed that he stood before an open window so as to catch a cold that evolved into the pneumonia that killed him. Gallery Mikhail Vrubel. "Demon Seated in a Garden" 1890. "Swan Princess" 1900. "Seraphim" 1904 Commentary Vrubel allowed himself to be caught up in the romanticist and spiritual/religious thinking that were current in his times, possibly excessively so if his mental state is any indication. Thanks probably to his study of mosaics and Christian art in Venice his paintings sometimes had a mosaic-like quality where paint was applied in different-shaped blocks varying in size by a factor of about two –- the background work in the Seated Demon painting contains a good deal of this. Like many artists who moved in the direction of Expressionism he wasn’t afraid to sacrifice accurate representation for effect. Note that the eyes of the Swan Princess are anatomically too large. Thanks to the large scale in which he often worked coupled with dramatic composition and stylized surface treatment, Vrubel’s paintings strike me as compelling to view, yet slightly disturbing –- perhaps a true reflection of his mind’s condition. In sum, an artist hard to forget once his work has been seen. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 8, 2006 | perma-link | (11) comments





Friday, March 3, 2006


Art Links of Note
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- -- The current Weekly Standard has Paul Cantor's review and commentary on American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting by Steven Biel. Cantor has a lot of thought-provoking things to say, so click here and give it a read. Cantor devotes much of his space to political-social issues of the 30s and later, but also gets in some more purely art-oriented licks. For example: More is at stake here than one painter's reputation. In a conflict that Biel sketches but does not thoroughly analyze or try to adjudicate, American Gothic stood at the flashpoint of one of the great aesthetic debates of the 20th century. Attacks on the work were among the opening salvos in the relentless war of the modernist art establishment against representational painting and in favor of abstract expressionism. In the modernist view, this was a battle between a mean-spirited, narrow-minded regionalism and a generous, forward-looking internationalism. But for those, like me, who are skeptical of the preeminent value of abstract expressionism, the battle could be reformulated as an attempt on the part of a single brand of 20th-century painting to erect itself as the one and only authentic form of modern art, while condemning all alternative visions to the realm of inauthenticity and kitsch, to use Clement Greenberg's favorite term of reproach. -- Among the comments on my Isaak Levitan post (here) was one by painter Jacob Collins. Collins wields his brushes amazingly well. Although he attains what can be termed a "high degree of finish" the result is not the overly-painted hard-edge look that often results from straining to be realistic, by trying too hard. I haven't seen Collins' work in person, but if what's on display on his web site is any clue his results are very satisfying. Take a look. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at March 3, 2006 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, February 28, 2006


Peripheral Artists (4): Isaak Levitan
Donald Pittenger writes: This is another installment in a series of posts dealing with 19th Century artists who lived far from Paris and other major artistic centers and are footnotes in the Paris-centered dominant art history narrative of the period 1860-1950. I tend to be indifferent to landscape paintings, yet I was struck by some landscapes I saw in St. Petersburg's Russian Museum. On investigation, nearly all were painted by an artist unknown to me named Isaak Levitan. Levitan is most certainly not unknown to Russians. It's a shame that artists of his caliber were essentially ignored by the Western art establishment for the past 100 years. His life was short (1860-1900) and unpleasant in many ways. Levitan was born in Lithuania and as a boy moved with his family to Russia proper. His mother died when he was 15, his father two years later. The only silver lining to the poverty he was plunged into was that it qualified him for a scholarship at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. During one of Russia's spasms of anti-Jewish sentiment Levitan, and other Jews, were forced to leave Moscow. But his artistic reputation was waxing and influential friends were able to intervene so that he could return. His friendship circle eventually included famed opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin (also spelled Feodor Chaliapin) and writer Anton Chekov. Nearly all of Levitan's paintings were landscapes without human figures. Although he must have been aware of artistic developments in France, these seem to have had little or no influence on his style. We also need to consider the nature of the land Levitan had to work with. Moscow-area topography does not offer the spectacular scenery of Grand Canyon and Yosemite or even the somewhat milder wonders of the California coast and Catskills that inspired major American landscapists. The land around Moscow ranges from flat to rolling hills. There are a few higher hills, and things get almost Alp-like (in a very flat context -- Catskills would loom over these hills) part-way along the route to St. Petersburg. So Levitan dealt with a lot of sky and not much terrain variation, leaving him to work with vegetation, water features and village or farm buildings. Towards the end of his career, the Volga River became a focus of his work. Levitan was diagnosed with a severe heart condition in 1897 and he died in 1900 not long before his 40th birthday. Gallery Isaak Levitan self-portrait. Landscape. Landscape with moon. "Evening on the Volga." Likely one of his later paintings. Commentary As usual, small digitized reproductions don't do justice to the actual paintings. In a museum setting with plenty of nearly grist for one's attention, Levitan's painting stand out as special. If you have the opportunity to see his work, seize it; you probably won't be disappointed. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 28, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Sunday, February 26, 2006


John Sloan Updates
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- A while back I wrote about American "Ashcan" artist John Sloan (click here to read it). Recently I've come across a couple of items related to that post which I think I should pass along. First, I ran a string of quotations from Sloan and made comments. In particular: "I feel pretty sure that all the heavy, staccato impasto paint in the old masters' work is made with tempera." This last remark is important. Sloan made the comment long before art restoration had become scientific -- magnified micro-samples photographed to analyze paint layering, for instance. And I've never come across a confirmation of his hypothesis; readers are welcome to set me straight on this. But he believed that the masters used tempera under-painting and practiced the technique himself, switching from direct application of color to oil glazing over tempera under-painting. I find in A.P. Laurie's "The Painter's Methods and Materials" (another useful Dover reprint) that during the transition from egg-tempera painting to oils the following might have been the case: The accumulation of evidence is in favour of the conclusion that these painters were painters in oil, but probably on a solid under-painting in egg; the extent to which this solid under-painting was carried being a matter for discussion. [Page 21.] The matter of whether the tempera was in the form of impasto is not mentioned. Secondly, I was pretty negative in my judgment of Sloan's work. But I came across a Sloan I like at Seattle's Frye Art Museum. It's titled "Blue Kimono" and dated 1913. "Blue Kimono" by John Sloan, 1913. My aging monitor doesn't show it in the colors I saw in the gallery -- the blues and greens seemed stronger there. Nor does the excellent brushwork around the face come through in the small-scale reproduction. This is yet another case of "ya hafta be dere." I'm not sure who posed for the painting. However, the woman does resemble Sloan's wife. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 26, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, February 21, 2006


What Sergei Eisenstein's Dad Did
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Are you a cinema buff and an architecture buff? Then this post's for you. Art Nouveau architecture (roughly 1885-1910) can be seen as part of the transition from eclectic Classicism to International Style Modernism. There are different flavors of Art Nouveau as well as alternative names such as "Jugendstil." Some Art Nouveau architecture is ornate, replacing Baroque decoration with tendrils and other plant motifs. Other buildings have more geometric decor as practiced by Charles Rennie Macintosh, Otto Wagner and Frank Lloyd Wright. If you want to view Art Nouveau in person, Europe is a happier hunting ground than America. You can find excellent examples scattered about Paris, Brussels and Vienna. But if you want to see large concentrations of Art Nouveau buildings, I suggest you head for Prague and some of the larger cities in the Baltic region -- Prague and Riga (in Latvia) especially. The reason why Prague and Riga have entire neighborhoods dominated by Art Nouveau buildings has to do with timing (which, as we all know, is "everything"). In Prague's case, an old part of town was razed and redeveloped about the time Art Nouveau was fashionable. (I'll be back to Prague this September and will try to work up material for a post.) Riga had a city wall until the mid-1800s and all buildings beyond the wall (before it came down) had to be built of wood for military reasons. Around 1900 Riga was a rapidly-growing city (by the end of the Russian Empire, it was its fifth-largest city) and much of this growth took place in the area beyond the former wall in the form of apartment buildings. In Riga you can find entire block fronts almost entirely comprised of Art Nouveau style buildings. Examples are Vilandes Iela (street), Rupniecibas Iela and Alberta Iela. Below is a view of Alberta Iela. Riga's Alberta Iela. Downloadable image copyright Latvia University Press Centre. Around 20 buildings in Riga are attributed to Mikhail Eisenstein (1867-1921) a civil engineer and architect who was the father of famed Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). Sergei's critically acclaimed films included Ivan the Terrible (parts I and II), Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky. The younger Eisenstein died shortly after his 50th birthday and his father died in Germany before reaching 55. For a photo of young Sergei and his parents, click here. Here are some examples of Eisenstein's buildings. Gallery Elizabetes Iela 10b, 1903. Elizabete Iela 33. Alberta Iela 2a, 1906. This was a childhood home of philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin. Commentary Mikhail Eisenstein's style strikes me as over-decorated. I respect it, but am ambivalent even though I'm a fan of Art Nouveau. I prefer Art Nouveau buildings with comparatively large plain surfaces that are set off by well-placed bits or concentrations of ornament or sculpture. Such contrasts of surfaces also can be seen in Spanish Colonial Revival buildings in Southern California and other parts of the American Southwest. Moreover, I'd like to see more use... posted by Donald at February 21, 2006 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, February 17, 2006


Bugatti Bliss
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Thanks to Ben Ladd -- one of the amiable and helpful techies at our excellent webhost, GlobalNet -- who sent in a couple of photos he took at a recent Detroit auto fair. Both of these beauties are Bugattis. Here's the classic Bugatti Royale, looking very royal indeed. And here's a revived edition, the Bugatti Veyron: Pretty glam, if a little too aero-cyber for my tastes. Be that as it may, I find both of these cars to be refreshing antidotes to the Chrysler prototype whose unfortunate styling Donald was recently deploring. Many thanks to Ben. Donald included photos of some other Bugatti beauties in this posting. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 17, 2006 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, February 14, 2006


Be Original! Do Like Me!
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the more maddening and/or amusing characteristics of the academic avant-garde (and its apologists) is the way 1) They like to set themselves up as spokespeople for something called "diversity" yet at the same time 2) They insist that all good and progressive people must, simply must, think and act alike. A perhaps-too-easy example comes from the world of bigtime architecture. I was meandering around the east 70s over by York -- a huge, many-blocks-big medical area that's an architectural nightmare: a patchwork that never settles into any kind of agreeable pattern. Across the street rose a building approaching completion. Sigh: yet another shiney-milky, bent-folded-and-mutilated piece of torqued geometry. They're everywhere these days. Kodak digicam at the ready! The building's glass surfaces were nothing if not odd and attention-grabbing. Very "Terminator 2," and worth a couple of closeups, anyway: Snooping around, I found myself recalling something ... Surely I'd been here before, no? Or in its sister or brother anyway? Origami surfaces, weirdo semi-transparency, show-offy "we aren't square, no sirree" angles ... Ah, now I remembered. And off I walked, Kodak in hand, to 57th Street near Madison. Here are some snaps of the remarkably similar LVMH building, by the Pritzker Prize-winning Christian de Portzamparc. The New York Times' ludicrous architecture "critic" Herbert Muschamp was such a hyperventilating admirer of the LVMH building that rumor had it that all you had to do to make Muschamp pass out in ecstasy was to murmur the words "translucency" and "folded angles." Modernism, eh? Forever redeeming itself, if only in its own eyes. You say the problem with modernism is all that cage-like strictness? OK, then, we'll twist and turn it! You say that modernist buildings look too much like graph paper? OK, then, we'll make buildings that look like chic perfume bottles! There's too much transparency? Then we'll feature translucency! You'd think it would be so much easier to cut their losses and give up the modernist dream instead, wouldn't you? Incidentally, the copycat building in the East 70s isn't by some loser. It's by James Polshek, famous in his own right for the cubic zirconium Rose Center for Earth and Space, part of the American Museum of Natural History. FWIW and IMHO: the Rose Center is one of the worst-designed museums I have ever experienced. I found it about as interesting to explore as a Kenmore refrigerator. But it's famous, it's acclaimed, and it's widely recognized as "original" despite my judgment. So what we have here isn't a case of a meatball ripping off a genius. It's a case of two fashionable architects -- guys who specialize in originality -- agreeing about what must, simply must, be done in architecture today. Be different: Do like us. Anyway, a couple of small questions? How exactly is it that so many artists who set themselves up as the embodiment of innovation can all end up doing the same thing? And how can a group of cutting-edgistas... posted by Michael at February 14, 2006 | perma-link | (20) comments





Saturday, February 11, 2006


Bastien-Lepage: Forgotten Influential
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- For many years, casual students of art history have been shown the thundering Main Line locomotive of 19th century Western painting passing through Classicism (David), Romanticism (Delacroix) and then, most importantly, Impressionism before crossing into the 20th century and the enlightened highlands of Modernism. Academic art was the Manichean evil against which the heroic Impressionists struggled, but only a few especially ridiculous examples were shown to get the point across. And the non-Academic, non-Impressionist painting that didn't conveniently fit the narrative was sidetracked to footnote status. That was the situation around 1960, anyhow. Today, brief histories of painting still tend to follow this simple scheme. However, over the last several decades, art historians, museum curators and publishers of art books have been making more and more room for serious studies of Academic painters along with other non-Impressionists whose reputations plunged around the time of the Great War. For example, it's not hard to find books about Lawrence Alma-Tadema and J.M. Waterhouse, the latter's work even being calendar fodder these days. Pre-Raphaelite artists, especially Rossetti and Burne-Jones, have regained much of the esteem they lost following their deaths. Sargent and Whistler are back big-time. Still missing in action, below the radar -- pick your favorite metaphor -- are artists lumped into the juste-milieu (loosely translated as "middle of the road") category. Actually this category isn't very useful because it has been applied to more than one 19th century setting; the extremes defining the middle differing over time. Morever, the term implies what the art is not and tells one nothing about what it is. For now, I'll focus on a man whose work influenced this amorphous group in the 1870s and 80s. This is Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84). He deserves a modern biography, but one has yet to appear. Material about him is sketchy, dispersed, or out-of-print. Such sources as there are nearly all agree that he was highly influential to important non-Academics and non-Impressionists. Here are highlights of Bastien-Lepage's life. He was born in Damvillers in the Meuse département and first studied art in Verdun. Showing great talent he went to Paris and gained admission to the École des Beaux-Arts and studied under Alexandre Cabanel. He fought in the Franco-Prussian War and received a severe chest wound. Returning to his studies he placed second in a quest to win the prestigious Prix de Rome. This near-miss so discouraged him that he returned to Domvillers to paint local scenes. He also painted portraits and an historical work (see below), being widely exhibited in France and Britain. His health was weak following the war and he died young, in Paris, of cancer of the stomach (according to one source). Roger Billcliffe in his book "The Glasgow Boys" explains Bastien-Lepage's influence on the Glasgow Boys, a group of (initially) non-establishment painters whose main work (of this school) appeared in the period 1875-95. Other artists of the time were similarly influenced. After mentioning the Hague School and the Barbizon... posted by Donald at February 11, 2006 | perma-link | (13) comments





Tuesday, February 7, 2006


Jane Jacobs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- We Blowhards and many of our fine visitors make frequent reference to "the great Jane Jacobs." I really have nothing to add to the chorus of admiring hosannas but my own hosanna. Hey, I think she's great too! But there's always the chance that a few visitors might not be familiar with the great Jane Jacobs or with her work. So it occurred to me: Why not provide an EZ, if half-assed and scattershot, intro? Jacobs, who turns 90 this year, is -- IMHO, but I ain't alone -- one of the most remarkable of the go-it-her-own-way critic-intellectuals of the past century, a proud amateur and generalist from an era that was moving ever more in the direction of professionalism and specialization. Jacobs was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a doctor. Soon after high school, she moved to New York City. During the '30s and '40s, she lived a catch-as-catch-can Greenwich Village life: working at this and that, beginning to write, exploring the city, and taking occasional courses at Columbia University. When the post-war years came along, America went into pave-the-country-over hyperdrive. Sorry to say this about the Greatest Generation -- all due honor paid to them, of course -- but: What in God's name were they thinking of? In short order, steel-and-glass towers were being thrown up all over the country; the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed into law, leading to the biggest engineering feat in the country's history; and the atrocity known as "urban renewal" was set in train. Plow it under! Build it anew! (Small sidebar: I'm forever tinkering with, and never quite finishing, a posting about urban renewal. Major themes: what a horror it was, and how underknown it is today. I'm not entirely sure of my judgment in the matter, but I suspect that urban renewal may have been a self-inflicted American disaster on a par with the Vietnam War. Before laughing at me, consider the tally. Thousands of communities were destroyed. Millions of people were forcibly relocated. So many of these people were black that black people joked about urban renewal, bitterly calling it "Negro removal." Tens of billions of dollars were spent in an almost entirely destructive fashion. We did this to ourselves -- can you imagine? Anyway, we're still living in the shadow of this gigantic mistake, just as we're still living in the shadow of Vietnam.) Has anyone ever fully explained what was going on in people's minds during those Le Corbusier-besotted/big-project/top-down years? As far as I can tell, the country was high on its victory in World War II, was thrilled to be done with the Depression, was delighted by the new and the shiney, couldn't have liked automobiles better, and was feeling even more can-do than usual. Still, is that enough to explain how far things went? What a crazy time. Planners and bureaucrats were determined to "rationalize" everything they could get their hands on. Where cities were concerned, this... posted by Michael at February 7, 2006 | perma-link | (30) comments





Monday, February 6, 2006


Unbelievable Bernie (Fuchs)
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- It was nearly three months late, but I didn't complain. I grabbed a copy and, cash in hand, practically ran to the cashier. Originally scheduled for November, Issue 15 of Illustration magazine finally appeared on a news stand. So what's the big deal? It is an entire issue devoted to Bernie Fuchs, who is my candidate for the title of greatest illustrator in the second half of the Twentieth Century. The Web site for Illustration is here. And here is a page with thumbnail page views from the issue (caution: this downloaded slowly on a computer attached to a fast line). David Apatoff did the write-up and claims (correctly, as best I can tell) that this is the first real biography of Fuchs. Apatoff has a nice blog on illustration and related art here; please give it a test-drive. I was astounded the first time I saw Fuchs' work back in the days I was a commercial art student. He was only seven years older than me but already unapproachably more advanced. (Moreover, Apatoff tells us that Fuchs lost three fingers from his drawing hand before he had gotten very far in his already belated art training. I doubt his work would have been better had he the use of all five.) Some artists I respect. Others I study. Bernie Fuchs is just about the only one whose work I worship. By all means get a copy of the magazine and see why. Gallery Unfortunately, most of Fuchs' really good stuff can't be found on the Internet: that's why I urge you to buy the magazine. Below are some examples that, I hope, will give you a hint as to why I'm raving. Sketch of John F. Kennedy. "Ferrara" "Ship in Green Water" "Dancing at the Wheel" "Pensive Moment" ...book illustration, 1981. I have my private collection of Fuchs' illustrations. It's comprised of pages I ripped out of magazines in the late 1950s and mid-1960s. They're getting a bit yellowed and faded, but I never threw them away. Nor do I plan to. UPDATE: I should mention that Illustration has spotty news stand distribution, so you might consider ordering a copy directly from the publisher. The Web site has a mailing address if you prefer to sent a check; otherwise, you can order on-line. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at February 6, 2006 | perma-link | (7) comments





Sunday, February 5, 2006


Should First be Best?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Ever hear the gripe that news media cover political campaigns and elections like horseracing or other sports? You know: who's ahead and by how much -- that sort of thing. Complaints about the practice center on how important things such as positions on issues get shortchanged in reports. While ignoring or downplaying issues might make for bad civics, it's impossible to ignore the fact that political campaigns and sporting events are both forms of competition. I'm not quite willing to claim that competition is part of human nature (mostly because I haven't given the matter enough thought), but it certainly is pervasive here in what's left of Western Civilization. Consider science. Scientific kudos are awarded for being the first to discover/explain/create something or other. This has been going on for centuries, if the Newton-Leibnitz controversy over who invented the calculus is any guide. James Watson's famous book The Double Helix deals with scientific competition as much as it does with scientific subjects. Not that there's anything wrong with being a beloved science teacher or well-paid pharmaceutical researcher. But if it's scientific glory you seek, you need to be first. Nothing less will do. They'll never hand out a Nobel Prize to the third guy to make an anti-gravity machine. That's also how the history of science is written. It's a string of names such as Lavoisier, Gauss, Pasteur, Roentgen, Einstein and Bohr. It seems to be the same for art history -- but should it? When I took a year-long art history class in college (way back at the end of the 50s) the instructor did a very 20th Century thing, casting western art as a progression interrupted by a few hiccups such as the Dark Ages. Once we reached late mediaeval times the course became a chronicle of improvements related to faithful depiction of the world. Matters treated included linear perspective, atmospheric perspective and human anatomy. Where possible, the artists who kicked the various cans down the road to reality were identified and celebrated for their achievements. Upon reaching the 1860s, the pointer shifted to the direction of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant field of painting at the time the class was given -- the narrative according to Albert Barr (of MoMA) and friends. Given that Post-Modernism was still in embryo, this made for a tidy presentation of everything from Lascaux to West 8th Street. All-in-all the art history narrative was pretty much like the scientific history narrative, right down to the controversies: Was it Picasso or Braque who invented Cubism? I wonder if this business of assigning precedence and glory affected -- perhaps even created -- PoMo art. Assume that most young artists since the mid-1950s have taken an art history course and that the content of the course wasn't drastically different from the one I took (for events up to about 1960, anyway). Lesson likely learned: you can become famous if you innovate. And take it as given that once painting became... posted by Donald at February 5, 2006 | perma-link | (11) comments





Monday, January 30, 2006


Peripheral Artists (3): Valentin Serov
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This continues the series about artists remote from both the main artistic centers of Europe and the Establishment narrative of 19th/20th Century art history. Previous posts are here and here. I own a couple illustrated booklets on Serov that I cannot read because they are in Russian (got �em for their painting reproductions). So I relied on Internet sites found here, here and here for the following biographical sketch. Portraitist Valentin Alexanrovich Serov, son of opera composer Alexander N. Serov, was born in St. Petersburg 19 January 1865. Following his father's death in 1871 his mother took him to Munich and, later, Paris before settling near Moscow at the Abramtsevo estate as guests. Besides taking art lessons from important artists (including Ilya Repin), the young Serov was able to come in contact with Russia's artistic/cultural elite and gain familiarity with their milieu. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, he exhibited "Girl with Peaches" (1887) which was warmly received and became one of his most famous works. Biographies mention that he was unaware of the Impressionist movement at the time, yet was painting in a semi-Impressionist style. I find this assertion hard to swallow given his links to the cream of Russian culture (which was highly Francophile in those days) and the fact that Impressionist works had been painted in France for nearly all his lifetime. Serov clearly was the antithesis of the proverbial "struggling artist," rapidly becoming a leading portrait painter whose subjects included the Czar (though he also painted landscapes and historical subjects) and being elected academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts before his 40th birthday. He married Olga Trubnikova in 1887 and they had children who became subjects for a number of his paintings. The 1905 mini-revolution politicized him and resulted in art sympathetic to liberal causes. His painting began to take on expressionist trappings. But how his art would have evolved beyond that is unknowable because, on 22 November 1911, while hurrying to work at a portrait setting, he collapsed from a heart attack and died, age 46. Gallery Girl with Peaches: Portrait of Vera Mamontova, 1887. Not a good reproduction, but the others I saw on the Web were no better. Portrait of Sergei Chokolov, 1887. Portrait of Maria Akimova, 1908. Abduction of Europa, 1910. This hints at expressionism. Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, 1911. But Serov stuck to traditonal styles on commissioned works. Again, the reproduction does not do justice to the original. Commentary Serov was an extremely talented painter. His abilities were apparent in childhood. And his blazing debut in his early twenties was noted above. On the other hand, Serov was never an innovator of art movements unlike Manet, Monet or Picasso. This, plus the fact that he practiced in distant (from Paris) Russia, probably accounts for his footnote-status in art history. I missed seeing his paintings in my mad dash through St. Petersburg's Russian Museum last fall. But I tried... posted by Donald at January 30, 2006 | perma-link | (17) comments





Friday, January 27, 2006


Same Old, Same Old
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards-- You can read here a New York Times review by Roberta Smith of yet another Cezanne show. (Requires registration.) The show is “Cezanne in Provence” and is being mounted at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. starting January 29, 2006. Reading reviews like this, I feel like I'm stuck in a movie theater with the same film playing over and over. Not that there's anything wrong with Cezanne, I like his paintings a lot, but it’s not exactly like he’s an underexposed or neglected talent. What is it today with museums and the founding (French) fathers of Modern Art? Why do we get show after show of art that is 100+ years old and yet are still publicized with this annoyingly proselytizing tone? Why is it necessary, on the occasion of the 500th or 5000th Cezanne show, to play the schoolmaster and lecture us on the fact that his art is important because "it effectively destabilized centuries of representation to reach a deeper, fuller, nearly hallucinatory kind of realism"? I doubt that in the 1930s the art-loving public got nonstop shows of Delacroix and the Barbizon painters (i.e., the “School of 1830”), or that in the 1890s the public got nonstop shows of J. L. David and the Neoclassicists (also 100 years past their glory days). And I doubt that when Delacroix or J. L. David were shown a century after their deaths, that the curators found it necessary to hector the public about the incredible breakthroughs made by those artists, or how their art-making methods amounted to a complete overthrow of the previous artistic practice. (Despite the fact that in many respects they were as revolutionary as Cezanne.) It’s kind of amazing how nostalgic and backward looking Dogmatic Modernism has really turned out to be. Modernism, forever fixated on its long-since digested “breakthroughs” reminds me of nothing so much as listening to an aging hippy talking about being at Woodstock or at Kent State. Apparently, some kinds of revolutions are, like diamonds, forever... Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 27, 2006 | perma-link | (22) comments





Wednesday, January 25, 2006


The Painting that Launched Spaceships
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Sometimes art has consequences. Rather than attempt a survey of paintings or posters that might have inspired this revolution or that architectural style, I want to focus on a painting reputed to have struck a chord with folks including some who became involved with space exploration. Certainly the painting struck a chord with me. Not long ago I posted on what I considered to be silly-looking Seattle buildings, one of which was the Experience Music Project (EMP). Besides a rock music museum, the building contains a science fiction museum. After posting the article, I remembered that I had been meaning to visit the Sci Fi museum, but hadn't gotten around to it. So I went. I have nothing to say about the interior of the building at this point except that, aside from exhibition decor, it struck me as being stark and haphazard. Sorry if those terms aren't helpful. Below is a picture of an exhibit, which doesn't quite give one a sense of the interior spaces, but it's the best I can come up with. [Note to self: Once I've sold my children into slavery to pay this year's income tax, set aside a few bucks and buy a digital camera to take pix for the blog.] Exhibit in Science Fiction Museum. The museum also has a Science Fiction Hall of Fame exhibit. One of the 2005 Hall of Fame inductees was Chesley Bonestell (pronounced bon-es-tell; born 1888, died 1986 aged 98) who painted conjectural views of the solar system and space exploration that were widely seen in the 1950s. Bonestell received architectural training and found work as a delineator. During the Depression he went to one economic bright-spot, Hollywood, and became a matte painter. In the 1940s he produced a series of paintings of planets as viewed from their moons. Some of these were published in Life magazine and later appeared in the 1949 book The Conquest of Space, illustrated by Bonestell and with text by science writer Willy Ley. The outstanding painting of the series was one of Saturn as seen from its moon Titan. Titan was thought to have an atmosphere (since confirmed by space probes) so Bonestell showed the planet and rings as sunlit highlights with shadows merged into the blue sky of the moon. Here it is: Saturn Seen From Titan by Chesley Bonestell. (Downloadable image copyright Bonestell Space Art.) This link has a good article about Bonestell and the Saturn painting can be found by scrolling down. A site with a lot of Bonestell material is here -- click on the blue button labeled "Gallery" and then to "Next Gallery Page" three times. This puts you on the fourth gallery page, which includes the Saturn painting; keep exploring because there is a lot of good stuff to be seen. The sites assert that the Saturn painting influenced people to either become interested in space exploration or even make space-related fields career choices. The painting hit me hard... posted by Donald at January 25, 2006 | perma-link | (13) comments





Tuesday, January 17, 2006


Seattle's Silliest Architecture
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The Fiancée sometimes chides me for getting too negative in my posts. Her bête noir is my review of the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, a building she mostly liked. So I'm under a little pressure to take a sunnier outlook in my critiques. But not always. Alas, this last weekend was spent rebuilding the software on my computer following its hard drive's untimely demise. After I posted about it, I had to spend a couple more hours dealing with tech support regarding internet connectivity in general and e-mail specifically. The obvious solution to my pent-up frustration and rage is to take it out on someone or something else, right? Gentleman that I surely am, I would never dream of bullying someone smaller and weaker. Instead, I'll pick on huge targets -- buildings -- specifically, buildings that have the misfortune of looking really silly. In my opinion, natch. [Draws hex signs to keep lawyers at bay.] I'll deal with three buildings that I have the misfortune of seeing almost every time I'm up in Seattle; out of sight, out of mind doesn't apply. Here they are, in my subjective ascending order of silliness: Experience Music Project The Experience Music Project (EMP) is one of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's gifts to his home town. Allen is a huge fan of Jimi Hendrix (1942-70) another Seattle guy who was/is more famous than Allen himself (who takes second-billing to Bill Gates when the subject of Microsoft arises). Allen spent some petty cash on Hendrix memoribilia over the years and eventually sought a means to publicly display it. EMP, by Frank Gehry. By the year 2000 the result was a Rock-oriented museum sited on the grounds of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and designed by starchitect Frank Gehry. The site also houses Allen's Science Fiction Museum. Locals were quick to observe that the place looks like crushed food cans. If you are driving south on Interstate 5 towards downtown, as you pass along Lake Union, look to the right towards the Space Needle. Near the Needle's base are lumpy, colored metalic objects that look like -- giant crushed food cans. That's the EMP. I need to confess I've never been inside the EMP, so I can't say how well it works as an exhibition space. My gripe is strictly about the exterior. It looks silly and there is no serious reason why it has to look the way it does. (A semi-serious reason might be that it evokes one of Hendrix's famously smashed guitars.) Seattle Central Library Another starchitectural gift to the so-called "Emerald City" (I hate that moniker) is the Seattle Central Library building by Rem Koolhaas. It has received international recognition as well as almost nothing but praise from the Seattle Media/Cultural Establishment. Seattle Central Library, by Rem Koolhaas. As for nyekulturny me, I gag every time I see it. I suppose the interior was the result of lots of deep thought and clever... posted by Donald at January 17, 2006 | perma-link | (29) comments





Monday, January 9, 2006


Art & The Middle Class
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards— I’ve been thinking a lot lately about art and social class. It all started when I went to a rather fancy movie house, the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood. The Arclight Cinema makes movie-going a surprisingly upscale experience. They have the highest ticket prices I’ve ever laid eyes on. The Arclight people sell assigned-seat tickets like a legitimate theater—there’s no hand-to-hand combat trying to get two seats together at this joint. There’s a restaurant in the lobby that is actually worth patronizing. The concession stand even features gourmet sausages and chocolates. I hope you get the picture. While the Arclight shows all the big commercial films, the bulk of its offerings are on the arty side. This approach seemed mirrored by the theater’s customers. On my way to the john I plowed through polite crowds of obviously monied adult cineastes…not a screaming kid or horny teenager in sight. Just outside the bathroom I casually glanced over and spotted the only discordant note in the whole complex: an old-fashioned, pulpy-lurid movie poster from the 1930s. I don’t think it actually featured a monster carrying off a scantily dressed maiden, but the poster had that brash, pop-y feeling to it. And suddenly it hit me what I was finding so surreal about the whole Arclight scene. It was the sight of all these middle-class people looking for an aristocratic high art experience from the movies, traditionally a working class entertainment medium. Pondering this paradox, I sat down and waited for the movie to start, only to overhear a girl in the row behind me talking about her recent decision to begin serious voice training in a conservatory. Apparently she had been conflicted about pursuing an arts career during an earlier bout of higher education, but now, in her mid-twenties: “I know that this is really what I want to do with my life.” Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking: How many paying jobs are there in opera in this country? A couple hundred? And aren’t you a little long in the tooth to be beginning such a difficult and problematic career path? Is the necessity of ever earning a living not a consideration here? But as I continued to shamelessly eavesdrop, the girl was working hard to make her decision sound “professional.” She was talking as if she was going to spend her parent’s money on law school or she was on the verge of a lucrative career in medicine or accountancy or civil engineering or something. With my mental receiver tuned to the issue of social class, what I was hearing was a weird jumble of conflicting signals: (1) an aristocratic sense of entitlement about pursuing a “noble goal,” with an aristocrat’s indifference to the highly uncertain financial payoff, (2) a middle-class sense of values that needed to justify such a decision by making it seem as if she was taking up a respectable “profession,” when in fact (3) the shoot for the stars life strategy she... posted by Friedrich at January 9, 2006 | perma-link | (25) comments





Wednesday, January 4, 2006


Shiney
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Although kids love shiney things, does it automatically follow that adults should too? In any case, mainstream architects never seem to outgrow the taste: For them, too much shine-iness is never enough. I wrote here about the bizarre passion architects have for angles, abstractions, and glass. We recognize "noise pollution" as something disagreeable, and as something worth minimizing. Why are we so much more reluctant to denounce visual offenses? I don't have synaesthesia, but when I round a corner and encounter this kind of thing -- -- it hits me just like a loud, obnoxious noise. But why stop with cold, flat, and reflective? Why not coat the ensemble with silver? Instead of relieving the pain, why not heighten it instead? Works in S&M dungeons, or so I hear. Here's a zigzagging, twinkly thing going up near where I work. Glad to haveya in the neighborhood, he said, shielding his eyes. Click on that photograph to see a larger, and far-more-eye-searing, version. Taking that photograph nearly burned out the sensor in my Kodak digicam. Here's a taste of what could have been in each one of these cases: A little easier on the eyes, no? Although there's bright sun on that brick surface, you can walk by without needing to don dark glasses. Despite appearances, this brick building is a brand-new one. Small lesson: There is no pressing reason why new buildings have to wear skins made of glass-and-metal. By the way, do you find that many of these chic-tin-can buildings look like bad furniture left over from the '80s, the kinds of once-fashionable/now-silly artifacts you giggle over at lawn sales? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 4, 2006 | perma-link | (10) comments





Tuesday, January 3, 2006


Architecture "Worth a Journey"
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Would you ever take a major trip to visit just one particular architectural site? I did once (as I'll explain), but that was when I was young. Nowadays a building I wish to see might weigh when planning a trip to Europe, but it would never be the focus of that trip. I'll take detours to visit a site holding particular interest, but that's the most I'll do. And if a site happens to be in a city I was visiting anyway, I'll make certain to take it in. (By the way, that "Worth a Journey" phrase in the title comes from those Michelin Green Guides -- their travel guides, not to be confused with their Red Guides dealing with food and lodging. The Green Guides have a star system that's usually summarized in fold-out map pages at the front of the books. The top category is "worth a journey" at three stars. Two stars is "worth a detour" and one star means "interesting".) Here are some architectural sites I've made sure to visit on various journeys: Glasgow School of Art. This is a Charles Rennie Macintosh masterpiece. Glasgow is a city often ignored by tourists, but I included it in a Scottish itinerary because I'd wanted to see that building in person since high school days. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. This gripped my imagination since I first came across pictures of it in a book I read when I was ten. As it happened, Istanbul was included in a 2004 tour of the region and Hagia Sophia was one of the stops. But I would have played hooky from the tour group to have seen it. Helsinki Main Railroad Station designed by Eliel Saarinen. Another must-see from high school days. When I finally visited Helsinki last fall it was my first stop. Maginot Line fortress -- surface observation post and artillery turret. The Maginot Line might be classed more as engineering than architecture, but it has fascinated me since childhood. I tried to visit a fortress on my first trip to Europe, but arrived in Thionville too late in the day to track one down. I succeeded the next trip. (I plan a post on the propaganda Maginot Line and the real one.) Ryoanji temple, Kyoto. Back in high school I did an (extremely brief) exploration of Zen Buddhism and one of the books I bought had a photo of Ryoanji's famous rock-gravel garden. It fascinated me so much that, seven or eight years later when stationed in Korea, I took a week's leave to visit Japan and included a special journey from Tokyo to Kyoto to visit Ryoanji. Below are a couple sites that have intrigued me since grammar-school days. I would definitely visit them if I were nearby. But I'm not likely to ever see them in person because I'm not very motivated to travel to the counties where they're located. Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Ankgor Wat in Cambodia. Finally, just... posted by Donald at January 3, 2006 | perma-link | (20) comments





Saturday, December 17, 2005


More Scruton
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A week or so ago, Right Reason's Max Goss did a two-part q&a with the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, here and here. Now Scruton returns to elaborate on some of the topics that commenters raised: authority, and town planning. A certain M. Blowhard gets a little carried away in one of the commentsfests ... More Scruton resources and recommendations here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 17, 2005 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, December 16, 2005


The Mona Lisa Algorithm
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Woman of no more mystery? Scientists at the University of Amsterdam had the inspired idea of scanning the Mona Lisa, and feeding the resulting file into cutting-edge "emotion-recognition" software. The computer made sense of her legendarily hard-to-interpret expression in this way, reports AP: 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry. She was less than 1 percent neutral, and not at all surprised. How long until a "Mona Lisa" Photoshop plug-in goes on the market? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 16, 2005 | perma-link | (9) comments





Tuesday, December 13, 2005


Dueling Light-Painters
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- "Envy is not a family value." Hmm. That sentence sounds almost like a familiar bumper-sticker -- might make a bumper-sticker itself. I can't prove this, but I strongly suspect that people in the art scene who have a "Hate is Not a Family Value" bumper-sticker on their car (or would have one if they weren't car-less in New York City) turn deep shades of green at the mention of almost any artist who manages to earn big bucks from his trade. Consider Thomas Kinkade. Or even speak his name at the next Po-Mo gallery opening cocktail party you attend: I hope you get out alive. For any Blowhards readers who never venture west of the Hudson, north of Spuyten Duyvil or east of Flushing, there are Thomas Kinkade galleries or galleries featuring Kinkade's paintings and reproductions in upscale, semi-arty malls and shopping areas all across the country. I wouldn't be much shocked to learn that sales of Kinkade keep some of the smaller independent galleries afloat. Kinkade styles himself "Painter of Light," claiming kinship to the 19th Century American landscape painters whose work was labeled "Luminism" by historians (see here and here for more information). He was born in 1958 in Placerville, California, studied art at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. After a stint doing animation backgrounds at Ralph Bakshi Sudios he began selling paintings via galleries and became astonishingly successful. On the personal level, Kinkade married his childhood sweetheart and fathered four daughters. He is deeply religious and has used his art for charitable fund-raising. For artsy-intellectoids, what's not to hate? Here are some examples of his work: Gallery of Kinkade's art "Cobblestone Bridge" "Quiet Evening" "New York, Fifth Avenue" The best-known works are the twilight village scenes with glowing windows but, as can be seen above, he also paints occasional city scenes. And he does landscapes. Of the paintings shown, I prefer the New York scene. In the art business, as in any other business, success breeds competition and imitation. One painter of glowing windows to emerge on the scene is Russian artist Alexei Butirskiy, born in Moscow in 1974 whose work I've seen in Carmel-by-the-Sea. His paintings include: Gallery of Butirskiy's art "A New Day" "Cafe Luminar" "Evening Lights" I happen to prefer Butirskiy's art to Kinkade's. This is because Butirskiy's images are sharper and I've never liked paintings made from a series of dabs as is the case of Kinkade or, for that matter, many Impressionists. Discussion What interests me here is the problem of evaluating any popular artist. I don't like the reflexive negative reaction of the Art Establishment to popular, financially-successful artists such as Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell. So far as I'm concerned, nearly all Establishment-anointed Post-Modern art is pretentious or silly, if it can be called art at all (more on this in future posts). This means I don't take Establishment criticism seriously. But... posted by Donald at December 13, 2005 | perma-link | (41) comments





Wednesday, December 7, 2005


Revivals
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Aesthetically speaking, it's indisputable that much of what characterizes our age is a have-it-your-way, mix 'n' match, self-expressive avant-gardism. I'm often dizzied by how never-before-seen and one-of-a-kind many new-media creations are. All those "what is it?" websites, those interactive games, those conceptual podcasts ... All those butterflies and special effects ... All those pages full of video highlights, all that play with color, typography, and movement ... All those performance-art/reality hybrids ... It can be really exhilarating. It can also be a little empty and depressing, in a "so much energy and invention, yet so little impact" way. Much youthful new-media work seems unanchored and solipsistic. Although it's often dazzlingly clever, amusingly original, and mystifyingly accomplished, it seldom makes it to even "One" on the emotional-human scale. It stands in relationship to traditional art the way masturbation stands in relationship to sex -- a necessary and potentially fun part of the scene, but a long way from a full account of the mystery of it all. (Happy to admit that I'm a seriously-over-the-hill old coot, by the way. I'm nothing if not arthritic and envious. Still, I gotta make do with what's available to me and contribute what I can. After all, it's not like I have any choice in the matter.) The combination of electronics and contempo upbringings seems to have freed young people to toss their most fleeting urges and inspirations out there with polish and enthusiasm. (With, in fact, immense self-pleasure.) Yet at the same time, something has come unmoored. The film director Bernardo Bertolucci has spoken about the way young people today live in an "eternal present." All questions of talent aside, young people today seldom go into movies, for example, out of having fallen in love with the medium. Movie history and the evolved language of the movies are nothing to them; as far as the younger movie-set is concerned, "Pulp Fiction" represents prehistoric ages. They go into the field because ... well, something about it kinda appeals to them. It's glam. It's hot. Or maybe they just can't help themselves. Another example: I doubt that the kids who show up in the media and arts worlds these days are any less well-educated than my cohort was. But there's a difference nonetheless, and it's in the attitude towards the ignorance. People from my generation usually woke up to how ill-informed they were and then made some efforts to fill in a few blanks. When kids today register how ill-informed they are, they show no shame or embarrassment. Instead, they're sort of amused that anyone might be so stodgy as to think that a little background might count for something. It wouldn't occur to them to make the effort to fill in any blanks. After all, why should anything be allowed to come between Me and The Goodies I Covet? They're the cut-to-the-chase generation. Side note: As young people grow ever more ignorant of traditional culture, they seem to grow... posted by Michael at December 7, 2005 | perma-link | (26) comments





Saturday, December 3, 2005


Peripheral Artists (2): Axel Gallén
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This is the second in a series of posts about painters who were figuratively peripheral to Established Narrative of the history of art and geographically peripheral in Europe. The first post, about Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt, is here. The subject of the present post is another Finnish painter, Axel Gallén (1865-1931), born to a Swedish-speaking family, who became a Finnish-nationalist icon, changing his name in 1907 to the Finnish form Akseli Gallén-Kallela (the appended name in reference to an ancestral farm). For more detailed biographical information than I'll present below, you can link here and here; the link to The Gallén-Kallela Museum is here. Should you find yourself in Helsinki with a few hours to spare and visit the Ateneum art museum, you'll see many paintings by Gallén. And as is almost always the case, they are more impressive in reality than they seem in illustrations such as those presented below. Gallén, like Edelfelt, received his early training in Finland (some of it from Edelfelt himself) and then moved to Paris, staying there for about three years total in two sessions between 1884 and 1889. Both times he was enrolled in the Académie Julien, a popular spot for non-French artists such as Childe Hassam and Robert Henri as well as French-born artists such as Matisse. While in Paris, Gallén was influenced by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), an artist who influenced many others in the 1880s including the "Glasgow Boys" (stay tuned for postings on Bastien-Lepage, some of the Boys and the painting scene in the mid-1880s). Unlike Edelfelt, Gallén turned from French influence as the 19th Century waned, drifting towards German Expressionism in the 20th Century. Mixed with this artistic change was an increasingly heightened sense of Finnish nationalism (Finland was part of the Russian Empire in those days) manifested in the desire to illustrate Finnish folk-myths such as the Kalevala. By the time of the Great War, Gallén was morphing into a traveler and "character." He was welcomed in Germany and Hungary -- the latter was satisfying, thanks to the kinship between the Hungarian and Finnish languages (though nothing I've read indicates how well Gallén actually spoke Finnish). He and his family spent months in what is now Kenya, where he met safari-ing former President Teddy Roosevelt. In the early 20s he spent more than two years in the United States, much of the time in Taos, New Mexico, still in its early years as an artistic Mecca. Upon Finnish independence in 1917 Gallén sided with General Carl Mannerheim, who emerged victorious in the post-war, post-revolutionary turbulence that swept over the former Russian Empire. He held some important positions, working on ambitious illustration projects all the while his artistic skills were withering. Gallén died of pneumonia in Stockholm 7 March 1931 while on his way home from giving lectures in Denmark. Gallery "Boy and Crow" -- 1884 Although painted before Gallén reached Paris and became influenced by Bastien-Lepage, this resembles contemporary... posted by Donald at December 3, 2005 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, November 16, 2005


De Young Museum Impressions
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The newest big city art museum is the totally rebuilt de Young in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The previous de Young was damaged in the 1989 earthquake to the point that it was closed in 2000 in fear that it might not survive another quake. It was demolished two years later to make way for a new building. Here is a picture of the old museum building. Old de Young building. The new building was designed by Basel, Switzerland architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, winners of the Pritzker Prize. It opened 15 October and The Fiancée and I inspected it 13 November. David Littlejohn reviewed the museum in the 3 November Wall Street Journal. His opening description is hard for me to improve upon: The new de Young Museum is basically a blank brownish box -- the color changes in different light, and may one day turn green -- 420 feet long, 240 feet wide and 40 feet high. A 144-foot tower -- a box atop a warped pyramid -- rises at the east end. A punctured space-frame canopy flies out 50 feet beyond the building at the west. Both tower and canopy are wrapped in copper screens: the undulating, slit-open roof is also covered in copper. Except from a few dramatic angles and in just the right light, the exterior of the new $200 million de Young is uninviting and not easy to love. This was from the critic who enthused over Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library (that I loathe). He goes on to say Many of the interior public spaces, on the other hand, are both inspired and inspiring. The visitor is energized by the very quality of thinking and intensity of imagination that went into them. As for the art inside, Littlejohn informs us that After the 1972 shotgun wedding of the de Young to the city's other public art museum -- the California Palace of the Legion of Honor -- all the de Young's European works were transferred to the Legion. The private San Francisco Museum of Art (now of "Modern" Art) laid claim to international works from Matisse on. In 1973, the private Asian Art Museum was founded. This left the de Young, even before its enforced relocation, with the problem of displaying in some coherent fashion "everything left over." Having let Littlejohn set the scene, let's take a look. Aerial view of museum under construction. This is an aerial view taken while under construction. Note the tapered "fingers" of the structure. The interiors of these are of course tapered as well. Open spaces between the fingers contain rocks and bits of foliage visible via windows of various sizes and shapes, the views including the nearby exterior wall of the neighboring "finger" as backdrop. Approach view. Approaching the museum's entrance the visitor sees mostly a blank copper wall relieved by dimpled texturing. Note the ribbon of windows (for the lobby area and gift shop top level),... posted by Donald at November 16, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Tuesday, November 1, 2005


Peripheral Artists (1): Albert Edelfelt
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The words "Peripheral Artists" in this posting's title have a double meaning. This is the first in an occasional series dealing with artists who (1) came from Europe's geographical periphery and (2) are considered peripheral to the currently-accepted narrative of the history of art. For these reasons alone they are probably unknown, even to many college-educated Americans having an art history or art appreciation class under their belt. My hope is to help make them better known. (By the way, I encountered these artists largely because I recently visited many of the countries bordering the Baltic Sea. Guide books sometimes mentioned important local artists, so I tried to visit museums to view their work.) Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) was Finnish even though his name doesn't seem Finnish and Finland was not a country during his lifetime. Maybe I'd better explain this. Prior to 1809, Sweden ruled Finland, but had to cede it to Russia following defeat in their 1808-9 war. Finland became an autonomous grand duchy in the Russian Empire, the Grand Duke being the Czar himself. Finland gained independence in 1917 following the disintegration of the czarist regime. Thanks to proximity to Sweden and centuries of Swedish rule, Swedes comprised a significant minority in Finland and Swedish is an official language along with Finnish (today the proportion of the population using Swedish as their native tongue has declined to the 5-10 percent range). Biographical Sketch Albert Edelfelt Edelfelt was of Swedish stock and spoke Swedish. His father was an architect whose family had been raised to the Swedish nobility in the 17th Century. His mother came from a wealthy merchant family. But his father gotten into financial trouble and died when Edelfelt was about 15, his mother then tidying up the money situation and giving encouragement to Albert's artistic efforts. Following a short stay at university and a couple art schools, Edelfelt headed to Antwerp to study art on a government scholarship. Seven months after arriving, in May 1874 he bolted to Paris where he studied at the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. He was also influenced by the rising artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, an artist little-known today, but important in the early 1880s. Like many young artists of the time, he produced paintings with historical subjects -- history paintings were (metaphor alert!) the top rung of the subject hierarchy in the days when academies ruled the artistic roost. His best-known historical painting is "Duke Karl Insulting the Corpse of Klas Fleming" which won a salon prize and brought welcome recognition. "Duke Karl Insulting the Corpse of Klas Fleming" 1878 Around this time Edelfelt soured on historical subjects for a number of years, turning to the everyday-life genre. An important result was "A Child's Funeral" (scroll to botton of linked page) which won a 3rd-class medal at the 1880 Paris Salon. (Apparently, the scene that inspired him was actually a boat ride to a child's christening. He altered the event... posted by Donald at November 1, 2005 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, October 28, 2005


The Depression in Color
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- If you're like me, the images you carry in your brain of the Great Depression are in black and white. So the Library of Congress' new show comes as a real eye-opener: a collection of color photos of that faraway era. The Library's website includes a terrific online exhibition. It's amazing how much more immediate color can make a photograph, let alone an era, isn't it? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 28, 2005 | perma-link | (6) comments





Friday, October 21, 2005


Graphics [Fads]
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A halfway-decent rule about fads seems to be that the moment a fad crests is the exact moment when it also begins to run out of steam. Take baseball caps. Only a few years ago, they were so common that I was sure they were on their way to becoming an enduring everyday fashion item. Then -- overnight, as far as I could tell -- they vanished. Even balding guys stopped wearing them. The only people I see in baseball caps these days are people who are actually on their way to the ballpark. Although I'm a broken-down old embarassment, I still enjoy tracking -- however half-consciously -- the fortunes of various contempo fads. One that has fascinated me for a while is a graphic-design trope: the use of what I think of as "nonsense brackets." Here's a typical example. As always, forgive the rotten scanning: Why are colored brackets surrounding this page's subhead? The meaning of brackets is generally taken by writers to be something like, "The editor has a comment here, and he doesn't want anyone to mistake it for a parenthetical remark. Pay attention to what I'm saying, but DO NOT include this passage in the final printed copy." The brackets above, in other words, have no meaning in a traditional sense. Do they have any significance in any other sense? There's no question that they give the subhead more visual pop than it would otherwise have -- so a meaning-set is being expressed: Poppiness is good! Do they convey anything else? They certainly signify, "The art director of this magazine has been looking at what the art directors of other magazines are doing." At the moment, there's something about nonsense brackets that says, "I'm up-to-date." Which makes me wonder: What relationship does attitude-signifying have to "meaning"? Here's a similar but slightly different use: Why the pointy brackets, for one thing? Although I'm a semi-professional media-and-words guy myself, I don't have any idea what pointy brackets are doing on my computer's keyboard, and I have never made use of them. And how odd that the pointy brackets are picking out the words that they're picking out. It would be just as plausible/unplausible for them to pick out all three words, or a different set of words. Perhaps we react to this arbitrariness by thinking: "Wow, how kookily arresting!" To my eye, one thing that highlighting the words "over $500" accomplishes is to make those words look like an item on a menu. Bracketed together, they look like something that you might move your cursor over. They invoke a computer screen, in other words -- something dancing and eager, and something more malleable and twitchy than a mere piece of paper. When I first noticed nonsense brackets -- about a decade ago? -- I was annoyed by them. These days I'm tolerant, weary, semi-amused. Still ... Even as decorative ornaments they strike me as so much clutter. I also dislike the way... posted by Michael at October 21, 2005 | perma-link | (29) comments





Thursday, October 20, 2005


Inside New Urbanism
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- DesignObserver's Michael Bierut was on the team that created the Disney-sponsored New Urbanist town of Celebration, Florida. (A decent page of photos is here.) He writes a fascinating posting about the experience -- and about his reactions to Celebration -- here. Good passage: Authenticity is a slippery thing. I live in a 1909 house that the realtor said was Victorian but I'd more accurately call Craftsman Style. Far from "authentic," to me it looks like it was built by someone who had seen some pictures of Greene and Greene houses and thought one might look good in Westchester County. It's surrounded by equally inauthentic hundred-year-old houses, all of which look swell today because they're so old. Interesting how many of the commenters on Bierut's posting find Celebration creepy. Some of them murmur ominously about Big Brother; a few even tiptoe up close to the "r" (ie., racism) word, as though the act of paying attention to sidewalks and porches will inevitably hurtle us all back to Selma circa 1950. Sigh: designers can be such hysterics and sillies. It never seems to have occurred to many of them that no one is forcing anyone to live in Celebration. Best, Michael UPDATE: Fred Himebaugh writes -- from onscene, first-hand knowledge! -- about Celebration here.... posted by Michael at October 20, 2005 | perma-link | (9) comments





Saturday, October 15, 2005


Watercolor vs. the DeYoung
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The edgy-architecture world would have you believe that the only newly-built alternative to the off-center twinkliness they're peddling is strip mall/cul-de-sac hell. Not true. There are also places like this one. Aside from the awful name -- what were they thinking? -- Watercolor is the kind of quiet-and-lovely new-traditionalist development that I suspect many people would enjoy knowing about, and having access to as a housing option. The Wife and I have visited, by the way, so for once I'm not just commenting on pictures. Here's a decent page of photos. New house in Watercolor In other architecture news, San Francisco's flashy new DeYoung Museum opens this weekend. All infolding volumes, zigzagging angles, lighting effects, and weirdo materials, the DeYoung is the edgy world's latest darling. Expect approximately a thousand times more mainstream-press coverage of the DeYoung than of Watercolor, sigh. I haven't seen the new DeYoung in person, so I'm doing my mature best to reserve judgment ... Oh, the hell with maturity: A-ha-ha-ha-ha!! Suckers!!! In ten year's time, that'll look about as chic as shag carpeting. The new DeYoung Rio Rocket, who has actually been by, likes the design. He writes an appreciation of the new DeYoung, and he links to some photos that he's taken of the project. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 15, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Tuesday, October 11, 2005


Popular Artists (1): Pino
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- This posting is the first of what I plan as an occasional series dealing with artists who seem to be important in the gallery scene yet tend to be ignored by the Art Establishment for reasons valid or otherwise. I'm not sure how this will evolve. I'll certainly include artists whose work I like, but my present plan also calls for presenting some artists I'm not sure about and maybe even a few of those whose paintings I can't stand. Here are some of my biases (which I'll probably repeat from time to time for future Blowhards readers): I'm an amateur painter with a degree in commercial art, and therefore I'm a pushover for artists who are also good technicians -- folks who can accomplish what I can't. This means I like representational -- especially figurative -- art. And I prefer paintings that fall on the side of draftsmanship as opposed to colorism. To give a rough example, contrary to how I'm "supposed to think," I prefer the early Monet to the late Monet. Heretical? So be it. Pino As I pursue my study of artists active since 1960 or thereabouts, I find it striking that many of what I consider the better ones were (surprise!) once commercial artists. An extreme case is Everett Raymond Kinstler who painted several official presidential portraits, yet got his start in comic books. This posting's featured artist followed such a path, making his name painting cover art for romance novels, then switching to fine arts when he (probably) got sick and tired of doing endless variations of babes in the arms of hunks. To set the scene, below is an example of the sort of art you're likely to find in a gallery that carries the work of Pino. (Actually the name is Pino Daeni. He was born Giuseppi Dangelico in Bari, Italy, 8 November 1939. I don't know when or why he changed his name, but his son Max (Massimo) retains the Dangelico last name.) "Contemplation" Pino's biographical information is sketchy. Most information on the Web doesn't go far beyond what's on his site. In a nutshell, somewhat against his father's wishes he went to Milan to study art, supporting himself doing commercial projects. When he was around 40 he moved his family to the U.S. where he felt there was more opportunity than in Italy. Much of his commercial work here was in the form of cover art for romance paperbacks, a kind of continuation of the book illustration he did before leaving Italy. Book cover by Pino The book cover shown above is from an Italian site. The hunk depicted might look familiar because the model was probably the well-known male model Fabio who Pino came across when Fabio was still an unknown; Pino used Fabio on lots of covers to their mutual financial benefit. He submitted some sample paintings to Scottsdale's May Gallery in 1992. This work was well-received and he was able to... posted by Donald at October 11, 2005 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, October 6, 2005


Giclée OK?
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- I blush to admit that I hadn't heard of Giclée (French for "squirt," pronounced zhee-clay) reproduction until about two years ago. My flimsy excuse is that I only paid casual attention to fine arts during the years I was focusing on demography, software systems programming, my business and other practical matters. A byproduct of that inattention was that I hadn't been to an art gallery in years. Anyway, a while back The Fiancée and I were in a gallery in Carmel-by-the Sea and I hesitated by a painting that interested me. Of course, the sales lady pounced. I managed to leave the place with my checking account intact and my mind buzzing with new information. It seems that the painting wasn't a real painting at all, but a Giclée reproduction -- a reproduction that looked just like the real thing. The "support" (as they say in the painting trade) was canvas, and there were impasto (thick paint) brush strokes. This convincing imitation sold for something like 2,500 bucks. Those impasto brush strokes, by the way, likely weren't Giclée, but probably were added later by hand using some sort of thick, transparent goo that makes the Giclée coloring look like heavy brushwork. But technology advances, and if it hasn't happened already, don't be surprised if impasto simulation can be automated as well as the color bits. What is Giclée? This explanation is going to be sketchy because I've never seen a Giclée being produced. I simply Googled on "giclee" and other permutations such as "giclee+impact" and "giclee+market" to get a rough idea what it was all about. Many of the sites Google turned up on their first display page were those of Giclée printing outfits, so you might have to dig deeper to get information from other sources. An example of a site with useful background material is here. At its core, Giclée is inkjet printing on steroids -- well, make that on archival paper or canvas. A Giclée printer uses more than the basic four colors used in ordinary printing, which helps account for the color-fidelity of the reproductions. The original work (painting, photograph, whatever source) is scanned and the data saved to a hard drive or (more likely) a CD. Later the support material is run through a Giclée printer where jets of ink or perhaps some other colored material are squirted at high speed onto the surface in the form of tiny dots. Finally the reproduction is numbered, framed, and shipped off to a dealer or customer. Giclée has been around since the late 1980s and an early complaint was that the inks would begin to fade after two or three years. Nowadays it's claimed that inks are good for 60 or even 100 years. Actually, no one knows for sure how long the inks will remain true; those lifetime claims are probably based on laboratory tests using exposure to intense lights and other forms of torture. (Keep in mind that original... posted by Michael at October 6, 2005 | perma-link | (13) comments





Wednesday, October 5, 2005


Flash! Moscow Unknown Lady Found in NYC
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- When I was in Moscow and St. Petersburg a few weeks ago I zipped around some galleries looking for important late-19th and early 20th century paintings. But I didn't see everything I had hoped to find. I chalked that up to not hitting quite the right era during my time-limited gallery scrambles. (For example, in one museum I looked at the late-19th Century stuff but missed paintings from the early 20th that were on another floor.) At Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery I was halfway hoping to stumble across Ivan Kramskoy's popular Unknown Lady. "Portrait of an Unknown Lady" by Ivan Kramskoy In Russia, this painting is like Gustav Klimt's The Kiss is in Vienna -- reproductions seem to be almost everywhere (I even saw one in a Russian farmhouse). I never found Unknown Lady, and simply shrugged it off. But I also noticed that three galleries had been closed off in the general area where the painting might have been: shrugged that off too, but maybe it was a signal. Today in The Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section I found a review of a new exhibit of Russian art at the Guggenheim in New York City with Unknown Lady glancing back at me. [Sound of scream of anguish here.] The exhibit runs through 11 January. My travel plans are locked in through then, so it looks like I'll just have to miss seeing her and maybe a couple paintings that weren't on display in St. Petersburg either. [End scream and cue sound of gnashing teeth.] Anyway [sob], if you happen to see her, ask Unknown Lady how she likes New York and wish her a pleasant stay. Later, Donald... posted by Donald at October 5, 2005 | perma-link | (13) comments





Thursday, September 29, 2005


Reno is Keno (Parrish the Thought)
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Nevada has always been off my personal beaten track. Part of this is geographical: Living near Puget Sound, if I drive to the east coast (even to Denver or Salt Lake City) or down to California, Nevada gets avoided. Moreover, I've often consciously avoided the state. This is because (judgmentalism alert!!) I find gambling a sick, tawdry, destructive business. Casinos themselves were pretty sleazy, even the shiny new ones circa 1990. And since I've never been much into performing arts, the shows offered no enticement either. Things are changing. The Fiancée has a condo in Las Vegas and spends a week there every year. I've been for a couple visits now, and find that Vegas is okay nowadays even though I used to hate the place. Recently I saw a statistic that claimed more than half the visitors to Vegas don't gamble. I can't vouch for that, but it's plausible: after all, c'est moi. Vegas has really good shopping if you're into luxury goods; I tend to leave town with at least one Italian sweater that costs a lot and that I seldom find an occasion to wear. I've even gotten to the point where I can cruise through Caesar's, the Bellagio and the Venetian en route to their shops without being particularly distracted or offended by the gambling floors. One negative consideration for me, setting aside my tepid interest, is that the top shows tend to be overblown and over-priced ($150 seats, anyone?). My bêtes trop-noir are the Cirque du Soleil shows, but that can be the subject for another post 'cause I'm here to talk painting. And cars. Some of the fancier casinos (the Bellagio and the Venetian come to mind) have mini-museums of art (complete with gift shops) with entry fees that strike me as being 30 percent too high for the amount of art available -- I'm talking fees that aren't much different from those that'll give you an entire day at the great big honkin' Met. Last November we took in a display at the Venetian dealing with entertainment as depicted in classical paintings, many from the Hermitage. Over at the Bellagio was a Monet show that included some works by Pissarro, Manet and others to set the scene. Reno Reno ain't quite Vegas: never was, might never be. Las Vegas has always struck me as being an artificial place whereas Reno seems more genuine -- a cowboy town that served as a transportation hub for mining operations on the eastern slopes of the Sierras. Even the gambling seems more genuine. When I was a kid, the now-defunct Harold's Club used to pepper western highways with signs proclaiming "Harold's Club or Bust!" along with the mileage to Reno. Back in the early 70s, Harold's Club, at around eight stories, was one of the tallest buildings in town with a restaurant near the top where I dined once while on my way from San Francisco to Albany, N.Y. I recall... posted by Donald at September 29, 2005 | perma-link | (10) comments




Me on Visuals
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Where the traditional visual arts go I'm no Friedrich or Donald, god knows. But darn it, I have my pleasures too. It just occurred to me to put together a posting linking to other postings that I've done about painters and artists. As with books, my list of painter-and-artist faves doesn't overlap much with the standard list. That may mean that I'm crazy or that I have no taste, of course. But it may also mean that a few visitors who feel perplexed or put off by the usual art-crit, art-history thang will find an artist or two among my faves who will suit them as well. (I'd love to be a gent and present a posting-full of links-to-postings by my co-bloggers about paintings and artists. But, y'know, given how tedious it is to pull together postings like this one -- copy, paste, link; copy, paste, link... -- my colleagues are just gonna have to fend for themselves.) So, herewith, a few of the painters and artists whose work stirs me deeply: The jazzy and sophisticated collagist Romare Bearden. The one of a kind avant-gardist known as Jess. A few modest, fan-ish words about the English colorist Howard Hodgkin. A few modest and fan-ish words about the erotic/freaky still-life painter Raymond Han. The LA conceptualist, wit, and teacher John Baldessari. A group of contemporary figurative artists, including Kent Bellows and Robert Cottingham. The onetime '80s bad-boy Eric Fischl. Almost no words, but -- what the heck -- an image by the austere British master Euan Uglow. The lyrical Canadian watercolorist David Milne. The group of loosey-goosey but sensual San Francisco painters known as the Bay Area figurative artists. The comic book artist Frank ("Sin City") Miller, who for reason made me muse about the French classicist Nicolas Poussin. A nod to and some links about Edgar Leeteg, the father of painting-pretty-girls-on-black-velvet. A long essay about the brilliant and now largely forgotten American Beaux Arts painter and stained-glass artisan, John La Farge. Some examples of (and links to) ultra-talented and ultra-accomplished contemporary realists, including Edward Schmidt and David Ligare. The poetic miniaturist and "postage-stamp" specialist Donald Evans. Hugh MacLeod and his "business-card art." The figurative-action painter (and legendary film critic) Manny Farber. And Ken Kewley, whose current show I visited today and found intensely pleasurable. Note to self: Blog about more of the artists whose work you love, dammit -- Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Eduard Vuillard, Aristide Maillol, Cecilia Beaux, Frederick MacMonnies, John Kensett, the Japanese Rimpa painters, Samuel Palmer, Correggio ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 29, 2005 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, September 28, 2005


Museum-Viewing Styles
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Even though I can boast a pre-Sesame Street childhood, I suffer from a short attention span when visiting museums. Well, not always: last summer The Fiancée and I spent about five hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- a lot longer than the one or two hours I normally tolerate even in museums I like such as the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. The Met held my attention because (1) I hadn't visited it in decades and it was interesting to see how much it had been improved, and (2) we broke up the visit by taking snack or coffee breaks at the cafes that had been added since my previous visit. A year earlier we were in the Louvre for nearly four hours and I recall feeling nearly brain-dead and almost crazed to get out at the end of the ordeal. (For some reason I immediately perked up once we got to the museum shop.) I find it interesting that The Fiancée and I have different approaches to museum-viewing. She is methodical, starting at a gallery's entrance then heading around it in the same direction reading each caption in its entirety. I, on the other hand, flit. If it's a museum dealing with something I'm familiar with, I'll head for specific objects that I especially want to see. Otherwise, I'll zip along until I notice something intriguing where I'll pause and soak things in until I feel I've learned or experienced enough. If the museum deals with something I don't know much about (such as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum just west of Tucson) I'm more methodical, but not totally so. Our viewing styles result in the following: I spend a fair amount of time fidgeting at the door to the next gallery while she slowly makes her way along the walls. All of this probably has to do with personality type leavened by education and experience. Are there other museum-viewing styles? What is your modus operandi? Am I impatient, uncultured or simply weird? Please comment. Later, Donald UPDATE: Tyler Cowen spotted this post and offers thoughts on museum-going from an economics perspective, giving it a flavor that you might well find interesting. Check the comments too.... posted by Donald at September 28, 2005 | perma-link | (17) comments




Ken Kewley Exhibition
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Long ago I wrote a short blog posting about Ken Kewley, an artist whose paintings and collages I love. I find Kewley's images modest, sweet, and gorgeous, as well as full of warmth, visual perceptions, and delight in form and color. They're wide-eyed but ornery. And they put me in mind of the work of David Park, Vanessa Bell, Elmer Bischoff, David Milne -- bloat-free, unpushy talents whom critics and historians seldom rank as modernist major leaguers, yet whose work often gives me far more yummy pleasure than does that of the recognized alpha-geniuses. Kewley: Chocolate Cake with Mango (2000) I notice that Kewley is currently having a show in New York City. It's at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 37 West 57th Street, 3rd Floor, and it runs through October 28. I'll be visiting soon. You can taste-test some of Kewley's art at his own very generous website. (I lifted the image above from chez Kewley.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 28, 2005 | perma-link | (5) comments




The Confession Line?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here's a fun online conceptual-art project. It seems to me to be the descendent of a pre-home-computers, circa-1980 art project called something like The Confession Line. An artist rigged a telephone answering machine so that callers could leave personal confessions or listen to recordings of these confessions. I loved to listen in and often did. Anonymity gave confessors license to spill mucho guts, and the fact that listeners were hearing actual voices made these monologues startlingly immediate. Weird! Spooky! Arousing! Fun! But for the life of me I can't remember the actual name of this art project. Is anyone else's read-access memory in better shape than mine is? Best, Michael UPDATE: Hallelujah, my mind isn't completely gone yet. As I munched my lunchtime salad, it came back to me: The art project I'm remembering was called The Apology Line. Here's a site dedicated to it. I'm sorry to learn that Allan Bridge, the artist behind The Apology Line, died in 1995.... posted by Michael at September 28, 2005 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, September 15, 2005


As Bad as All That?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Is the situation in architecture really as bad as all that? Does the modernist/decon/po-mo crowd -- the field's ruling elite -- really sneer at common and traditional tastes, pleasures, and satisfactions? Can they possibly be as puffed-up and arrogant as all that? You betcha. John Massengale tells an all-too-common story here and here. John's conclusion: "More and more, what the architects like best is what the public hates most." Which provokes a question: Why should this we-know-better-than-you attitude be so prevalent in architecture? In some other fields -- acting, movies -- the walls crumbled long ago. In fact, only twenty years ago architecture seemed on the verge of rejoining the human race. But the field's academic, prize-giving, and political elites regrouped; they snagged back control. And, these days, they're doing their impressive best to persuade us that we're in the midst not of a tragic repeat of '50s-modernist devastation (my view) but of an architectural golden age. Key thing to remember: They don't want to serve, they want to dictate. Not only that, they want us applauding, expressing gratitude, and throwing money. Hmm. Whaddya say we jeer 'em instead? Hey, is anyone else as tired of translucent new buildings as I am? As the owner of a new iMac, I'm happy to agree that semi-transparent geometry makes for a cool home computer. Looks very nifty on a desktop. But what kind of fool thinks it appropriate to insert a gigantic iMac into a traditional urban fabric? Earth to architects: Buildings are not standalone objects that we buy at a store, lug home, and use privately. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 15, 2005 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, September 14, 2005


Mad-Dog
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Freaky! The oddball things that people get up to with Photoshop ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 14, 2005 | perma-link | (6) comments





Friday, September 2, 2005


Donald on the Pebble Beach Concours
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Car-styling buff Donald Pittenger files a report for 2Blowhards from the recent edition of Pebble Beach's legendary classic-car competition. *** Pebble Beach Concours D'Élégance 2005 Report by Donald Pittenger For a moment I thought I should ask Ralph Lauren if he needed help pushing his 1938 Alfa Romeo race car. But there seemed to be enough helping hands already, so I continued on my way towards the snack area where champagne flutes awaited dehydrated automobile fanatics. Such is life at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Élégance classic automobile show. What it is I suppose a touch of background is needed for any Blowhards readers from, oh, New York City let's say, who feel nervous when out of sight of concrete, have no idea what a drivers license is used for and believe golf is a German geographical term. The French phrase "concours d'élégance" can be translated as "elegance competition" and has been used for meets where seriously fancy automobiles are judged on design and perfection of presentation. There are several shows of this kind that are well-known to car fans world-wide. These include the shows at Villa d'Este on Lake Como in Italy, Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne by Paris (click here and look for "Classic"), and the concours at the famed Pebble Beach golf course near Carmel-by-the-Sea on the California coast just south of Monterey Bay. The Pebble Beach Concours has been held annually starting in 1950, though it was cancelled in 1960 due to bad weather. (Travel tip: the central California coast has "lousy" weather during the summer -- plenty of fog banks and daytime highs in the low 60s Fahrenheit. Clear weather is more likely in the fall. I have fond November memories of doing push-ups on Fort Ord gravel while gazing on the sun-lit factories of Monterey's Cannery Row down the bay.) Cars are displayed around the 18th green of the golf links, directly in front of the Del Monte Lodge which serves as the reviewing stand for the awards presentation part of the show. Some of the illustrations for this article offer background glimpses of the fabulous setting. A controversial aspect of top-line classic car shows is the degree of restoration and polish on display. A number of critics say that the prize-winning cars are over-restored -- exhibiting a degree of perfection not even found the day they rolled out of the factory. Ditto the spit-and-polish of the display. For instance, owners proudly open hoods revealing gleaming, oil-smudge-free engines. One possible man to blame for this is the late J.B. Nethercutt, whose 1958 Pebble Beach winning duPont set new standards at the time. JB could afford it, being part of the Merle Norman cosmetics clan. Like horse racing, classic car showing is an expensive proposition, so most award winners are seriously rich. The folks who manage the Concours usually have a featured car brand ("marque" is the term of art here) along with a few subsidiary features. In 2003,... posted by Michael at September 2, 2005 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, August 25, 2005


Donald Pittenger on John Sloan
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm pleased to announce that Donald Pittenger has agreed to start writing as a full-fledged Blowhard. Visitors have had a chance to enjoy Donald's thoughts and observations about cars, cities, and illustration. I'm looking forward with great eagerness to what else he comes up with. Donald has some traveling on the near-term agenda, but he'll begin regular blogging on his return in late September. Until then, I'm glad to say that I have some pieces that Donald has written waiting on the hard drive; I'll be putting them up as Guest Postings over the next couple of weeks. Here's one of them: some thoughts about the American Ashcan School artist John Sloan. *** John Sloan -- Political Radical, Artistic Conservative by Donald Pittenger Thank heaven for Dover books. Inexpensive, well assembled (considering their price) and offering a lot of content in a variety of specialized fields. I recently bought their edition of "John Sloan on Drawing and Painting" by Ashcan School artist John Sloan, a revised and re-titled version of his "Gist of Art" that first appeared in 1939. Actually Sloan didn't write it, even though his name is on the cover. It was compiled by Helen Farr, a former student and lover who became his second wife. Much of the content was from notes taken by Farr at classes taught by Sloan at the Art Students League and supplemented by notes and recollections from other former ASL students. Sloan did go through the manuscript and made such changes as he saw fit, blessing the result as faithfully expressing his views. I bought the book because I find it interesting to read the mature views of people who know their business: I hope to learn something that might prove useful. Actually, I've never liked Sloan's paintings. And I don't like most of his politics, either. Nevertheless the book intrigued me because, although Sloan was an avowed Socialist, his views on art struck me as being conservative at the time they first appeared in print and well-nigh reactionary today. These are interesting contradictions, because many of us tend to be more consistent in our views. Not entirely consistent of course, perhaps ranging from middle-of-the-road on some matters to somewhat-extreme on others. This posting sketches Sloan's life and politics, but focuses on his art and theories of art. My main source is "John Sloan on Drawing and Painting" cited above, and I also made use of the biography "John Sloan" by John Loughery, Henry Holt, 1997. A bit of biography Sloan was born in 1871 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, a lumber and paper industry town at the time and later the home of the Piper airplane firm, builder of the famous Piper Cub light plane. His family moved to Philadelphia where Sloan attended the elite Central High School with classmates William Glackens (another Ashcan artist) and Albert Barnes (the famed art collector). Thanks to his father's nervous breakdown, Sloan had to leave high school to earn... posted by Michael at August 25, 2005 | perma-link | (13) comments





Saturday, August 13, 2005


Dutton on Evo-Crit
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- For a long time now, I've gotten more out of what's been discussed and discovered in the sciences (especially in the biological sciences) than I have out of arts criticism and arts theory. Academic "Theory" especially seems vapid, arid, and sterile -- it strikes me as nothing more than narcissistic wheel-spinning. But fractals, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology? I'm happy to admit to being an innumerate dimwit who struggles with basic science and makes do with popularizations. But all of these fields and lines of thought make my head -- and especially the part of it that's devoted to the arts -- spin. I find it odd and sad that this kind of approach hasn't taken off more. Are most artsies too double-D dumb to sink their teeth into scientific material? Have the minds of the academics been destroyed by Theory? Why are culture-people so close-minded? Perhaps many -- civilians and artsies alike -- are content to view culture through lenses that have been shaped by romanticism and modernism. Perhaps the romantic/modernist p-o-v, however played-out and absurd, suits a lot of people. Sigh. There's always the chance that I'm an idiot, of course. Perhaps I'm flat-out wrong about how earth-shaking the new-science discoveries are in their implications for the arts. Perhaps I've put my money on the wrong horse -- maybe some other fresh approach is on the verge of taking off. Or maybe it's just quirky ol' me: Maybe these evo-bio/neuroscience discoveries that mean so much to me will never mean much to many other people. Still, I'm nothing if not weatherbeaten, cussed, and (shhh) arrogant: I'm deeply convinced 1) That the official arts discussion has dried up, 2) That the official arts reflect this sterility, and 3) That the best place for the arts to find some fresh juice to feed off of is in the new sciences. In fact, there has been some terrific work done that brings together the new sciences and the arts. It just isn't widely-known. Short version: Try Ellen Dissanayake's "What Is Art For?" and "Homo Aestheticus"; Frederick Turner's "The Culture of Hope"; Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language," "The Timeless Way of Building," and "The Nature of Order"; Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind"; Leon Krier's "Architecture: Choice or Fate"; Joseph Carroll's "Literary Darwinism" ... The work of Nikos Salingaros should shiver some timbers too. Nikos' website, where he makes available a lot of terrific material, is here; 2Blowhards did a long q&a with Nikos, all five parts of which can be accessed from this webpage. And Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" -- a discussion of the blank-slate/modernist thang, and of how recent discoveries in science have refuted this view -- has a first-rate, 20ish-page general discussion of the implications of the new sciences for the arts. This work undermines and contradicts much of contemporary art's orthodoxy -- and huzzah to that. But does any of it represent the Final Word on anything? Certainly not. The arts discussion is... posted by Michael at August 13, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, August 11, 2005


The Albany Mall
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Donald Pittenger recently visited one of the true follies of mid-century American modernism, the Albany Mall, aka The Empire State Plaza. If you're in the mood for grandiose bureaucratic planning, featureless buildings, and bleak "empty spaces" decorated with bits of "modern art," then maybe a trip to Albany, NY will prove just the thing. The Empire State's Imperial Architecture in Albany by Donald Pittenger Most New York City folks will be more than happy to tell you what year it was that the city Went To Hell. (I'm not a New Yorker, but I used to spend plenty of time there and can assure you with absolute certainty that the year was 1965. Or maybe 1968. Anyhow, whenever it was that the subway employees who got jobs during the Depression retired.) This game can be played regarding the point when New York State was no longer the Empire State. And I peg it at the start of World War 2. True, California didn't overtake New York in total population until around 1961, but the war effort accelerated the shift in population, industry and influence to the west and south; after 1945, New York was running on fumes and momentum. To glimpse New York in its days of imperial glory, dig up a copy of the old Federal Writers' Project guidebook for the state. (This was one of those Depression-era make-work projects. It employed writers and photographers and the goal was to produce a guidebook for each state and selected other areas.) The New York State book was first published in 1940 and I have a copy from the sixth (1955) printing. Besides reflecting the Depression zeigeist, cooing over unions and strikes, it reveals that even at the end of the Thirties the state swarmed with major companies and important industries, upstate as well as downstate. Nothing like the (relatively) nearly empty husk it is today. Rockefeller, Imperator I mentioned momentum a moment ago. There was still some of that left when I went to work for state government in Albany in the late summer of 1970. This was a couple months before Nelson A. Rockefeller's third and final re-election as governor. (Since Rockefeller has been dead for more than a quarter-century and some younger Blowhards readers might not be familiar with him, here's a brief profile. Nelson Rockefeller was a grandson of John D. Rockefeller -- a self-made man who became one of the richest men in America. Nelson, born 1908, attended Dartmouth College and until 1958, when he was first elected governor, worked in various public roles as well as for family-owned interests. For instance, fairly fresh out of college, he worked with his father on the Rockefeller Center project in New York City. Arts-wise, he was a champion of Modernism and served the Museum of Modern Art 1932-75 in a number of capacities including trustee, treasurer, president, and board chairman. He stepped down as governor of New York State in 1973 and... posted by Michael at August 11, 2005 | perma-link | (29) comments





Thursday, July 28, 2005


Sole Creators?
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the biggest surprises I experienced on settling into the culture/media life was how messy questions of attribution often turn out to be. Teachers (as well as our own romantic fantasies) sometimes lead us to think of artworks as being the products of unique individuals. In fact, coaches, friends, technicians, spouses, editors, producers, and even corporations often play immense roles in the creation of cultural works we think of as having been created by one person. A quick handful of examples: Katharine Hepburn was a great actress, but she didn't write her own lines or block her own scenes. George Lucas' movies were certainly better when he was married to Marcia. The editor Michael Korda elicited, shaped, and published the novels of Jacqueline Susann. The British mystery writer Dick Francis stopped writing when his wife died; although the mysteries had always been marketed as being "by Dick Francis," he and his wife had in fact been a creative team. (Small personal note: To my mind, one of the bigger puzzles of the reading-and-writing game is the question, Why do so many readers enjoy imagining that the book they're reading was created by only one person? Why should this matter? Weird.) But perhaps the existence of the blogosphere is blowing some doors open. DesignObserver's Michael Bierut writes a good-natured posting confessing that he hasn't always been the sole creator of his own work, and spelling out how it is that the design process often works. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 28, 2005 | perma-link | (15) comments





Saturday, July 16, 2005


Donald on Distortion in Car Ads
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm pleased to present some more information, observations, and musings from Donald Pittenger, who has been thinking recently about visual distortions in automobile advertisements. Here's Donald Pittenger. *** (Literally) Distorted Advertising: Car Ads 1920-1970 by Donald Pittenger The 2003 Pebble Beach Concours d'Élégance classic car show included a tent where automobile artists showed their wares. One of the artists was Arthur Fitzpatrick, who was part of the "VK AF" team that illustrated a famous Pontiac advertising series from 1959 to 1972. Fitzpatrick did the cars and (the late) Van Kaufman provided the backgrounds. I loved those Pontiac ads. Kaufman's backgrounds were interesting to look at and skillfully done. Fitzpatrick's cars had wonderful reflections and highlights on their surfaces, the reflections being of Kaufman's artwork. They were a great team, and their success is indicated by the extremely long life of the advertising campaign; Pontiac wouldn't have kept shoveling the money if the ads didn't seem to pull in buyers. So I chatted briefly with Fitzpatrick, happily playing the role of shy fan who had admired his work way back in the days when I was a commercial art major in college. Then I looked over the various reproductions he was selling. Okay, this was two years ago, so I've forgotten the details -- but my impression is that I didn't see many (or any) Pontiac illustrations. What there was plenty of were pictures of Buicks he did before his Pontiac gig. I just checked his web site and see that he now has a lot of reproductions from the "VK AF" oeuvre for sale. Clearly, the Pontiac ads are his claim to fame, so it makes utter commercial sense to offer reproductions. But why did they seem to be so late in coming? Most likely it had to do with negotiating copyright or ownership issues with General Motors or its Pontiac ad agency of the time. But two years ago I was puzzled, so I looked up some "VK AF" examples and noticed something that hadn't fully hit home back when the ads were new: Fitzpatrick often seemed to be distorting the shapes of those Pontiacs, making them lower and wider than the actual cars. But not the Buicks, which seemed normal to me. 1965 Pontiac 1955 Buick Might he have held back selling reproductions due to a small tinge of professional embarrassment? I don't know, and it really doesn't much matter because Fitzpatrick by no means was the only one to distort, and the matter of distorting the appearance of cars is what I want to discuss here. But first let me set the automobile advertising illustration scene. A Brief History of Automobile Advertising Illustration I'll skip the early years and begin with the 1920s. By that decade, cars were getting pretty reliable (a theme of some ads in the early days), so "lifestyle" crept into advertising. This was in the form of either having a scene of some genteel activity such as... posted by Michael at July 16, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Thursday, June 30, 2005


Fact for the Day
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- In 1950, New York City had over 1.1 million manufacturing jobs. Today, the number of manufacturing jobs in the city totals 112,000. (Source: The Manhattan Institute.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 30, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, June 29, 2005


Typewriters and Confusing Designs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A couple of recent postings at the standout graphicsyak site DesignObserver stand out even more than usual. Rick Poynor writes an ode to his typewriter (a lovely old Olympia). "What a mixture of emotions a machine can stir," Rick writes -- typewriter nostalgia! Will digital tools make similar claims on people's emotions? Rick and many commenters note that analog media tools have a weight, heft, and tactility you don't often run across these computerized days. Sample passage: You can’t just brush the keys of a manual typewriter. You really have to hit them. That character has to arc through the air on its metal stalk and thwack the ink on to the paper. Correcting errors is messy and boring. Redrafting is worse. Typing can be an unglamorous slog. Rick's observations remind me of a book I've often wished someone would pull together: a study of the effects of writing tools on the kind of writing that writers produce. One for-instance: Writing, re-writing, and publishing in the pre-digital years was such a laborious chore that writers gave more forethought to what they committed to paper than writers do today. A consequence of these arrangements was a tendency for writers to strike a pose that can impress us now as formal, solemn, and self-important. After all, when a given task is going to take a lot out of you, you're likely to make a big deal out of addressing it. By contrast, digitech makes expressing yourself trivially easy. One consequence may be something I often notice: the tendency of many people -- writers included -- to vent and drivel. Good god, but a lot of people feel compelled to express their every passing feeling these days, don't they? (Think cellphones.) Once self-expression is easy, why not indulge? Many people seem to feel the need to do the self-expression-thang even when they've got zero to express. In the digital era, people's behavior seems to have become more ejaculatory and less reflective than it once was. Before we crack up about the word "ejaculatory," let me note that the distinction between "reflective speech" and "ejaculatory speech" is of long-standing. It can also be a useful one. Short version: Reflective speech equals "You've gone off to think about it, and you have returned with well-considered images, stories, and thoughts." Ejaculatory speech is its opposite. Ejaculatory speech is anything but thought-over; instead, it's direct expression. The meaning of the specific words that are said or written in ejaculatory speech counts for far less than the enactment of the behavior that the words are a small part of. "Life is both tragic and comic" is an example of reflective speech. "Whoa, dude! Un-fuckin'-real!!!!" -- accompanied by the usual facial expressions and hand gestures -- is an example of ejaculatory speech. Side note: Much of the language in advertisements is ejaculatory speech. And -- whewboy -- do I ever see a lot of tantalizing connections to be made here. The advent of... posted by Michael at June 29, 2005 | perma-link | (7) comments





Wednesday, June 22, 2005


Fischl on Art-World Changes
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Eric Fischl was my fave of the American artists who made a splash in the '80s. His images of decadent suburbia cast a sinister-sexy spell, and the way he projected these sleazy/mundane moments in heroic-epic terms struck me as both amusing and artistically plausible. Fischl also showed some daring (and talent) in the way he was attracted to both edgy material and traditional figurative easel painting. No surprise that he eventually associated himself with the New York Academy of Art, the prissiest and most reactionary -- in a good way, if you know what I mean -- of the East Coast art schools. Eric Fischl: Bad Boy (1981) I ran across an informative interview with Fischl in, believe it or not, Hampton Jitney magazine. In it, Fischl muses about how the artworld has changed since the '80s. The piece isn't online, so I'll retype one passage here: What has changed over these last decades is the gallery system. Galleries are in transition now because of the art fairs, auction houses, and the internet. Primary dealers are becoming obsolete. Younger artists understand this implicitly and so don't tie themselves down to one dealer. They are generally more entrepreneurial than my generation was. Also, collectors are driving the art world more now than in the past. They are able to find young artists before daelers and curators find them. In fact, dealers and curators look to collectors to see who they should be paying attention to. That has been a big change. The downside is that the new collectors don't seem to know or care that much about the history of art and so approach art in much the same manner as they do their business. They look for trends. They try and corner markets. They buy low and sell high. They treat art as a commodity. It is what they know and what they best. Good for business, bad for art. Reminds me of many things we discuss here at the blog. Set a medium free from its traditional technologies and gatekeepers, and what you wind up with often seems to be both an explosion of art availability, and a de-sacralizing of the art itself. Funny how that works. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 22, 2005 | perma-link | (9) comments





Tuesday, June 14, 2005


Steve on Golf Courses
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I have a pretty broad conception of what "art" and "culture" can mean: ads, TV, and magazine design as well as concert music and museum art. I like to think that I'm more about what culture is than what it ought to be. Even so, I was taken up short when I first read Steve Sailer's American Conservative article on golf-course-architecture as art. Silly me, I'd never given the topic a moment's thought. Yet there it is: landscape architecture, full of aesthetic qualities, there all around us, and in popular use. I'll take an eye-opener like Steve's piece over yet another run-through of conventional "what is art?" aesthetic theory any day. Steve has now put the piece online, and has dolled it up with lots of helpful photos and links. It can be read here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 14, 2005 | perma-link | (5) comments





Saturday, June 11, 2005


Donald on the Chrysler 300
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I was delighted to learn that Blowhards friend and illustration buff Donald Pittenger is a car conoisseur as well as a fan of automobile design. It's a too-often-unstated assumption here at the blog that "culture" is a broader and more-diverse thing than pictures hanging on a museum wall. (Though we like those too!) Pleasurable, beautiful, and worth-noticing cultural experiences are to be found all around us: in our buildings and our neighborhoods; in our media diets; in how we clothe and feed ourselves; in how we decorate our surroundings -- and, of course, in the cars we drive. Today we're very pleased to have Donald checking in with some observations about the snazzy new Chrysler 300. *** Driving in Controversial Style: The Chrysler 300 by Donald Pittenger Sometimes I wonder if my teachers in junior high and high school -- and, yes, even college -- knew that instead of taking notes I was sketching planes and cars in my notebooks. I like to think they didn't, but teachers as well as parents usually know a lot more than they let on. Of course it was a harmless activity: the only thing that suffered was my GPA. I've always been a car nut, at least where appearance is concerned. My parents used to tell me that I could distinguish convertibles from sedans when I was only a couple years old. I really got "into" cars in 1950 when my dad let on that he would be shopping for a brand new car to supplement our 1941 Pontiac. So I spent a couple months snipping out cars from ads and sticking them on my bedroom wall. Then I got to wondering what the 1951 Pontiacs would look like (Dad decided to stick with Pontiac); this was my first brush with the notion of future car design. 1951 Pontiac A few years later I enrolled in the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild which, after World War 2, was a competition sponsored by General Motors where youngsters designed cars and built scale models: top prizes were generous scholarships. I found that I couldn't really settle on designs, but this was moot because I lacked the tools and ability to build the required models anyway. Nevertheless, I thought it would be neat to be a professional car stylist. (I touch on how I drifted away from this career path in my March 5, 2005 Blowhards post.) Despite never having become a styling pro, I've maintained an active interest in car styling throughout my adult life. I have many of the major books on the subject and buy fancy (and expensive) Italian styling magazines when I see them. And I still doodle imaginary cars -- never real ones. A car design I couldn't have come up with The "hot" sedan for 2004-5 is the Chrysler 300. Not only is it selling well, it garnered almost every "car of the year" type award from various car buff magazines. This is in spite... posted by Michael at June 11, 2005 | perma-link | (22) comments





Wednesday, June 8, 2005


Confessions of a Naked Model
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- We're pleased to run another guest posting by "J," an artist and illustrator who helps pay the bills by working as an artists' model. We're also pleased to let you know that J's art professional art career has been making impressive strides. J recently placed an illustration with the Wall Street Journal. And a piece of J's has been selected for inclusion in Art@Large's upcoming show, "New Erotix," which will be on display from July 7-23. Here's some information about the show. J's newly-revamped site, where you can enjoy her art and explore some fun links, is here. J's previous postings for us are here, here, and here, and here. J's modeling site, where you can enjoy some visuals of the lady herself as well as get in touch with J for modeling dates, is here. You can read an interview with J here. To clear up a little possible confusion: J's professional name is Molly Crabapple. Now, on to J's latest bulletin from the naked-modeling front. Tits and Artifice Yesterday, my uncle found my modeling website. Witness to my plump and gawky adolescence, he could only gasp. "Molly, you sure don't look like your pictures!" "No shit" I wanted to snap. I wouldn't have been so angry, except that a week earlier, a snaggle-toothed client had said the same thing when I showed up at his hotel room for some "photos." Fresh from a long day of portfolio drop offs, I looked like an art student, sans makeup, with circles under the eyes. "In your portfolio," said my client, "you seemed like a goddess." Beyond my client's snootiness and my uncle's disbelief lies a misconception that has implications too high-falutin' for this column. Implications that effect art, feminism, and how women view their bodies. The misconception is that photos tell the truth. Of course I don't look like my photos. Schlepping down the street in worn-down heels, I lack several crucial components of pictorial swank. First, the makeup. For any photo shoot, I wear ten pounds, applied by a trained professional, plus hair spray-sugared into a confection as fragile as an Argentinean coup. This goes for any look, no matter how "natural." Then there's the posing. Towards the camera go those round bazooms -- way from it goes the big Puerto Rican ass. But mostly, for my transformation into goddesshood, I thank lighting and Photoshop. You may have seen me in the fluorescent glare of the Barnes and Noble bathroom. But in photos, gelled, reflected, soft-boxed lights caress me like Rudolph Valentino. Any blemishes left are taken out by the kind scalpel of Dr. Adobe. Of course, I'm not saying anything to surprise passport holders to the world of "glamour photography." We know that our favorite Playmates, sans peroxide, Photoshop and spray-on tan, are girls like our (more attractive) neighbors. Witness Maxim's Hometown Hotties contest. Hundreds of girls apply, all pretty, but all human and diverse. By the time the 12 finalists are... posted by Michael at June 8, 2005 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, May 26, 2005


Building Boom
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- America's current orgy of neomodernist-style building may be the largest since modernism itself laid waste to our cities and suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. (This is strictly my impression and not anything official, by the way.) How well is this building boom likely to work out? My bet is that we'll live to regret it as much as we now regret what we did to ourselves in the post-WWII years. A sad/enraging fact is how much of this activity is being paid for by you and me. The New York Times sees fit to call the aggressive and difficult Thom Mayne "the U.S. government's favorite architect," for instance. And Mayne was recently given an award by the federal government's General Services Administration's Design Excellence program. The what? The GSA's Design Excellence program, that's what. Since 1994, the GSA has been awarding a lot of government work to edgy architecture firms. This is a large and deliberate program that was the brainchild of Edward A. Feiner; it's full of review boards (aka, well-connected experts handing commissions to each other); it's spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money; and it's meant to class up government buildings -- or rather to make them shiney and contemporary. As you might imagine, the architecture establishment loves the Design Excellence program. I wonder whether taxpayers -- ie., you and me -- appreciate the results, though. The guidelines the GSA is following were established in 1964, not exactly a great time in architecture history. Two of these guidelines: Producing facilities that reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the Federal Government, emphasizing designs that embody the finest contemporary architectural thought. Avoiding an official style. Hmmm .... But on to the visuals. Let's compare a couple of traditional federal courthouses to a couple of twinkly Design Excellence showpieces. Traditional first. This is Milwaukee's federal courthouse, built originally in the 1890s and then expanded in 1930. Here's Butte, Montana's federal courthouse, built in 1903: These are, in other words, the kinds of buildings our government used to build. Both are -- at the very least -- solid and attractive. They look like they're here for the longterm. They're also anything but disorienting. They're instantly comprehensible; they look like the kind of thing you expect courthouses to look like. And both contribute to the urban fabric; you don't take a glimpse at them and start making plans to flee to the suburbs. Both buildings also -- IMHO -- do a good job of living up to some of the GSA's guidelines. They express an easy-to-grasp dignity of a kind many people would like to feel their government possesses. And neither building could be said to impose an official style. They're in quite dramatically different styles, in fact. The Milwaukee courthouse's style is neo-Richardsonian/neo-romanesque while the Butte building's style is Renaissance-revival. Over to the Design Excellence courthouses. Here's a Thom Mayne courthouse for Eugene, Oregon. What strikes me instantly about this building is... posted by Michael at May 26, 2005 | perma-link | (48) comments




Gehry Costs
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Interesting to learn from the WashPost's Bob Thompson and Jacqueline Trescott about imbroglios at Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the musueum's director is resigning. In recent years, attendance at the Corcoran has been flat, and losses have piled up. Gehry's proposed Corcoran addition What fascinates me most about the story, though, is the way that the mess is partly a consequence of the Corcoran's having fallen for the Bilbao dream -- the hope that a signature piece of flossy new architecture might solve all its problems. In 1999, the museum commissioned a Frank Gehry addition. But funding has stalled for a number of reasons: The dot-com bust vaporized a lot of pledges, for one. Oopsie. For another, estimates for the cost of the Gehry addition have risen from an initial $60 million to a current $200 million. Double oopsie. Small question? How eager is the public really to make yet another pilgramage to yet another Gehry titanium ribbons-and-bows showpiece? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 26, 2005 | perma-link | (7) comments





Thursday, May 19, 2005


Donald Pittenger on Flair, Part 2
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Today we continue with the conclusion of Donald Pittenger's musings on flair in art and painting. Please click on the images that accompany Donald's words: most will pop up in a larger window. You'll be able to eyeball the art in much better detail. Part one of Donald's essay is here. *** Skill and Flair in Painting, Part Two by Donald Pittenger The matter of artistic "flair" Confession: I tossed the word "flair" into the original article on the spur of the moment. I gave it almost no thought, yet I used it because it struck me as being apt. What do I mean by flair in painting? Several things. Flair might be a dramatic sense created by the artist. In David Michaelis' book "N.C. Wyeth: A Biography" (Knopf, New York, 1998, pages 199-200), Wyeth's version of a scene in "Treasure Island" (where the pirate Israel Hands climbs a mast to attack Jim Hawkins and is killed by Jim) is contrasted with Walter Paget's earlier illustration of the scene. By N.C. Wyeth By Walter Paget [Editor's note: Since I couldn't find the specific images Donald refers to, I had to settle for the above comparison instead. Apologies to all.] Michaelis notes that Paget depicts Hands starting his fall after the shooting, with Hawkins higher up the mast, smoking pistols in hand. But Wyeth, he explains, heightened the drama by selecting a moment just before Hawkins fired. In the Paget version, the viewer quickly sees what happened whereas the Wyeth version leaves the viewer wondering if Hawkins will fire or whether the sword-wielding pirate will cut him down instead. Flair might be how paint is applied, the quality or nature of the brushstrokes. Consider Maxfield Parrish and John Singer Sargent. By Maxfield Parrish By John Singer Sargent Parrish's technique was essentially classical. His paintings were carefully planned, sometimes using Golden Mean geometry in their composition. Human figures were drawn from carefully-staged photographs of costumed models taken by Parrish himself. His usual model for many years was his ultimately shabbily-treated mistress Sue Lewin. Sue posed for both male and female characters. A byproduct of this is that many people in the paintings -- often in the same painting -- look somewhat similar, like Sue actually. For example, see his "The Lantern Bearers." Parrish: "The Lantern Bearers" Once the composition and photos were in hand, Parrish painted the grisaille (monochrome-tonal) layer. Then he would apply layer after layer of thinned-oil colored glazes until the work was completed. Parrish: "Dreaming/October" His unfinished version (there is also a completed work) of "Dreaming/October" contains both grisaille and completed areas, allowing us to glimpse how he constructed his paintings. There was no drama or flair in how the paint itself appeared in isolation from the context of the work as a whole. Sargent, like most other Post-Impressionist era painters, dispensed with grisaille and simply slapped on oil paint pretty much as it came out of the tube, mixing colors and perhaps... posted by Michael at May 19, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, May 13, 2005


Donald Pittenger on Flair in Art, Part One
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Our friend Donald Pittenger's recent posting on illustration and fine art elicited a lot of interest as well as many interesting comments -- all of which has prompted Donald to do some musing about a classic art-question: what's the role of skill in art? I'm pleased that Donald has pulled together his thoughts on the topic. Here's Part One. *** Skill and Flair in Painting, Part One by Donald Pittenger In a previous post I perhaps rashly suggested that skill and flair were important factors in artistic quality. For example, whereas I found Norman Rockwell a technically accomplished painter, I couldn't categorize his work as being truly first-rate because it lacked what I called "flair." These notions of skill and flair inspired several comments to my article. The present post is an attempt to respond to these comments by dealing with the concepts in more detail. By Norman Rockwell What some commenters said. Billy Tantra noted: I've got a professor who says that it's only insecure people who want an obvious sign of 'skill' in the art they look at. According to him, people who are in the know have no need for that. By Jackson Pollack Miss Grundy states: Okay, as a total ignoramus about art, I'll bite -- if we're not appreciating some measure of skill, then what are we appreciating? Or are we somehow divorcing "art" or "artistry" from "skill"? (You see how ignorant I am.) … This is what the evidently insecure, unwashed masses fix on when they scorn modern painting, right? "I could have done that!" "My three-year-old could have done that!" And then are able to dismiss Painting as a complete hoax -- "at least drawing and illustration shows some skill" … "Someone help me understand this. I look at a Jackson Pollack and *do* see skill/artistry, because I know if I dripped paint on a canvas, in a million years, it would never look like his." By Edward Hopper Benjamin Hemric observed: I've always loved Norman Rockwell. In a way I'm surprised that he wasn't more popular with modernists because he seems to me to be a supreme "symbol" maker and creator of iconographic images (something that I imagine the modernists value highly). In my opinion, his paintings went beyond realism. They captured and communicated an "essence" (and were therefore similar to another favorite artist of mine, Edward Hopper). I think if his message had been more obscure (like, to an extent, Edward Hopper's), popular among fewer people (more elite) and had been a leftist one (rather than an establishment one), modernists would have hailed him as one of the great artists of our time … I'm surprised that people feel that Rockwell lacked "flair." Are there examples to show what is meant by "flair"? Or, using another approach, how might his illustrations have been done differently if he had done them with more flair? I apologize to the commenters for leaving sometimes substantial parts out due... posted by Michael at May 13, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, May 11, 2005


Nikos Reactions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Say what you will about 2Blowhards favorite, the architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. But you can't say he leaves people cold. Cases in point: City planner, photographer and all-around civilized guy Konrad Perlman reviews Nikos' current book "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction." Verdict: thumbs emphatically up. Nikos' book is "the clearest description of the state of architecture and the destructiveness of the Decon movement." It's a lovely and appreciative review, by the way -- Konrad writes from deep familiarity with culture and pleasure, as well as mucho feet-on-the-ground professional experience. Meanwhile, San Francisco's well-known bookstore William Stout Architectural Books has seen fit, in their online catalog, to describe Nikos' book this way: "This book offers an hysterical right-wing analysis of post-modern architecture, warning us of the existence of the "Derrida virus", and crowning Christopher Alexander the new Albert Speer." Evidently determined to discourage sales, William Stout has hiked the book's price by eight dollars. I'm going to let down my usual mask of bemusement in order to ask a sincere question. Do you suppose that it has occurred to whoever wrote William Stout's catalog copy that he/she is calling Nikos, Christopher Alexander, and those who find their work enlightening and helpful not just "hysterical right-wingers" but fascists? In any case: What's not to love and admire in the level-headed and humane rationality of the architectural left, eh? You can buy Nikos's wonderful -- and controversial -- book here (and for eight dollars less than at William Stout's). You can access 2Blowhards' mindblowing, five-part q&a with Nikos here. Nikos' own site, where you can enjoy a ton of brain-expanding freebies, is here. Best, Michael UPDATE: Many thanks to David Sucher, who had the inspired idea of finding out what the facade of William Stout Architectural Books looks like. The very Nikos Salingaros-friendly answer:... posted by Michael at May 11, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Tuesday, May 3, 2005


Weirdos and Culture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Arts and Letters Daily links to a hilarious memoir by Terry Castle about her friendship with the recently-deceased intellectual legend Susan Sontag. In one passage, Castle takes a friend to Sontag's apartment to introduce her to the great lady: Half an hour later, somewhat blowsily, Sontag finally emerged from a back room. I introduced her to Blakey, and said rather nervously that I hoped we hadn't woken her up from a nap. It was as if I had accused her of never having read Proust, or of watching soap operas all day. Her face instantly darkened and she snapped at me violently. Why on earth did I think she'd been having a nap? Didn't I know she never had naps? Of course she wasn't having a nap! She would never have a nap! Never in a million years! What a stupid remark to make! How had I gotten so stupid? A nap -- for God's sake! My main response: What a weirdo! John Massengale reprints a Sharon Waxman piece about the film director David O. Russell. In one passage, Waxman describes Russell's behavior on the set of his recent film "I [Heart] Huckabees" this way: Mr. Russell is almost never in the usual director's position behind the monitor. Giddy and childlike, he rolls on the ground, dances, does push-ups and shouts at the actors with a megaphone. ''I never want it to end,'' he whispers. Mr. Russell starts the day wearing a suit, but it's slowly coming off: first the jacket, then the shirt. Also, he keeps rubbing his body up against the women and men on the set -- actors, friends, visitors. My main response: what a weirdo! At the moment, I'm currently going through Robert Greenberg's Teaching Company lecture series on Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky might have been designed by God specifically to have his life turned into a Ken Russell movie. A hypersensitive mama's boy right from the outset, Tchaikovsky grew up to become compulsively addicted to cigarettes, booze, and 14 year old boys. With age, he became ever more delusional and paranoid. He imagined slights where there were none, and he held grudges unforgivingly for decades at a stretch. At one point, Tchaikovsky convinced himself that what he needed most was to be married --- and so he went and married the first woman who'd take him. (She turned out to be crazy in her own right, as well as a nymphomaniac.) In despair over how badly the marriage was working out, Tchaikovsky became hysterical; he walked into a freezing river in an attempt to commit suicide. In fact, he didn't even catch a cold. A short while after leaving his marriage, he developed a walloping case of hemorrhoids. Convinced that he was dying, Tchaikovsky had his will drawn up. My main response: What a weirdo! The lesbian feminist Andrea Dworkin, who recently died, not only all but called all instances of heterosexual intercourse rape; she was married to a gay man,... posted by Michael at May 3, 2005 | perma-link | (90) comments





Friday, April 22, 2005


Architecture Elsewhere
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * John Massengale reports on an absurdly anti-urban new proposal for New York's West Side. Note that the proposal comes from a former Chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard School of Design. I often find myself dreaming about what a happier and more pleasant place America would be if only Harvard disappeared off the face of the planet ... * Richard Meier is one of the starchitects whose sparkly new buildings are defacing Manhattan's beautiful old Greenwich Village. What a pleasure to learn that his glassy cages are poorly constructed, and leak. * At City Comforts recently, Laurence Aurbach blogged about a perfectly hideous Thom Mayne proposal for a new Alaska capitol building. Good news: plans to build the new capitol have been put on hold. Finances seem to be the main reason -- but public dislike of the proposal also played a role. Moral: let's keep rooting, louder and louder, against bad buildings and bad urbanism. * Catesby Leigh is a first-class architecture-and-urbanism critic, especially trustworthy and enlightening on the topic of the various new traditionalisms. His new piece is -- typically for Leigh -- a little prissy but 100% right as well. I hope there isn't a connection between prissy and right ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 22, 2005 | perma-link | (28) comments





Wednesday, April 13, 2005


More Silver
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I noticed a while back that many -- and make that many -- of the cars featured in car ads these days are silver. Well, as far as I can tell, since my posting the trend has only continued to gather steam. In my never-ending quest to provide a little substance for my otherwise content-free blogging, I took it upon myself to do some actual research, thumbing through the ads in the current issue of The New Yorker. Final tally: Total number of car ads: 10. Number of cars in those ads that are silver: 6.5. (One of these silver cars has the faintest bit of brown mixed in with the silver.) Given the number of colors that a car in a car ad might be painted, what are the odds that 2/3 of the cars in a magazine issue's car ads would be the exact same color? Any theories about why we're seeing so much silver? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 13, 2005 | perma-link | (23) comments





Saturday, April 9, 2005


Architecture Elsewhere
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * John Massengale spells out what's wrong with Christian de Portzamparc's proposed new co-op building on lower Park Ave. (Follow the links for more images and comments.) John gives Starbuck's a little what-for too. * The building I'm currently seething about is this flashy Gwathmey-Siegel atrocity, now nearing completion a few blocks from where I live. Where I live is Greenwich Village. Let me repeat that: Greenwich Village. Think low-lying brick buildings; mucho sidewalk life; a counterculture atmosphere; zig-zagging and leafy streets. (Check out the building behind the Gwathmey-Siegel, for instance.) The Village is one of the few homey -- cozy, quirky, human-scale -- neighborhoods in Manhattan. What kind of a developer (and what kind of an architect) would look at such a neighborhood and think: "Hey, you know what I think I'll put there? A tall, angular, gleaming, perfume bottle!" I have a word for people who think this way, and the word is "asshole." I can't help admiring the project's motto/tagline/whatever: "Sculpture for Living." To whom could such a tagline appeal? One possibility: the dumbest kind of fashion victim. * Thanks to visitor Kevin Hurley for pointing out this good Anchorage Daily News article. It concerns Thom Mayne's winning design for a new Alaska state capitol building. Surprise, surprise: some Alaskans don't like it. (It looks like a Photoshop 101 exercise to me.) Brief passage: "Many called the designs sci-fi, or simply ugly, and described Mayne's dome as a big egg or even a nuclear reactor." Mayne, who recently won the prestigious Pritzker Prize -- and about whom I blogged here -- seems to be doing his best to play beleaguered, forward-looking, eager to help, and not-backing-down. But he's unlikely -- to say the least -- to oblige with the kind of traditional-looking and traditional-feeling capitol building many people might prefer. What Mayne does is zigzags. Laurence Aurbach posts some observations and opinions here. * I recently walked down 54th St. in Manhattan for the first time in months and got a shock. The newly redone Museum of Modern Art faces 53rd St. but backs up on 54th St. And -- despite the care that has been lavished on the building's chic-minimalist design -- its relationship to 54th St. is appalling: one kindergarten-level urbanism mistake after another. A little searching turned up David Sucher providing a photo and many sensible criticisms, and a down-to-earth and eloquent Witold Rybczynski review in Slate. Nice Rybczynski quote about what it's like these days to walk down 54th St.: The effect of 196 unrelieved feet of corrugated aluminum is extremely unpleasant. It looks like the sort of temporary hoarding that is used to keep people from falling into an excavation at a building site, but without the posters and fliers. * Can buildings and developments in traditional styles stink too? DesignObserver's Lorraine Wild thinks that Southern Californian developers aren't just overdoing the "Tuscan" style, they're doing it badly. * James Kunstler's April Eyesore of the Month... posted by Michael at April 9, 2005 | perma-link | (14) comments





Saturday, April 2, 2005


Guest Posting -- Leon Krier
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- About a week ago, we ran a Guest Posting by Laurence Aurbach about the great New Classicist architect and thinker Leon Krier. Not for the first time, Krier had been called a Nazi sympathizer by a self-righteous Modernist. Today we run a Guest Posting by Leon Krier himself. Thanks are again due to Laurence Aurbach, who has been in touch with Krier, and who has obtained permission for us to run a brief statement. A bit of background: Classical architecture -- the basic language of much Western building and town-making for a couple of thousand years -- has been reviled by many Modernists since the Second World War as complicit in Naziism. The thinking is that what a couple of thousand years of Western Civ led to were the horrors of WWII. Thus, everything associated with those couple of thousand years of Western Civ, including its architecture, needed to be thrown out. We needed to begin again from a blank slate. (Hence, in part anyway, the blankness of much Modernist architecture.) Classical architecture, from this point of view, was at the very least an enabler of Naziism, if not a straightforward expression of it. It sounds absurd, but this is how it was (and, by some, still is) seen: the good Modernist demonstrates his opposition to Naziism by thwarting Classical architecture. Sigh: this is the kind of thing that passes in the arts worlds for deep political thinking ... Much of Leon Krier's life has been devoted to rehabilitating Western Classical architecture as a living tradition and practice. Beautiful and humane buildings, neighborhoods, and towns ... Doesn't it make infinitely more sense to understand them as among the flowers of Western civ -- and to understand Naziism as an outbreak of barbarism, not civilization? Civilization is what's to be cherished; Classical architecture and Classical (and traditional) towns represent some of what's best in civilization. Besides, look at the havoc Modernists have inflicted on our cities, towns, and homes. Which is the truly destructive force: Classicism or Modernism? To rehabilitate Classicism, Krier and Maurice Culot wrote a book investigating the notorious Nazi architect Albert Speer, who designed many overblown Classical fantasias, and even built some. This was a courageous move on Krier and Culot's part, because Speer is the man Modernists love to point at: See! A Nazi! Who loved Classicism! See! Krier and Culot's book was clearly intended to pry apart the association between Classical building and Naziism. After all, the Nazis built in other styles too, and totalitarian regimes haven't exactly been shy about using Modernism. Given these facts, why pick on Classicism? Can a bad person choose a good style to work in? Answer: of course, it happens all the time, and it means nothing whatsoever about whether that style itself is good or bad, let alone whether it's being well or foolishly used. But aggressive and antagonistic idiots (who often don't seem to have looked at the book) like to believe... posted by Michael at April 2, 2005 | perma-link | (22) comments





Thursday, March 31, 2005


Prince Charles on Architecture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back in 1989, when Prince Charles published "A Vision of Britain," I was prepared to find it naive, laughable, or worse. What could the Prince possibly have to contribute to the conversation about architecture and urbanism? Instead I found his book articulate, full of good sense, and quite moving. John Massengale reprints one of the Prince's recent speeches. Here's an excerpt: As important as creativity is in all aspects of life, I simply do not see why it should be used as an excuse to sacrifice literally thousands of years of continuity with tradition in the process. In this regard, the desperate obsession with being “modern” seems rather old-fashioned – after all Modernism is only a style. But why can’t we be obsessed with being, above all, “human?” That way, I believe, lies true modernity since the process of life itself involves a subtle balance between the past and the future. Most of us need roots and a sense of belonging in order to feel some degree of security and meaning. Our built environment best enshrines that psychological need in a physical form. And in a world dependent on technology, surely we need a contrast in our surroundings that reflects our innate humanity and not just a continuity of the DVD player or the lap-top computer? There is plenty of scope, then, for the creative mind in applying the principles of traditional urbanism to contemporary human needs. Creativity is important, but it is not a trump card. Nothing wrong with this man's taste or brains, as far as I can tell. I notice that an Amazon Reader-Reviewer who dislikes the book can't resist comparing the Prince to Hitler. Sigh: how would the leftie-modernist team score any points at all if they didn't have Hitler to compare their opponents to? Visitors curious to eyeball the structures new-traditionalist architects are designing and building should enjoy this A Vision of Europe page. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 31, 2005 | perma-link | (12) comments





Friday, March 25, 2005


Donald Pittenger on Illustration
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm pleased to report that our friend Donald Pittenger continues to respond to my proddings and coaxings. His new mini-memoir/essay concerns a great topic: illustration and fine art. As ever, Donald's reminiscences and ruminations raise all kinds of juicy questions. For instance: it's a simple fact of life that illustrators are often far more skillful as craftspeople than contempo fine artists are. What's to be made of this? What, more generally, is the role of technique and skill in the visual arts? Further lines of inquiry: most of us who get hooked on looking-at-visuals start off with the commercial and popular arts -- CD jackets, ads, magazines ... How and why are we led from such interests and pleasures into the Fine Arts? Is Fine Art a better thing, or just a different game? Given the wealth of hyper-talented, striking visual material that the commercial world generates, why should we bother with Fine Art at all? These are just a few of the questions Donald's essay set off for me, anyway. I think many readers will find the piece as informative and provocative as I did. Please be sure to click on the images; most are pop-ups. Donald's previous Guest Postings can be seen here, here, and here. *** Fine Art and Illustration by Donald Pittenger I've enjoyed looking at well-executed pictures since childhood. But I’m surprised I didn’t curb this early enthusiasm, especially as a youth. You see, youth is when one is most susceptible to subtle pressures in the form of High Culture expectations regarding Proper Art Consumption. Yet somehow I never felt guilty about savoring drawings by Austin Briggs, Noel Sickles and their ilk: mere illustrators, not in the Pantheon of Fine Art. Worse, in the early part of their careers they actually drew comic strips!! (For the record, Sickles did the aviation strip "Scorchy Smith" and Briggs took over "Flash Gordon" from Alex Raymond. Later they became illustrators and their work appeared in major publications such as Life and Saturday Evening Post.) By Austin Briggs By Noel Sickles Sometimes illustrators themselves felt the High Culture heat. Here's a quote from a letter sent by famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth to Sidney Marsh Chase, an artist friend (originally quoted on page 171 of David Michaelis' book "N.C. Wyeth: A Biography", Knopf, New York, 1998): "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed -- one cannot merge into the other. The fact is you have got to drop one absolutely before attempting the other." From the context of Michaelis' book, this was written around 1910 when Wyeth was in his late 20s and embittered after a falling-out with his teacher and mentor Howard Pyle. Although he had to illustrate to support his family and enjoyed the act of illustrating, Wyeth kept trying to prove himself as a Painter (capital-P) for the rest of his life. Wyeth the illustrator My take from the biography is that one thing that distinguished illustration for Wyeth was an imperative... posted by Michael at March 25, 2005 | perma-link | (23) comments





Wednesday, March 23, 2005


Thom Mayne/Quinlan Terry
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- As I'm sure you've read, the architecture world's most prestigious award, the Pritzker Prize, has been given to Thom Mayne, an L.A. architect known for 1) not having been able to build much until recently; and for 2) the aggressive, tearing-it-down/blowing-it-up quality of the work he has been able to build. Here's an L.A. Times article about Mayne, with a link to a slideshow of Mayne's work. It's a surprisingly frank piece: There is nothing traditionally beautiful or explicitly welcoming about his designs. "I'm interested in conflict and confrontation," Mayne said. His buildings, often cloaked in canted or folded metal screens, giving them a dramatic silver-gray cast, have a muscular presence. They use fragmented forms to express the anomie of contemporary life — and of sprawling, centerless Los Angeles in particular ... Although Mayne tends to describe his architecture as progressive and optimistic, others see its forms as alienating, even nihilistic. To the walkways suspended above the playground of the Science Center School in Exposition Park, finished last year, Mayne added metal screens that from certain angles resemble blades, their chiseled edges pointing straight down over kindergartners' heads. Bring on the anomie! How strange that mainstream architecture endorses the work of someone who builds as though traditional beauty and comfort need to be renounced. I couldn't help noticing how many of Mayne's buildings are public buildings: courthouses, Federal buildings, schools. Which means, of course, that your tax dollars and my tax dollars are subsidizing architecture that's found by many taxpayers to be alienating and off-putting. Wouldn't it be lovely if there were someone we could not only protest to, but vote out of office? But what strikes me most as I read about Mayne is the '60s-generation quality, both of his work and of the man. (I've never visited any of his buildings in person and I've never met the man. Still, why not take a few swings?) Mayne's work attacks the rigidities of International Modernism but only to arrive at a more fragmented kind of modernism. Mayne himself is eager to speak about his divorced parents, his years in psychoanalaysis, and the influence of such '60s icons as the Kennedys and Black Power on his thinking. To my mind, his architecture expresses a deeply-held, sputtering-crybaby conviction that someone ought to pay for his miseries. Too bad that someone turns out to be us. In the photos that accompany this Metropolis visit with Mayne from 2003, the skin-tearing, eye-poking quality of his work is plain to see. (Am I the only person who finds that the typical Mayne building looks like a kitchen appliance with half its shell torn off?) So is the grandstanding, self-adoring, high-pitched personal psychodrama. It's the '60s all over again, and not at its best. Some excerpts from Metropolis: Mayne did build several small projects--mostly homes and restaurants--for the architectural cognoscenti, but, he says, this time was immensely frustrating. He would scream at clients and became famous for his explosive... posted by Michael at March 23, 2005 | perma-link | (23) comments





Thursday, March 17, 2005


Stoned Again
Francis Morrone writes: Dear Blowhards, Perhaps through my own fault (OK, definitely through my own fault), in my last post, which I found very difficult to structure so as to strike the right emphases, I set off a discussion of whether Ed Stone's Gallery of Modern Art deserves to stay or deserves to go. I say stay; Michael, and others, say go. Here's Michael in the comments to my last post: But that's what I say about nearly all these modernist buildings -- knock 'em down when their time comes. I can't think of many that (IMHO, of course) add to the city. I think it's one of the greatest con jobs ever that the modernists have managed to get the preservationists and landmarkers to give modernist work any respect at all. Who knows for sure, but my bet would be that most landmarkers and preservationists detest modernism, and may even have become landmarkers and preservationists as a way of fighting what modernism has done to cities. Why cede an inch to the enemy? And here is commenter Chris: I agree with your "knock 'em down" prescription. Why don't they? Francis and others agree the Stone building is flawed --deeply flawed, in fact. Many agree that many of the modernist buildings and art works are similarly flawed. But then the powers and critics in charge say "but." "But it's historical." I say, historical what? Crap? Historical crap?! We should save it!? What's going on? It's a madness. Michael well knows that I deplore most Modernist buildings as much as, if not more than, he does. So why do I guardedly support the campaign to preserve interesting examples of Modernist design? It so happens that last night (actually, early this morning, around 2:00 a.m., when I do some of my best reading) I was catching up on back numbers of the British magazine Apollo, in my opinion the best art periodical in the world. It is all the better in recent months since Gavin Stamp, my favorite architecture critic, has joined the magazine as a columnist. I read his column from January, called "Anti-Ugly." (Apollo has an awesome website allowing access to the magazine's full issues. Registration is required, but is free. But it also means I can't make direct links. The site is easy to navigate, so the piece I'm referencing is easy to find once you do the registration process.) Do you know Stamp? Until recently he was teaching up in Glasgow, where he led campaigns to save the undervalued buildings of the great Alexander "Greek" Thomson from the philistine vandalizers who are surprisingly even more numerous in some cities than in New York. In 1978, Stamp curated the London 1900 exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects. London had long undervalued, indeed outright disrespected, its extraordinary heritage of late-Victorian and Edwardian buildings just as New York had mistreated her own wealth of Beaux-Arts beauties. Visitors to London would see these 1900 buildings all over the city, love... posted by Francis at March 17, 2005 | perma-link | (15) comments





Wednesday, March 16, 2005


Stoned
Francis Morrone writes Dear Blowhards, It looks like curtains for the old Gallery of Modern Art at Columbus Circle. Do you know this building? On February 25, David W. Dunlap wrote in the New York Times (site registration required): After being delayed more than a year by litigation, the plan to reclad and recreate 2 Columbus Circle as the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design is poised to proceed after a court decision in its favor yesterday. A five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court unanimously upheld the earlier dismissal by Justice Walter B. Tolub of a lawsuit against the reconstruction project by three preservation groups--Landmark West, Historic Districts Council and Docomomo. "Now, we're full steam ahead," said Laurie Beckelman, the director of the new building program at the museum. She said the project, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, might begin by the middle of this year and be completed in mid-2007. (Here is a brief recent article from New York magazine showing the old and proposed new buildings in side by side images. Here is the web site of Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works Architecture. Click on "updates" in the upper right corner.) That news report, together with Daniel Zalewski's recent New Yorker profile of Rem Koolhaas (not, alas, online), together with Donald Pittenger's excellent recent comments on his formal mis-education in art and architecture (here, here, and here), opened up a string of my own memories of a period (of my own schooling) in which the conventional historiography of modern architecture, and in particular New York architecture, changed irrevocably. Here's a brief chronology: 1975: The Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1978: Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas is published by Oxford University Press 1981: Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House is published by Farrar Straus Giroux None of these means very much to me anymore, though each struck me with some force at the time, for each seemed to vindicate the love of certain kinds of architecture that had been written out of history. Let's start with the MoMA show. Wow. Who would have ever thought such a thing possible? Ada Louise Huxtable in the Times was very equivocal in her assessment. Yes, she said, that 19th-century Beaux-Arts stuff was all right in its time and place (and to say that was a big concession when for years Nikolaus Pevsner, the most influential architectural historian of the 20th century, had been saying that virtually the entire 19th century had been one big mistake), but, Huxtable said: It is hard, even for would-be revivalists, to rationalize the logic and costs of the grafting of classical forms and orders intrinsic to masonry construction onto the totally different requirements of modern steel and concrete. It is equally hard to fit the straitjacket of academic classicism on the many new building forms required by the 20th century, even if craftsmen were not extinct. Can't... posted by Francis at March 16, 2005 | perma-link | (24) comments





Tuesday, March 15, 2005


Aurbach on Krier
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- How vicious can the architectural establishment be? A telling test case is the Luxembourg-born architect and theorist Leon Krier. Krier's thing is the greatness of the traditional European neighborhood, which to him represents the poetic pinnacle of Western civ. What makes these places so special? What can we learn about pleasure and beauty from them? To an outsider, it might seem that such a passion -- and such a line of inquiry -- is a harmless, interesting and helpful thing. After all, tons of people love the towns and cities Krier extolls: neighborhoods in Paris continue to charm, small towns in Italy and Spain still attract and enchant. In our own country, such places as Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Williamsburg, and Santa Barbara lure and delight scads of visitors. Many Americans love visiting these places on vacation; they love retiring to places like them too. It seems fair to conclude that many Americans would love it if where they live and work on a daily basis had some of the qualities of these special places. Krier's thinking about what makes such places so special -- and what we might learn from them -- is the most enlightening writing on these topics that I know of. But the architectural establishment is deeply invested in modernism, and has been for 50 years. Make that not just "deeply" but "maniacally." Absurd though it may seem, the establishment is almost completely intolerant of any suggestion that modernism may not be a world-saving, world-redeeming thing. Suggest that modernism has been a mistake, and they'll actually flip out. There's a historical explanation for this mindset, which is the European experience of World War II. There seem to be two ways of interpreting that horrifying war. In one view, Naziism was the awful expression of an evil that lay deep in the heart and in the nature of Western civ. In the other view, Naziism was an example of barbarism bursting through the ever-fragile shell of civilization. After the war, the west's elites opted for interpretation #1. As a consequence, it was felt that Western civ needed not just to purge itself of Naziism, it needed to reinvent itself from scratch. If what centuries of effort had culminated in was Naziism, then the project of Western civilization needed to be gone about entirely differently. Hence the European Union, and hence as well modernism in architecture. It can seem bizarre to us more than half a century after the end of the war, but many people circa 1950 were convinced that classical architecture had played a major role in fascism. It wasn't seen as set decoration or costuming. It was seen as the expression of the society that gave birth to fascism -- really, as a direct expression of Evil. And thus classical architecture had to go. (Similar reasoning reinforced modernism in music and literature as well.) In the place of classical architecture, the new elites would put international modernism. Buildings, cities,... posted by Michael at March 15, 2005 | perma-link | (16) comments





Saturday, March 5, 2005


Guest Posting -- Donald Pittenger 3
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Another visit with Donald Pittenger. This time Donald recalls what an education in the arts was like in the '50s, and shares some reflections and ideas about how the '50s approach came about, and where the lunacy might have come from. Part one of Donald's memoir can be read here. Part two is here. *** Art Education in the 1950s by Donald Pittenger I wasn't taught much about art as an Art major back in the 1950s. Let me clarify. I was taught next to nothing about techniques and technology in drawing and painting (both oil and watercolor) classes. I'll speculate about why this was so in a bit, but first let me describe my experiences. Oh, and let me mention that I'm not going to subject you to a whiney-victim screed regarding the vile, oppressive "system" and how it ruined my life. Truth is, I was never good enough to support myself as a commercial artist, so I entered graduate school in another field when I left the Army. And better art training probably would not have made me "good enough" anyhow. My "stuff" wasn't quite "right". To begin, the reason I got into Art School in the first place was because I was a "good drawer" in elementary school, and in junior high, and maybe even in high school. In high school, for a reason I have completely forgotten, I was my school's representative at the all-city art class at the Seattle Art Museum. Each of the eight high schools in the Seattle school district sent one or two students for a one-day-per-week (I think it was) session at the museum. We were taught by Guy Anderson who, in the mid-1950s, was considered one of the big four "Northwest School" artists. Northwest modernism: Guy Anderson (For what it's worth, the most famous were Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, the fourth was Kenneth Callahan, who has generally ranked behind Graves and Tobey, but was and is better-known than Anderson.) More Northwest modernism: Morris Graves I can't remember what, if anything, Anderson taught us. Nor can I remember what, if anything, I was taught in art classes in junior high and high school; I remember drawing and painting a lot of pictures, but that was about it. Since I don't remember the teaching, I'll move along to college, which I do recall better. More Northwest modernism: Mark Tobey I wanted to be an automobile stylist, so I entered the University of Washington in the fall of 1957 as an Industrial Design major. (Yes, even at the time, I knew that the Art Center School in Los Angeles (it’s now in Pasadena) was the place to go for transportation design. But it was too expensive and I thought it best to graduate from a university, "just in case." Plus, I probably would not have succeeded in transportation design anyway. In any sort of graphic art, I'm "pretty good", but not top-notch.) I switched from Industrial... posted by Michael at March 5, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, March 3, 2005


Guest Posting -- Donald Pittenger Part Two
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- More memories and reflections from Donald Pittenger. Today: how architecture was taught in the 1950s, when Authoritarian Modernism was really something to behold. I wish I'd been aware of what Donald writes about here in the 1970s, when I cluelessly studied architecture history. I'd have had a lot less brainwashing to shake myself free of later. You can read the first part of Donald's memoir here. *** Observations on Architectural Training in the 1950s by Donald Pittenger As part of my wayward art training as an undergraduate at the University of Washington (1957-1961), I took two architecture classes. My freshman year, I took an Architecture Appreciation class (or was it History of Architecture? -- I forget the exact title). As a sophomore I took the year-long Beginning Architectural Design (I'm guessing about this title too) course that provided basic training for students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, and perhaps a couple other fields. At the time, I was transitioning from Industrial Design to Commercial Design (alias commercial art), but stayed in the course anyhow. Where it begins One incident sticks in my mind from the Architectural Design class. It was the winter or spring of 1959 and we were assigned the project of designing a low-house or town-house unit. We were given certain parameters such as square-footage and perhaps number of stories, but had aesthetic freedom. After the completion deadline, our floor plans and wash renderings (combined on a large piece of illustration board) were propped against a wall and critiqued by the instructors. (It was a large class, with more than 70 students and about three teachers.) Every design was in the T-square-and-Triangle International Style idiom -- except for one. Some naive soul produced a tidy looking traditional design that included a brick front and diamond-shaped window glazing. He was gently, but unmistakably, informed by the teachers that Such Things Are Not Done. Everyone got the message, even though all but the wretched traditionalist had already internalized the prevailing architectural ideology. One reason we knew the Standing Orders was due to the aforementioned Architecture Appreciation class that was a required course for Architecture majors. Architecture Appreciation was taught by a gent in his late fifties or early sixties, one Arthur Herrman, who also happened to be Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. I just did a Google search on Herrman and found but one tangential citation, so I can't report on his background; all I can do is report on what I remember from the class. The class had a lot of students because it was open to non-majors and it was held in the auditorium of the old Architecture Hall that dated from Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (a mini World's Fair) days on the University of Washington campus. It was essentially a slide-show lecture where the slides were from black-and-white photos or illustrations. I also had to buy a copy of the current edition of Sir Banister Fletcher's book “A... posted by Michael at March 3, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Wednesday, March 2, 2005


Guest Posting -- Donald Pittenger, Part One
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- One of the great underdiscussed culture-topics that often comes up at this blog is what it's like to live a life that involves some involvement with the arts. The conventional press provides a torrent of info about the lives of the stars and the bigtime players. But how about the rest of us? What are our lives-with-the-arts like? We go about incorporating "culture" into our lives in a huge variety of ways. At one extreme are people who take no note of cultural matters at all. TV, design, food, storytelling, clothing, and music -- it's just stuff that's out there, to be leaned on, enjoyed, and griped about. But, really, what's the big deal? At the other end of the spectrum are people for whom cultural questions often get to be overwhelming -- those who make an actual living helping create culture: designers, writers, musicians, editors, acting coaches, technicians, production assistants, etc. (And let's not forget those Backbones of Culture, the arty trust-fund babies who write slim, sensitive, autobiographical novels and spend their days getting themselves photographed for downtown style magazines. A-hahahahahaha ...) Most people with a semi-substantial interest in the arts -- that would be most of us -- fall somewhere in between. There are so many questions that seldom come up, at least in print. What's it like interacting with the arts over the long-term? (My quick response: sometimes it's more rewarding, sometimes it's less...) How does one's relationship with the arts change over time? (My relationship with the arts has been like a love affair; it has its ups, it has its downs ...) To what extent is an involvment with the arts a positive? (It can enrich and deepen one's experience of life ...) In what ways can it be a negative? (It can derange and mislead ...) How do we jigger the givens of our lives -- money, relationships, time, etc -- to make room for our cultural interests? (I've given up promotions in order to have more free time ...) And how has all this affected how we experience the arts? (I respect the basics more now than I did when I was young. And I value the ability to put the Self and its needinesses aside far more than I once did ...) I've always enjoyed reading comments left at the blog by Donald Pittenger, who brings a lot of perspective, brains, and humor to bear on what he says. I've also had a great time swapping email with Donald. But I was eager to know more about his experiences and reflections too. So I recently asked him if he might be willing to pull together a few additional memories and thoughts. I'm thrilled that he has done so, and that he has done so in spades, writing what's in essence a short memoir -- a wonderful and informative look at a life spent in and around the arts. Donald has considerately broken his piece up into... posted by Michael at March 2, 2005 | perma-link | (8) comments





Tuesday, February 22, 2005


Barbarians
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- A question for you. Here’s the first half of my question’s given. Over the last 40 years or so, the range of cultural material that’s taken note of in the mainstream press has grown much broader. If you look at TV shows or magazines of 40 or 60 years ago, the narrowness of what was discussable can come as a shock. Was jazz worthy of the attention of respectable people? Were movies? Cultural arbiters puffed sombrely on pipes, brushed tobacco off tweedy sleeves, and expressed the gravest reservations. These days, the culture-sphere is a giant supermarket-bazaar. Almost everything is allowed notice: pop music, TV shows, web phenomena, porn. FWIW, I take this development to be a Generally Good Thing. A ton of cultural material is being produced, and of uncountably many kinds. For an individual, this means that it can take mucho effort to find work that you resonate to, let alone to clear away the space to relax with and experience your finds. (That's a good discussion-topic too: in a clamorous marketplace, how do we manage to find what we enjoy? And what's the process of searching, sifting, and enjoying like?) But for those who follow and discuss cultural matters professionally: Why pretend that all this material isn’t out there? Why behave as though it doesn't have an audience? And why make believe that there isn’t talent at work in all these fields? There are other elements to be taken into account, too -- cultural significance, for instance. You may despise ads, or argue that they shouldn’t be considered serious art. But how can anyone claim that advertising art and graphic design have no cultural significance? They’re big business; they influence fashions and trends; they reflect tastes; the people who make them are often very gifted. Why not discuss the field? Here’s the second half of my question’s given: at the same time that the range of what's acknowledged has opened up, the level of discussion about cultural matters has gone down. I have no desire to make the claim that, long ago, we inhabited a paradise where civilized gentlemen carried on noble discussions. At the same time, it’s undeniably true that mainstream discussions of the arts were once surprisingly substantial. V.S Naipaul, for example, appeared on the covers of wide-circulation magazines. That's inconceivable today. The attitude towards the goodies -- the gossip, the showbiz, the money -- was completely different than it is now. These days the goodies are often all you get. Mainstream cultural coverage is driven by popularity, box office, personalities, career-scorecarding, political controversies, release dates, exclusives, and cutesy conceptual ideas. Editors and producers form a daisy chain, trying to outguess each other as to what’s going to be hot and smart five minutes from now. Back in the day, the goodies were seen as the the spices that helped sell the meal. Today, once the sell is over the show shuts down. The meal never arrives. Arts coverage now... posted by Michael at February 22, 2005 | perma-link | (24) comments





Monday, February 21, 2005


Taking "The Gates" Seriously
Fenster Moop writes: Dear Blowhards, Much ink, digital and otherwise, has been spilt over the burning issue: how seriously should one take Christo and Jean-Claude's The Gates? Now, here is someone who seems to take it quite seriously. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Best, Fenster... posted by Fenster at February 21, 2005 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, February 16, 2005


Tinkertoys
Fenster Moop writes: Dear Blowhards, Whores, ugly buildings and politicians are supposed to get respectable with age. Here's a politician and an ugly building from a 1949 Life magazine: Nelson Rockefeller promoting manufactured housing as the next big thing. Nelson passed away in the arms of a young woman who was not his wife, though she was not as I know paid for her services and therefore we have no prostitute respectability issue to ponder. The circumstances surrounding his demise did, however, put a bit of a dent in Nelson's respectability. But it's been a couple of decades since his passing, and I think he is once again quite respectable. Which leaves that house. Sorry, but in my view that is just one plug-ugly building that is just going to stay that way. It looks as though the exterior of the building is not yet finished, but, in light of Rockefeller's architectural tastes, I am not so sure. Compare the 1949 house to the mid-60s campus of SUNY-Albany, designed by Edward Durrell Stone. The university building looks like the 1949 house on steroids. Just the thing for Nelson! But once again I digress (as Archie once said of Jughead: his mind wanders but it never gets very far). I wanted to write about manufactured housing. Its time is always just about to come, but it never quite seems to arrive. Why is that? Residual snob appeal problems of the art crown with trailer trash? Or that good design simply cannot enter into an amicable three-way marriage with manufacturing processes and housing product? Or that technical issues have not yet developed to the point where the marriage can be arranged? The future seldom arrives on time, since the schedule of its arrival is typically posted by zealous and breathless enthusiasts who forget that technology is embedded in a complex social network, and that systems have a conservative bias. Consequently, many then conclude that the predicted change will never happen. But often the problem is not permanent, but only that the rate of change has been temporarily oversold. In time, the future arrives. So: is there a point at which conditions will shift to favor manufactured housing, in terms of design, affordability and appeal to living human beings? Hard to say. I think it is getting interesting, though. Some recent examples of interesting manufactured housing can be found here, here and here. I was particulary intrigued by the first website, put up by a small outfit called architecture + hygiene. That firm employs surplus shipping containers, putting them together in various tinkertoy arrangements. Its basic model is called the quik house. what is the quik house? The QUIK HOUSE is a prefabricated kit house designed by Adam Kalkin from recycled shipping containers. It has three bedrooms and two and one-half baths in its 2,000 square foot plan. The basic kit costs $76,000 plus shipping. The shell assembles by the end of the week, you will have a fully enclosed building. From start... posted by Fenster at February 16, 2005 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, February 4, 2005


Hughes on Goya
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- FYI, a video documentary about Goya by the terrific art critic Robert Hughes will have its first airing on the Ovation network tomorrow (Saturday) at 4 pm EST. Other showtimes: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 - 4:00:00 PM Thursday, February 17, 2005 - 8:30:00 PM Friday, February 18, 2005 - 12:30:00 AM Saturday, February 19, 2005 - 3:00:00 PM Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 8:00:00 PM Friday, February 25, 2005 - 12:00:00 AM Monday, February 28, 2005 - 9:30:00 PM Tuesday, March 01, 2005 - 1:30:00 AM Ovation's site is here. A page about the documentary is here. I haven't seen the show yet -- but this is Goya, and this is Hughes. How can it not be worth watching? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 4, 2005 | perma-link | (11) comments





Saturday, January 15, 2005


Photography Questions
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Here are a few photographs by Established Great Lee Friedlander. I'm in awe; Friedlander strikes me as having amazing talent, skill and control. I love his work. It makes me want to see more of it, but also to spend years doing likewise: developing darkroom skills, studying the history of the artform, and applying what little talent I have to learning the ins and outs of a complex craft. I want to apprentice myself to Art. Here's the website of the Lomographic Society, where people who enjoy snapping pix with a distinctively crappy camera post the results of their amateur experiments. I love a lot of these photographs too, and find the Lomo scene amiable and inviting. Looking at these photographs makes me want to say "screw the whole craft thing," buy a Lomo, and start taking random snapshots of my own. I want to rock out, man. What to make of the fact that I had as good a time surfing through Lomographs as I did looking at Friedlander's magnificent images? (A different kind of good time, granted.) Do we conclude that I'm a tasteless dolt? That's always a possibility, and I certainly don't mind if we reach that conclusion. Or do we suspect that we're kidding ourselves when we imagine that photographic wonderfulness can only be the result of talent, skill, and control? If we choose 2, does that tell us anything about the nature of photography? And if it does, what can we conclude about photography as an art form? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 15, 2005 | perma-link | (15) comments




John Baldessari
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Do you guys go for the work of the artist John Baldessari? I took in this show shortly before it closed and had a good time. But I always have a good time when I look at his pictures. Here's an example. Two Person Fight (2004) Baldessari -- who has been an influential teacher as well as a longtime presence on the art scene -- is a semi-conceptual gamesman. He gets you watching how you take things. Though the orange color of the silhouette in this painting pops out, for instance, Baldessari has cut into the painting's surface so that the orange area is in fact physically recessed. Then he doubles the effect. Because B&W Gal is slugging Silhouetted Guy in our direction, we expect to feel him crashing into our laps. Yet, because Baldessari has recessed Silhouetted Guy into and behind the picture plane, Silhouetted Guy is actually moving towards and through B&W Gal. These shenanigans create an arresting push-pull/pull-push dynamic. Has she KO'd his identity? Has he obliterated hers? And where do you-the-viewer stand in relationship to all this? You may look at the picture and find yourself reacting along the lines of, "Huh?!? Wha'?!? Oh. Hmmm ... Well, hey, whaddya know?" Generally speaking, I don't enjoy games-playing art, do you? I tend to agree with an artist friend who likes to say, "What's wrong with today's art-world art is too much Duchamp, and not enough Cezanne." But Baldessari's spirit -- which is a sunny, mischievous, California spirit -- wins me over. I look at his work and think, Well, why the hell not? I can't say that I get a lot more from his art than I do out of flipping through some of the kickier magazines, though Baldessari's creations are quieter and more poetic than most media creations are. But still, that's a lot more than nothing. I suppose you could linger over the philosophical-aesthetic conundrums Baldessari's artworks are semi-intended to provoke. Certainly most of his champions would have you do so; and in some interviews and statements I've run across, Baldessari has been willing to feed the appetite some people have for intellectual be-witchery. Blanketing your your work in a certain amount of high-toned fog seems to be part of the job of being an artworld gallery-artist these days. But you can also take Baldessari's pictures more simply -- as quick-reading, off-beat pranks that may or may not set some inner bells to ringing. Here's an unpretentious and fun interview with Baldessari where he comes across the way his paintings do (to me, anyway): friendly, full of curiosity, whimsical, and a little weird in the most benign way. He's probably a great teacher. It's hard to imagine anyone more likely to steer students into the habit of saying, "What if ...?" As a gallery-going friend once said: "When I first started going to art shows, I thought I had to know everything about the art. I thought I had... posted by Michael at January 15, 2005 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, January 5, 2005


Graphic Design
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Do you guys follow the graphic design field? I do, if in my usual half-assed, raggedy way. I know some designers; I've been through some histories; I have a shelf -- a short shelf, but still -- of books, some of which I've spent actual time with ... Years ago I even took a couple of graphic design courses, learning the hard way how completely I lack graphic-design talent. I'm also a regular visitor over at the design blog DesignObserver. It's become one of my favorite online hang-outs. A classy cast of designers and critics -- including Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand, and William Drenttel -- contributes essay-like postings and occasional linksfests. Drenttel remembers working for the late Susan Sontag as her graphic designer here. My very favorite design critic/journalist, Rick Poynor, is a DO gangmember, though he doesn't post as regularly as I'd hope he would. (Here's a recent Rick piece for the Times of London about a graphic-design show he curated at the Barbican.) And a peppy and impressive cast of commenters kick in a lot of energy, brains, and storytelling. The designer and author Stephen Heller, whose design-history books I'm a big fan of, is a regular visitor, as are many students and professionals. Me, I mainly lurk, though I sometimes can't resist the opportunity to leap in and play Old Crank. Typical thrust of my comments: "Cool-looking layout! Now, how about the readability?!" Next question: do you guys have any problems with the notion that graphic-design is art? Rick Poynor's article for the Times announces that the 21st century is going to be the century of design, and waves the flag for that development. Personally, I have no trouble at all with the idea that any kind of commercial art might be discussed as art. Good lord, why should I? I came to the arts via movies, and many of the authors I first fell for were in it for the money. These days, too, it's an open secret that many people who enjoy exploring the contempo visual realm know: the gallery-art world is so full of conceptual games-playing that its visual payoffs can be few and far-between. You can finish up an afternoon of gallerygoing with eyeballs that are still hungry. So these days, you'll often get a faster, easier, and (IMHO, of course) more-stimulating eyebuzz by looking at websites, ads, computer graphics, and edgy magazines. I ask whether you have trouble with the idea that graphic design should be thought of as art because it comes up so often over at DesignObserver. I'm hard-put to know why the question concerns designers as much as it does. Why should anyone have trouble with the idea that the commercial arts are art? (Although Tatyana, who works as an interior designer, has a funny and practical take on the "is it art" question. I once said to her, "So you're an artist!", and she quickly responded, "No!" Tatyana finds the pretentiousness of... posted by Michael at January 5, 2005 | perma-link | (25) comments





Thursday, December 30, 2004


Vacation and the Arts
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm just back in the city after a week of vacation. I'd been planning on blogging while away. But after struggling with the place's rickety 56K AOL connection, I decided to abandon all online activities, email included, until I could get back to the trusty cablemodem. Hats off to all who manage to be active Web-presences via 56K modems. I wasn't man enough to put up with the frustration. In any case, I did my usual amount of reading, listening, and watching while on vacation. And while I may get around to opinionating about some of it, what I found myself musing about more was the way that being on vacation affects my experience of artsgoing generally. It's not as though I spend the working part of the year grimly plowing through encyclopedias and the vacation part of the year scarfing up the collected work of Jackie Collins. I'm as prone to read brainy stuff on vacation as I am during the workyear; one of the books I let myself luxuriate in during this recent holiday was Stephen Toulmin's brilliant intro-to-philosophy, "Knowing & Acting." Like a lot of Toulmin, it's both a little pokey to read and utterly mind-blowing in what it says. And I certainly treat myself to lots of inconsequential delights and goodies during the working part of the year. I'm nothing if not self-indulgent. Still, there's no question that I'm more whimsical in the ways I interact with the arts while on holiday than I am during the workyear. Tour a mansion? Can't imagine anything I'd rather do! Check out a Hollywood blockbuster? Well, why not? Though I've got only the remotest, anthropological interest in today's standard Hollywood fare, while on vacation I'm kinda curious about what the industry's been up to. But, generally, the impact being-on-vacation has on my artgoing activities seems to be less about the kind of thing I read or watch (or listen to or visit ...) than it is about the spirit I do this artsgoing in. I might visit a museum; I might read some poetry or philosophy; I might dig out a blues CD I haven't listened to in years. The artsgoing becomes more forgiving -- more a matter of helping myself to treats than it usually is. Which isn't a surprise, vacation being the break-from-the-usual-thing that it is. The entertainment industries know all about this, of course. The usual thing in book publishing, for example, is to treat summer as "summer-reading" season. The book publishers are selling a picture of careworn people with knotted-up brains being set free -- finally !! -- to sprawl on the beach and indulge in junk-food cultural pleasures: Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy, James Patterson. Do most people still view their summer weeks off as a time to indulge in junky reading pleasures? I know that booksellers still behave as though this is the case. But is it really? I wonder. Given how pervasive popular culture has become ...... posted by Michael at December 30, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, December 27, 2004


Museums
Francis Morrone writes: Dear Blowhards, How much museum going do you do these days? Museums are much on my mind these days. I recently visited the new Museum of Modern Art for the first time, and followed it up with visits to the Metropolitan and the Frick. I've also followed the dismaying news accounts of the sad fate of one of my favorite museums, the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Let's start with MoMA. I used to love MoMA. Its collections chronicling the period of high modernism, 1880-1950, resided in intimate spaces in a building that was itself one of the signal modernist buildings of New York. It went up in 1939 to the designs of two unlikely architects. Philip Lippincott Goodwin, who was a MoMA trustee, the son of the banker James Junius Goodwin, a West 54th Street neighbor of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and an Ecole des Beaux-Arts-trained traditionalist architect, designed MoMA in collaboration with a younger architect, Edward Durell Stone, who had recently worked for Wallace K. Harrison and had helped to design Radio City Music Hall. MoMA's director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., had wanted to hire Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design MoMA. Barr was overruled by his board. And that's probably a good thing. Mies designed some great buildings. But his museums were terrible. Goodwin and Stone, on the other hand, created an improbably homey building in which two generations of New Yorkers educated themselves in modern art, watched movies (MoMA was one of the first museums, if not the first museum, to establish a department of film), and pondered what it meant when an Electrolux vacuum cleaner or a Chemex coffee maker shared space with canvases by Cézanne, Matisse, and Kandinsky. Philip Johnson, who was MoMA's first curator of architecture before he decided to go back to school to become an architect himself, designed MoMA's sculpture garden in the 1950s. This was long one of the most elegant outdoor spaces in the city. But in the 1980s, everything changed at MoMA. The museum staged a gargantuan Picasso retrospective, the largest ever. Every day huge crowds filed past the paintings, in such a procession that any proper appreciation of them was impossible. I found the experience wholly unpleasant. What was the point of such a show if one could not see, let alone savor, the works? So as to accommodate ever greater crowds, MoMA undertook a vast expansion under the architects Cesar Pelli & Associates. Now, I like Pelli. And I think he did what he could with the program. It's the program that sucked. MoMA lost all its intimacy, all its charm. I know it's a cliché to say it, but the place took on the character of a shopping mall. I stopped going. (I often wonder if my disaffection from modernism during this period of my life led to my absence from MoMA, or whether my absence from MoMA led to my reconsidering modernism.) One of the tenets of a conservative attitude... posted by Francis at December 27, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments





Monday, December 20, 2004


Architecture Books for the Holidays
Francis Morrone writes: Dear Blowhards, The mega-gift-giving season is upon us, and we slow shoppers are in the home stretch. Many, many years ago, when I was a mere lad, I worked at Urban Center Books in New York. This was, and is, the bookstore operated by the august Municipal Art Society, and, as one might expect, the store specializes in architecture books. Back then, Jacqueline Kennedy was a board member of MAS, and she frequently shopped in the store. One purchase of hers that I rang up was that of a full set of Christopher Alexander's books. I never did find out what she thought of them. One evening a couple of days before Christmas, as I was alone in the store closing up, Caroline Kennedy came into the store in a panic. She'd not yet bought any Christmas presents for her architect husband. I locked up, and spent more than an hour helping her pick out expensive tomes that she purchased and that I hoped might inspire Ed Schlossberg's work. See any traces of Lutyens in his buildings? Me neither. But no matter. It was a grand experience for me. She was charming, I thought, and--I know this is neither here nor there--much better looking close-up than she ever seemed from photographs. My crush on Caroline aside, were she to ask me today what among the season's architecture books she should purchase, here's what I'd tell her. Let's start with some criticism. Nothing in recent years beats the latest from Nikos Salingaros, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (Solingen, Germany: Umbau-Verlag). (It can be ordered here.) I plan to post further on this remarkable book. For now, suffice it to say that Nikos--who has himself posted in this space and who is well known to Blowhards readers--writes architecture criticism of the highest order. I say ''criticism'' rather than ''theory'' because for me his genius lies in his ability to build from the specific to the general, which is the opposite of the tendency of academic theorists of architecture. A few critics in my experience have the ability to describe a building so as to explain how its parts add up to an emotional experience. Ian Nairn could do it. Gavin Stamp can do it, as for example in an amazing essay he wrote in the Spectator in praise of John Simpson's addition to the Queen's Gallery--an addition that is one of the great works of architecture of our time. (Here's a great book on Simpson and the gallery, not by Stamp but by the equally estimable Richard John and David Watkin.) Lewis Mumford could, from a viewpoint very different from my own, do it. Nikos does it. His commentary on Libeskind, on Tschumi, on Derrida, on Charles Jencks is definitive. (Interestingly, of these critics, only Stamp had or has professional training in architecture or architectural history. Salingaros is a mathematician, Nairn was trained as a mathematician, and Mumford possessed no academic degree at all.) A bonus of Nikos's book is that... posted by Francis at December 20, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, December 16, 2004


Confessions of a Naked Model
We're pleased to run another guest posting by "J," an artist and art student who helps pay the bills by working as an artists' model. J's site, where you can enjoy her art and explore some fun links, is here. J's previous postings for us are here and here. John Leavitt contributed the drawings that accompany this piece. I'm pleased to pass along some happy news about J's modeling career too: the well-known punk fetish photographer Eric Kroll has made a date with J to train his famously transgressive lens on her. So, Dita van Teese? Watch your back. There's a new alpha-fetishgirl in town. Are We Whores? The Ethics of Modelling for Amateurs Yesterday I nearly killed a man. With my breasts. I was posing in a seedy hotel in the meatpacking distract. The photographer, a snaggle-toothed sixty, crouched over me, clacking away with his digital. Suddenly, he grabbed his chest. As he sunk to his knees, I imagined the headlines: "Man Dies of Heart Attack in Motel Love-Tryst." "But I’m a model, not a prostitute," I'd cry to the reporters, like "Showgirls"'s Nomi Malone insisting that she wasn't a stripper, but a dancer. Then I thought about average sentences for manslaughter. I hoped the judge would go easy. But after sixty agonizing seconds, my photographer rose and pointed a finger in my direction. "Your fault! Out!" He clasped his heart as he peeled off three hundreds. I left without looking back. Those of you who read my original columns may be shocked at the drop in my morals. "Poor J," you cluck, "going from artists' muse to hotel room sordidness." You make a mental note on downward spirals. But examine my bank account before judging. Modeling for photographers means $100 an hour, and more independence than any job at the Gap. "Just like prostitution?" asks the cloven hoofed gentleman's attorney. We'll get to that … If posing naked for dentists from Massapequa reminds you of the world's oldest profession, it's a relationship that came into being with the internet. Before the internet, firm lines ran between model and non-model. Models: the six-foot tall fifteen-year-olds who walked runways and coke-binged in Milan. Non-models: everyone else. If you were not anointed with the proper genes -- and an agency -- a model is something you would never be. Of course, photographers always realized that there were other fun things to photograph besides adolescent Amazons. But they had no way to get in touch with people to pose. Until the internet. Four years ago, OneModelPlace.com, the world's largest online directory of photographers and models, came into being. It provided portfolio space and an easy way for photographer and photographed to connect. And it allowed girls who didn't have a chance in hell of joining an agency to make a go at modeling. Girls like me. So we used the two things we held over agency girls. Tits. And a willingness to show them. Joining us were photographers who wanted to take... posted by Michael at December 16, 2004 | perma-link | (24) comments





Wednesday, November 10, 2004


More Francis
A pause in the usual flow of things to deliver a public-service announcement: Francis Morrone will be co-giving a lecture-and-walking-tour course at New York's Institute for Classical Architecture. The very tempting title: "What You've Always Wanted to Know About Architecture But Were Afraid to Ask." I'll be attending myself. Lectures will be on two Mondays, November 15 and 22, from 7:00pm – 9:00pm. The walking tour will take place on Saturday, December 11, between 1:00pm – 3:00pm. The phone number for reservations is (212) 730-9646; the Institute's webpage is here.... posted by Michael at November 10, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments





Saturday, November 6, 2004


Nairn
Francis Morrone writes: Dear Blowhards, I run hot and cold (well, mostly cold) on Susan Sontag. For hifalutin highbrow know-it-all richly allusive essay-writing I'll take Guy Davenport or Hugh Kenner most any day. But I do admire Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation," which appeared back in the sixties in Evergreen Review (remember that?). In this essay, she champions criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis. Some of Manny Farber's film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent's essay "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers'," Randall Jarrell's essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it. Hear, hear! I love Manny Farber; I adore Randall Jarrell. I like to think I've learned more from Jarrell than from any other writer. If that's so far unevident in my several hundred pieces of published writing, put it down to the fact that Jarrell was a genius and I am--as Johnny Damon likes to say of himself--an idiot. In architecture, there is one critic who could have been on Sontag's list. That's Ian Nairn. Not too many Americans of today know the name. Nairn died in 1983, at the tender age of 53. He was British. His writings appeared in Architectural Review and--what made him briefly famous--in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, and the Sunday Times, for each of which in turn he served as architecture critic. Like many of the best commentators on architecture and urbanism, he had no formal background in the subject. He was trained neither as an architect nor as an architectural historian. Rather, like our man Nikos Salingaros, he was a mathematician. He also flew airplanes, both for the R.A.F. and for fun. The bio on one of his books says "By temperament he is much happier among working journalists than professional men, and lists flying and pubs--the only kind of building he would like to design--among his hobbies." I did not hear of Nairn until a year after he died. It was 1984, and my wife and I were in London. We stayed in the home of friends--he an architect, she a bookseller--who handed us a copy of a 1966 guidebook called Nairn's London. I began to read; rapture ensued. And London came to life. Nairn was a Modernist. So don't think I fell in love with him because he echoed my own sometimes fogeyish views. I have never cared for critics whom I agree with. No, it was Nairn's way of going at things--the way, as Sontag might have put it, he could "reveal the sensuous surface" of things. Nairn's London is a quirky guidebook to London buildings. It is utterly useless for getting around the city. It contains no maps, but rather keys its entries to the A to Z--which makes for some cumbersome touring. (The best practical and comprehensive... posted by Francis at November 6, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, November 2, 2004


Elsewhere
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- * John Massengale took a break from RedSox-blogging to wonder what the economy will look like if oil prices keep rising, and to reprint an Andres Duany critique of the New Urbanist town Celebration. * David Sucher asks one of those obvious-but-seldom-posed questions: do people really use the vast green spaces between office buildings? * Fred Bernstein reports for the NYTimes that, all over America, buildings erected in the 1960s are being demolished. Is this because the Boomers who grew up in the '60s are taking their petty revenge? Or is it because the '60s was one of the lousiest eras ever in architecture history? I'm not weeping about the loss of these buildings myself. * Peg Tyre reports for Newsweek that some retirees have begun to settle not in the usual retirement places but in attractive downtowns instead. * Business Week's Christopher Palmeri reports that a couple of big suburban-building firms are beginning to train their sights on urban downtowns. An excerpt from his interesting article: Both have spent decades trying to lure folks out of the city. Now, faced with a land scarcity in the 'burbs that threatens to crimp their growth, those same companies are suddenly making a reverse commute of their own by gobbling up urban properties at a fevered pace ... To be sure, the downtown market is fraught with challenges for the suburban builders -- including strict zoning requirements and environmental cleanups of some industrial properties, as well as land and construction costs that are far higher than what they're used to in the suburbs. What's more, builders accustomed to having carte blanche in the exurbs often find themselves in protracted negotiations with zoning officials and preservationists who demand that each project be tailored to the community. "It's higher-profile, so many people have opinions," says Karatz. For suburban builders who get it right, however, the urban market can yield profits every bit as fat as what they make in suburbia. * Do many Americans really want to live in walkable neighborhoods? Laurence Aurbach thinks the answer is yes. * Rob Asumendi's website Simply Building is a Christopher Alexander-influenced gem, full of sensible thinking and handy tips about buildings and living spaces. I especially enjoyed Rob's short article asking why architectural drawings don't pay more attention to the human figures in them, and this back and forth about Japanese baths. * James Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month is, as always, a giggle-and-outrage-inducer. * DadTalk explains why he finds life in suburbia -- specifically L.A.'s Inland Empire -- hellish. DadTalk also reports that he's on a diet that works for him. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 2, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, October 16, 2004


Ted Schmidt at the New York Academy of Art
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- NYC artists and art-hobbyists are lucky to have the New York Academy of Art around. It offers visual-arts instruction based on Beaux-Arts approaches. From one point of view, this is the ultimate in stuffy, kaput art training. On the other ... Well, a couple of notes. One is that some of the Academy's founding money came from avant-garde immortal Andy Warhol, who was fond of classical approaches and didn't want them to die. The other concerns a modernist artist I know. Loosey-goosey abstractionist though he is, he still thinks all artists should master the traditional basics before launching themselves into orbit. He also thinks that the NY Academy offers the best basic art training around. I see that a firstclass NY Academy teacher and artist, Ted Schmidt, is giving a two-day workshop next weekend in The Art of Drawing the Head. I wish I were free to attend. I took a workshop from Schmidt a few years back and thought he was terrific: knowledgeable, passionate in a quiet and likable way, and painstaking. I can't imagine a better way to give your drawing skills a tuneup. (I'm a perpetual novice myself, and Schmidt was kind and patient with me.) Schmidt's own drawings are sumptuous beauties. One of the best things about taking a workshop with him is watching him draw. In his hands, drawing is both firm discipline and intense pleasure. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 16, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, October 13, 2004


Classical Symposium
Blowhard Francis Morrone will be hosting and moderating an Institute for Classical Architecture symposium this Saturday. The topic: "Changing Attitudes in Historical Preservation." The lineup: impressive. The place: the New York School of Interior Design, 170 East 70th Street. The time: 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. It's a great subject -- tricky, fraught, and controversial. The conversations and talks by participants should set off showers of brain sparks. You can read more about the symposium and sign up to attend here.... posted by Michael at October 13, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments





Friday, October 8, 2004


Renaissance and Religion
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards, I keep wondering why art history generally tends to be such bad history. Or, maybe a better way to put it would be to ask why art history tends to be so resolutely a-historical, as though art were produced in a sort of social and economic vacuum. One has to wonder if this isn’t a result of the “museum” effect, where our encounter with the art of the past occurs in a carefully stripped down, antiseptic, context-less context. Which is, of course, inherently a falsification: whatever purposes the art of the past was intended to fulfill by its makers or consumers, sitting in pristine purity on the wall of an art museum wasn’t one of them. Pondering this question, I took one of the art books that litter my shelves at home down and looked at the way it was organized—which is by grouping artists roughly into two “stylistic” categories and into fairly artificial “generations” (only three generations are identified for a period of longer than 100 years.) Scratching my head, I then actually read the introduction to see why the author had chosen to organize the book this way. The book I was looking at, by the way, is “Italian Renaissance Painting” written by James H. Beck, who is (or at least was in 1999) a professor of art history at Columbia University and a specialist in Renaissance Art. (BTW, I would actually recommend the book—for the color reproductions anyway.) Bingo, the good professor actually discusses this point: Iconography—that is, the subject matter and meaning of paintings—and the cultural conditions that help explain the works of art and their patronage are of great interest. Such investigations share ground with cultural history and the history of ideas and are fundamental to an understanding of the period. But an approach of this kind is less useful for establishing a broad stylistic framework in which the art may be studied. [emphasis added] Okay, it’s his book and he can organize it any way he wants, but I’m still puzzled as to exactly what we’re supposed to learn from the professor’s approach to “studying” art? How to fit Renaissance paintings into Professor Beck’s stylistic framework? “Oh, yeah, now I get it—that Botticelli altarpiece fits into the second-generation lyric current of Renaissance painting. Wow, that rocks, dude!” Apparently the goal of studying art history at Columbia is solely to polish up one’s aesthetic discrimination to the point where one could aspire to being a professor of art history at Columbia. Well, shortly thereafter I ran across a book deep in the stacks of the UCLA graduate library that took a refreshingly different approach. It’s called “Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300 to 1600” by Richard A. Goldthwaite, an economic historian. Mr. Goldthwaite takes the position that art is a product designed to fill a need in society. In other words, if nobody will pay for it, art—which is quite labor-and-materials intensive—doesn’t get made. He then... posted by Friedrich at October 8, 2004 | perma-link | (33) comments





Thursday, September 23, 2004


Salingaros on Viseu
It's hard to believe but true: only a handful of architecture schools teach traditional architecture and urbanism -- which means, in other words, that there are only a very few schools in the entire world that teach students how to create the built environments that most people find pleasing and rewarding. I apologize for the blizzard of italics, but: what a strange state of affairs, no? All the other schools are modernist enclaves, devoted to whatever's chic and hot: deconstruction, blobitecture ... Once again, I find myself shaking my head over the bizarre and noxious schemes our elites are determined to put over on the rest of us. So it was heartbreaking to learn that one of the rare trad-architecture outposts was recently toppled. We're pleased, though, that 2Blowhards favorite Nikos Salingaros has taken this opportunity to pull together some information, ideas, insights, and reflections, and has given us permission to run his piece on our blog. Here it is. Aggression and Architectural Education: The "Coup" in Viseu by Nikos A. Salingaros Architecture and Urbanism students beginning the 2004 academic year at the Catholic University of Portugal in Viseu were surprised to find a new director and 13 new professors. Commentators have interpreted this move as a takeover, changing the direction of the school from traditional to modernist. To me, replacing the traditional architecture school in Viseu by a modernist faculty is an event of momentous significance. Of course, I'm affected indirectly because my good friend Lucien Steil was on the faculty, and Jose Cornelio da Silva, whose work I know and respect, was its director. Both have now gone to teach at the University of Notre Dame's Rome program. I would like to try and ignore personal issues here and focus on the long-term meaning of the takeover. If we count the number of places that a student could learn traditional architecture in recent years, we come up with 4 and 1/2. We have Notre Dame, the University of Miami, and, until now, Viseu. Prior to that, the Prince of Wales's Institute, headed for a while by another good friend of mine, Brian Hanson, was operational for several years, and helped to train many young people who are now very much sought-after. It was forced to close down. With the recent change in Viseu, that leaves no other institution in the European Community in which one can train. There are many traditional architects in Europe with whom a student can arrange an apprenticeship, but that now becomes more of an individual effort. The 1/2 remainder is Yale University where, to his great credit, Dean Robert A. M. Stern has always sought to balance traditional architecture with the latest avant-garde. If only that attitude were adopted at other schools! As an aside, I just saw Bob Stern here in San Antonio at the dedication of his new building, Northrup Hall in Trinity University. Stern joked with me that our mutual friend, the great classical architect Leon Krier and I were... posted by Michael at September 23, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments





Saturday, September 18, 2004


Will Middlebrow Ever Return?
Fenster Moop writes: Dear Blowhards, As Terry Teachout and many others have noted, the fragmentation and proliferation of new media voices correlate with a decline in Middlebrow Culture. The Era of Broadcasting is replaced by the Era of Narrowcasting, as illustrated quite well by the damage to CBS' credibility in l'affaire Rather. But, to use contrasting metaphors, how does one distinguish in a cultural moment whether it is a case of genies escaping bottles or a case of a pendulum reaching the end point of its arc? Under the former metaphor, circumstances prompt a permanent change; under the latter, we are all slaves to human nature, and the fights that we fight have a tendency to move in large, barely perceptible, circles. The current conventional wisdom seems to be that the former metaphor--the genie escaping the bottle--is the correct one. Teachout himself states--ruefully, in a way--the ability to frame a common culture "is now splintered beyond hope of repair." The signs point in that direction, but a contrarian bet in cultural matters if often the correct one, so I wonder. I agree that the tools we have to communicate with one another are influential in shaping what we communicate. But is it the case that the ability to watch a wrestling channel 24/7 will lead permanently to a wrestling caste, cut off from public affairs, Oprah's Book Club and Sibelius? People play with new toys, to be sure, but might it not be the case that they will sooner or later find themselves in need of a new recentering? [temporary diversion to urbanism theme: my dad loved his 900 square foot ranch house and had no need for Main Street--actively avoided it in fact--but new urbanism is not a bad bet for the next several decades. what people yearn for can run in cycles.] A possible signal in this regard: Bill O'Reilly has been taking heat from the Right since the Rather thing blew up. He's been using the "fair and balanced" argument to pontificate against "right-wing talk radio hosts" and "far-right bloggers" in a semi-defense of Dan. That has gotten said hosts and bloggers mad. Laura Ingraham showed up on his show two nights ago, crying "Bill, how could you??!!" And she had an article to this effect in yesterday's New York Sun as well (subscription required). In her view, bloggers have changed everything--it's a utopian moment in which the new media have altered everything forever, and Bill, an old media guy, just doesn't get it. What's going on? I think Bill, a very savvy guy, simply figures that the cultural moment is being recentered. Tussles usually take place on the extremes--Ladies and Jemmin', Michael Moore versus Jerry Falwell in the fight of the century!--but the terrain at stake is usually the last few inches in the center of things. It's not that O'Reilly is looking to "take Rather's place at CBS", as some have speculated. Rather (so to speak), it's a matter of a shift in what constitutes... posted by Fenster at September 18, 2004 | perma-link | (5) comments





Saturday, September 11, 2004


Katarxis #3 Is Now Online
Michael Blowhard writes Dear Blowhards -- Although I've got lots of wonderful books sitting around the apartment clamoring for my attention, the reading I'm most eager to get to right now is Lucien Steil's architecture webzine, Katarxis. Issue number three is fresh out of the oven, and it's a full-of-goodies doozy, with words and thoughts from such brilliant lights as Christopher Alexander, Andres Duany, Nikos Salingaros, and Leon Krier. The issue even does us the favor of reprinting an immortal 1982 debate, a romper-stomper-style smackdown between Pattern Language superhero (bravo! yay!) Chris Alexander and deconstructivist arch-fiend (boo! hiss!) Peter Eisenman. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments




In Memoriam b/w Let's Go Get 'em
Fenster Moop writes Dear Blowhards: On this third anniversary of the (choose descriptor): attack tragedy outrage, what is the proper response as a (choose frame of reference): human being American artist? The above lists, hardly exhaustive, suggest something of the choices we have as a culture in framing a response to an event as monumental as September 11. Some will demand one interpretation; others will recognize the need for discourse and complexity. I tend toward the latter view. I like the debate and, to a degree, the contentiousness. That does not mean, however, that I do not have my own views, and that I do not try to interpret something general about the mix of the particulars. So, my question: what gives, in your opinions, relative to the way artists are dealing with the 9/11 anniversary? In my town, it seems the art view, as evidenced in the day's scheduled events, is all about things like "healing" and not at all about, for want of a better term, killing the enemy. In one event, volunteers will hand out carnations, one for each of the persons brutally murdered (oops, my bias showing), each flower bearing a message asking the recipient to commit an act of kindness in memory of the person who . . . er . . . tragically passed away. Elsewhere, an artist/academic deals with computer viruses and imagery, speculating that "rolling back the tide of imperial politics will require more than simply piquing moral sensibilities". In a basic sense, of course, art is as art does. But that kind of argument reifies art and, ironically, elevates it to a kind of extra-human matter. And as such, this kind of approach is a conversation-stopper: don't ask why I am doing this art--I am an artist! Well, go ahead and take that view, if you want. But I am less an artist than an observer of human behavior, and I can't help notice that "art" seems to be taking a particular side. Why is that? Is it more because of some intrinsic quality of art, or the artistic process? Or is it because artists in this country at this particular point in time have their heads up their asses? Best, Fenster... posted by Fenster at September 11, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, September 1, 2004


Responses and Elaborations
Dear Blowhards -- Although a little anxious that I may be breaking my arm patting my own back, I can't help feeling tickled to notice that some classy bloggers have taken up, responded to, and elaborated on some of my gab. Over at Artsblogging, George Hunka, some readers, and I had a few amiable back-and-forths about that eternal conundrum, government financing for the arts. The exchanges can be read here and here. Here, John Massengale approvingly links to my posting about American highways (which can be read here) -- very flattering, given that John's an established architecture-and-planning pro while I'm a mere fan. He adds crucial information to the interstate-highway story that shouldn't be missed. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 1, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, August 27, 2004


The Renaissance
Dear Vanessa -- I just finished reading two compact histories of the Renaissance, William Henry Hudson's The Story of the Renaissance (which I listened to on audiotape, rentable here), and Paul Johnson's The Renaissance (buyable here). They're both accessible and helpful, as well as miracles of organization and condensation. If anyone's interested: I'd recommend reading the Hudson before the Johnson. Johnson's awfully good on the art of the period, and he brings his vigorous and earthy commonsense to bear on everything he says. But Hudson's book is much more comprehensive, without being much longer than Johnson's. It's the better E-Z general survey. A couple of things struck me as I was going through these books. One was ... Well, it's going to take a few sentences to set up. The Middle Ages, out of which the Renaissance emerged, was a theocratic time. All the era's best brainpower went into re-justifying theological conclusions that were already agreed-upon: the medieval Christian view of the world. As Hudson writes, "All thought led back to the monastery." As the Middle Ages started to come apart, some people started looking outwards. They looked beyond the walls of the monastery, began comparing what they saw with what they'd been told, and having new and fresh thoughts. This opening-up was the Renaissance Humanist spirit at work; the ingrown reasoning it slowly dislodged was Medieval Scholasticism. My modest reflection? That what the PC/multiculti/academic view of the arts -- whether modernist, post-modernist, or deconstructivist -- represents is a present-day equivalent of Medieval Scholasticism. It's a never-ending, self-justifying, all-devouring system that's a labyrinth leading nowhere but back to its own premises and predetermined conclusions. Both books -- but especially the Johnson -- were very effective at reminding the reader how naive we are when we imagine Renaissance artists as early versions of self-expressive, modern, gallery-art-type artists. In fact, Renaissance artists were almost all outgoing entrepreneurs with bills to pay and contracts to honor. Art was their business; hustle, talent, and skill were what they were selling. Manpower, too: Bellini was famous for employing dozens of assistants. Here's a vivid passage from the Paul Johnson book about what the art game was like in Renaissance Florence: We must not take too elevated a view of the Florentine art shop. It was a business venture, whose chief object was to get lucrative commissions, execute them at a profit, and excel or fend off the competition. Florence was about art, but it was also about money. In 15th century Florence, there was a continuum from the countinghouse through the wholesale cloth warehouse, to shops selling embroidery and colored shoes, to the all-purpose art workshop, catering to the sometimes vulgar taste of rich parvenus, but also producing works of genius that we now venerate. That's the stuff, as far as I'm concerned: don't be so blind that you ignore the actual circumstances out of which art emerges; but don't be such an unresponsive clod that you fail to experience and acknowledge how beautiful and... posted by Michael at August 27, 2004 | perma-link | (16) comments





Wednesday, August 25, 2004


Gals and Art
Dear Vanessa For fear of feminist wrath, I've never before ventured these thoughts in public, so they may be a lot less bulletproof than are many of the observations I venture here. (Oddball though my p-o-v may often appear, I generally take my ideas out for many spins before I set them before a rowdy crowd.) Still, I'm curious to hear what you think. I've always thought that the female contribution to culture was 'way undervalued. Even if women often don't have the same drive men do to build monuments to themselves and their egos, they still often provide goals, purposes, desirability and more. They keep the whole project of culture focused on human needs and desires. It's been argued by many, for instance, that the awfulness of so much modernist architecture and urbanism can be attributed to the unalloyed maleness of it -- it's all engineering, math, and abstractions, "machines for living." It's often women who take responsibility for insistence on the "livable" thing. At its worst, this insistence is all about pleasing them specifically, and can be a pain; god knows that the princessy, self-centered, please-me woman is someone we know all too well. But generally, the culture benefits. Without the keep-it-real energy women bring to bear, male tinkering and competition would run shapelessly riot and would lead to nothing of value, unless your idea of a worthwhile life is the Wild West. Which reminds me of a day I spent at Microsoft long ago. The place was swarming with brilliant geeks, but what became clear to me in minutes was that these were people with no feeling for what a normal person might want from software. They had no "audience sense" -- that's how we'd put it in the arts, anyway -- and no instinct for what's pleasing and what's not. They were smart and aggressive-enough businessguys to know that qualities like "pleasing" and "usable" are important to customers, so they studied people -- but it was a comical spectacle, like watching Martians try to puzzle out humans. And isn't that autistic-ish quality part of what drives many people nuts about Microsoft's software? Ie., that feeling that it was made by instinct-less committees of robots? It seems to me that what people find pleasing about Apple's work is less a matter of specific solutions or ideas than a general sense that Apple really does know, on a gut level, what people want, like, and find enjoyable. You connect with their work on a human and instinctual level. On an instinctive level, what Microsoft software feels like is frantic cluelessness and aggression; it leaves you feeling muscled-around. Now, given that (in terms of usability and attractiveness, anyway) Microsoft has always been chasing Apple, that means that Apple (much more "feminine," much more look-and-feel) is much more the innovator here than Microsoft (geeky-males-galore) is, doesn't it? So doesn't that mean that the "feminine" side of things can drive innovation? It may be that an important part of being a... posted by Michael at August 25, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments





Wednesday, August 18, 2004


Elsewhere
Dear Vanessa -- * Polly Frost's latest stories feature eroticism, horror, and satire -- sounds pretty tasty, as well as like a happenin' and fresh new thing. Here's a Nerve profile of Polly by Lynn Harris. * '60s icon and sex kitten Jane ("Je T'Aime") Birkin is now touring as the opening act for Lou Reed. The Guardian's Jason Solomons writes an engaging profile of the eccentric actress here. * George Hunka has masterminded a new groupblog on a good topic: artsblogging, here. He and blogmates Jessica Duchen and Helen Radice are fast out of the starting gate with postings on such topics as whether or not to dress up for an evening at the theater, and the need for more exchange and discussion among the arts. George's own firstclass blog is here. * Good lord: public-television fundraising drives, eh? Lynn Sislo has some suggestions for PBS here. * One of the web's many benefits is how easy it's made it to check out the work of photographers. Recently, I've been enjoying the photoblog (here) of Jonathan Gewirtz, who also word-blogs at Chicago Boyz, here. * I notice that a new Criterion boxed set of three Jean Renoir movies has just been released; it can be bought here. The three films -- "The Golden Coach," "Elena and Her Men," and "Paris Can-Can" -- share a theme: theater-seen-as-life/life-seen-as-theater. To spring for the not-cheap set or not? Hmm: I'm a major fan of "The Golden Coach," but it seems to me that you have to be in a pretty generous mood to be charmed by the other two films. (I semi-love them anyway.) But Criterion has adorned the package with many tempting goodies ... Heck, I dunno. Film buffs won't want to miss "The Golden Coach" in any case. * Jerry Adler's piece for Newsweek online is a reader-friendly intro to behavioral economics, here. At one point, Adler is discussing what game theory predicts vs. how people actually act: "The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates," Adler writes, "are those who don't take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics." (UPDATE: Arnold Kling comments on the Newsweek article here.) * Speaking of autism and econ, economics malcontents will want to browse the latest issue of the Post-Autistics Economics Review, here. I especially like the idea of using a measure of GNH (Gross National Happiness) alongside the more familiar GDP. * Surfing around Amazon just now, I noticed that a film I love was released on DVD last year: the Taviani brothers' 1982 Night of the Shooting Stars (buyable here, Netflixable here), a fable-like and panoramic view of one Italian village's experience of World War II. The film is one of the rare movies that operates at the highest level from the very first frame. It's got the magic of early Spielberg, a degree of stylization comparable to the best Fellini, and an intensity of beauty that's all its own. * Jim Kalb and... posted by Michael at August 18, 2004 | perma-link | (22) comments





Friday, July 30, 2004


Evolution and Architecture
Dear Vanessa -- David Sucher (here) reprints a terrific Philip Langdon piece (here) about all the lousy new architecture that Harvard and MIT are inflicting on the Boston area. Simply and straightforwardly, Langdon spells out the basic case for a traditionalist approach to building and urbanism: Although it's true that occasionally architecture moves forward in a giant leap, more often it advances incrementally -- carefully incorporating innovations into a base of design and construction wisdom that has been refined through decades if not centuries of experience. Traditional buildings, with their usually pleasing proportions, human scale and comfortable public spaces, are the beneficiaries of a long process of separating the wheat from the chaff. Traditional building and urbanism are the results of the same processes that have resulted in present-day life forms. (This is evo-bio at work in the arts.) When you look at a traditional courtyard, arch, column, porch, or piazza -- or even at those swags, medallions, and pineapples that traditional buidlings wear like jewelry -- you're looking at forms that are the results of longterm processes, and that are as marvelous and idiosyncratic as the life forms that have evolved to populate the world. Towns and cities are like ecosystems, in other words; the buildings in them, and the elements that make up these buildings, are like individual organisms. That's a big part of the fascination of architecture, for my money anyway: eyeballing buildings, neighborhoods, and spaces can be fascinating in the same way that looking through a microscope at tiny wriggling beasties can be. And let's hear it for free and accessible: experienced in this way, a city is like a giant, no-admission-charge, open-air museum of natural history. Modernist/po-mo/decon buildings, neighborhoods, and spaces? For all their occasional design pizazz, they're too often lacking in simple life. James Kunstler makes brainy, riotous fun of these chic-theme-park new Harvard/MIT buildings here, here, and here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 30, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, July 29, 2004


John Massengale
Dear Vanessa -- I had a delightful New Urbanist lunch with the architect, author, and blogger John Massengale today. (John's blog is here.) Over Indian food, we first agreed that there's something about passing 50 that changes you from a detail person into a big-picture guy. Then we turned to such neotraditionalist topics as ... well, to be honest, a lot of what we gabbed about was off-the-record and will have to be kept that way. But I do think I'm free to say that you shouldn't be surprised to see the following stories show up in the Star sometime very, very soon: Christopher Alexander and Cameron Diaz: Their Romance to Become Reality-TV Series!!! Spotted Poolside at the Fontainebleau Drinking Fuzzy Navels: HRH The Prince of Wales and Donald Trump!!! Four-Picture Paramount Deal Inked by Nikos Salingaros!!! Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Leon Krier Home-Sex Video Now on the Web!!! Look Out Martha: Andres Duany and Target to Franchise the New Urbanism!!! Henry Hope Reed Escapes from Betty Ford Clinic, Beats Up Paparazzi!!! Just kidding, in case any of our more literal-minded visitors didn't pick that up. John's been doing a lot of top-quality blogging recently that I should have been better about linking to. Here he muses about modernity and classicism -- don't be afraid, it's an engrossing subject. Here he wonders why most airports provide such lousy welcomes to cities. Here he reveals "just how anal architects can be." Hardcore libertarians really need to wrestle with the Andy Singer cartoon John reproduces here. Blogging: among many other things, a good way to meet great people. It's a wonderful way to learn, too. Many thanks to John for a terrific lunch. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 29, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, July 13, 2004


Lunch Emails
Dear Vanessa -- Friedrich and I chose the "Dear Michael"/"Dear Friedrich," epistolary form we use on this blog for a simple reason: we're lazy. Since we were writing each other long, art-gaga emails anyway -- we've been doing this for years -- and since neither one of us can ever see the point of doing more work than is absolutely necessary, we looked at our emails and thought, What could be easier than copying and pasting? Well, OK, we always made an effort to pretty-up our thoughts and words. But we also genuinely did want to promote a conversational and informal tone. We felt it was important. Let the pros and the profs take care of the formal essays and from-on-high lectures. Our small contribution to the artchat world would be to be proprietors of a place where the kind of email and cafe gab we both love might flourish. Friedrich is on hiatus from blogging, but he and I continue to swap emails as of old. Every now and then I persuade him to let me do the heavy labor of cutting and pasting. Here's a recent lunch-hour back-and-forth. I hope it's amusing. Michael Blowhard: I got back from vacation thinking I’ve got to get more serious about my, ahem, creative work. Those dozens of stories and novels I’ve got laying around … maybe there’s a way to finish them up after all. Turns out there is, actually -- I hand them over to the Wife. I was always confident and happy dreaming up projects, laying them out, polishing them … but never at bringing the characters and situations to life. At that one stage, I’d always feel my projects go dead on me, and I could never figure out why. It turns out my wife is great at that stage. So she’s helping -- as in taking over 99% of the work. It’s going great. What fun to be able to offload what I can’t do onto someone who’s great at it. (Shhh: don’t let anyone know! Because if you let this cat out of the bag, I'll have no literary reputation left whatsoever!) And look out, world: now I get to raise from the dead every lousy little fiction project I ever dreamed up and then abandoned. Luckily, I seem to be of a little use to The Wife with her writing projects too. I make a few suggestions about structure and plots, both of which, to my surprise, I seem to have a knack for. What’s up with your creative side? Friedrich von Blowhard: I’m thinking about doing some still life paintings. I’m also getting pretty serious about trying to write a book on art history that focuses on what paintings are really about. What were they intended to mean, at least in their original context? I’m thinking of a cultural history of art, with a fairly heavy emphasis on religion as the area of culture that’s most in tune with the visual arts. Obviously that... posted by Michael at July 13, 2004 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, July 8, 2004


Who Designs? Our Tools or Us?
Dear Vanessa -- How much impact do the tools we use have on the products we make? I tend to think the answer is, Quite a lot. Tatyana, on the other hand, disagrees. Speaking from experience as a pro, she points out that many designers use computer aided design (CAD) to create ultra-traditional artifacts. No disputing that, of course. Darn it. Yet I'll persist a bit anyway. The developments I've witnessed over the last few decades in TV, magazines, and movies have left me with the impression that, while technology can't be said to determine anything, it can certainly be said to condition much. For instance, most magazines these days are put together with the computer programs Quark and InDesign. Both of these programs work by constructing pages out of boxes -- picture boxes, graphic boxes, headline boxes, text-column boxes, etc. And what do most magazines look like nowadays? A bunch of jazzed-up, poppy boxes. But taking Tatyana's point, I admit that Quark and InDesign are being used to create completely traditional magazines too. The Nation, The New Republic, and The New Yorker are probably all constructed using the same tools that are being taxed to the max to create Entertainment Weekly. Still, take movies. While computer-editing and image-tweaking technologies can be used to craft classical movies, I can't help noticing that since the introduction of these gizmos the standard American movie is no longer a traditional movie; it's instead a pumpy, cyber-media, cut-cut-cut thing. Coincidence? But this is all merely a longwinded run-up to my lousy photo of the new Time-Warner center in Manhattan. (I blogged a bit about this building here.) Does that look like a real building to you, or does it look like a CAD computer-screen image of a building? For reference, here are a couple of CAD images: I notice that the Time Warner building and the CAD images have some similarities. They're featureless, they're texture-free, they're abstract, they're plasticky. "Toy Story"-esque, no? For comparison, here's a traditional pen-and-ink architectural drawing: Unrealistic in its own way, perhaps. But this drawing feels handmade. It conveys an awareness of tactile textures and of how light interacts with materials. It conveys depth and weight. I notice more emphasis on the context the building is intended to fit into as well. As computers speed up, will CAD renderings catch up with hand-drawing in terms of conveying texture, presence, and weight? Or is it more likely instead that our tastes will adapt themselves to what CAD tends all its own to deliver? Perhaps many people already prefer polygons, vinyl featurelessness, and flourescent-esque computer-light to the real, er, traditional thing. By the way, does the Time-Warner Center remind you, as it does me, of Darth Vader's mask? (A friend calls the style of this building "Death Star architecture.") Reflect-y planes of sinister black glass ... Don't ask me why, but when I look at this building, I can hear the voice of James Earl Jones. Which re-raises a question that came... posted by Michael at July 8, 2004 | perma-link | (29) comments





Saturday, June 26, 2004


Laughing at Rem
Dear Vanessa -- Don't miss Keith Pleas' visit here to the new Rem Koolhaas Seattle public library. (From pix, the library looks to me like a cyberwarehouse, a camp orgy of translucency, metal grillework, and computer-aided origami -- part Apple Store, part airport, part Edsel.) Keith doesn't seem impressed, to say the least. In one hilarious passage, he's giving some thought to the place's avant-garde signage: My question is, how readable will any of this signage be with real, live people in front of it? Frankly, I think the design team didn't think beyond how it would look in the photos they're going to have submitted to the architecture and design journals which, naturally, are taken without people messing up the spaces. Oh, and give yourself extra credit if you noticed the shin-high railings along the angled wall and thought "hey, won't people trip on those?" These aren't the words of someone who's in the thrall of current architectural Theory, that's for sure. Thanks to David Sucher (here), who pointed Keith's posting out. David himself tours the library today; the blogosphere awaits his verdict. Personally, I'm hoping the NYTimes will fill the architecture-critic position recently vacated by Herbert Muschamp with either David or Keith. The public discussion about architecture -- which seems to me to be in a particularly demented state these days -- could use a heavy dose of David and Keith's brand of intelligent common sense. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 26, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, June 25, 2004


Guest Posting from Planet Friedrich
Dear Vanessa -- This just in from a former Blowharder: I'm still gnawing away at Modern Art. Not very originally, I would identify at least four major sub-traditions in Modern Art: Social Realism, Formalist Modernism (Post-Impressionism through Abstraction), Symbolism (Symbolists-Surrealism) and Conceptual (Duchamp and his postmodern children.) The problem is a huge fuzziness about the beginnings of all of these. Social Realism has antecedents going back at least as far as Caravaggio. Formalist Modernism is clearly related in various ways to Neoclassicism and Romantic painting, to say nothing of much older Japanese, African, and other sources. Symbolism is obviously almost undistinguishable from Romanticism. Conceptual art is essentially the use of traditional/historical strategies for communicating meaning in art applied to objects, words, behaviors, etc., rather than to representational visual symbols. In many ways, conceptual art is the 20th century version of history painting -- just without the draftsmanship. Some of those questions, however, were just motivated by reading a lot of history in a short time and suddenly making what appeared to be obvious connections -- e.g., how is psychoanalysis related to "The Sorrows of Young Werther" or "The Confessions" or "Emile"? (Perhaps more awkwardly, how is psychoanalysis related to Spiritualism and Mesmerism? To European imperialism?) How is landscape painting related to the rise of Deism, Unitarianism and Rational Religion? Where exactly did Romanticism come from, and what's it about, exactly? That is, can it be related to underlying social/economic/religious/scientific trends? By the way, it also dawned on me that it's not just a matter of "interpreting" art in light of social forces -- I think it can also work the other way around. For example, I was wondering why the French Revolution turned so savagely violent. After all, it came at the end of a century of significant material progress for the French (higher incomes, greater life expectancies, improved roads and infrastructure, etc.) The absolutist monarchy wasn't the nicest institution in the world, but it hadn't visited that kind of violence on Frenchmen in over a century -- really, since the repression of The Fronde. What exactly were they so pissed off about? And why were the French revolutionaries so eager to go to war with virtually all of Europe? Then I thought of J. L. David, whose paintings are full of quasi-hysterical glorifications of moral harshness (Oath of the Horatii, Brutus) and of dead heroes (Marat, Bara, Lepellitier, etc., etc.). Obviously he was hitting the French where they lived, emotionally. And in David's personal and professional life, all the action came from a dichotomy between a desperate desire to connect with "good" father-figures and furious anger at "bad" fathers -- not surprisingly, as his own father was killed in a duel when he was an infant, thus leaving him orphaned and searching for substitute father figures like his architect uncle (bad), like his cousin Boucher (good), like his neoclassical mentor Vien (mostly bad), like the senior administrators in the Academy (bad), like Marat (very good), like Robespierre (good), like... posted by Michael at June 25, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments




Herbert Muschamp is Real Gone
Dear Vanessa -- What a lovely development: the NYTimes' absurd radical propagandist, er, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp is stepping down. Here's a sensationally good NY Observer piece about Muschamp's run at the paper, and why he's leaving. Those who are curious about how the ego-tecture game is played -- and those still idealistic about bigtime architecture -- are urged to give the piece a read. It's not as if Muschamp's absurdity (and his ego, his tyrannical temperament, and his corruption) was a big secret. "If the transition is self-motivated," writes Clay Risen, the article's author, "it's also, sources at The Times said, a relief to a new crop of editors unwilling to defend, as their predecessors did, the critic's iconoclasm and obscurantism, his unapologetic dilettantism and his unabashed socializing within the highest social circles of the creative world he judges in print." Much, much more follows. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 25, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, June 24, 2004


Slow
Dear Vanessa -- Expert foodie that you are, you're well aware of the Slow Food movement, whose international website is here and whose U.S. website is here. 2Blowhards visitor Dave Lull writes in to point out a couple of other slow-it-down movements and websites that have appeared recently. As we say in the media game, "Three examples and you've got yourself a real trend." Here's a site devoted to a book by Carl Honore that's about the virtues of slowness generally. Honore isn't advocating anything hippie-ish or unwashed, let alone any form of hide-in-the-woods Luddism either. He's advocating something very civilized instead. "Being 'Slow'," the author writes, "means living better in the hectic modern world by striking a balance between fast and slow." Here are some facts from the book's press material: Americans spend 40% less time with their children than they did in the 1960s; an American on average spends 72 minutes of every day behind the wheel of a car; a typical business executive now loses 68 hours a year to being put on hold; and American adults currently devote on average a meager half hour per week to making love. Here's a q&a with the author; here's the book's Amazon page; here's a Yahoo News visit with Honore. "Living better" -- if art ain't about that, then I just lost interest. I also enjoyed noticing that Honore is a yoga fan. And here's Dave's other find, the website of the Slow Cities movement, which seems very Jane Jacobs, as well as directly influenced by Slow Food. I'm eager to hear what David Sucher (here), John Massengale (here), James Kunstler (here) and Larry Felton Johnson (here) -- Slow types, all of them -- think of the Slow Cities movement. I notice that Kunstler's June Eyesore of the Month award (here) goes to the very speedy new Rem Koolhaas-designed library in Seattle. Kunstler makes some good jokes at the place's expense. David Sucher tours the library this Saturday and will blog about it soon after. I'm eager to read David's observations and verdict. How not to root for these Slow developments? Careening through cyberlife while clicking on flashing buttons has its virtues and pleasures; it can leave you feeling frantic and empty too. What's all that workaday speeding-around meant to lead to anyway? Yet more speeding around? Pardon me while I collapse, then take a mood-booster. It occurs to me that there are two Slow movements I'd like to see someone start up. First: Slow Tennis -- wooden rackets, small racket heads. Enough with the flashy monotony of today's boom-boom, stunt-centric MTV spectacle, and back to the civilized amateur's game tennis was prior to the 1980s. OK, classic tennis could be boring -- but why do we get so hung about Boring? Boredom is a close neighbor of Leisure, after all; I sometimes wonder if the Fear of Being Bored might not be the symptomatic disease of our age. And, y'know, I'll take it over Numbing -- which is... posted by Michael at June 24, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments





Wednesday, June 16, 2004


A New Sarah Susanka Book
Dear Vanessa -- Sarah Susanka, the architect and author who's best-known for "The Not-So-Big House," has just published another lovely and helpful book, Home By Design. Like "The Not-So-Big House," it's a beautifully-produced, practical, and visual guide to how to make a house a home. Susanka's titles refer to the idea that it can worth spending a little extra money and care on somewhat fewer square feet than Americans often do. She's urging us to buy quality, not quantity, in other words, and she's showing us how to do it wisely. Susanka -- and her designer and photographers, as well as the architects and builders whose work she features -- steers a middle ground that I suspect many homeowners will find helpful. Her books have real substance; they aren't mere lifestyle-and-trimmings extravaganzas. Instead, she discusses such questions as: Why do so many buildings and spaces these days feel barren? Why do so many houses fail to turn into homes? What's the difference between square-footage-surrounded-by-walls and a room you love? Her books are intellectually engaging, yet they're fun and easily-browsable catalogs of ideas too. These are user's guides, in other words, the contempo equivalent of the "pattern books" used by the local builders in the 19th century who created many of our best-loved houses and neighborhoods. Susanka boils Christopher Alexander's "patterns" down to a manageable number, discusses general principles as well as specifics, and gives lots of (superbly-photographed and laid-out) examples of how to put them to use. She isn't trying to bury you in theory, or to lock you into some absurd all-or-nothing system; she digs the fact that it's your project, and your life. Interesting, no? Hmmm, so architecture as an art form doesn't have to be about a solo ego showing off; it can instead be about helping people get more of what they want out of their buildings and neighbhorhoods. Susanka's own designs tend towards a modernism-meets-Arts-and-Crafts thing that isn't much to my taste. But so what. She isn't trying to impose her vision; she's offering general patterns that can be adapted to personal taste. She's here to serve, not to impose. When I talked to her once some years back, I found her modest and enthusiastic, firm in her convictions, and eager to acknowledge Chrisotpher Alexander as a giant. In fact, people intrigued by the Alexander approach will probably enjoy exploring Susanka's books, as they'd enjoy exploring Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow's recent Patterns of Home, buyable here. (Two of this book's three authors collaborated with Alexander on "A Pattern Language.") No coincidence, by the way, that all these books are published by the excellent Taunton Press -- I blogged about Taunton here. Eyeballing books like these, you get some idea of what Alexander's ideas look like when put into practice by talented designers and builders. Although images can never replace on-the-spot, in-person experience, you can also begin to sense what these structures feel like too. Which is really the important thing, because the central goal of... posted by Michael at June 16, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, June 11, 2004


More on FLW
Dear Vanessa -- In a posting a while ago (here), I wondered out loud about Frank Lloyd Wright. Sure, many of his buildings are show-stoppingly beautiful, and that's something that needs to be acknowledged. But why shouldn't some of their other qualities and characteristics also be acknowledged? Many of them leak; some have had terrible construction problems; some are absurdly unfunctional. And it isn't uncommon for inhabitants of a FLW house to feel like it never really belongs to them. Instead of feeling like they live in their own home, they wind up feeling like the curators of a FLW monument to himself. Comments continue to appear on this posting occasionally, nearly all of them outraged. I enjoy checking them out, though few people seem to come up with anything but a variation on the old "it's not that you disagree with me, it's that you really don't get it" argument. And quel shockeroo to learn (for about the zillionth time, sigh) that those in the architectural know consider "architecture" something apart from such values as usefulness, soundness, and a willingness to serve rather than dominate. No, "architecture" -- for those in the know, bien sur -- is something else entirely. Something along the lines of "design completely divorced from all other considerations." I dunno, I guess that's just too durned sophisticated a thought for a rube like me. No matter how hard I try, I just cain't figure out why I should think of a building as being all that much different from a car. And when I think about what makes a "good car," such questions as price, utility, comfort, safety, and durability count as high in my mind as "brilliance of design" does. I'm sorry, I just cain't help it. So imagine my feelings when I read a NYTimes article this morning by Carol Vogel about Wright's Guggenheim Museum, here. Trustees are getting ready to give the building a $25 million restoration. Ever-popular the Guggenheim may be, but it's never been the greatest place to display art. It has also looked suspiciously ratty for many years now. I've taken photos of its peeling exterior and cracked sidewalks, planning to put them up on the blog. Too late, though: I've been scooped by the Times. Dang! A fun passage from Vogel's article: Neither the building's design, which was commissioned by the Guggenheim in 1943, nor its construction, which was completed in 1959, went smoothly. The only builder Wright could find to execute his drawings economically was a man whose expertise was in constructing parking garages and freeways. The building's outer wall was made by spraying layers of gunite (a mixture of sand and cement commonly used to line swimming pools) from within the building, through steel reinforcements, against pieces of plywood that were molded into the building's shape. Every few years the exterior is patched and painted, but the cosmetic touches camouflage far deeper problems. In extremely cold weather, moisture from the skylights and windows that have not... posted by Michael at June 11, 2004 | perma-link | (56) comments




How To Refer to "It"?
Dear Vanessa -- How often are you and the Hubster getting to the theater these days? The Wife and I recently treated ourselves to a little theatergoing for the first time in a while. Back in my unsuccessful-pro-who-nonetheless-kept-up-with-the-arts days, I was able -- thanks to a generous artsgoing expense account -- to see a lot of plays. Boy, did we sit through a lot of bad theater. But we sat through some awfully good theater too. So it was nostalgic fun to indulge that groove again. It was even more fun when I reminded myself that for me these days, "keeping up" is an option. All of which may mean nothing more than that, even as an arts-goer, I'm a born amateur. To run through the plays we saw: The limited-run Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers. Are you a Stoppard fan? I'm split, myself. I've seen a handful of the plays, none of which I've been crazy about, yet I often love his screenplays. My suspicion: he's at his best (and he's best able to set aside his own ego) when adapting other people's material. But I'd never before seen one of his pinwheeling-extravaganza-type plays given a full-dress, big-budget workout, and I was curious to see what such an event would be like. Not great, is my answer. Stoppard's certainly a funny guy, and he's got to be one of the world's cleverest-ever playwrights. And there's something endearingly puppyish about his eagerness to entertain. But his plays can also get to feeling antic, hectic, and wearying; his determination to dazzle loses its charm and starts feeling compulsive and competitive. A pet theory of mine: nearly all in-linear-time art-things that last longer than a half-hour need some sense of the human, the narrative, and the relaxed to carry an audience's goodwill along with them. But you may be a bigger fan of nonlinear theater than I am. It seems to me that the challenge for a director and actors would be to figure out how to supply the energy while at the same time drawing the audience into the drama. David Leveaux's production was super-professional -- he produced a very well-done evening. But it didn't lick the central problem. The production, by the way, seems to exist in large part to show off Simon Russell Beale, the lead actor, who's evidently a legend in England for his self-amused verbal prowess; he's a Charles-Laughton-on-speed type. At first I was suitably amazed by Beale, but as the evening went by I lost interest in his performance. But the real problem of the evening, it seemed to me, was the fact that the play was being presented on Broadway. A huge house ... A clueless, bussed-in audience ... Up on that immense stage, the play seemed tiny and elitist; the audience behaved restlessly and unappreciatively, and left me with the impression that it'd have been happier watching the tube. I came away thinking that Stoppard's plays are perhaps best thought of as good... posted by Michael at June 11, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments





Thursday, June 10, 2004


FvB's American Art Timeline
My former co-blogger FvB, in the midst of some Deepthink about American art, cooked up the following timeline. I got a lot out of eyeballing it, and persuaded Friedrich to let me post it here. AMERICAN ARTIST TIMELINE 15-year “generations” 1775 Rembrandt Peale 1778-1860 (American Neoclassical?) 1790 Samuel Morse 1791-1872 (American Neoclassical?) Asher B. Durand 1796-1886 (Hudson River School) Thomas Cole 1801-1848 (Hudson River School) 1805 John Frederick Kensett 1816-1872 (Hudson River School-Luminist) Martin J. Heade 1819-1904 (Hudson River School-Luminist) 1820 Jasper Francis Cropsey 1823-1900 (Hudson River School-Luminist) Frederic Edwin Church 1826-1900 (Hudson River School-Luminist) Albert Bierstadt 1830-1902 (Hudson River School) James A.M. Whistler 1834-1903 (Hard to characterize) 1835 John La Farge 1835–1910 (American Renaissance) Winslow Homer 1836-1910 (American Realist) Thomas Moran 1837-1926 (Hudson River School?) Thomas Eakins 1844-1916 (American Realist) Edwin Howland Blashfield 1848–1936 (Muralist, American Renaissance) Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) (American Realist) Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1848-1907 (American Renaissance Sculptor) William Michael Harnett 1848-1892 (American Realist) William Merritt Chase, 1849 – 1916 (American Realist/Impressionist/ Post Impressionist) Abbott Handerson Thayer 1849-1921(American Renaissance) 1850 Theodore Robinson, 1852 – 1896 (American Impressionist) Julian Alden Weir 1852-1919 (American Impressionist/Post Impressionist) John Twachtman, 1853 – 1902 (American Impressionist) John Frederick Peto 1854-1907 (American Realist) Kenyon Cox, 1856-1919 (Muralist, American Renaissance) John Singer Sargent 1856 – 1925 (Hard to characterize) Maurice Prendergast, 1858 – 1924 (American Post Impressionist) Childe Hassam, 1859 – 1935 (American Impressionist) Robert Reid 1863-1929 (American Impressionist) 1865 Robert Henri 1865 – 1929 (American Ashcan School Painter) William Wendt 1865-1946 (California Impressionist) George Luks 1866-1933 (American Ashcan School Painter) Guy Rose 1867-1925 (American Impressionist Painter) John Sloan 1871-1951 (American Ashcan School Painter) Granville Redmond (California Impressionist), 1871-1935] William Glackens 1870-1938 (American Ashcan School Painter) Maurice Braun 1877-1941 (California Impressionist) 1880 Edward Hopper 1882-1967 (American Scene Painter) Edgar Alwin Payne C.1882-1947 (California Impressionist)... posted by Michael at June 10, 2004 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, June 8, 2004


FvB on France, America, Modernist Art, etc.
He may have retired from blogging, but Friedrich von Blowhard is obviously powerless to keep his brain from its usual concerns. Here's something I've slapped together from a few of the recent emails my former co-blogger has sent me. It will no doubt amuse you to hear that I am still reading about art, religion, France and America. To wit, I can't make sense out of the collapse of the French between the World Wars out of your notion of a highly disciplined bourgeois life made liveable by a measured (if psychologically central) indulgence in the pleasure principle. I can only assume that what you saw in the early 1970s was the result of the French having renounced their one-time world-historical role (i.e., the Grand Nation, the Revolutionary Nation, the Napoleonic Empire, Paris as the capital of the 19th Century, etc.) as exhausting and beyond their means. I suppose one could say that ambition had been beaten out of them by the World Wars, by their rather humbled position in the Cold War era, by Algeria, by Vietnam, etc. My guess would be that the dilemma of the last three centuries for the French-- .e., what might be termed the post-Louis XIV era--has been that their fundamentally feudal culture has simultaneously been so out of touch with the needs of the modern world and yet somehow impossible for them to give up and still think of themselves as French. They spent decade after decade (really, century after century) trying to "fix the problem" without really changing anything that was a "core principle" (and working really hard, most of the time, to avoid acknowledging that they would never regain the glory days of Louis XIV). Every ambitious attempt to adjust to the modern world -- the attempts at reform by the 18th century monarchy, the Revolution, the Napoleonic "distraction," the Third Republic (which actually kind of worked, but only kind of), the Popular Front, their attempts at imperialism, etc., etc., kept ultimately blowing up in their face, either from within (because they wandered too far from their core, essentially feudal, conservatism) or from without (because other societies that had made better adjustments to the modern world kept kicking their asses.) Hence they raised the art of the public "argument" about what they needed to do to a much higher pitch than in any other society, which gave their country a uniquely intellectual form of amusement (but not just amusement; there was a serious problem that they needed to solve and it was a really tough nut to crack). In their defense, I guess you could say that the French--rather heroically--kept picking up the pieces and trying again to master the Sisyphean task of reconciling feudalism with the modern world, and each failure seems to have helped them adjust, if only incrementally, in the next period (if only by reconciling them to the notion that "greatness"--that most dangerous of addictions--was further and further out of their grip). I guess what I've just... posted by Michael at June 8, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, May 28, 2004


Underneath It All
I grew up in a sweet, provincial, middle-class, small-town/suburb-ish, vanilla-American part of the world. Bicycles, baseball, Boy Scouts, cheerleaders; parents with jobs, not "careers," whatever those were; nice kids who married high-school sweethearts and raised nice, vanilla kids. Granted that a little "Twin Peaks" and "Boys Don't Cry" could be found too if you looked hard enough. But this really was a fringe element. Horizons may not have been big, but on the other hand nine out of ten people were trustworthy, and nearly everyone meant you well. Parental ambition and my own curiosity blasted me out of that comfy universe and landed me on a very different planet, one of high-powered narcissists, glittering schools, big egos, money, vanity, connections, etc. A cold and vicious place -- yikes! But so long as I was still in school, I did OK for myself. I was tenacious enough to hold my own among these strange, ferociously highstrung creatures. I even had moments when I felt downright special: yo, look at me! I could continue to be a nice person yet still do well among the egomaniacs! I was so cool that I could balance on the edge of a cliff! Once that framework was no longer in place, though -- once I left the fancy schools yet remained among the fancy people -- I fell off that cliff. I had adventures and misadventures, a few of them enjoyable, a few of them even chic. I did fine in some respects. But I spent a lot of time in bewildered freefall. Good lord, how to cope? I'd do my best to get on top of things, or I'd give over and try to get Zen about my fate -- anything to find some kind of poise. But I always lost the battle. Aside from a few fantasies about making movies, I'd otherwise never had professional ambitions. But I did have a bit of a verbal knack, and I'd tumbled into a part of the media woods where that might serve ... So every few years I'd laboriously pull reluctant energies together and treat myself to a tense spasm of "trying," as in trying to make an impression. And every time, I'd give it up pronto. Having failed to make an impression on a field I didn't want to get ahead in anyway, I'd lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling, and mutter gloomy and pointless words. In my own mind, the only thing I'd ever really hoped to do in this anxious, pushy, free-for-all world was to have a good time -- or at least a snazzier and more interesting time than I'd have had if I'd stayed back in sweet, boring ol' vanilla-land. Downside of all this: frustration, tension, and a lot of time spent trying to pull myself together in all the wrong ways. Upside: primarily the Wife (and hooray for her). But also some very good friends, a ton of lost naivete, and a fair amount of hands-on knowledge... posted by Michael at May 28, 2004 | perma-link | (18) comments





Tuesday, May 25, 2004


Proportional Representation?
The New York Times' Robin Pogrebin reports here that there are surprisingly few blacks on the boards of a lot of NYC arts organizations. He gives Asians and Hispanics a few mentions too. But the article is clearly focused on arts boards and blacks. I read the piece in an agreeable state of grumpy self-satisfaction, happily muttering to myself things like, "Those damn leftish elites can't even bring themselves to practice what they preach. Hell, they can't even practice what they love imposing on the rest of us! It's the New Hypocrisy!! Didn't you always know this would be the case? ..." Grump, harumph. But a few hours have passed and my thinking about the piece has grown a little ... well, the word "nuanced" certainly overdignifies it. "Confused" is probably closer to the truth. But maybe in a fun-to-rummage-around way. In the first place, while it's certainly true that people in the arts are generally ultra-left, it may also be true that the board members of arts organization aren't so leftish. Board members, after all, are usually people with tons of dough, and may well be rightish. So my grumpiness about hypocrisy may have no basis in fact, darn it. And hats off to Pogrebin, who refrains from mentioning the "r" (racism) word too, too many times. Still, I find myself wondering about a few Larger Questions. As is my wont, I'm going to dodge the immediate and obvious debate about whether or not fields (and boards) should be making big efforts to go out and diversify themselves in racial terms. ("It's up to them but shouldn't be enforced by law," is my general feeling, FWIW.) I'm going to plow into a few other questions instead. Larger Question #1: Why on earth should we expect every field or organization to look like a representative sample of the American population generally? What an odd presumption. If, say, we had ourselves a look into the oceanography field and we discovered that there aren't a lot of Latino oceanographers, should we instantly leap to the conclusion that something must be amiss? On what basis? Accuse me of working on nothing but raw hunch here, so be it. But I for one wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that there aren't too many Latinos going into oceanography these days. I lift this point from the great Thomas Sowell, who has often argued that we look at the topic of racial representation from an entirely mistaken point of view. We shouldn't come to the topic asking, "Why are there so few people of Race X in this particular field?" The attitude we should bring instead is, "Why should any field be expected to look, racially speaking, like the population generally? How absurd." In his wonderful and helpful Ethnic America (buyable here), Sowell uses German-Americans as an example. This group arrived in America bringing, as you'd expect, a history and a culture with them, as well as a distinctive set of talents and skills --... posted by Michael at May 25, 2004 | perma-link | (25) comments





Thursday, May 13, 2004


New-Urb Elsewhere
Dear Friedrich -- Fun Web rumblings on the New Urbanism front. * John Massengale (here) has dug up a report (here) about architecture news at Princeton University. On one side of campus, a swoopy, titanium-clad new Frank Gehry building is being erected. (Wouldn't you think Gehry could have come up with a new trick by now?) Meanwhile, on another side of campus, a gray-stone, collegiate-Gothic dorm complex in the style of Old Princeton by the brilliant New Classicist Dmitri Porphyrios is being built. So who's the real radical here? * The ever-practical David Sucher has put up a posting that'll teach you at least half (and maybe more) of all you need to know about urbanism and suburbanism in less than 30 seconds, here. * The excellent Witold Rybczynski 's review of a new Duany/Plater-Zyberk/Alminana book is a sleek and amusing sprint throught the crucial basics of American urbanism history (here). The book itself can be bought here. * Larry Felton Johnson documents Cabbagetown, a pleasing Atlanta neighborhood, here. Larry's been blogging up a storm recently; it's been a special pleasure hanging out at his site. * As everyone who's more in the know than I am has already pointed out, the great Jane Jacobs' new book, "Dark Age Ahead," is now on sale. It can be ordered here. * I've read it before and I'll read it again: Roger Scruton's long essay for City Journal entitled "After Modernism" (here) is, IMHO, one of the greats. A headful of energized thoughts is a guaranteed minimum result of reading this amazing piece; a complete brain-reorientation is a distinct possibility. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 13, 2004 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, May 12, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi -- The Response
I hope visitors have taken the opportunity to read Nikos Salingaros' eight-part essay about the work of the deconstructivist theorist and architect Benard Tschumi. (You can access all eight chapters from this posting here, or you can read it straight through at Nikos' own site here.) IMHO, Nikos (like his colleagues in architecture Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier) is doing some of the most-provocative, solid and productive thinking that's being done about the arts anywhere these days, right up there with the work of Frederick Turner, Denis Dutton, and Ellen Dissanayake. It's quite a privilege to show his brain and thoughts off on our blog. If anyone has hesitated to plunge into Nikos' essay, please give it a try anyway. Even if architecture isn't one of your passions or hobbyhorses, I suspect the essay will get your mind buzzing about a lot of arts-related subjects: the proper role of the artist, for example, and the function of theory in art. And it's likely to be helpful in getting what's happening in the cultural sphere generally in better focus. I see evidence of what Nikos describes and wrestles with, for example, in graphic design, literary fiction, and movies too. It was fun to notice Nikos' essay being discussed around the blogosphere. After all, the more the discussion about the built enviroment we share opens up, the better off we all are. I forwarded along some links to Nikos and asked if he'd be willing to pull together a response. He was, and here it is. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi: The Response by Nikos Salingaros 9. APPENDIX: Reactions to this paper. Following the publication of my paper online, readers wrote in comments; others published a response on their own website. I was very curious to see how people would react to my arguments, as it would indicate whether the original points registered or not. Non-architectural readers were intrigued if not totally convinced. At the very least, my article opened up a healthy debate on the topic of contemporary architecture OUTSIDE the normally closed architectural circles. I was pleased that those architects who did not dismiss my arguments outright tried very hard to come to grips with what I had said. I never expected to convince them at once, and was delighted that they took the trouble to engage. On the whole, however, my paper provoked the type of response I anticipated. Nearly every critique bore out my thesis on the existence of an architectural cult (as I describe elsewhere). The reaction consisted of standard cult responses to an external threat. One may even consider this as a sophisticated scientific experiment, although that was not my original intent. Perturb the deconstructivists and their followers by criticizing their beliefs, and see how they respond. Interpreting their response then gives invaluable information on what type of system we are actually dealing with. This is especially important when the inner workings of an institution are shielded from the outside world, or when... posted by Michael at May 12, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, May 10, 2004


Froggytime
&tDear Friedrich -- I'm having another one of my Froggy moments -- a stretch when, without having consciously intended it, I find myself in the midst of a lot of French, or France-related, art and culture. I stumble into these episodes regularly. It's been more than 30 years since I spent a high-school year (and a college summer) in France, and lord knows I don't ever need to revisit that country. But I guess my stay had its effect. Here are my current Froggy culture toys: Pascal's great Pensees. Pascal makes the most plausible and attractive case for Christianity that I've ever read, er, heard (I'm going through the book on audiotape; it can be rented here). What's most fabulous about the book, IMHO, is the coexistence of Pascal's clear and mild writing style, the grace of his thought processes, and the man's deep convictions. Moving and beautiful. Gilbert Adair's novel about Parisian cinephilia circa 1968, The Dreamers, which was kinda-sorta the basis for the recent Bertolucci movie that Turbokitty and I rapped about in this posting here. I like the book -- it's very smart and peculiar -- and will blog about it soon. I know there must be someone somewhere who's got some interest in this book and what I have to say about it. No? Yes? I'm halfway through showing The Wife a Froggy movie I love, the cheerfully perverse gay chamber dramedy Water Drops on Burning Rocks, which Francois ("Swimming Pool") Ozon adapted from an early Fassbinder play. (I blogged about this movie when I first watched it here.) Those curious about the pleasures of le cinema francais could do a lot worse than order this beauty up from Netflix. It's got many of the French cinema's virtues: it's small and witty, spontaneous yet formal. Some tips for those just getting started. Pay attention to the framing choices Ozon makes: when and how characters move on and offscreen, and moments when inside-the-camera-frame frames (doorways, windows) are introduced. Watch the way Ozon orchestrates his simple yet intense color palette. It's based on eggshell blue and rust -- and doesn't that make the occasional intrusion of dull green and black super-eloquent? Marvel at the quality of light; young as he is, Ozon is a master at using light to bring out contrasts in textures, as well as the translucency of flesh. I was about to type something like "Mid-Americans queasy about seeing men kiss might want to take a pass" when it occurred to me that red-blooded he-men who dig the adorable and sensual Ludivine Sagnier will probably never find a better chance than "Water Drops" to enjoy her charms. Gay film that it is, it's also a sexily rewarding film for hetero hunks. ;i>Quel paradoxe! I just finished Annie Ernaux's exquisite (or precious, depending on whether you like it or not, and I do), abstract/existential having-an-affair novel, er, text, Simple Passion (which is buyable here). Is it essay, memoir, fiction, or philosophy? Whatever it is, it's basically... posted by Michael at May 10, 2004 | perma-link | (22) comments




How Modern Painting Became A Secular Religion
Michael: In your post, Religious Needs -- What To Do About 'Em?, you talk about the tendency over the past 150 years or so for people to treat non-religious aspects of life in a highly religious spirit. I thought I’d try the experiment of looking at one such ‘secular’ religion through the lens of religious sociology. My methodology in this regard is entirely ripped off from religious sociologist Rodney Stark. (I became aware of Mr. Stark from one of your previous links and bought one of his books; thanks for the tip.) In “The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy” Rodney Stark and his co-author Roger Finke use numerical data from U.S. religious history to debunk many commonly held notions about religion in American life. A few of their many interesting conclusions about the ‘market penetration’ of religious organizations in America include: 1. That the decline of so-called ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations (such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians et al) is not the result of such organizations ‘losing touch’ with the culture during the Sixties, but has been ongoing since at least 1800. 2. The rise of aggressive fundamentalist and evangelical religious sects is likewise not a recent phenomenon, but has also been observable continuously over the past 200 years. The growth of such supernaturally-oriented denominations has also been the biggest motor inflating the role of religion in American life. 3. That the increase in the number of Roman Catholics (now the largest U.S. religious group) was not a natural consequence of immigration from Catholic countries, but the result of the American Catholic church matching the aggressive, supernaturally-oriented Protestant sects ‘revival for revival’ and demand for demand. Stark and Finke don’t just peddle isolated facts, of course; they also offer explanations. They begin to make sense of all this with an idea borrowed from H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1929 analysis of the evolution of religion, The Social Sources of Denominationalism. Niebuhr’s locates the origin of new religious organizations (and the fading vitality of older religious organizations) in social class and in the dichotomy between what he termed ‘sects’and ‘churches.’ According to Neibuhr: In Protestant history the sect has ever been the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor. That is to say, the least-successful members of society (in worldly terms) need a religious organization that stands apart from the normative social order. This ‘standing apart’ allows the group and its members to redefine conventional notions of success and failure (e.g., success may not be a matter of wealth, but of, say, being ‘born again.’) ‘Standing apart’ also increases the solidarity of the members in their struggles with the larger society. In Niebuhr’s terminology, the poor need a ‘sect,’ a religious organization that is in considerable tension with the surrounding social order. And he means tension quite literally, as illustrated by the conflict-laden early years of sects such as the Quakers, the Mormons, the Puritans. Virtually all innovative religious organizations begin... posted by Friedrich at May 10, 2004 | perma-link | (6) comments





Friday, May 7, 2004


Things They Don’t Tell You About Modern Art
Michael: In my wanderings around the Internet I came across a fascinating web page the other day. It’s on the website of the Grey Art Gallery website. It is devoted to a show called “Counter Culture: Parisian Cabarets and the Avant Garde, 1875-1905”. (You can check it out here.) Some of the fin de siecle Montmartre hijinks described on the website stirred dim memories from my previous reading. I remember coming across descriptions of Bon Bock dinners and the Chat Noir and Quat'z'Arts cabarets. These were all institutions that helped to convert the general bohemianism of the 19th century Parisian art world into a specifically avant-garde culture. And who can’t get behind the idea of hanging out in cafés, talking radical art and radical politics all day long? To say nothing of getting loaded, watching ‘shocking’ avant-garde amusements, and trying to score with the local girls? It might all be a cliché but it’s a rather fun one. But what was new to me on the web page was an artist’s and writer's club called the Hydropathes, and, more specifically the Arts incohérents exhibitions organized by a young writer and Hydropathe member, Jules Lévy. As the website describes them: On Sunday afternoon, 1 October 1882, the artists Edouard Manet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, the composer Richard Wagner, and the king of Bavaria were among two thousand curious invitees reported to have crowded into the Left Bank apartment of the young writer and Hydropathe Jules Lévy to view the exhibition bizarrely entitled Arts incohérents. Two months earlier, as a challenge to academic art, Lévy had organized a show of "drawings made by people who don't know how to draw." Lévy's October proto-happening included professional artists who poked fun at the art establishment and produced "incohérent" works using a variety of peculiar and everyday found materials, for example, sculptures made from bread and cheese. One entry, a group painting by six artists, anticipated the collaborative efforts of the Surrealists some forty years later. The most provocative work was the first documented monochrome [i.e., all-black] painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud and entitled Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night. Artist Alphonse Allais expanded on Bilhaud's conceit by exhibiting a white and then a red monochrome painting in the 1883 and 1884 Incohérent shows; in 1897 he published a book of these images along with an empty musical score billed as a funeral march for the deaf. As early as 1885, with photographs of an ear filled with cotton and a hand holding a rose, filmmaker Emile Cohl prefigured the uncanny juxtapositions of Surrealists. And in 1887 proto-performance artist Sapeck (Eugène Bataille), who was known to travel the streets with his head painted blue, portrayed the Mona Lisa smoking a pipeyears before Marcel Duchamp added a moustache to the Louvre's venerated icon. But while these pieces anticipate the work of later avant-garde artists, the Incohérents employed raucous humor rather than esoteric theory to challenge academic tradition. I don’t know about you,... posted by Friedrich at May 7, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, May 6, 2004


The WTC and Free Enterprise
Dear Friedrich -- As you've probably read, Larry Silverstein, the tycoon behind the World Trade Center, has lost his bid to receive a double insurance payout. (He spent $100 million in legal fees to achieve that result.) As a result, the rebuilding of the site is likely to be a less gargantuan thing than anticipated. But what caught my eye in Julia Vitullo-Martin's good piece about the future of the Ground Zero plans in today's WSJ (not online) was one particular passage. A surprising number of people I talk to seem under the impression that the often-awful forms American cities and American suburbs take these days represent the free enterprise system in action. Strip malls? Barren plazas at the base of towers? Sprawl? Too bad, but hey, it's The People expressing their preferences freely. Um, er: can we talk about tax breaks, highway subsidies, bizarro regulations, high-level cronyism, etc etc? As an admittedly dramatic example, here's Vitullo-Martin spelling out some of what was involved in the creation of the WTC: The World Trade Center had never been the monument to capitalism the terrorists believed it to be. Rather, it was the product of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's peculiar brand of government gigantism -- immense office towers built on private land acquired under eminent domain, exempted from city building codes, and freed from all taxes to compete with the private sector. Despite the status of Mr. Silverstein and his partners as leaseholders, the Twin Towers were never truly privatized -- which in normal terms would have meant "sold." Instead they were merely leased for 99 years to maintain such Port Authority privileges as tax exemption and freedom from city regulatory codes. Another reason why architecture-and-urbanism is so much fun to follow: politics. Best, Michael UPDATE: Laurence Aurbach, a better researcher than I, found the Vitullo-Martin article online. It can be read here.... posted by Michael at May 6, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, April 28, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 8
This is the final section of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here, and part seven here. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros 8. Conclusion: the necessity for theory. In this essay I pointed out which contemporary authors have in my opinion actually contributed to creating a theoretical foundation for architecture. I also argued that what is currently accepted by many architects as architectural theory is not theory at all, but rather a clever means to propagate a particular design style. Outsiders (which includes most people) naively assume that contemporary architecture possesses a theoretical basis, like for example chemistry and neuroscience, which explains why buildings ought to look the way they do. However, a mass of writings mislabeled as architectural theory only helps to generate and support certain images; those images are then copied, and used as templates for buildings in an alien style. That is not a theoretical foundation. Those writings fail to satisfy any of the accepted criteria for a theory in any field. Every discipline has a store of knowledge accumulated over time, which explains a huge range of phenomena. (Architecture has been collecting information for millennia). Some of this knowledge is codified into a compact theoretical framework; other parts are strictly phenomenological but tested by observation and experiment. Facts and ideas combine in a particular manner, common to all proper disciplines. The crucial characteristic of a valid theoretical framework is a transparent internal complexity coupled with external connectivity. This arises from the way explanatory networks develop in time: More recent knowledge about a topic builds upon existing knowledge. Older knowledge is replaced only by a better explanation of the same phenomenon, never because a fashion has changed -- this process creates multiple, connected layers of knowledge. A theory in one discipline must transition sensibly to other disciplines. This means that there ought to be some interface where one discipline merges into another, all the way around its periphery. Any theory that isolates itself because it is incomprehensible to others is automatically suspect. A tightly-knit internal connectivity, along with a looser external connectivity, provides the foundations for a mechanism of self-correction and maintenance. This holds true for any complex system. Architecture as a profession has repeatedly disconnected itself both from its knowledge base, and from other disciplines in an effort to remain eternally "contemporary" (the much-publicized recent connections to philosophy, linguistics, and science notwithstanding, since they are now exposed as deceptions). This is, of course, the defining characteristic of a fashion; the opposite of a proper discipline. Again and again, architecture has ignored derived knowledge about buildings and cities, and has embraced nonsensical slogans and influences. Those who profit from the instability and superficiality of the fashion industry are deathly afraid of facing genuine knowledge about the world. It would put them out of business. Architects and critics periodically change the reigning fashion... posted by Michael at April 28, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, April 26, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 7
This is part seven (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, and part six here. We'll put up part eight on Wednesday. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros 7. Can this ever be called architecture? To those outside the architectural arena, much of its contemporary writing and thinking seems incomprehensible. What stands for theory appears to be engaged with issues and ideas divorced from human beings, being concerned with topics that are irrelevant to people's activities and sensibilities. The field is instead driven by images. Without a theoretical basis, such images can lead to full-size buildings that feel monstrous and alien to their inhabitants and neighbors. What looks novel, cute, and exciting on a computer screen or magazine page may turn into a nightmare by distorting the lives of people who have to use it after it is built. Genuine architectural theory tells us which buildings are successful or not, and gives the reasons why. Unfortunately, that body of knowledge is felt to be outside architecture as it is currently defined by its leading exponents. Theoretical concerns such as the basis for hierarchical complexity in architectural form, and algorithms for generating adaptive structure are simply not part of fashionable architectural thinking. This material is not taught in the schools. Within the current architectural paradigm, there is little interest in rules for creating an architecture suited to human beings, and for designing urban regions that are manifestly alive with human activity. Apparently, no-one reads the few articles and books discussing those rules, and if they ever do, they certainly do not apply them. That is a consequence of a fundamental replacement of worldviews. Is it real? Or games with CAD? Going back to the computer analogy, an operating system can replace functions normally performed by hardware -- such as all interactions with the outside world -- with software. Most important, a computer that is hard-wired to have one type of interface can be made to mimic an entirely different interface via the imposition of a new operating system. The human mind, which is hard-wired for a specific set of input/output responses with the world, is known to be subject to programming that changes how it interacts with the outside. This programming downloads a new operating system that emulates an entirely different (alien) machine. Some puzzling architectural practices are now beginning to make sense. Contemporary architectural training substitutes a universe of alien images for the real world in the minds of impressionable students. Designs for proposed buildings have all acquired the characteristics of eerie computer screen images. Those ghostlike, translucent visions represent disassembled structures -- they intentionally make it difficult to visualize a form concretely, so that not only the form's image, but also its informational encoding communicates disassembly. The real world of physical forms has thus been replaced by a virtual one conforming to a peculiar aesthetic.... posted by Michael at April 26, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, April 24, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 6
This is part six (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here. We'll put up part seven on Monday. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros 6. Programming that emulates a pathology. Architects and architectural critics have become expertly adept at fancy wordplay, sounding impressive while promoting the deconstructivist style's unnatural qualities. This linguistic dance is used to justify a meaningless architecture of fashion. The problem is that criticizing an empty but flowery discourse is like shadow boxing with phantoms -- one can never win a debate against an opponent who creates an impressionistic cloud empty of tangible facts. My solution is not to debunk the style of contemporary architectural writing (even though that is sorely needed), but to try and explain what it models. I would like to draw some interesting analogies between architecture and biology, psychology, and computer science. These analogies help to explain the peculiar language used to validate architecture as a fashion. In my article "The Derrida Virus", I achieved some insights into how deconstruction acts by considering it to be analogous to a virus (or "meme", as an informational virus is otherwise known). I now wish to stretch the analogy further and to suggest possible parallels with a pathology of the human brain, which would make the action of the Derrida virus more directly biological. La Fresnoy: Multiple meanings? Or scrambled anti-sense? Studying deconstructivist writings gives me the impression that except for Derrida, who is very cleverly and deliberately obfuscating, their authors are suffering from some sort of brain damage. The normal, evolved mechanisms that enable human analytical thought have apparently been scrambled, so that those authors seem mentally incapable of expressing a direct, logical statement. Their writings almost make sense; but not quite. The deconstructive method avoids closure. Altogether, this mimics the effects of a lesion that has destroyed part (but not all) of the brain, preserving linguistic facility and memory while damaging the ability to synthesize thoughts. Since synthesis depends on connectivity, which deconstruction erases, this suggests some new type of mental pathology with observable effects. Louis Sass has drawn an interesting parallel between deconstructivist discourse and the speech patterns of schizophrenics. He finds the following common features: Disorienting changes of direction. Meandering sentences that never come to a point. BLOCKING, or halting in the middle of a train of thought. The use of meaningless words or phrases. Cryptic references, along with the impression that they are essential to make sense of the present message. GLOSSOMANIA, where speech is channeled by acoustic qualities rather than by meaning. Flow that is governed by normally irrelevant features of the linguistic system. DEICTIC AMBIGUITY, i.e. insufficient contextual cues to establish thematic coherence. A focus on multiple but normally irrelevant alternative meanings of words. LINGUISTIC ALIENATION, where a word is divorced from its object. Banal and pompous phrases spoken with an exaggerated emphasis (as... posted by Michael at April 24, 2004 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, April 22, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 5
This is part five (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros 5. The collapse of French deconstruction, and its implications for architecture. Let us turn to Greek Mythology for a critical analogy. Two monsters that wreaked havoc but could not easily be defeated were Antaeos, the mythical giant who gathered superhuman strength from touching the earth -- and the many-headed Hydra, whose heads kept growing back after being cut off. The hero Herakles (Hercules) was able to vanquish Antaeos by lifting him off the ground, thus cutting his contact and source of strength. Herakles got the better of the Hydra by cauterizing the wound with a flaming torch after cutting off each of its heads. Just like in the cases of both Antaeos and the Hydra, deconstructivist architecture draws its strength from somewhere, regenerating itself after each devastating attack. It has seemed impervious to criticism, always reaching back to its philosophical power base for new strength. Realizing where the source of this strength lies, I recently wrote a paper that presents a new interpretation of the French deconstructivists. (It can be read here.) Instead of accepting their writings as philosophy, as has been customary, I suggest that they are a kind of mental virus, whose purpose is to destroy ordered thinking and stored knowledge about the world. In my paper, I draw detailed analogies between this type of mental virus (also referred to as a "meme") and the ways that biological viruses act. In honor of deconstruction's founder, I named this ingenious mechanism for meme propagation after Jacques Derrida. I should mention that in expressing this innovative and controversial thesis, I am by no means acting alone, and in fact draw support from distinguished allies in philosophy, science, and architecture. Tschumi's Lerner Student Center at Columbia University This discussion opens up a Pandora's box of questions that eventually need to be answered. It has nothing really to do with any individual architect, but is a phenomenon tied to the current architectural establishment. If the French deconstructivists are not only exposed as being without intellectual merit, but their method as actually dangerous to our society and institutions, where does that leave deconstructivist architecture? Will it be able to survive as a style cut off from its traditional intellectual power base? It could indeed; for the following reason. In addition to its intellectual power base, deconstructivist architecture possesses a considerable political power base in those persons and institutions that have profited from it, and therefore have the most to lose if it ever collapses. What is immediately obvious is that, following the collapse of French deconstruction, deconstructivist architecture will henceforth likely be judged as a fashion -- a sensational stylistic play for fun and profit. Finding itself without the crucial support of French intellectuals, deconstruction in architecture appears simply as a visual provocation, a... posted by Michael at April 22, 2004 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, April 21, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 4
This is part four (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros 4. Institutional validation of Tschumi's work. I recently joined a debate over Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum being built in Athens. It was supposed to be ready for the Olympic Games, and to possibly house the Elgin Marbles if ever they are returned. In an earlier essay (which can be read here), I gave my opinion of the project (not a positive one, I am afraid), and used criticisms by other authors of Tschumi's writings and his previous work to support my point of view. Some commentators noted that the New Acropolis Museum could have played a role (albeit a minor one) in the downfall of the Greek Government. Tschumi's design for that building -- consisting of a glass box on stilts -- is only one of several problems facing this project. There are serious objections to erecting something on an unexcavated archaeological site, and critics allege that artifacts were destroyed while digging the building's foundations (which led to a lawsuit to block the project). New Acropolis Museum I believe there exists a philosophical relation between these two points. Deconstructivist design violates ordered structure in some way -- more obvious in some deconstructivist buildings than in others. It represents a lack of respect (to put it mildly) for the ordered coherence embodied in traditional architecture and in the vast majority of human artifacts. Deconstructivist buildings make no effort to connect to and blend with their surroundings, for the simple reason that they wish to stand apart from them. Indifference to what exists on and around the site (in this case the Classical style of the Parthenon; the Neoclassical style of the New Greek State; local residents; unexcavated antiquities) can be understood as being consistent with the general disconnecting method handed down by the French deconstructivists. Tschumi forged an alliance between architecture and French Deconstruction, applying Jacques Derrida's precepts to the pavilions at Le Parc de La Villette built on the outskirts of Paris. The architectural establishment propelled Tschumi into a brilliant career as architect, lecturer, teacher, and university administrator. In the 1980s, architecture was desperately seeking a philosophical underpinning; something to give it both justification and renewal; anything unusual and exciting upon which to base a new movement in design. The profession seemed stuck in the modernist rut (the postmodernist stylistic fruit salad notwithstanding). To those who had bought into French deconstruction, Tschumi was seen as an ideal candidate to lead a progressive school of architecture. In the same year (1988) that Tschumi was appointed Dean of Columbia University's Architecture School, the Deconstructivist Show at the Museum of Modern Art validated all its main practitioners. Even those of my acquaintances who applaud Tschumi's earlier role happen not to like his latest work very much, however. They consider him passé. No-one could explain to me... posted by Michael at April 21, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, April 19, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 3
This is part three (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here, and part two here Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros Part 3. Psychological association in Tschumi's texts. Trying to pin down anything in Tschumi's writings is very frustrating; but there is something I wish to note. In "Architecture and Disjunction" (page 187), we are offered a supposedly scientific explanation of the design for Le Parc de la Villette. The stated concern of the project was to apply theoretical concerns on a practical level, to move from the 'pure mathematics' of The Manhattan Transcripts to applied mathematics ... The other strategy involved ignoring built precedents so as to begin from a neutral mathematical configuration or ideal topological configurations (grids, linear or concentric systems, etc.) that could become the points of departure for future transformations. And again (page 197): La Villette was the built extension of a comparable method; it was impelled by the desire to move from "pure mathematics to applied mathematics. Applied mathematics? Now, in addition to being an architectural theorist, I also happen to be Professor of Mathematics, and I can find no obvious mathematical content (either pure, or applied) in Tschumi's writings and buildings. One could (although he himself does not do this) describe Tschumi's buildings as intentional but selective randomness introduced into ordered form. His designs destroy the order achieved by having a multiplicity of subsymmetries; he undoes those symmetries in order to define structures that are partially, though not totally, incoherent. Breaking vital connections and symmetries between component parts amounts to violence in terms of undoing the mathematical richness of coherent form. Such a drastic severing of internal connections kills biological organisms. In "Architecture and Disjunction", Tschumi had already (sort of) summarized his basic idea: The concept of violence also suggests different readings of spatial function -- that the definition of architecture may lie at the intersection of logic and pain, rationality and anguish, concept and pleasure" (page XXVIII). This may be the key to understanding what is really going on. A psychological state of excitement, anxiety, and sensual urges (especially those triggered by the forbidden pleasures of combining violence with sex) is subtly created by the text and photographic images. I am not presenting the above quotes in order to criticize them, since I don't know exactly what Tschumi wishes to communicate. Nevertheless, the theme of violence is evident throughout his work. He reproduces the defenestration photograph from "The Manhattan Transcripts" again on page 100 of "Architecture and Disjunction", enlarged just in case someone missed it in its earlier, smaller, incarnation. Back in "The Manhattan Transcripts", I recognized two shocking, revolting frames from the 1928 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí film "Un Chien Andalou", in which a young woman's eye is slit open with a straight razor (page XXIV). Just in case we missed them then, these images are presented again in "Architecture and Disjunction" (page 158), therefore Tschumi must consider them... posted by Michael at April 19, 2004 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, April 17, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 2
This is part two (of eight) of a new Nikos Salingaros essay. You can read part one here. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros Part 2. Bernard Tschumi's Writings. Is this man a theorist? Is he even a thinker? I recommend to everyone Tschumi's two books: The Manhattan Transcripts, and Architecture and Disjunction. The first is worth studying in great detail, since it helped Tschumi to become the Dean of Columbia University's School of Architecture in 1988. It contains a 6-page Introduction and barely 10 pages of text. The body of the book consists of indistinct black-and-white photographs (whose subject often cannot be made out), and line drawings by the author. Those represent cartoons of distorted and broken buildings. Their message is unclear, as is their relationship to the text. The same black-and-white drawings are reproduced, this time filled in with dull purple and red, in a separate section entitled "Colored Plates." The photos in "The Manhattan Transcripts" include the infamous one of a man being thrown out of a window, with the caption: To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder. What is contained in this book was judged at the time of its initial publication (1981) to represent a novel architectural theory -- and considered worthy of reprinting in a new edition in 1994. I cannot see any theory here that explains or predicts the effects of architectonic form. If this is not architectural theory, then we need to discover exactly what the text conveys. There is an explanation in the Introduction and in the prefaces to each set of drawings, which sets out the underlying idea. For example, on page 8: The first episode ... is composed of twenty-four sheets illustrating the drawn and photographed notation of a murder. On page 14 we read: And that's when the second accident occurred -- the accident of murder ... They had to get out of the Park -- quick. And on page 8: He gets out of jail; they make love; she kills him; she is free. And again on page 32: But what could she do ... now that the elevator ride had turned into a chilling contest with violent death? This has nothing to do with architecture, of course, but it does help to establish a macabre psychological ambiance that is crucial to the project. If I were pressed to come up with the message of this book (and this is necessarily a subjective opinion) I would say that it communicates violence; and projects violence onto buildings. This is in fact the visual message encoded in the cartoon drawings shown in the Color Plates. Forms that are instantly identifiable as buildings are broken, twisted, and dismantled; their component elements left precariously unstable. Images that someone leafing through this book might at first glance dismiss as silly actually carry the clear message of undoing coherent structure. These images have a special quality that sticks to the reader's mind. By... posted by Michael at April 17, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, April 16, 2004


The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions II
Michael: This is the second of my two-part posting on the 'culture-quake' that occurred in America after the Civil War, rendering the Hudson River school of art almost instantly obsolete and enshrining a series of very different art movements in its place. (You can read the first part here.) The Civil War And Its Acceleration of Social Trends As I mentioned, a number of disruptive antebellum trends went from ‘subversive’ to ‘dominant’ as a result of the shock of the Civil War itself. Of course, the war itself had a significant impact on American life. And what an impact it was. Out of an American population of 31 million in 1860, the military death toll from the Civil War was in the range of 620,000-700,000 (i.e., 2 – 2.25% of the population.) Obviously, in contemporary terms this would be the equivalent of 6-7 million combat deaths. I’ve heard it said, believably, that everyone in America in 1865 knew someone who had lost a family member to the war. In trying to estimate the effect of this trauma on cultural attitudes, one can look to other epochal wars. The Civil War death rates of Americans were quite comparable to those of Britain, France and Germany in World War I. Since the Great War is commonly cited as having a transformative effect on European culture, I think one can safely assume a similar effect had occurred 50 years previously in America. Brady Studio, Dead At Dunker Church, Antietam, 1862 Clearly, the sheer bloodiness of the war dealt antebellum-style optimism a painful blow. One cannot help but suspect that the assassination of Lincoln and the inability of Reconstruction to fully emancipate the now 'freed' former slaves in the face of continuing armed resistance in the South—after all those combat deaths—also had a sobering effect on America’s confidence that all problems were solvable for men of good will. Moreover, the Civil War intensified the growth of urbanization, industrialization and the financial infrastructure that made them possible. It was plain that these factors had been critical to winning the war for the North. The increased stratification of American society that followed was, if not liked, then at least considered an inescapable part of ‘the order of things’ by post-Civil War society. Finally, the war seems to have encouraged the adoption of an evolutionary mind-set, if only for its ‘wised-up’ aura of grim realism. (Again, I must remind you, when the term ‘evolution’ is used, this often refers more to Lamarckian and Spencerian ideas about evolution rather than those of the Darwin himself.) As Mr. Menand puts it: In a society that had just been through a civil war the appeal of [evolution] is plain—as [Henry] Adams, in his mordant way, recognized…[survival of the fittest-style] evolution, he wrote in the Education, was the perfect theory for a ‘young man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people... posted by Friedrich at April 16, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments





Thursday, April 15, 2004


Salingaros on Tschumi 1
The architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros is, as some visitors know, a 2Blowhards favorite. We've been thrilled to publish a long q&a with Nikos (this page here will give you access to the interview's five parts); a piece Nikos co-wrote with Brian Hanson about the architect Daniel Libeskind (which is readable here); a collection of thoughts about Louis Kahn (here); and a short essay about Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum; you can read that piece here. So we were excited to learn that Nikos has extended his thinking about deconstruction and Tschumi, and has composed a new essay. It's a beauty: eye-opening, contentious, provocative, humane, and great fun. It's likely to set off new thoughts and establish new connections even if you aren't an architecture-and-urbanism buff. We're pleased to be able to publish Nikos' new essay on our blog. Given that it's a sizable piece of writing, we'll run it in bite-sized pieces over the next eight days. (Alongside our usual hijinks, of course.) Here's Part One. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi by Nikos Salingaros This is a series of chapters from an essay that tries to make sense of contemporary architectural theory. I will discuss some aspects of deconstructivism, with particular emphasis on the theoretical contributions of Bernard Tschumi. 1. Architectural theory. In order to discuss any supposed contributions to architectural theory, it is necessary to define what architectural theory is. A theory in any discipline is a general framework that (1) explains observed phenomena; (2) predicts effects that appear under specific circumstances; and (3) enables one to create new situations that perform in a way predicted by the theory. In architecture, a theoretical framework ought to explain why buildings affect human beings in certain ways, and why some buildings are more successful than others, both in practical as well as in psychological and aesthetic terms. One important requirement of an architectural theory is to coordinate and make sense of scattered and apparently unrelated observations of how human beings interact with built form. Another is to formalize those observations into an easy-to-apply framework that can be used for design. Sadly, architecture is only now embarking on a long-overdue formulation of its theoretical basis. It is not an exaggeration to say that up until now, the field has been driven by personal whim and fashion rather than being supported by any theoretical foundation. As a result of a serious misunderstanding (due to scientific ignorance by three generations of architects), a voluminous body of writings has been mistaken for "architectural theory", even though it is nothing of the sort. This material is taught to architecture students, and is studied by practicing architects; nevertheless, it merely serves to promote certain stylistic fashions and dogmas rather than an understanding of architectural form. Enough genuine architectural theory now exists to form a nucleus from which the topic can be built. This nucleus consists of the writings of Christopher Alexander, Léon Krier, the present author, and a few others. Genuine architectural theory has... posted by Michael at April 15, 2004 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, April 14, 2004


The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions, Part I
W. S. Haseltine, The Rocks at Nahant, 1864 Michael: A few weeks ago I was leafing through one of my art books, “Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine,” when I noticed the odd chronology of Mr. Haseltine’s American career as an 19th century landscape painter. To wit, this seems to have lasted only from 1859 to 1867, when he decamped for Europe at the ripe young age of 32. Even more oddly, his period of domestic success was shorter still—from 1862 to roughly 1865. During this time he was favorably reviewed in the press and his paintings were included in many distinguished collections. However, virtually upon the cessation of the war, the jig was up with his American career, as Andrea Henderson notes in her essay, “Haseltine in Rome”: Haseltine and his [better known Hudson River school] contemporaries—Albert Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, and Frederic Church among them—were increasingly savaged in the press for what critics saw as the repetitive and retrogressive nature of the work… Given that Hazeltine was a pretty competent landscape painter, a terrific landscape draftsman, and that his subsequent Rome-based career was financially successful right up to the doorstep of the 20th century, he struck me as an unlikely candidate to have been nothing more than a ‘flash in the pan.’ W. S. Haseltine, Near Otter Cliffs, Mount Desert, 1859 Moreover, it seemed doubly unlikely that the other Hudson River painters listed above would also, as a group, suddenly suffer a lack of artistic quality and go from ‘inspired’ to ‘repetitive and regressive.’ It seemed rather as if Mr. Haseltine’s artistic ship, the Hudson River school, had, hit an iceberg and sunk; that some kind of cultural cataclysm had altered the whole geography of American art. The dates, of course, suggested that the cataclysm might well be the Civil War. Generally, however, I was under the impression that the nation—well, the North at any rate—had pretty quickly shrugged off its battlefield losses and gotten on with making money and enjoying itself during the subsequent Gilded Age (as Mark Twain so memorably named the postwar era.) Hence the exact reasons for this shift in taste seemed rather mysterious; at least until I picked up Louis Menand’s excellent intellectual history of the post-Civil War era, “The Metaphysical Club.” Reading Mr. Menand’s book, I realized that this era constituted a fascinating case study of a revolutionary shift in both intellectual world-view and national taste, and I thought I’d try to share a brief outline of the cultural cataclysm, and maybe even draw some tentative conclusions about how such shifts ‘work.’ What Were Things Like Before the War? Before we can identify the nature of this change, we need to know what things were like before it happened. What, in short, were the characteristics of the antebellum (i.e., pre-Civil War) cultural consensus that was so abruptly altered at the end of the war? In a phrase, the central tenet of the antebellum cultural consensus was American exceptionalism. This... posted by Friedrich at April 14, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments




Shorter Art?
Dear Friedrich -- Do you find yourself craving shorter art experiences? I do. Over the last few years I've found myself thinking such thoughts as, Who really wants a piece of fiction to be hundreds of pages long? And I find myself thinking more highly of short films, art songs, and poetry with every passing day. Have I become quicker to "get" art and thus more efficient at having aesthetic experiences? (Possibly.) Have I fallen victim to flashy-media-induced Short Attention Span Syndrome? (Possibly.) Is this taste, like my vanishing jawline, yet another function of age? (Certainly.) Tyler Cowen wonders why art can't be shorter too, here. "How about 'high culture' in bite-sized portions?" Tyler asks. FWIW, I've heard from many fiction writers that they find novels so big and overwhelming that they wouldn't write them at all if they didn't feel they had to. Many say they find writing fiction that's story-to-novella length a far more natural, creative, and enjoyable experience than writing novels. And, hey, I just stumbled across this quote from the first-class British mystery novelist Peter Lovesey: If I could make a living as a short story writer, probably that would be a great joy for me. I love writing the short stories ... There one can take risks more and experiment and if it doesn't come off, well, there's no big deal, whereas if you've spent a year, as I do, writing a novel and it doesn't come off, well, you're in trouble. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 14, 2004 | perma-link | (14) comments




Kimmelman on Libeskind
Dear Friedrich -- Wow: a hard-hitting, to-the-point piece by the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman about Daniel Libeskind's fabled Jewish Museum in Berlin, a building designed in the shape of what Libeskind has called "a deconstructed Star of David." Some excerpts: "It is the epitome of kitsch." "In Berlin, as at ground zero, the architecture was chosen before a decision was made about how to fill the building. The balance between form and content has been a vexing issue." "The building was opened with nothing in it in 1999. Nearly 350,000 people came to see it before any exhibition was installed. Many writers speculated about whether it might best be left empty, as a Holocaust memorial sculpture, not least because it looked nearly impossible to fill coherently with objects. It has been." "I have visited half a dozen times, occasionally with specialists in German Jewish history. The experience, which derives partly from the strategies of interactive theme park design, has been diverting, although the display has not become much more comprehensible after the sixth visit than it was after the first." "Mr. Libeskind's building turned out to be much costlier than he had said it would be." "Over all the architecture and the exhibition trivialize and overwhelm history. The museum panders to the sort of audience of middlebrow Germans and tourists who don't know any real, live Jews, watering down and sweetening up the past." Given that Libeskind was chosen to master-plan the rebuilding of the WTC area, it sounds likely that New York City will soon find itself wrestling with a goodly number of advanced-architecture headaches. Kimmelman's terrific piece can be read here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 14, 2004 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, April 7, 2004


Architects and Glass
Dear Friedrich -- It's important (IMHO, of course) to learn to defend ourselves against architects, many of whom share a taste-set that civilians find bizarre, even repulsive. High-toned architects like flat (or warped) planes, acute angles, razor-sharp lines, and things that glare and gleam; they like buildings that twist, swoop, torque, and fold in on themselves -- that stand out rather than fit in. My usual response to these whirling abstract structures is, "Hey, when I wanna look at TV graphics, I'll turn on the TV." But most of all, architects like glass. In fact, many architects are such fanatics about shimmeriness and reflectiveness, openness and transparency that you'd almost think they don't like buildings at all, given the fact that the rest of us tend to look to buildings for such qualities as permanence, shelter, coziness, and security. Glass is something a building can definitely have too much of. Randy Minor, a Chicago Magazine writer who lives in a Mies van der Rohe-designed apartment building, once wrote this about what it's like to live surrounded by acres of Miesian glass: My own living habits, however dull, are calculated and self-conscious the minute I walk into my modernist marvel. The only privacy I have is in a couple of corners in my tiny bathroom and kitchen, where I retreat when I want to be "alone." I wrote here about a couple of new Richard Meier-designed glass-and-steel perfume bottles, er, towers in Greenwich Village that have atttracted a lot of media interest. Flashy geometrical cages -- what a considerate and lovely way to enhance rambly old bricks-and-cobblestones Greenwich Village, eh? So it was fun to find out in this article here by Deborah Schoeneman for New York magazine that some real-estate shoppers, now that they've had a look at Meier's wraparound, floor-to-ceiling glass, are having second thoughts. Schoeneman writes: The Rear Window effect already has some buyers backing out of the building."It's not very private," complains one uptown socialite whose new husband bought a Meier loft before they were engaged and has since put it on the market for $2.75 million. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 7, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments





Friday, April 2, 2004


Three Questions
Dear Friedrich – The Wife and I are on vacation in Sedona, Arizona. Do you know the town? An amazingly gorgeous area, in the same (very general) neck of the woods as the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, and full of what everyone fondly refers to as “Red Rocks” -- peaks, mesas, valleys and boulders of a deep rust color. Huge skies with three or four weather patterns visible simultaneously; snakes and cacti; surprisingly dense patches of desert greenery … No matter which direction you look in, you pretty much expect John Wayne to step into closeup. The town itself doesn’t have much to recommend it unless you’re a seeker; it’s a New Age haven, full of rumbling tourist buses, pink Jeeps taking clutches of midWesterners for trips out to the Power Vortexes, and stores selling wind chimes and crystals. Lolling around the great west, I find myself wondering about three questions. Are you as fascinated as I am by the way certain styles and personalities make it onto the semi-permanent cultural menu? Two that have become perennials are hippie-backpacker style, and punk-rock style -- who'd have thought? You and I were around during the early days of both styles; I don’t know about you, but at the time I’d never have guessed that either one had long-term potential. I also have no idea why they appeal to contempo kids. Do you? Are you as struck (and annoyed) as I am by the way video screens seem to be cropping up everywhere? For instance: above the entrance to the typical NYC subway stop is a rectangular, iron-encircled space that for years has been filled by an advertising poster. Slowly, these posters are being replaced by video screens. And, as video screens will, they flash, they glow, and they twitch -– they’re yet another grabby distraction you have to train yourself to ignore. And at airports ... Killing time at airports has become even more annoying ever since airports started filling waiting areas with TVs tuned to news, sports and financial channels. The TVs at New York’s LaGuardia are almost inescapable; it can be hard to find a gate-side seat that doesn’t face a TV, or at least put you within earshot of a TV. Is it written in the Constitution that every vacant square foot is fair game to sell as advertising space? New rule of American life: if a video screen can go there, it will. Are there categories of art whose members are all bad? (Not including such categories as “lousy art,” wiseguy.) As our recent conversation about light entertainment hinted, I’m inclined to think that non-lofty art categories have much to offer. I like some cowboy art, for instance -– enough, anyway, to feel ashamed that I don’t know the field better. And I’m prone to think that even such categories as “tourist art,” “t-shirt art,” and “greeting-card art” can be interesting; god knows I’ve run across handsome and attractive tourist art, nifty and funny t-shirts, and... posted by Michael at April 2, 2004 | perma-link | (30) comments





Thursday, April 1, 2004


The Elvgren Mystery Continues
Michael: A couple months ago I broke the remarkable story of Gil Elvgren's astonishing burst of painting in a 1938 sabbatical from his career as an illustrator. (My posting can be read here.) Over a few months in that year, Mr. Elvgren, ordinarily a creator of pretty-girl calendar paintings, cranked out a set of masterpieces which anticipated the formal concerns of artists many decades in the future like Frank Stella and Gerhardt Richter. Shockingly, several more examples of his visionary work have appeared. As a result of my close relationship with the security guard currently watching over these paintings, and my willingness to make a large contribution to his favorite charity—him—I was allowed to take these photos, which have never before appeared anywhere. G. Elvgren, Black Painting, 1938 The first painting appears to anticipate many of the concerns of noted abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, as well as the series of all-black canvases produced by a variety of artists in the 1970s. What is particularly uncanny is the use of Reinhardt’s patented square format for the painting, as well as the exploration of the aesthetic subtleties of black on black. G. Elvgren, Springboard, 1938 The second painting appears to utilize much of Mark Rothko’s compositional apparatus, here making the link between abstraction and landscape painting particularly visible. Some commentators feel that a remarkably early commitment to raising the public’s awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution is also a factor in this unusual work. How to account for Elvgren’s time-warping genius? I doubt it’s possible. Still, we’re going to keep on trying. The answers are out there, somewhere. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at April 1, 2004 | perma-link | (9) comments





Sunday, March 28, 2004


Guest Posting -- Toby Thain
Dear Friedrich -- In my years of following the arts, the biggest story has seemed to me to be the digitification of culture. (Have I ever just come right out and said that? I certainly should have.) It may be fun to argue about whether this novel or that show of new paintings is any good. But as topics they seem to me dwarfed, to say the least, by the question of what's happening to culture generally as it goes digital. I went into the culture field wanting to yak about books and movies (etc), and to add some product of my own to the culture stream. Instead, wham: along came computers -- and for the last 15-20 years, what's been most visible in the arts is the way that the various fields are reconfiguring themselves as digital waves sweep through them. We wouldn't have rap music if music hadn't gone digital. Magazines, ads and television wouldn't look the way they do if it weren't for computers. Bookselling superstores depend on databases. Copyright, distribution, the final experience of culture itself -- all are up for grabs because of digital technology Sigh: I've got no inborn interest in this process. I didn't enter the field knowing that culture would be going digital, and I never would have chosen to spend my adult life deep in the midst of these matters. But we're in a period of transition, and that's all there is to it. Perhaps in 50 years the process will finally be near-complete, and culture will have settled down enough so that people will be able to return to having civilized chats about stable-but-evolving artforms. A little late for me, but there you have it. In any case, it's inevitable that many of our interactions with culture– 70%? 95%? -- will be mediated by electronics. How will that affect the experience of culture and art? It can be helpful to ask these questions. What are we gaining? What might we be losing? How might artists and audiences respond? (IMHO: the most important thing artists can do these days is to take active part in the creation of digital culture, to make sure that art values aren't lost in the process. Artists: good lord, at the very least, put up a website!) I've learned a lot from the many discussions that have taken place on this blog about digital photography. We've compared notes, we've floated responses and ideas, and we've done a little theorizing and speculating. Many of us have used digital cameras, if in modest ways, so we can speak from hands-on experience. Jimbo loves the detail his Canon digital SLR delivers. Felix puts his Casio in his shirtpocket and pulls it out at parties. Lynn loves taking nature shots with her Canon. I bore everyone with worries about about whether digital photos have the magic film photographs sometimes do. And we all seem to love the convenience and fun. The other day, a very interesting and informative email about... posted by Michael at March 28, 2004 | perma-link | (25) comments





Friday, March 26, 2004


Light Entertainment
Dear Friedrich – Do we give light entertainment the respect it deserves? I started wondering about this question today as I was finishing the first book I’ve read by Ngaio Marsh, a mystery called Tied Up in Tinsel. (I listened to it on audiotape; it's rentable here. Hats off to the book's astoundingly good reader, Nadia May, by the way. I've listened to her read probably a dozen audiobooks, and she's never been less than clear, crisp and terrific. She has a flawless instinct for when it's appropriate to do some acting and when it makes more sense simply to read. When the time comes to act, she's dazzling: able to juggle scads of characters, as skillful with men's voices as well as women's, and able to score with dry humor as well as crude, knockabout farce. What a performer.) Do you know Ngaio Marsh's work? She's considered one of the half a dozen greats of the Golden Age, by which is meant the era ('20s-'30s) when audiences and writers had a taste for puzzle mysteries: Mr. Mustard in the cloakroom with a dagger, that kind of thing. She was born in New Zealand; although she was Anglo, her first name is a Maori one, and is pronounced "Nye-oh." She painted and wrote plays, and after she found her stride as a novelist split her adult life between NZ and Britain. Her writing has a lot of theatrical zing. She's one of those rare fiction writers whose characters stand up and walk around on their own; nearly all of the characters in the book I read were bursting with life. What she's most prized for is her dazzling social satire; when people get grumpy about her work, on the other hand, what they tend to say is that her novels are sparkling comedies of manners -- and then the crime happens, after which the books bog down. In any case, a not-bad way of describing "Tied Up in Tinsel" is P.G. Wodehouse meets Agatha Christie, with an added soupcon of malicious sexuality. Which is immensely high praise, at least in my cosmos. Reading the book, I had the following sequence of reactions and thoughts. At first: "This is brilliant! This is amazing! Wow! Who knew?" Then: "Well, harumph, let's be adults here: excellent though this book is, it is mere first-class light entertainment, after all." And, a while later: "Why the hell am I slamming on the brakes like that when this book is giving me so much pleasure? Isn't calling a book this good, this -- harumph, harumph -- phenomenal mere first-class light entertainment an act of condescension? And where do we get off condescending to something that's fantastically enjoyable?" When I emerged from the novel, I'd worked myself into quite a state of indignation about how dismissive we can be about light entertainment. To be sober for half a sec: it doesn't hurt to remember that we don't want to discuss the frothy stuff we love in ways... posted by Michael at March 26, 2004 | perma-link | (47) comments





Thursday, March 25, 2004


Cultural Hype
Dear Friedrich – I don't doubt that some of the people who visit the hot new gallery-art shows or read the latest hot "literary" novels do so out of simple enjoyment. I've got one friend, for instance, who, when asked what his cultural interests are, responds quickly, "Gallery art and graphic novels." Hey, he knows what he likes, and I see no reason to question his word. Our occasional Guest Poster Turbokitty is another example of someone who enjoys the hot-new-gallery-art scene. Her enthusiasm about it is winning and genuine. At the same time, I have zero doubt that some of the people who keep up with what's hot are doing so … well, for other reasons. They aren't reading, looking or listening simply because they love the stuff. Perhaps they're there out of curiosity. Perhaps they're there because they think "keeping up" is important, god only knows why. Perhaps – fools! -- they think something of immense cultural import is happening here and now, and they've got to, they've just got to, be part of it. Once upon a time, I followed a fair amount of the new, high-end hot stuff myself; I did it partly because I was curious and partly because I didn't know better, but mostly because I was being paid to "keep up." But I haven't been a pro for three years now. These days, interacting with the arts like a normal person (ie., choosing my cultural matter according to interest, whim and mood), I'm enjoying the arts far more than I did in my keeping-up days. I also experience them differently than I did during the pro years -- but that's for another posting. Which leads me to what I find myself wondering about today: if all the juju around the new and the hot cultural thing -- the hype, the cultural pressure, the pretences -- if all that evaporated, how many people would remain in the audience? How many would still be visiting that art gallery or buying that novel, let alone commissioning that piece of starchitecture? No way of knowing the answer for sure, of course. And in self-defence let's make all necessary noises about how people are grownups, are responsible for their own decisions, and are doing things for their own reasons, etc etc. Still, it seems obvious that a lot of what sustains these worlds and these phenomena is cultural pressure: newspaper and magazine babble, peer-group urgency, and whatever oomph the arts industries themselves can manufacture. Make those pressures go away, make the juju lose its magic, and how big an audience would remain? Some kind of audience, obviously. But how much of one? Me, I'm guessing that 80% of the audience for the new hot cultural thing would vanish if the hype and pressures sustaining it were to disappear. What would your guess be? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 25, 2004 | perma-link | (18) comments





Friday, March 19, 2004


Massengale on Modernism
Dear Friedrich -- You won't want to miss John Massengale's brilliant posting about Modernism, here. John has managed to squeeze several books' worth of thinking and knowledge into a few thousand words. Long live the blogosphere: where else are you going to find this kind of to-the-point, essential (and free) cultural history? IMHO, of course -- but, grrr, disagree with me at your peril. John got my own thoughts, such as they are, firing off in a variety of directions. The one that's making the most noise is a question that's been ricocheting around my head for years now. It's this: can Modernism ever take its place as just one style among many? The obvious, level-headed, easy, and probably correct answer is: Sure, why not? John thinks so, and it's certainly to be hoped that he's right. But I can't help wondering if this Modernism-thing isn't a bit more complicated than that. Why? Because of the nature of the grip Modernism had (and still has) on some people. For many years and for many people, it functioned as ideology, as vision, as credo -- really, as a substitute religion. Although Modernism was meant to be an approach that suited a post-religious age, it quickly took on all the characteristics of a traditional religion, not that it was ever able to deliver the satisfaction and happiness traditional religions sometimes manage to. Like those other 20th century pseudo-religions Marxism and Freudianism, Modernism depended for its zing and popularity on the promise of redemption. Over time, it developed religious trappings too: a priesthood, a gospel and a doctrine, sacred spots to which believers made solemn pilgramages. Modernism was art as a way, or rather art as The Way. Buy into it sincerely enough, pray hard enough, submit to its imperative to go on finding new ways to defy tradition and -- who knows? -- Greatness might strike. The Self would find liberation and fulfillment, the masses would be set free, bliss would be attained ... Probably not, of course -- gotta keep the masses supporting the cause and kowtowing before the Genius we all serve, after all. But you never know, do you? Maybe life really can be transformed in its very nature. And gosh, we all sure hope so, don't we? Don't we? Thwack! My question seems to boil down to this: does enough remain of this kind of pseudo-religion when the spark goes out of it to constitute a viable style? Does Modernism -- Modernism simply as a style -- have enough going for it to stay alive as one option among many? It seems to me that styles that have staying power resonate; they've got some real appeal, something that not only fascinates but pleases, and perhaps even serves. If Catholicism, for instance, were to lose its hold, I'm sure that the "culture" created in its service would still transfix; it's a mighty rich one. But of course Catholicism is a real religion. How about a pseudo-religion like Modernism? How... posted by Michael at March 19, 2004 | perma-link | (24) comments





Wednesday, March 17, 2004


Towers in the Park
Dear Friedrich -- Fair warning: what follow are the rants of a semi-educated fan. Sensible people who want responsible commentary instead will find it chez David Sucher (here) and John Massengale (here and here). Now, on with the overcaffeinated ravings. You may have heard that New York City wants to host the 2012 Olympics. (Here's the website spelling out the city's bid.) Where would it house the athletes? And what would it do with the housing after the show's over? Some official-sounding group has commissioned plans from bigname celebritects; here's a piece about the proposals by the NYTimes' ludicrous radical propagandist, er, distinguished architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp. There's a link on the page to a slide show of the proposals. Oh, what the heck, why not copy and paste? Here are a couple of examples of what was submitted. By Zaha Hadid By Henning Larsens Tegnestue By MVRDV Architecture as lava lamps! Towers as progressive-school playground equipment! Buildings that strike poses and wear clown suits! All of which I suppose some people might find cool. But of course these aren't meant to be table-top pieces of "design," freely bought for personal use. They're meant to be buildings, which thousands of people will be stuck interacting with whether they want to or not. So how about getting down to earth for a sec -- 'way down to earth, in fact. Let's ignore the swirls and colors and take a look at the bases of these structures, where many, many people would be interacting with them. What's life like down there? Hmm, well ... A lot more familiar than the innovative zigzagginess of the designs would suggest. Yep: for all their Jetsons-esque edginess, these proposals are nothing but up-to-date examples of one of the most destructive ideas of 20th century modernism, the Tower in the Park. The what? Well, some essential (IMHO, of course) cultural history. We owe the idea of the TIP to the godawful Le Corbusier, the totalitarian of modern architecture, who was convinced that cities -- in their jumble, in their compression, and in their eclecticism -- needed drastic reform. (His kind of drastic reform, of course.) They needed order; they needed light; they needed air. Tear down the old! Build the rational, the good, and the new! What would the Good look like? Here's what The Corbu Man thought downtown Paris should be turned into: Le Corbusier's vision for Paris So much for those retro qualities, romance and poetry, eh? But the Radiant City, as Le Corbusier called his vision, suited the taste that many powerful 20th century figures had for imposing gigantic, rationalized, theoretical schemes on living organisms. And because the powerful saw their own virtue and visions reflected in these designs, the Le Corbusier-ian approach was given repeated tryouts; it became, in fact, standard architecture-world taste and product. It was what was being taught at Our Lousy Ivy University back in the mid-'70s, for instance -- one reason I never took architecture classes, curious though I... posted by Michael at March 17, 2004 | perma-link | (25) comments





Tuesday, March 16, 2004


Greek Elections
Dear Friedrich -- It hasn't been widely noticed in the States, but 2Blowhards visitors may be interested to learn that on March 7th, Greek voters voted their center-Left government out of office, and voted into office a center-Right government. Architecture-wise, the leftist PASOK government had initiated an Olympics-related, build-lots-now program that leaned heavily on chic establishment architects. How much of a role did public dislike of this program play in the government's downfall? Hard to tell; discontent with inefficiency and corruption in a general sense were in any case far more important factors. Still, how fascinating to see that one of the first actions of the New Democracy government has been to stop work on the New Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi. Nikos Salingaros' Guest Posting for 2Blowhards about Tschumi's awful design can be read here. I was pleased to see that Nikos's essay was linked to by several Greek blogs, a Spanish blog, and was even translated into Italian. Emailing back and forth, Nikos and I decided that the time has come to start referring to the "Athens Effect" in honor of recent events. As we propose it, the "Athens Effect" describes the downfall of an institution (corporation, university, government, or nation) that embraces alien architecture. In short, it's the opposite of the "Bilbao Effect," which describes the magic transformation Frank Gehry's museum is said to have wrought on the city of Bilbao. Here's the news as reported by Kathimerini, an English-language Greek newspaper. I've stitched this together from two different news stories. Supreme Court deputy prosecutor Anastassios Kapollas has instructed an Athens prosecutor to press criminal charges for breach of duty against the state-appointed committee that awarded the museum contract to architects Bernard Tschumi and Michael Photiades ... court sources revealed on Thursday that nearly all the officials involved in the 94-million-euro museum project would face criminal charges for breach of duty in awarding the contract and approving the museum plans. Will this prove to be the first time that the academic-avant-garde-celebritecht establishment (designers as well as the people who award them contracts and give them prizes) has been called to serious public account? Beats me. Perhaps visitors who are more knowledgeable can help out here? Here's a brief report from INTBAU, the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism. What fun to see that INTBAU cites Nikos' 2Blowhards piece, and includes a fresh quote from Nikos as well. Let me encourage everyone to explore the entire site, by the way, which is full of terrific information, images and articles: hey, there really is a high-class alternative to the anti-human, ego-driven crap the media and most of the schools are peddling. Ah, the web. I'm thrilled that anyone exploring INTBAU's site and links can get up to speed about these crucial if a little esoteric matters in a matter of a few hours. Still, I can't help feeling a little rueful that in the pre-web era accumulating that very same knowledge took me several years. Oh,... posted by Michael at March 16, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, March 11, 2004


Restaurant Realities
Dear Friedrich -- I often love those little info-graphics in USA Today -- Snapshots, I see they call them. Today's is about restaurant traffic: How many meals are bought in which category of restaurant? The data come from a study done by NPD Group at the end of last year. The results? 74% of restaurant meals are bought from fast-food places; 14% from midscale restaurants; and 11% from "casual" places. I was surprised by fast food's 74% -- but now that I think of it, I'm surprised I was surprised. People picking up burgers without leaving the car, kids wanting more fries, people stopping while on trips ... Of course the figure would be really high. What surprises me most is the number of meals bought from what the study calls "fine dining" restaurants: 1%. I'd have guessed that figure would be quite a lot higher -- 5 or 10%. Shows you how bad my gambling instincts are. Also shows you what a minority taste -- or at least what a luxury -- tiptop food is too, I guess. USA Today's site is here. I can't find this particular Snapshot online. Best, Michael PS: People interested in the book publishing biz should enjoy a couple of long-view stories the newspaper is running in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of their bestseller list, here and here . One interesting factlet from among many: it's guesstimated that 7 out of 10 books either lose money or barely break even. I blogged here about bestseller lists, and about how USA Today's is the best of the bunch. You can eyeball their bestseller list here.... posted by Michael at March 11, 2004 | perma-link | (5) comments





Wednesday, March 10, 2004


Rewind: Hudson River School, Part II
Note – Michael Blowhard and I are pleased with some of our very earliest blogwriting, and we're pained that nearly all of it went unread. It takes a serious while to find a reader or two in the blogosphere. So we've decided to unearth some of that early writing and give it a fresh chance; now and then we're going to indulge ourselves and re-run some of our earliest postings. Here's hoping a few readers get a kick out of them. I chose this episode, in part, as a response to Michael Blowhard's posting 1903, or Jumping on Terry, which was itself a reaction to some comments by Terry Teachout which could be read as disrespecting 19th century American Art. This is the second part of a two-part series on the Hudson River School. Part I can be read here. Michael— As promised, I am continuing with the history of the Hudson River School as the torch was passed from Thomas Cole to the second generation. But before discussing the specific artists, I wanted to sketch out some of the cultural issues that affected their work. The settling (and exploitation) of the West was the great American project of this era. However, the relationship between the wealthy patrons of the Hudson River School—who virtually all lived in the urban East—and the rural or wilderness parts of the country were complex. The landscapes of the Hudson River were originally chosen as motifs because they were easily accessible to New York City-based artists; they are, in essence, tourist vistas. (It’s no accident that commercial tourism and the Hudson River school sprang up at roughly the same time, the 1820s, or that the geographical range of the Hudson River school expanded along with the growth of the railroads and steamship lines.) These paintings embodied the only personal relationship the Eastern urban elite was likely to have with undeveloped nature, i.e., that of a tourist. The Hudson River landscapes also addressed a more general cultural problem of the wealthy, urbanized Eastern elite. For generations European settlers had been used to an essentially practical or “business” relationship with North America—it was a good place to live and extract cash. But now this more leisured elite wanted to find an aesthetic relationship to this vast territory, and their cultural apparatus, oriented towards European models, wasn’t helping. As Rebecca Bedell in her book, “The Anatomy of Nature” notes: Americans had long suffered from an inferiority complex about their continent. It had been stigmatized as “The New World,” a savage place devoid of historical associations and bereft of intellectual and aesthetic stimuli. In…the American landscape many found answers to these accusations…In the great falls of Niagara and in the sculptured towers and ravines of the Southwest, Americans found substitutes for the castles and cathedrals of Europe. They could take pride in the sublimity, vastness and beauty of their country’s natural wonders. More generally still, Americans of this era, being an intensely religious people as well as very interested... posted by Friedrich at March 10, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, March 2, 2004


1903, or Jumping on Terry
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- It's pile-on-Terry-Teachout time! In "An Open Letter to Terry Teachout" (here), John Massengale chides Terry for a characterization Terry once made of the American arts in 1903. Here's Terry's passage: What a difference a century makes. In 1903, comparatively few Americans took anything like a passionate interest in the arts. Only two living American novelists, Mark Twain and Henry James, had done major work, and Twain's was long behind him. Our best painters, the American impressionists, hewed to a style frankly derivative of their European models; our art museums were narrowly provincial in scope and ambition. We had no great composers, no great poets or playwrights, no ballet companies, and only a handful of symphony orchestras and opera companies. Here's a bit of John's response: I�m surprised by your endorsement of this Modernist bias towards the early 20th century. You are breezily dismissing one of the greatest artistic periods in American history ... 1903 was the heart of the period called the American Renaissance and the peak of the widespread and very popular City Beautiful movement. Without question, it was the greatest time in America for architecture and city-building. I feel bad about letting myself be drawn into this, because Terry's a model citizen -- a terrific critic and an ultra-generous and enthusiastic blogger. Writers about the arts nearly all have a lot to learn from him. Still, I can't resist. I think John's got Terry good: it seems perfectly clear to me that the more you learn about 1903, the more it can make 2003 look lame. But the real reason I can't hold back is that I so vehemently agree with what I take to be John's larger point, which is how surprising it is that that even educated, arty Americans lack awareness of how vibrant pre-modernist American culture was. It's a pet rant of mine too. We often look back on early 20th century American art -- let alone 18th and 19th century American art -- and don't see much there. A few painters ... some white marble sculpture ... maybe some folk art ... Melville 'n' Poe 'n' Twain 'n' Hawthorne ... And that's about it. The rap on pre-modernist American art is that there simply wasn't much, and that what was there was provincial, derivative, rube-ish -- hardly worth paying attention to at all. Generally a dismal, almost shameful episode we'd do well to leave behind. One example: even publishing-world pros and insiders tend to assume that there was no "real" American publishing prior to the arrival of some Euro emigres in the early 20th century, modernist figures who finally gave us a "real" book-publishing culture. Um, er ... How many ways can you spell "bullshit"? To explain things a bit more patiently: given the kinds of educations and brainwashings we've gotten for several decades and given the ways our "educated" tastes have been formed, it's understandable that many people hold these assumptions. This is simply part of the... posted by Michael at March 2, 2004 | perma-link | (22) comments




Spending Time in Bruegelville
Michael: I think I’ve mentioned before that the older I get, the more landscape painting seems to satisfy my emotional ‘art needs.’ Well, the other day I was looking through a book on Pieter Bruegel, the 16th century painter from what is now Belgium, and it struck me that perhaps I’ve underestimated landscape drawing as well. Bruegel is of course a one-of-a-kind type of guy, who doesn’t fit easily into categories: he was by turns a history painter, a satirist, an illustrator of proverbs, a depictor of peasant life (without himself being a peasant), a fantasist in the manner of Bosch, a designer of etchings and engravings, and a landscape painter. (Bruegel was a rough contemporary of Shakespeare’s, and seems to have shared with him a cultural mindset combining acute social observation with a vigorous fantasy life.) Bruegel was also the master of a particular style of pen and ink drawing in which every line, stipple, cross-hatch, dot and hook creates an astonishingly atmospheric rendering. It is as though the light shimmers and the air moves between every stroke of his pen. Of course, his pen is also perfectly capable of creating monumental figures, solid tree trunks, and sturdy tools and buildings as well. (Creating is, of course, the operative word here; these drawings are by no means a ‘tame delineation of a particular place’ and appear to spring chiefly from Bruegel’s imagination.) To show you an example, here is a detail from a drawing he made for a series of engravings on the Seasons. P. Bruegel, Spring (detail), 1565 The figures are remarkable, but my eye takes off for the far reaches of space, pausing briefly on the lover’s party on the banks of the river, formed with incredible economy from a few strokes of the pen (and obviously inspiring Ruben’s “The Garden of Love” of the next century.) Another example is “A Landscape with St. Jerome” (the little saint is visible at the base of the tree kneeling in prayer.) P. Bruegel, Landscape with St. Jerome, 1553 But what I focus on increasingly these days are the half-hinted-at distances behind: These drawings, for reasons only known to my subconscious, or to God, make me muse on my mortality, but in a pleasant kind of way. It’s becoming clearer to me that in a few more decades I’ll be leaving, er, this place. Looking at these drawings, I fantasize that when when I do, I’ll head out into the kind of vibratory, tremulous distances that Bruegel’s pen renders so well. It looks like a nice place to, well, dissolve into the mist and the light and the air. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 2, 2004 | perma-link | (12) comments





Sunday, February 29, 2004


Guest Posting -- Salingaros on Tschumi
We're pleased to present another Guest Posting by a 2Blowhards favorite, the mathematician and architectural thinker Nikos Salingaros. A little background. This upcoming Sunday, March 7th, Greece is holding general elections. An issue likely to influence the outcome is -- amazingly enough -- an architectural one: the New Acropolis Museum, which is partly intended to house and display the Elgin Marbles, depending of course on whether Greece can persuade England to return them. Greece's more-or-less Socialist current PASOK Government chose the Swiss-born, New York-based Bernard Tschumi to design the Museum. The project has caused an uproar, both because of Tschumi's angular, heavy-on-the-glass design and because of the way in which construction is being carried out. Is the Acropolis a mere piece of real estate that should be subject to political and fashionable whim? Or does it instead belong to Western Civ more generally? In any case, the PASOK government has ignored criticism and is plowing forward in a way reminiscent of the worst kind of top-down, 20th-century development, forcibly evicting residents of apartments which were then demolished to make space for the new museum. As a result, the opposition New Democracy party, which is more-or-less conservative, has a decent chance of winning the March 7 election. If it does, the government of Greece may be able to correct what many see as a terrible mistake. You can click on the images in this posting to view them at a larger size. THE NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM by Nikos Salingaros To emphasize that Greece has finally reached the cultural level of the other European countries, its present government chose the Swiss (now American) architect Bernard Tschumi to design the New Acropolis Museum. Surely, with this Museum, the Greeks demonstrate that they are up-to-date! Another goal behind this choice was to convince the British Government that it is time to return the Elgin Marbles (sculptures taken from the Parthenon in 1802) to their country of origin. In a bold gesture of optimism, the upper floor of the museum will remain empty awaiting the imminent return of the Elgin Marbles. As Tschumi optimistically declares: "I truly believe that the day the museum is finished, the marbles will return". Nevertheless, the rest of the world does not share this self-confidence. On the contrary, Tschumi's name provokes laughter among certain architectural circles. The American journalist Robert Locke, in an article entitled "America's Worst Architect is a Marxist" presents Tschumi as a poseur: "an architect of gags that fall flat." His architecture's theoretical bases are characterized as absurd: "Tschumi's theoretical writings, the basis of his reputation, are a tangled mess that alternately induces dizziness and puzzlement as to whether the author actually knows what philosophy is, or merely heard it described by someone in a bar once ... The worst of this stuff is so self-evidently empty as to defy attack." The truth is that Tschumi became famous for his theories without having built anything at all. His buildings in Le Parc de la Villette at the... posted by Michael at February 29, 2004 | perma-link | (19) comments





Friday, February 27, 2004


Michelangelo and Rodin
Michael: I came across a little book the other day entitled “Rodin and Michelangelo” at a going out of business sale at a Crown Books. (Apparently, as I found out later, this particular Crown Books outlet has been ‘going out of business’ for several years now.) Appropriately, it was the catalogue of an exhibition back in 1996-1997 staged by the Casa Buonnaroti of Florence and the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. Given their respective investments in their artists, both institutions had a fairly obvious motive for cooperating: i.e., to cross-market themselves to fans of the other artist. The Casa Buonnaroti would of course want to stress Michelangelo’s continuing importance to Modern Art, while the Rodin Museum would like to position Rodin as the heir of the Divine Michelangelo. This little piece of artistic cross-marketing made me consider how common such salesmanship is in art history, and how it often obscures the real relationships between artists. Of course, the cross-marketing of Michelangelo and Rodin hardly began with this exhibition/book. As early as 1884, Octave Mirbeau proclaimed it in the pages of Le Gaulois: I tell you, Monsieur, this man is Michelangelo, and you do not recognize it. Well, I’ll grant you that in 1884 Rodin was producing work strongly influenced by Michelangelo, but that development was only a few years old at the time. Back in 1876 Rodin—born in 1840—was working in Brussels as a flunky for the fashionable commercial sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. Carrier-Belleuse, a very talented guy who could sculpt in any style but typically worked in a pseudo-Rococo idiom, had assembled a studio the Belgian capital in order to decorate the new Brussels stock exchange. Rodin had worked there for six years without his common law wife Rose Beuret or his son, both of whom stayed behind in Paris, presumably for financial reasons. To make Rodin’s own obvious lack of success more galling, Carrier-Belleuse was dismissive of the younger man’s artistic dreams. The wildly ambitious Rodin, who had been met chiefly with rejection by the art world—he had been turned down for admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts not once, but three times and seen his first significant work, “The Man With the Broken Nose” rejected by the Salons of both 1864 and 1865—must have been desperately looking for a crowbar to pry open the gates of fame and fortune. He found what he was looking for in an uptick of French artistic interest in Michelangelo. According to Flavio Fergonzi, [There were several] events in the French artistic milieu to which Rodin could not have remained indifferent. The first of these events…was the emergence of the so-called sculptural Florentinism fashionable among French sculptors in the 1870s…[C]ritics began to notice, beginning with the [post-Franco-Prussion war] Salon of 1872, a sober and rigorous neo-Renaissance style that complemented the seriousness of the new values of the Republic…[T]he second event…had to do with the quadricentennial of Michelangelo’s birth and the reactions to it in French culture. Beginning in January of 1875, the artistic... posted by Friedrich at February 27, 2004 | perma-link | (10) comments




Underserved Audiences
Dear Friedrich -- What does the success of Mel Gibson's "Passion" movie mean? Probably many things, but I'm prone to think that that one of them is that there's an audience out there that the entertainment business has been doing a lousy job of serving. I love these the-market-has-spoken moments, don't you? A fairly recent example was the success of the novels of Terry McMillan. Pre-McMillan, an unspoken -- and largely unthought-about -- assumption in the publishing biz was that blacks didn't read much fiction. The phenomenal success of "Waiting to Exhale" showed how wrong that assumption was. Blacks -- black women, anyway -- were in fact eager to see themselves, and their lives and experiences, reflected in fiction. To its credit, the book publishing industry snapped to pronto, and the modern-black-woman's novel has become one of the industry's standard products. Another example from book publishing: right-wing books. For an absurdly long time, the big NYC publishers turned their noses up at right-wing books; the idea of providing right-wingers with reading material seemed (and still seems) distasteful to many people in book publishing. So the creation, production and distribution of right-wing books was left to out-of-town and oddball publishers. Surprise: many right-wingers do read, and these oddball publishers had hit after hit after hit. Recently, but only very recently (such has been the resistance of NYC publishers to anything right-wing), NYC publishers have started waking up to the fact that they can't afford not to pursue the right-wing market. Yucko, perhaps -- but, good golly, there's a lot of money to be made over there. What will the entertainment biz make of the success of Gibson's Jesus movie? Will film and TV people take the movie's commercial triumph as an indication that there are lots of good-Christian types who are willing to buy movie tickets but only for the kinds of movies that they're comfortable with? Or will the biz shrug off "The Passion" as a one-time, unrepeatable phenomenon? What's your hunch about this? I suppose it's also possible that the entertainment biz will simply dodge these questions. Where Flyover Country's concerned, the entertainment biz is comfortable with the status quo: mocking rednecks, portraying uprightness as uptightness, and selling squareness to rubes. I wonder whether the biz will find the idea of respecting this audience and serving its entertainment needs and desires ... unbearable. Sharon Waxman in the NYTimes (here) reports that some major film executives have been so angered by what they feel is the anti-Semitism of "The Passion" that they've said they'll never work with Gibson again. But how about the opportunity to make scads of money producing films that appeal to red-state Christians? No word on that yet. Hey, and to move from the Himalayas to a sandpile: I looked at our 2Blowhards stats the other day and was floored to see that we're averaging better than 2000 visits a day. Fast response #1: when will these people come to their senses? But fast response #2: why... posted by Michael at February 27, 2004 | perma-link | (33) comments





Thursday, February 26, 2004


Bay Area Figurative Artists
Dear Friedrich -- By Wonner; by Peterson The San Francisco painters David Park (here), Richard Diebenkorn (here) and Elmer Bischoff (here) are three of my favorite 20th century artists, but the loose school they represent -- Bay Area Figurative painting -- included many other talented, if less well-known, artists too. Here's a page devoted to one of them, Paul Wonner; here's one devoted to another, Roland Peterson. I think many people who are wary of modernism might find the work of these painters surprisingly agreeable. It's casual, atmospheric, and pleasure-centric -- 1920s Paris via the Golden Gate, a bohemian utopia that smells of the Pacific. The Hackett-Freedman Gallery handles work by a lot of these guys, and their website (here) is itself an informative and helpful thing of beauty. Caroline Jones' wonderful book, Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965, can be bought here. Are you a fan too? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 26, 2004 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, February 25, 2004


In the Neighborhood of Genius
Dear Friedrich -- In the NYTimes, Lawrence van Gelder asks, "What's it like to live near the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles?" His answer: Dazzling and hot might be two words that come to mind. Neighbors are complaining that the intense glare from some of the shimmering stainless steel curves, above, of the $274 million hall designed by Frank Gehry has raised the temperature in nearby condominium apartments by as much as 15 degrees, The Associated Press reported. Jacqueline Lagrone, 42, said that when she returned for lunch one day before a temporary change was made: "You couldn't even see, and then the furniture would really get hot. You would have to literally close the drapes, and you'd still feel warmth in the house. You would have the air-conditioning on all the time." On one corner, where a glossy steel finish reflects the sun more harshly than the brushed steel used elsewhere, officials have put up netting pending a permanent solution. "We've chosen a sort of sandblasted finish," said Terry Bell, a Gehry partner. He said the impact of shiny steel on neighboring buildings was considered by the architects, but during construction, curving metal sheets ended up at a slightly different angle than called for by the plans. Van Gelder's piece can be read here. Best, Michael UPDATE: The LATimes has taken note too, here. Link thanks to David Sucher, here.... posted by Michael at February 25, 2004 | perma-link | (1) comments




Confessions of a Naked Model
We're pleased to run another guest posting by "J," an artist and art student who helps pay the bills by working as an artists' model. J's site, where you can enjoy some of her art, is here. The Society of Illustrators runs a Jazz-and-Sketch session once a month where three girls pose together and a live band blasts swing. I showed up at my first one a month ago. I came in wearing a red silk robe that I hoped conjured images of opium dens, but which may just bring to mind the Chelsea Salvation Army. Despite my efforts, I got upstaged. On the stand with me stood a blonde with a newsboy cap and diamond collar, using a mink coat as a cover-up, her lips smirking and tomato-red. In good models, exhibitionism runs deep. This isn't something talked about in our profession. We are supposed to be posing for the money, or to demonstrate shoulder-joints, or for some other mature, sterile purpose. We're not supposed to be doing it to show off. But the high of being looked at isn't something I can deny. I fly when I'm on the model stand; afterwards, I'm bouncy and exhilarated, and more flirtatious than I'd ever be in normal, subway-riding life. Being on the stand gives you a persona. It lets you slip into the role of Kiki de Montparnasse (here), or at least of some beautiful wench secure enough to take off her clothes. This exhibitionistic drive gives us the energy and commitment it takes to twist ourselves into horrible poses,spend entire session's wages on props, and serve as inspirations rather than just demos of how a hip joint turns. When the blonde and I were twisted together for twenty minutes, she whispered to me "I wonder how many guys are going to go home and think of us tonight." Posing at a sketch club differs from posing at a school. Private sketch sessions have to attract participants -- to add some honey to the vinegar of work. They can’t afford the dourness that comes so naturally to universities. People won’t show up. Schools can do with you what they want; once you’ve signed over your four years and $35,000 tuition, you can't complain. Also, attendees of private sketch sessions are hobbyists who go to socialize and feel creative, or else professionals on their goof-off hours. They aren't earnest students. At the private venues, we models get to talk to the artists. We flatter and flirt. Cards get distributed and a good time is had. No matter how intense the atmosphere gets at a private sketch club, pleasure is in the air, while at universities, the what's in the air is resolutely work. When I pose in a new place, I have to sound out how much liberty I have. Can I talk to people during breaks, or sit in the corner reading? Can I joke when I'm on the stand? Many universities want models to be like furniture. While this... posted by Michael at February 25, 2004 | perma-link | (6) comments





Sunday, February 22, 2004


Rewind -- Journalism and Fantasy
Note -- FvBlowhard and I are pleased with some of our very earliest blogwriting, and we're pained that nearly all of it went unread. It takes a serious while to find a reader or two in the blogosphere. So we've decided to unearth some of that early writing and give it a fresh chance; now and then we're going to indulge ourselves and re-run some of our earliest postings. Here's hoping a few readers get a kick out of them. Given that I'm simply copying and pasting into a new posting, comments will be left behind. Apologies for that -- I don't know how to work around the problem. But don't let that stop anyone from commenting this time around. We're as eager as ever to yak about this stuff. Today -- MBlowhard responds to a question FvB asked about the role of fantasy and journalism in art and lit. Friedrich -- Journalism vs. fantasy? I suppose that I view "the journalistic" as one element a given work of art or entertainment might be selling, nothing more or less. I don't live for it, per se, but I'm sometimes glad when it's present. I thought the fiction (is that what you mean by "fantasy"?) side of "Bonfire of the Vanities," for instance, was weak, though I enjoyed the book's journalistic side. I recently watched a movie on DVD called "Perfume," and one of the things it too was selling was "journalism" -- in this case, the look and feel of the fashion-and-media industry. The movie (worth seeing for a variety of reasons) was dead-on, and very enjoyable, in that department. Starved as this spectator usually is for something, anything, I'm not about to turn down some decent journalism if and when it comes along. The "Yeah! That's what it's like!" response is perfectly enjoyable for me. But that's just a mature and impersonal response. Yawnsville. Personally, the fulcrum I'm more drawn to contemplating is realism vs. symbolism. (The strictly fantastic -- sci-fi, fantasy, etc -- doesn't attract me as much as it does you. I tend to be happiest when I can feel the imagination stirring beneath a cloak of something recognizable.) I seem to have a bigger-than-usual appetite for the symbolic -- Colette, for instance, or turn- of-the-century erotic painting. People can talk all they want about Klimt's superficiality, about how he's more a poster designer than a real artist, but they'll never persuade me to stop enjoying his paintings. I suspect that my taste for the symbolic helps explain my attraction to crime fiction, too. Its basic structure (a crime is committed, an investigation follows) resonates for me. I walk around thinking thoughts about how wrong literature goes when it tries to model the (supposed) quantum uncertainty and existential formlessness of existence. What's the point of doing that, or even attempting to do it? (People can do as they please, especially in the arts. I'm just chugging along my own tracks right now...) People are storytelling creatures. We... posted by Michael at February 22, 2004 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, February 19, 2004


Taunton Press
Dear Friedrich -- Have you ever noticed the books published by The Taunton Press? As a homeowner often caught up in projects and overhauls, you might enjoy them -- as might visitors intrigued by various discussions we've had on the blog about architecture, homes and neighborhoods. Taunton has its roots back in the hippie-carpenter, Whole-Earth-Catalog days, and they publish many beautiful, helpful books and magazines about homes. (They also publish books and magazines about carpentry.) Many of their books are ultra-simpatico with the principles of people like Christopher Alexander; they show, in other words, an aversion to avant-garde showmanship, and a love of (and respect for) comfort, utility, solidity and attractiveness. Taunton's books and magazines are themselves handsome examples of the craft of bookmaking. Taunton's a creative and distinctive publisher -- far more interesting and worthy of attention (IMHO, of course) as makers of books than many celebrated novelists are. Years ago I met and spoke with one of Taunton's most popular authors, the architect Sarah ("The Not-So-Big House") Susanka. It was pleasing to hear her talk about how rewarding she'd found it to publish with Taunton. It was also fun to hear her talk about how, even in architecture school, she'd never felt she really "got" architecture until she ran across Alexander (et al)'s great A Pattern Language (buyable here). I see on Taunton's informative and attractive website (here) that Susanka has a new book due out soon. (Her own equally-fun-to-explore website is here.) I hope it's a good one. There are a few new Taunton books I've spent time with and can recommend: Russell Versaci's Creating a New Old House (explorable here and buyable here), and Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson and Barbara Winslow's Alexander-influenced Patterns of Home (explorable here and buyable here). Both books are gorgeous, helpful, well-priced and full of ideas almost any homeowner should enjoy playing with. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 19, 2004 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, February 18, 2004


Frederick Turner
Dear Friedrich -- I just discovered that the amazing Frederick Turner -- whose moving and beautiful poetry collection April Wind (buyable here) I recently read, and whose just-as-fabulous New Classical manifesto The Culture of Hope (buyable here) I'm treating myself to for a second time -- has also written some columns for TechCentralStation. Here's an archive of them. Have you run across his work yet? Turner's a very exciting figure. Teacher, poet, essayist ... He glommed onto the implications of the new science earlier than any other arts figure I'm aware of, and he has has led the charge for an evo-bio and chaos-theory-informed return to classicism ever since. He's talented, brilliant, eloquent ... I hope to blog about him at length sometime soon. No, I plan to, dammit. Until such time, here's Turner's own website to explore And here's a passage from an Edge q&a with Steven Pinker that should intrigue. EDGE: So what do you see as the appropriate role for art? PINKER: Good heavens, that's not for me to weigh in on! The most I can do is suggest ways in which the sciences of mind might pipe in with insights that could complement those of scholars in the humanities. Linguistics can help poetics and rhetoric; perception science can be useful for the analysis of music and the visual arts; cognitive science has a role to play in the analysis of literature and cinema; evolutionary psychology can shed light on esthetics. And more generally, the sciences of mind can reinforce the idea that there really is an enduring human nature that great art can appeal to. EDGE: Who are some of the people exploring the convergence of art and science? PINKER: Among novelists, Ian McEwan, David Lodge, A. S. Byatt, John Updike, Iris Murdoch, Tom Wolfe, and George Orwell are a few that I am familiar with who have invoked notions of human nature, sometimes traditional ones, sometimes ones from scientific psychology, in their work or their explanations. Among scholars and critics, the list is growing; here are some who pop into mind. George Steiner on biological conflict and drama. Ernest Gombrich on perception and art. Joseph Carroll, Frederick Turner, Mark Turner, Brian Boyd, Patrick Hogan, on literature. Elaine Scarry on mental imagery and fiction. Denis Dutton has been a catalyst for this convergence through his journal Philosophy and Literature and his web site www.ArtsandLettersDaily.com. EDGE: Does this portend a more general trend? PINKER: We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human nature. They've been long separated because of post-modernism and modernism. But now graduate students are grumbling in emails and in conference hallways about being locked out of the job market unless they perpetuate postmodernist gobbledygook, and how they're eager for new ideas from the sciences that could invigorate the humanities within universities, which are, by anyone's account, in trouble. Also connoisseurs and appreciators of art are getting sick of the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring mangled... posted by Michael at February 18, 2004 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, February 12, 2004


Virtual Architecture?
Dear Friedrich -- Is it real or is it Memorex? Some facts about Time Warner's new headquarters, the latest glassy behemoth to open in Manhattan. It's located on Columbus Circle where Robert Moses' Coliseum used to be. Development of the site took 20 years. Construction was completed in about four years. It cost $1.8 billion, and has 2.8 million square feet of space. It's got twin 80-story towers. It was designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It is or will be home to CNN, some of the Time-Warner offices, a shopping mall, a supermarket, a health club, a hotel, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Ricky Martin owns a condo in the building. An Englishman paid $45 million for the building's snazziest penthouse. The building has three below-ground garages with room for more than 500 cars. Questions about the building: Will it suceed as a retail destination? Will New Yorkers take to indoor-mall style shopping? Will they do so even if the mall is seven floors up and down? "Vertical shopping" is what it's being called, and no one is certain it'll work. Will the building manage to draw pedestrians and shoppers to Columbus Circle? It's an area that for a long time has been a nowheresville -- someplace you hurried through to get elsewhere. Mary Reinholz in New York Newsday, here, does a good job of telling the whole story. For unintended laughs, the NYTimes' so-called "architecture critic" Herbert Muschamp never disappoints. (His piece costs money to see, so no link.) Here's Muschamp in full flight: It is good to see Skidmore, Owings & Merrill back in the business of piling up big chunks of quartz. Stone was never this firm's strength. Ten Columbus Circle does ample penance for the opaque minerals Skidmore deployed so extravagantly during its neo-Art Deco phase. There's some flame-pattern gray granite at the building's base, but it's there mainly for contrast with the giant cluster of glass crystals, which appears to have been quarried from the sky. Whatever he's on, I want some. Twinkle, twinkle, great big atrium Photo by Dith Pran My reaction: working in the neighborhood, I had a chance to watch the Time Warner headquarters go up. And under construction, the building looked awful; a friend of mine was in the habit of referring to it as "Death Star architecture." Now that it's open it doesn't seem offensive. I've visited the building a few times since it opened last week. I strolled around it, and I joined the curious mobs checking out the shopping mall inside. It isn't a nightmare, and it has its cyber-chic. Although the face it presents to 58th Street looks made of tarpaper and broken-bone-style beams, the building fronts Columbus Circle more invitingly than I expected. As a built objet d'art -- I think of these new torqued-and-twinkly office buildings as avant-garde perfume bottles -- the Time Warner headquarters is effectively shimmery. It's full of newish materials -- post-halogen pinpoint lights; metal panels that iridesce;... posted by Michael at February 12, 2004 | perma-link | (14) comments





Friday, January 30, 2004


NEA Gripes
Dear Friedrich -- Alan Sullivan's posting (here) about Bush's plan to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts strikes me as very sensible. Like Alan, I'm a pro-arts guy who'd like to see the NEA killed -- for the good of the arts. IMHO, of course, and despite whatever good the NEA has been responsible for, it's also been responsible for much that's bad in recent art: for the development of a topheavy arts-adminstrator class; for turning the arts into a welfare client, with all the psychological damage that usually entails; and for guaranteeing that the arts will be more politicized than they'd otherwise be. Hey, here's a good interview with an NEA critic. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 30, 2004 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, January 23, 2004


Jess
Dear Friedrich -- Did you run across the news that the artist known as Jess died at the age of 80 earlier this month? Ken Johnson wrote a lovely and appreciative obit for the NYTimes, but it's now pay-per-view. Here's the good obit Kenneth Baker wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. Have you seen much of Jess' work? An amazing artist, well-known in San Francisco but much less so in the rest of the country. I don't feel that Jess had a rough time of it -- his work is in collections at the Met, at MOMA, and at other major artplaces. So I can't play the satisfying game of railing against the cruel world for its injustice, darn it. The reason I think it's a pity that his name plays almost no role in the standard postwar-American-art story is simply that I suspect a lot of people would enjoy his work. I was wowed by it myself. Yet, despite being a bit more tuned into art-things than most people, the only reason I ever encountered Jess was that a friend who knew him personally browbeat me into paying attention. Jess was a one-of-a-kind artist. Maybe that's the reason he isn't better known; he wasn't a member of any art team, and he represented no larger trends or tendencies. You couldn't point to his work and say, See, that's what Conceptualism, or Ab-Ex, or Neo-Geo is all about! He wasn't an example of anything; he was about as singular an art phenonenom as can be. There wasn't much to Jess' biography. He was gay; he started out adult life as a scientist and an engineer; he found atomic bombs and atomic power so upsetting that he lost faith in science; he ditched his last name and cut off most contact with the outside world; and he turned to art. He shared a house and his life with the poet Robert Duncan. Ken Johnson compares Jess's work to that of Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, which is a good and smart comparison; it was nothing if not visionary. As far as I'm aware, most if not all of Jess' work was meant to be hung on walls, but he worked in strange and often hard-to-categorize ways. Some of his "paintings" incorporate what looks like thousands of pieces from jigsaw puzzles; others are made of coils of oil paint so skeins-of-yarn thick that it probably makes more sense to think of them as colored relief sculptures than as paintings. People who object to modernist art because it looks like a kid could do it would be taken aback by Jess' paintings. The workmanship and labor are plenty apparent, even obsessively overdone; some of his paintings took him years to complete. His imagination seemed to enjoy feeding on visual material that's often considered unfair game for modernist art -- "literary" material, such as illustrations from Victorian children's lit, or pictures from science textbooks. He had tons of wit and made many collages; his... posted by Michael at January 23, 2004 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, January 16, 2004


Person A and Person B
Dear Friedrich -- A question for you (as well as anyone else who's moved to pitch in here, of course): Imagine Person A and Person B. Person A goes to a Black Sabbath concert and reports afterwards that he had a "great" experience. (Is Black Sabbath still in existence, by the way?) Person B goes to a concert of Pollini playing Chopin (I don't much about classical music, but I do know that Pollini does Chopin well) and comes back afterwards to report that he too had a "great" experience. Knowing nothing else about these two people, would you feel capable of saying that one of them had a "greater" experience than the other? I guess what the puzzle boils down to is: let's suppose we can agree that the music of Pollini/Chopin is greater than the music/theater of Black Sabbath. Even so, does it automatically follow that Person B's experience was therefore greater than Person A's? I'm prone to say "No," and mostly because I'm prone to taking people at their word. (Seems like a basic gesture of respect to do so.) Since there's no better authority on the subject of Person A's experience than Person A himself, I accept his description of his experience. Likewise where Person B is concerned. But other questions do claw at my brain a bit. I tend, for example, to feel that my own involvement in culture has made me a deeper person, and I often (not always) find that "greater" art moves me (reaches me, excites me, whatever) more "deeply" than less-great art. So I'm prone to think that Cultured-Me's "great" experiences are more substantial than the "great" experiences that Uncultured-Me had, say, 35 years ago. But that's not comparing two different people, that's comparing two different Me's. And, not to get too caught up in fancypants po-mo-ism, let's face it: people experience the same thing in many different ways. I've attended many plays, movies and concerts that I were thought were godawful, even while the people around me were obviously having a "great" experience. I couldn't question the fact: there they were, being deeply moved. And I've been to art-things that have deeply moved (and/or excited) me, but which other people in attendance were bored or at least untouched by. My excitement was genuine, but so was their boredom. And, despite my (perhaps self-deluded) conviction that I'm a deeper person today than I once was thanks in part to my decades of cultural adventures, do I really feel that I can say that I'm a deeper person than the kids I grew up with who didn't leave town, who didn't devote themselves to the arts, and who still, as middle-aged creatures, have smalltown tastes? No, I don't think I'd care to say that. I like and respect many of my hometown buddies too much, for one thing. For another, they've had their own lives, at least as rich as mine, and if they tell me they had a "great" experience at,... posted by Michael at January 16, 2004 | perma-link | (30) comments





Thursday, January 15, 2004


Elvgren--Ahead of His Time?
Michael: As you know, Gil Elvgren is today considered primarily as a notable figure among American pin-up artists of the 1940s and 1950s. However, recent shocking developments suggest that his importance to 20th century art far transcends the narrow genre of the pin-up. The recent discovery of a number of his paintings from a brief early foray into fine art has deeply unsettled the theories of art historians who have been allowed to view his revolutionary work. For example, Glenn D. Lowry, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art remarked after visiting the Elvgren paintings: “Holy s**t!” Jeremy Strick of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art could only manage: “Heavy, dude.” A few of these blockbuster images are being reproduced for the first time publicly on this blog. By the late 1930s, Elvgren (1914-1980) had established a budding career as an illustrator and calendar artist. However, it appears that his artistic ambitions weren’t satisfied by this type of work, and, in a dramatic move he gave up illustration for six months at the height of the Depression and focused on easel paintings. Apparently he first decided to come to grips with the advanced art of the 20th century, and painted works in the style of a variety of artists, including Braque and Kandinsky. G. Elvgren, Hommages to Braque and Kandinsky, 1938 However, he soon left such derivative works behind and struck out boldly in the direction he felt sure that art would (eventually) evolve. Skipping past such landmark styles as Abstract Expressionism, Elvgren landed, astonishingly, on styles that anticipate such later masters as Frank Stella and Gerhardt Richter. G. Elvgren, Untitled #23 and #64, 1938 Apparently he even abandoned painting altogether near the end of this sabbatical, noting in his journal that: Painting is Eurocentric and foregrounds the masculine cult of genius. Moreover, the celebrity of artists like Picasso and the high prices paid for certain works of art suggest that art is becoming nothing more than a commodity. I predict that someday a literary theorist named Roland Barthes will declare the “death of the author” and will emphasize that the reader, not the author, creates meaning. Likewise, the only way forward that I can see for the visual arts will be to turn to modes of expression that will be more ephemeral and conceptual. How far this visionary genius might have advanced the visual arts is, regrettably, unknown. A heavy snowstorm in 1938 caused the roof of his attic studio to collapse, giving him a severe concussion. When he was released from the hospital, he immediately returned to pin-up illustration and refused to have anything to do with fine art for the remainder of his life, except to occasionally paint portraits of motorboats for his drinking buddies. He apparently destroyed most of his paintings from 1938, but fortunately overlooked several that he had stored in the basement of a neighbor (whose recent death put them on the market.) How could a young pin-up artist and illustrator have... posted by Friedrich at January 15, 2004 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, January 2, 2004


Raphael on Popper
Dear Friedrich -- One of the many things that surprised and dismayed me about the arts world is how intolerant it is of dissent. Silly me, I'd thought what I was entering was a field of activity; instead it turned out to be something more like a strict church, or a particularly rigid political party. Disagreement is allowed to go only so far. Dissent on the big topics simply isn't permitted. I remember, for example, an artist friend being enraged by the topic of the rebirth of academic-classical painting -- a rebirth which is, objectively speaking (and like it or not), a fact. "But you simply can't paint that way today," he spluttered. 2Blowhards visitors who recall the disputes that took place on this blog about whether or not the New Urbanism can be considered to be architecture -- it wasn't a conversation about whether the New Urbanism has any contributions to make, but whether it qualifies as architecture -- are familiar with this kind of reflex. The fact that the New Urbanism is something that many well-qualified architects are involved in didn't seem to make any difference to those who took the it's-not-architecture line. New Urbanists concern themselves with different issues than the ones the architecture commissars say are Architecture's Only True Issues? Then what they're doing isn't architecture. Quarreling with the main tenets of the arts world doesn't make you what you'd imagine -- an arts person who disagrees about a topic with other arts people. It makes you something else entirely. First, you're attacked. Then you're shunned. Then you're ignored. You become persona non grata, in other words. You may be writing, painting, thinking, composing, or performing up a storm, yet you still lose your membership card. Those academic-classical painters? They aren't to be accepted as artists, they're ... well, something else entirely, god only knows what. Non-artists, in any case. Possibly scum, and almost certainly fascists. How to explain this doctrinaire, you're-with-us-or-against-us attitude, let alone the vehemence with which many artsies cling to and uphold it? And how and when did fanaticism become a prerequisite for membership in the arts world? I recently read a small book by Frederic Raphael about the philosopher Karl Popper (buyable here), and a few passages in it caught my attention. Raphael is discussing Popper's ideas about knowledge, belief, science and politics, but they seem to me to apply to the arts as well. In pseudo-science as practised by Freud or Marx, ideology can make facts accord with anything if its terms are sufficiently elasticized (and elusive). The critics of such ideologies can be systematically dismissed by their proponents, since in the terms of the system they can always be accused of being, for instance, either 'in denial' or 'lackeys of the bourgeoisie.' ... The fallibility of the democracies had turned out to be a strength; the infallibility of dictators had revealed their weakness. Totalitarian systems created an illusion of frictionless cohesion and inflexible unanimity, but -- by damning all dissent... posted by Michael at January 2, 2004 | perma-link | (13) comments





Tuesday, December 16, 2003


Salingaros on Kahn
Dear Friedrich -- As you know, I've been trying to persuade Nikos Salingaros to make use of 2Blowhards as a vehicle for his more blog-y and informal reflections and observations. And I'm pleased to report that I've had some success -- Nikos has written up his responses to the work of the architect Louis Kahn, and has given us the OK to publish them. Readers who want to find links to Kahn resources on the Web are urged click here. Nikos' website, where he makes available his very impressive writing and thinking on architecture, is here. Salingaros on Kahn 1. Which Kahn? First let's get the architect's identity straight. There are three Kahns in American architecture: Albert Kahn; Ely Jacques Kahn; and Louis Isadore Kahn. The first was a great Classical architect -- a contemporary of Julia Morgan and Stanford White who also built some plain industrial buildings, but not for human habitation. Albert Kahn made the mistake of pointing out that the industrial style is inappropriate for most buildings, and claiming that modernism is not real architecture, so you don't hear much about him nowadays. The second Kahn was a master of Art Deco, who helped to define what New York ought to have become were it not for the modernists. Ely Kahn built some of the more attractive modest skyscrapers, which were replaced by the faceless monstrosities of today. When archaeologists of the future define New York culture by its artistic style, it will probably be the Art Deco style of 1930, just as Paris is indelibly associated with the Art Nouveau style of the 1900 Metro station entrances. Nevertheless, both New York and Paris have done their best to erase their identifying symbols, like the ex-convict Jean Valjean trying to hide all traces of his true identity. The third Kahn was the champion of modernism that we know so well -- the Kahn of "what does a brick want to become?" It is de rigueur for young architects to refer to him casually as "Lou" so as to imply a nonexistent familiarity. Even though Kahn was born in Estonia, he grew up in the USA, and is thus considered more American than the numerous European modernist architects who immigrated as adults. The "official" histories of architecture are written so as to imply that genuinely homegrown American innovation in architecture really took off with Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson. To think this way is ridiculous, but it represents modernist dogma and is not meant to be supported by either reality or facts. To criticize Kahn's work amounts to criticizing the spirit of American Architecture. Louis Kahn is an American Icon, and I respect that. Christopher Alexander and I were talking about famous modernist architects, and Louis Kahn's name came up. Christopher said: "I cannot bring it in my heart to criticize the guy, since he always went out of his way to be nice to me when I was a young man. He really liked me, and amazingly,... posted by Michael at December 16, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Monday, December 15, 2003


Guest Posting -- Turbokitty
Dear Friedrich -- Turbokitty, who 2Blowhards visitors know as the writer of a variety of kick-ass contributions to our Comments section, is my favorite rambunctious art chick. The Wife and I enjoy downtown evenings out on doubledates with Turbokitty (real name: Michelle Vaughan) and her alpha blogger b.f. Felix Salmon, whose own website is here. Anyway, Michelle was rapping the other day about this and that, and she got me fascinated; she was talking about how she'd recently started seeing and perceiving things in new ways. I asked if she could get it down in writing, and she soon came back with this piece. I think it's loads of visual-people fun -- as well as, shhhh, sweet and touching. Enjoy. The images are thumbnails, so be sure to click on them. TurboKitty Turns a Corner It happened in my living room about a month ago. I was listening to  Ween, a group  I've liked for years and years because they were such hysterical and  quirky college musicians who smoked fierce amounts of pot. But on  their brand new CD, "Quebec", the music is ... so grown up. "Ohmigod,"  I thought. "What the hell happened?"  The music was still playful and twisted, but through the entire album  something resonated -- Gene and Dean Ween had loved and lost (*sigh*). It was serious stuff, although it wasn't as if they'd entirely given  up their psychedelic smartass style. But also in there was more ambiguous music. Whoa dude, were they getting deep on me? So I listened to the CD over and over. I went through all the lyrics (yes, at age 32, there I was deconstructing potheads). I wanted to know what was going on, and I finally realized that they've moved into another dimension of communication, with irony worn like old shoes, not forgotten but with new places to go. It occurs to me that perhaps we've moved into the post-post modern world. Sometimes I feel like I've fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in a world of déjà vu. Even Ween's growing up -- like I say: Omigod. Now, they're older than I am, around 35 or 38. And maybe one of them got a divorce, and maybe one of them kicked speed. And it can be depressing to come off speed. Still, I've grown up with Ween, so this change affected me, and I didn't expect that. It made me feel sad, like when I used to feel sad for Charlie Brown in the Peanuts strip when nothing went his way. What was going on? I became an art chick back during the eighties. I was a kid living by the beach in California and I was bored out of my skull. I knew I was going to be an artist from when I was five. My grandfather was a cubist painter, and I loved to draw ever since I was a little kid, and I was lucky enough to have parents who promoted my interest in it;... posted by Michael at December 15, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Saturday, December 13, 2003


The Man or His Times?
Michael: Do you ever wonder if we culture vultures put too much emphasis on the individual artist, and not the—for want of a better term—trend? I would never hold myself out as anything other than a classical music ignoramus, but as I drive around listening to my local station, I have noticed that I like 18th century music far better than 19th century music or 20th century music. Obviously, there are individual exceptions, but they remain just that: by and large, I know that I will enjoy just about anything written in the 18th century, and especially in its last third. Thinking about this in other arts, I would say that in painting there are whole eras that I particularly like and other whole eras that I have to work harder to enjoy. I will happily take a good long look at anything 15th century, for example, and anything produced in the first half of the 17th century (probably the apogee of Old Master talent: Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt and Velasquez, among others, were all at work.) Whereas I find late 17th century and early 18th century painting to be of less interest. Granted that there were glorious exceptions, but to me the mighty river of art seemed a bit damned up during that era. (I’ll pass over 18th century sculpture in silence.) I find the same true even in pop culture. In my movie-buff days I remember working my way through the films of the 1950s and early 1960s and wondering what was responsible for the general collapse of quality. It was as if Hollywood—by and large—just forgot how to make movies somewhere in the early 1950s, or else it suffered a massive loss of self-confidence in the ‘tried and true’ bag of tricks it had developed. There are good films from this era, but the average movie is simply not as entertaining as, say, the average 1930s movie. And in pop music of the postwar era, I remain a man of the 1950s. I’ll listen to almost anything from that decade; I have to pick and choose in all other eras to be happy. Anyway, these are my choices, I’m sure they’re not yours or anyone else’s. What I’m getting at is that the habits, tastes and formal strategies of an era may have a lot more to do with how much one enjoys a work of art than we generally allow for when worshipping at the altar of genius. I remember reading somewhere a quote that ran roughly as follows: “What mysterious quality of Mozart raises every note of his music so far above the hackwork of his contemporaries?” I thought about that for a while and thought, ‘Maybe there is no mysterious X-factor. Maybe half or two thirds of Mozart was the simply the era, and can be enjoyed quite nicely in the hackwork of his contemporaries, thank you very much. Maybe another third of Mozart was superior ability to execute the common vision of the... posted by Friedrich at December 13, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, December 11, 2003


"My Architect" and Louis Kahn
Dear Friedrich -- A few discussions back, Annette asked an important question that I for one would like to see finally well-answered: if modernism is such a horror, and if its assumptions, methods and results run so counter to what people naturally prefer, why has it had such a good run? [Note to the curious and the quarrelsome: I know I know I know that "modernism" in the official playbook indicates an art movement that came to an end circa 1975ish, thence to be succeeded by po-mo, decon and other movements. I don't use the word that way. As far as I'm concerned, po-mo and decon etc are extensions of -- and not refutations of or alternatives to -- official "modernism"; they're the same beast, even if dressed in different clothes. That's a minority opinion, I know, but I think it's a defensible one. Some other posting, in any case.] I found myself scratching my head a lot over Annette's question the other night when I visited the Film Forum and watched the acclaimed documentary My Architect. Have you heard about the film? It was made by Nathaniel Kahn, the illegitimate son of the modernist architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974). Narratively, it's about Nathaniel's attempt to find out what his dad, who he didn't know well while he was alive, was like and to perhaps come to terms with the old man too. As an example of the art of documentary filmmaking, "My Architect" is mainly a triumph of persistence and intelligence. And if I roll my eyes when presented with the theme of "coming to terms with the monster parent," who cares? The audience seemed moved by the film, and gave it a round of applause. The film interested me mainly as a portrait of Louis Kahn, who was quite a character, talented-modernist-egomaniac division. (Once again I count my lucky stars that my own dad was a modest man and a sweetheart.) Kahn was a charismatic guy, despite being small and unattractive. His demise wasn't the stuff of a John Ford movie either; despite his reputation, Kahn -- who was found dead in the men's room of Penn Station -- died deeply in debt. Did you ever wrestle with Kahn's work? He's known as one of American modernism's almost-lost opportunities. He never got to build many buildings -- certainly nothing like as many as the competition (Johnson, Pei, etc). But it's generally agreed that some of the buildings he did build -- the best-known include the Exeter library, the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and the National Assembly Building in Dacca, Bangladesh -- are among modernism's great achievements. Kahn arrived in this country from Estonia when he was five and is generally thought to have hit his artistic stride around the age of 50. The quick version of what was wonderful about his work is that he put soul, texture and mysticism into modernism. It's also said that he created modernist buildings that have the qualities... posted by Michael at December 11, 2003 | perma-link | (18) comments




Advice to Artsies
Dear Friedrich -- I vote that we pass a constitutional amendment requiring that Alex Tabarrok's "advice to a liberal arts major" (here) be read out loud -- slowly and clearly -- to all lib-arts and fine-arts undergrads at the beginning of every school year. Hmmm: maybe to all arts classes of any kind and any size, occurring anywhere in the world. Oh heck -- let's just insist that arty kids commit the posting to memory. I take minor issue with Alex on one point. He suggests this: "Look for work that draws upon your artistic skills. A writer can be an editor, a poet can write great ad-copy, a photographer can photograph weddings (do not sneer it's a privilege to be trusted with recording one of the most important events of a person's life.)" I've seen many people wind up unhappy from trying to do exactly this. Not because it's an impossible goal -- it isn't -- but because achieving it leaves many people in miserable states: half-fulfilled artistically (at best), paid lousily, and (what's most important) out of love with the artform they originally cared about and around which they shaped their lives. The joy too often goes out of an activity when you start trading it for money. And frustrated, not-rich, and brokenhearted does not make for a rewarding life. So I'd make a slightly different suggestion: develop some sensible and marketable skill or craft for which you're well suited but that has nothing to do with the art you love. That way you'll be able to pay your bills doing something bearable, and you'll also be able to pursue your art passions in an unspoiled way. Otherwise Alex's advice strikes me as spot-on. How do you react to his posting? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 11, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, December 4, 2003


Design
Dear Friedrich -- A confession of ignorance and bewilderment: Are you as puzzled by the existence of this thing called "Design" as I am? And by "Design" I don't mean the fact that there's a guy or gal somewhere who's in charge of making the product look good. I mean "Design" in a kind of abstract sense. In a "Hey, let's go to the museum store and buy some Design!" sense. When you buy Design, you aren't buying a functional something that has some aesthetic appeal. No, you're buying aesthetics, with some vestigial function attached. Usually, of course, what winds up getting purchased is a carrot-peeler with a big, sleek translucent handle; or a big, sleek, translucent wall clock that's hard to read; or an umbrella decorated in big, sleek, color-theory 101 colors. You'll never actually use any of them. "Design," in other words, seems to mean -- 90% of the time, anyway -- the kind of genteel, cautious modernism that's what's typically featured in the Home or Living sections of many newspapers. So, can we conclude that "Design" is another arm of the Great Modernist Conspiracy to Shove a Lot of Awful Stuff Down Everyone's Throats? (And after all these years of being excessively polite to modernism, I've decided that I'm happy viewing modernism as a conspiracy if you are.) If so, I want to know more about it. When and where did this "Design" thing start? Who can we complain to about it? How has it managed to survive at all? And what can be done to hasten its demise? Here's the website for -- shudder! -- the Museum of Modern Art's Design Store, where many sleek, translucent, almost-functional things can be bought. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 4, 2003 | perma-link | (20) comments




Richard Gregory
Dear Friedrich -- I've been plotting out a lengthy appreciation of the British neuroscientist and philosopher (as I guess he ought to be called) Richard Gregory for 'way too long now. Time to let those plans go and just pass along information instead. So: I think Gregory is a wonderful figure. His specialty has been visual perception, and "how does it occur" has been the main question he's addressed. His interests have led him to spend a lot of time working with and thinking about optical illusions, which he presents as opportunities to sneak in there and have a look around. Hmm, that sentence may not have been very helpful. Another try: in Gregory's view, optical illusions present wonderful opportunities to investigate vision and perception. Why? Because our vision-perception systems break down when presented with a successful optical illusion. And when bewilderment occurs, perhaps you can crawl inside the stalled system and have yourself a look around. Gregory has come back with many fascinating ideas, observations and hunches about how our brains put together our image of the world. Of his books, "Eye and Brain" (buyable here) is the best (short, accessible) introduction to his thought; in "Mirrors in Mind" (buyable here), he muses enlighteningly on our fascination with mirrors. Although he doesn't generally use storytelling as a vehicle for thinking and reflection in the way that Oliver Sacks does, I find that his writing excites my imagination in a similar way. I suspect that anyone who's enjoyed the thinkers we've advocated on this blog (Ramachandran, Salingaros, Dissanayake, Oakeshott, Pinker, Krier, Frederick Turner, Alexander, Polanyi, etc) -- our alternatives to the played-out usual art-world suspects -- would enjoy Gregory a lot. Come of think of it, I'm pretty sure that Gregory was Ramachandran's teacher. Richard Gregory's website is here. There's an oddball but fun site devoted to him and to some of his optical illusions here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 4, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, December 2, 2003


Guest Posting: Maureen on Blindness and Beauty
Dear Friedrich -- I was having a good time swapping emails about ballet and beauty with Maureen, an occasional 2Blowhards visitor, when the conversation went off on a fascinating tangent. I expressed interest; Maureen filled in some blanks; and pretty soon this fascinating story had come together. After a little coaxing, Maureen -- who works for a Northeastern university and publishes books about blindness, the aging process, and rehabilitation -- gave me permission to run her account here. For most of my life, I've worked with people who are blind. Throughout my academic life, I've written countless words that seek to unlock the scientific and human meanings of sight (or lack of). I'll continue to write, of course, but my interests have been shifting from the cold hard science of it all to the meaning of aesthetics and art to someone who has never seen. What is beauty, then? Is it possible to appreciate visual art without ever having seen? These are the thoughts that keep me up at night lately. Of course, there's a human basis to this interest as well. Mine happens to be my dear friend and interpreter Jacek. In 1996, I made my first journey to Poland in order to help construct the first post-graduate university program in the rehabilitation of the blind in post-Communist Central Europe. Little did I know that it would become my abiding obsession and vocation. Jacek was assigned to me as my personal interpreter. He spoke fluent English, was intensely curious about America and Americans, and happened to be totally blind -- but with a twist. He was not only blind, but he had no eyes. As an infant, he had contracted a rare form of ocular cancer, and as a consequence, his eyes were enucleated (removed). Yet -- in Communist Poland! -- this man managed to earn a post-master's degree and start his own interpreting business. He was also a well-known jazz keyboard player. I loved Jacek instantly, which was fortunate since I spent almost every waking moment of my visit, as well as every subsequent one I’ve made since, with him. Traveling with him was always interesting. We had to juggle his portable keyboard and his long white cane in addition to our computers and backpacks. Sometimes a friend would provide a ride. But it was always in one of the tiny Polski Fiats that you see in Kieslowski films. No matter: traveling was always a Marx Brothers “Night at the Opera” affair. One of the things that I liked best about our friendship was that it seemed to transcend the superficial. At least, or so it seemed at first, we were free from the appearance game. Aha! Not quite. I soon began to learn that this accomplished man also had a serious eye, so to speak, for beauty -- female pulchritude, to be exact. I learned that Jacek had been making numerous inquiries about my appearance. He wanted to know every detail about me, although he already knew... posted by Michael at December 2, 2003 | perma-link | (23) comments





Saturday, November 29, 2003


Guest Posting -- "J" on Modeling for Artists
John Leavitt, our "True Art School Tales" correspondent, is on vacation. During this hiatus, we're pleased to run a guest posting by a conpirator and friend of John's, "J," a student and artist in her own right. J's site, where you can enjoy some of her art, is here. The cartoons accompanying J's piece are by John, whose site is here. *** Confessions of a Naked Model, by "J" The woman is a beauty -- red haired, voluptuous, and naked. Pity she's a hundred years old. One hundred and seventeen to be precise. Edgar Degas painted "Bather Stretched out on the Floor" in 1886, and for all the years since her creation, she's lost none of her charm. When I visit her in the Met's Impressionist room, I like to listen to the comments my companions make. Fellow art students go mad over the crayon strokes, while my father's academic friends use words like "objectification" and "male gaze." I think about the crick in her back. I am a naked model, one of those generous women who fold, twist and contort their bodies to serve as the raw material for Art. And if I never had to take a pose as torturous as Degas's bather, credit not my employers' kindness but their lack of imagination. Like most decisions made in art school, my choice to become a nude model was fuelled by caffeine, poverty and bullshit. Though college is the high point in an artist's economic life (when your parents still support you), a Chinese food spree had sapped my bank account into the single digits. My friend L. had just bought me a coffee he promised would be my last, and we were bemoaning the lack of jobs for illustrators. "You have another option" he told me, flipping the brim of his fedora. "Whoring and petty crime?" "Sort of." In art school, stripping naked for cash doesn't raise the eyebrows it might in the Brigham Young College of Theology. In life drawing, students are in constant proximity to bare bodies of both sexes -- though these are often lumpy, ill-proportioned, and with curves in all the wrong places. Most are pathetic. Eighty-year-old Polly comes to mind. With breasts down to her belly and a habit of falling asleep -- Polly convinced me that I could be a model. Wasn't I better than her? A few days perusal of Craigslist yielded a lead: "Human statues, we need you! Come to Maison DuPont's Danse of Decadence. $20, tips and all the absinthe you can drink." I rang the loft buzzer in high hopes. Madame DuPont opened the door -- but instead of the darkly beautiful dominatrix of my imaginings, she was an aloof, middle-aged women whose ass-less corset fit her like a winch. My stomach rumbled in dread. Despite thinking myself a Sexually Liberated Woman, I was convinced that the world would crumble when my skirt hit the floor. "Your spot's on the couch!" The world remained intact as I stripped... posted by Michael at November 29, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, November 20, 2003


Greats I Don't Get
Dear Friedrich -- Aaron Haspel's good posting here about Henry James and the movies (a response to some postings over at About Last Night, here and here) reminded me that, years ago, when I still had a little zip and fire, I looked into starting up a magazine of my own. I was pretty serious about the project and ditched the idea only when I learned what a horror it is to get a small magazine decently distributed. But before crapping out, I'd thought the magazine through pretty thoroughly. One of my favorite ideas for it was also one of my smallest ideas. It was to feature in every issue a medium-sized boxed talk with someone prominent and/or interesting about great art he doesn't get -- kind of a reverse Desert Island Discs thing. A talk with Daniel Dennett about his inability to respond to Mozart and Kleist, for instance -- an entirely made-up example, by the way. I was fond of the concept mainly for being mischievous and rowdy; there's little I like better than blowing stale air away from the arts. But there was a semi-serious idea at the core too, which was to convey the point that it's OK not to get some great art. This is art, after all, not science or history, and doin' the art thing is as much about exploring your own responses as it is about exploring the world. I had a few subpoints in mind too: 1) You don't have to love everything you're told is great, 2) You don't have to claim greatness for everything you love, and 3) You don't have to dispute the greatness of the works and artists you dislike. Explore a lot of great art, give yourself the experience of it, have whatever response you have to it -- and then let it all go. What does it matter, really, whether you agree with the so-called experts? (I can get vexed when I see people try-try-trying, oh so very hard, to "appreciate" a work in exactly the way they've been told to. Why do they strain with such determination to have a particular great experience? Why not have the experience they're having instead, whatever it is?) It matters only that you give the work a try and take note of what the experience was like for you. But don't be such a self-pleasing fool that you avoid what's been deemed to be great. That's crazy too. Hey, it's cool and fun to challenge yourself. Anyway, the rules of this game: You aren't disputing the greatness of the artist or the artwork. You can see the point of the work or the artist, and you understand what's there to be gotten. You understand the greatness of it too -- the range of its influence, what other artists have taken from it, etc. It's impressive, and you're impressed. And you've given the work or the artist a decent and earnest try. But you've found that when you look... posted by Michael at November 20, 2003 | perma-link | (107) comments





Tuesday, November 18, 2003


True Art School Tales
A new installment in John Leavitt's ongoing True Art School Tales, his irregular, illustrated diary about life as an art-school student. John's currently studying at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology. His own website -- where he shows off his witty and elegant art, as well as his prowess as a designer and cartoonist -- is here. *** True Art School Tales A Taxonomy of Art School Professors The Feeler: Wants you to dig deep into the core of your being to express your personal uniqueness. Thinks teaching interferes with the flow of personal expression. Paints lots of flowers. Other Job: Housewife/kindergarten teacher. Quote: "Your colors really bring out the Youness of you." The Prickasso: Smells like Scotch. Calls the girls "baby." Tells you to "Murder the canvas! Paint with yer dick and blood." Paints lots of women in questionable poses wearing leather boots. Other Job: Long-lost gallery painter. Quote: "When that whore of a model comes back, I'll show you how to do an undercoating, you bastards." The Ghost and the Dozer: Different yet oddly similar. The Dozer gives an assignment then drifts off. The Ghost takes roll, goes for coffee, and never comes back. Both have tenure. Other Jobs: None. Quote: "Zzzzzz." The Cause-Head: Made career in political art and doesn't want you to forget it. Assigns lots of work on The People's Plight and The Struggle. Has lots of buttons. Other Job: Flag-waver. Quote: "Now let's try something on the Pain of Oppressed Women Everywhere." The Visiting Teacher: From another school or foreign land. Has high standards, and doesn't know why you can't meet them. Wonders aloud why you're so lazy. Wishes he could hit students. Other Job: Professional Painter. Quote: "You think art is hard? Try working in coal mine." The Working Professional: Makes a living in the field, wants to teach you how. Assigns mock projects, practical lessons, and passesa long lots of tricks. Knows actual art directors. Other Job: Illustrator. Quote: "Correctional fluid is your friend!" The Human Manifesto: The Gods of art have given her a Theory that explains all art and how to make it, yet somehow it always involves finger-painting. Wants you to follow the Glorious, Shining Path, or else. Other Job: NEA grants-board member. Quote: "Art is pain!" -- by John Leavitt... posted by Michael at November 18, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, November 14, 2003


The Business of Art: Stan Lee and Marvel Comics
Michael: Thanks for shipping me Jordan Raphael’s and Tom Spurgeon’s bio of the comic book legend, “Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book.” As a long time fan of Marvel comics from the 1960s it was quite intriguing to get an inside look “behind the curtain,” so to speak. The comics industry offers many, many analogies to the industry I work in, so I was irresistibly drawn to the business aspect of Stan Lee’s story. Anyway, it’s not as if you can avoid it. In pop culture, more than half the action is always on the business side—a rule that the comic industry illustrates nicely. According to Raphael and Spurgeon, the comic book industry was actually—and tellingly—dreamed up by two employees of a printing company, who licensed old Sunday color comics from newspapers and put them into a comic-book format. Although the original business model was to have these “funny books” underwritten by corporate sponsors as giveaways, in 1934 they took a chance and printed up some for sale at newsstands. When the trial issue of 35,000 copies quickly sold out, a new industry was born. A year later the firm of Wheeler-Nicholson produced the first comic book featuring original material. (Wheeler-Nicholson soon evolved into DC Comics.) Intriguingly, Max C. Gaines, one of the printing company employees who invented the “comic book,” also served as mid-wife on the industry’s breakthrough project. He put two young creative types who were shopping around an idea for a new type of book in touch with the editor of DC comics. The result, of course, was first Action Comics and then Superman, which had sales of a million copies a month within a few years. Naturally, the Superman phenomenon created a gold rush atmosphere, and many entrepreneurs promptly entered the market. By 1941, there were 168 comic book titles jostling for space on the newsstands of America. One of these market entrants was a pulp magazine publisher, Martin Goodman. It seems fair to characterize his interest in comics as purely financial; he was an acute observer of industry trends and was a big believer in jumping on any apparently profitable bandwagons—and abandoning any areas that cooled off, no looking back. He was strictly a numbers man, a trend spotter, and had no interest in any aspect of comic book content, although he did possess a fanatical interest in comic book covers, since they were his sole and only marketing medium. Being a big believer in nepotism, Martin Goodman was willing to hire an unemployed 17-year-old relative of his wife, Stanley Martin Lieber, soon to be known as Stan Lee. The boy was originally intended to be a gofer for his editor, Joe Simon, and his art director, Jack Kirby. Since these two were also the creators of his new hit comic, Captain America, which was moving to monthly status, they needed help with routine matters. However, when Simon and Kirby discovered that the firm’s accountant (tellingly, Goodman’s brother) was... posted by Friedrich at November 14, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Wednesday, November 12, 2003


Cave Paintings: Art and Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic
Michael: Are you fascinated by the cave paintings of Western Europe? As someone whose own tastes run towards animal art, I must admit I have always loved this stuff. But I always just looked at the pictures, so to speak, without giving much thought to the whys and wherefores of this art. Dig That Draftsmanship: Mammoth from Rouffignac This may have been the course of wisdom, because as soon as you turn to the whole question of the meaning and purpose of cave paintings, the questions start piling up faster than the answers. To give only a few examples: · Why did Upper Palaeolithic people start making images at all, and, once having started, continue to do so for tens of thousands of years? · Why does cave art primarily depict animals? Why are pictures of people—and plants—so rare? Why does cave art over a very long period of time depict such a narrow range of species, primarily bison, horses, aurochs, woolly mammoths, deer and big cats? · What were upper Palaeolithic people doing drawing, painting and sculpting images in caves at all? What was the deal with caves, anyway? · We tend to assume that “art” is meant to be looked at. Why did Upper Palaeolithic people bother to make images in extremely inaccessible portions of caves where the possibility of a significant “audience” was essentially nil —like at the end of passages reachable only by extensive crawling on your belly through mud while trying to keep your tiny animal-fat lamp lit? · What is the meaning of the multiplicity of geometric forms such as grids, dots and chevrons that appear in conjunction with many cave images? As I understand it, after a century of explanations—including art for art’s sake, totemism, hunting magic, Marxist class struggle (I kid you not), Structuralism, etc.—so little agreement has been reached about the answers to these questions that most archaeologists have sworn off even trying to develop theories and are sticking to a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Well, I picked up a book recently by David Lewis-Williams, “The Mind in the Cave” that bravely attempts to answer these and other questions. (Lewis-Williams, who is Professor Emeritus at the Rock Art Research Institute of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is obviously made of sterner stuff than your average archaeologist, or else, being retired, he no longer cares what anyone thinks.) While I am in no way qualified to assess his arguments based on the “evidence”—I’ve never visited one such cave, let alone all of them, as he appears to have—I must say his explanation seems somewhat reasonable to me. Perhaps more to the point, his theory got me thinking about relationships that may be true for all art, including that made today, as well as for the cave paintings at Lascaux. Professor Lewis-Williams’ thesis, if I understand it correctly, is that Upper Palaeolithic art-making has strong analogies to the shamanistic religious practices of the modern-day hunter-gatherer societies. He is painfully aware that... posted by Friedrich at November 12, 2003 | perma-link | (29) comments





Tuesday, October 28, 2003


True Art School Tales
A new installment in John Leavitt's ongoing True Art School Tales, his irregular, illustrated diary about life as an art-school student. John's currently studying at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology. His own website -- where he shows off his witty and elegant art, as well as his prowess as a designer and cartoonist -- is here. *** True Art School Tales October: the middle of term, the time of year when a young man's thoughts turn to dropping out of school and becoming a wandering minstrel painter, perhaps. *** Instead, I'm walking though the fluorescent-lit halls of the Graphic Design Department when something catches my eye. It's a poster -- the final project by some typography student. It consists of lots of angry lines and mix-'n'-match text. But the angry lines are slicing and dicing the type into ribbons. It's a nightmare; the eye boggles, as, of course, it's meant to. What next? Magic Eye ads? I harumph and write it off to the notorious insularity of the Graphic Design Department. I move along, thinking, as I often do, that the graphics students really ought to spend some time with illustrators as well as with actual advertisers. Perhaps that way they'd learn how to really design, and perhaps they'd also have some sense knocked into them; they might learn not to force the audience to decode their work. *** Then I see it -- the ugliest poster I have ever seen. Uglier by far than the one that had just brought me up short. This one consists of a series of black lines over white, with black text stuck tightly in between the lines. All the text runs together, the tops and bottoms are cut off by the black lines. It hurts my eyes to look at it. There's no other way to put it. The text is illegible, whether from up close or from a distance. The tension between the letters and the background is tangible and makes the design painful to look at. This is a poster conveying information about an event, and yet that information is impossible to read. It's meant to attract your attention, yet it makes you want to look away. This poster fails in every way, as concept and execution. Yet it somehow it made it though the classroom process. *** Something is rotten in the state of graphic design. It wasn't always like this. While my tastes run toward the 19th Century, I also have a fondness for American design before 1970. It's all so bright and cheerful, so clean and crisp. The type is easy to read and the illustrations are well-incorporated. These designs pack a lot of information into a small page without feeling cluttered or hectic. (My favorite example is a matchbook at Lilek's site here.) But my personal favorite designs? Art Nouveau posters. The solid forms, the large swathes of black and white ... They're intricate and beautiful, as well as readable, clear, and accessible. The sins of Art... posted by Michael at October 28, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments





Thursday, October 23, 2003


Quotes of the Day
Dear Friedrich -- I'm reading a wonderful paper by N.K. Humphrey entitled "The Illusion of Beauty," and thought I'd pass along a couple of lovely passages. The first is a quote Humphrey cites from the British philosopher A.N. Whitehead: The essence of rhythm is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern, while the parts exhibit the contrast arising from the novelty of their detail. A mere recurrence kills rhythm as does a mere confusion of differences. A crystal lacks rhythm from excessive pattern, while a fog is unrhythmic in that it exhibits a patternless confusion of detail. And a passage from Humphrey himself: If I give a hungry dog a solution of saccahrine it will lap it up; if I show a cock robin a bundle of feathers with a red patch on its underside the robin will attack it; and if I show a man an abstract painting or play him a piece of music he will, if he thinks it beautiful, stop to watch or listen. There is, I believe, a formal similarity in all these cases. In each we have an animal performing a useful and relevant piece of behaviour towards an inappropriate sensory stiumulus. But there is, I agree, a rather basic difference, namely that in the first two cases we have a good scientific explanation of what is going on, while in the third we're almost ignorant. I notice that Humphrey has worked with both Richard Dawkins and Dian Fossey -- beat that. A number of his papers, which I'm just beginning to read through, can be seen here. The next one I'm going to dig into: "Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind." Bliss. To think of the time and energy American lib-arts departments have wasted on their love-affair with politics and deconstruction when there are minds like Humphrey's out there to be enjoyed. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 23, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, October 21, 2003


Milton Grenfell on Traditional Architecture
Dear Friedrich -- Laurence Aurbach, an editor at The Town Paper (here), left a comment on the previous posting that I can't resist making into its own posting. He was responding to my link to an article about the Charlotte, N.C. New Classicist architect Milton Grenfell. Here's Laurence's note: Michael -- Milton Grenfell wrote a fine essay on style for a publication I helped to produce, "Council Report III/IV." Here is an excerpt: Remarks on Style I would contend that the style of architecture marked by its radical rejection of all historical styles, namely Modernism, is a style inadequate to the task of creating "comfortable and interesting" places because it is deficient in three aspects which are crucial to such places, namely: 1) intelligibility, 2) complexity within order, 3) connectivity. First intelligibility. There are three ways abandoned by modernism that architecture has traditionally made itself intelligible: typology, ornament and tectonics. Typology transmits information through association that convention has assigned to forms. Traditional typologies tell us what is a house of worship, what is a bank, what is a school, what is a house, and where the front door is. Typologically, shed roofs are for rabbit hutches, outhouses and other such modest outbuildings. Quonset huts are for temporary military encampments. Ornament as a means of making buildings intelligible has, until the modernist movement, been inseparable from architecture. The totemic devices painted and carved into the wooden posts of even the most primitive shelter proclaimed the owner’s lineage or his powers in battle or the hunt. Before typology or tectonics, when we lived in mere holes in the earth, mankind adorned the walls of his caves with pictures that still delight us. Indeed, delight, that third prong of Vitruvius’ timeless Triad — Commodity, Firmness and Delight — is inseparable from ornament. Since we ornament where we live, where we are buried, and even our own bodies, man might well be described as the "ornamenting animal." Such behavior is peculiarly and inextricable human. Finally, that term beloved of architects, tectonics, which might be defined as a building’s expression of the craft of building. This expression often operates on the level of actuality and metaphor. For example, a cornice projection actually shelters a building’s fabric and occupants from sun and rain, but also creates a metaphor for shelter. Whereas the swelling, or entasis, of a column shaft is purely a metaphorical representation of the column’s load bearing. Nevertheless, such metaphors speak of truths about building that transcend mere fact. --from "Remarks on Style" by Milton Grenfell I can't post Grenfell's entire essay, but here are links to other essays that appeared in the same publication: "A Conversation with Dan Solomon and Andrés Duany," here. "Learning from Traditional Mediterranean Codes" by Besim S. Hakim, here. Best, Laurence Many thanks to Laurence Aurbach, and I do urge everyone to visit The Town Paper (here) -- lots of sensible, intelligent talk about buildings, neighborhoods and towns. Me, I'm scooting over to read the Solomon-Duany and Hakim papers... posted by Michael at October 21, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Wednesday, October 15, 2003


Tom Wolfe and Transparent Buildings
Friedrich -- That brilliant troublemaker Tom Wolfe has written a couple of op-ed pieces for the NYTimes about 2 Columbus Circle, here and here. Felix Salmon comments here, and David Sucher comments here. Though the general question is whether the crumbling, quasi-Moorish Edward Durrel Stone building is any good (Wolfe gives it an it's-so-wonderfully-goofy thumbs-up; I give it a thumbs-down), another question gets raised too, which is: Why do so many new buildings these days look all twinkly and refract-y, like avant-garde perfume bottles? It ain't just fashion, although that's certainly a big part of the explanation. There's also a rationale, a lot of which boils down to: solid-seeming buildings equal authority equals bad, while structures that dissolve into mist equal anti-authoritarianism equals good. I kid you not. My own take is that they're virtual buildings -- databases given a few kinky twists in order to make architectural statements. In other words, fashion, ideology and corporate convenience are triumphing at the expense of demonstrated human and user preference. Sigh. I've got a cold today and no appetite whatsoever for polemics over architecture, so will confine myself to pointing out a good article in Spiked Online by Ciaran Guilfoyle, here, which explains transparent-building fetishism; and an interview with Lynne Munson, here, during the course of which she explains why modern art museums look the way they do. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 15, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Saturday, October 11, 2003


Goltzius and Authorship
Friedrich -- Your posting here about authorship and the Bible got me thinking about authorship and other kinds of works too. As you know, there's little that peeves me as much as the determined hero-worshipping that seems so strong a part of the modernist/romantic ethos -- all that titanic-genius, lone-creator crap. (Responsible-adult break: of course there's a range here, with some artists working more on their own and some less. Nod, nod. Genuflect, genuflect. Now back to our previously-scheduled rant.) A little reality, please. We all depend on inherited forms and techniques, as well as on the work of others; we all need a culture within which to operate; we all count on and learn from friends, family, spouses, teachers, audiences, partners, associates, etc. Nobody comes up with everything. Still, lots of people cling to the idea of the loner-hero artist. I find this bizarre, although I suppose I should find it interesting instead; romantic and modernist ideas seem have a kind of cobra-like, hypnotic power. Even so, you'd think that by now people would be comfortable with the idea that not all artworks are the product of a single individual. An extreme example: the temples at Angkor Wat, built by thousands of hands over many centuries. Here's a more familiar example: the movies. There they are, the products of cultures, companies, teams and individuals -- yet still many people want to assign them to one name. In fact, one of the reasons it took the self-serious set so long to accept movies as an artform was because of the question, Well, if they're art, who's the artist? But it's this kind of messiness that often gives artforms like the movies their strength. To pick a classy example: "The Letter." To an acting fan, it's one of Bette Davis' strongest vehicles. To a literature fan, it's a solid adaptation of Somerset Maugham. To an auteurist film buff, it's one of the director William Wyler's best movies. Down-and-dirty, nuts-and-bolts types might want to remind us that without the producers, Hal Wallis and Jack Warner, "The Letter" never woulda happened. And surely there are a few people for whom the movie is really a Max Steiner thing, or a Herbert Marshall picture ... Who's the real creator of "The Letter"? It's a hard question to answer if we're allowed to volunteer only one name -- yet there the movie is. It got made, it exists, and it's there to be experienced and enjoyed. Why argue with that? I once asked a film critic, "So why do we film nuts call 'The Letter' a William Wyler film?" She gave a shrug and said, "It's a convenience." Look further into the facts than your college art-history course took you, and you discover that these kinds of complications crop up regularly, even in the domain of what's thought of as the more solitary arts -- the painting-type visual arts, say. The Wife and I recently spent a happy hour at the Metropolitan Museum going through... posted by Michael at October 11, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments




Quote of the Day
Friedrich -- It is easy to lose ourselves in efficiency, to treat that efficiency as an end in itself and not as a means to other ends. -- Management theorist Charles Handy (an interview with whom can be read here.) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, October 3, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: A week or so ago I was trying to get comfortable with the influences on Canada’s Group of Seven painters, so I spent some time looking at Post-Impressionist art on the web. I came across this little number by Toulouse-Lautrec which I hadn’t previously seen. H. Toulouse-Lautrec, The Kiss, 1892 How's that for fin-de-siecle decadence? Or, if that doesn't get your motor running, how's that for quietly terrific draftsmanship? Enjoy, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 3, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Saturday, September 27, 2003


1000 Words: David Milne
Michael Blowhard writes: Friedrich -- Your megafab posting on the Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven (here) reminded me of one of my favorite visual artists, the Canadian David Milne. Have you run into much of his work? He seems to be barely known in the States. Some of my artbuff friends haven't heard of him, and I know of him only because I saw some of his work at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. I gather that in Canada he's seen as a national treasure, though even so he doesn't seem to be celebrated as proudly as, say, the Group of Seven or Emily Carr. But really, I don't know what Milne means to Canadian art fans. Perhaps a Canadian visitor can fill us in here? Milne lived from 1882 until 1953 and was friendly with the Group of Seven -- he was a big admirer of Tom Thomson's. Unlike them, though, he was always a go-it-alone artist, and he was drawn to oddball, quiet moods. He made plenty of oil paintings, especially early on. But he liked experimenting, and he was probably more comfortable with quicker, lighterweight, let-the-materials-do-the-talking, is-it-a-drawing-or-is-it-a-painting media -- drypoint, pen and ink, watercolor. His images are generally spare and evocative. They're tone poems, with nothing of the on-a-mission, lumberjacky quality that the Group's images sometimes had. Instead, they're caught-on-the-wing combinations of the fleeting and the sensual. They range from Bonnard-ish/Vuillard-ish interiors to icily delicate, calligraphic watercolor landscapes and townscapes. His work often has a modest, handmade, Arts-and-Craftsy out-of-it-ness -- a lucid, simple, and inquisitive attitude that shows no fear of the decorative. There was a modesty too in his use of modernist techniques and approaches. He was nothing if not an early-modernist, but he clearly saw modernism as an addition to the traditional art palette and not a replacement for it. I really love his images. To my mind, only the kinds of people who would let importance-rankings interfere with their pleasure and enjoyment -- and I'm sure there'd be no such person among visitors to 2Blowhards -- would ever think to dismiss Milne as a "minor artist." Yet, if you can accept the word "minor" not as a judgment but as a description (and I certainly can), a minor artist is exactly what he was. He was working in minor media, and in minor modes and minor keys. But he was wonderful -- a "minor artist" in the same way that, say, Isherwood was a "minor writer." A little bio: Milne was born in Ontario, and as a kid took some art correspondence courses. He moved as a young man to New York, where he supported himself making cards and window displays while studying at the Art Students League. Overseas during WWI, he never saw action but made a lot of images of postwar Europe; he received some English acclaim for this work. He lived in the woods in New York state and Massachusetts for a few years before moving back to... posted by Michael at September 27, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, September 26, 2003


Another Oakeshott Quote
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Oh, am I in a quoting mood this evening. Here's a passage I love from Michael Oakeshott's The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. Oakeshott uses the image of a conversation to suggest what participation in a field is -- what a field may indeed be. Art, for example. In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no "truth" to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument ... In conversation ... thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other's movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another. Have I mentioned recently how enjoyable and rewarding the conversation that we've found in the blogosphere is? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 26, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Rybczynski on What's Architecture
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Just to mess with all our minds for a few seconds, I want to pass along this passage from "The Most Beautiful House in the World," Witold Rybczynski's terrific small book about building his own house. What's architecture? And who's an architect? It would be convenient if architecture could be defined as any building designed by an architect. But who is an architect? Although the Academie Royale d'Architecture in Paris was founded in 1671, formal architectural schooling did not appear until the nineteenth century. The famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts was founded in 1816; the first English language school, in London, in 1847; and the first North American university program, at MIT, was established in 1868. Despite the eixstence of professional schools, for a long time the relationship between schooling and practice remained ambiguous. Not one of the three best-known architects of the twentieth century -- Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier -- received a formal architectural education. The great Renaissance buildings, for example, were designed by a variety of non-architects: Brunelleschi was trained as a goldsmith, Michelangelo as a sculptor, Leonardo da Vinci as a painter, and Alberti as a lawyer; only Bramante, who was also a painter, had formally studied building. These men are termed architects because, among other things, they created architecture -- a tautology that explains nothing. It's a mess, and ain't that great. Rybczynski's book can be bought here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 26, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, September 25, 2003


Virtues of Localism: Group of Seven
Michael: As you hopefully remember, I wrote here about how misleading the notion has been that Modern Art has been a thoroughly international, de-contextualized exercise. To illustrate my contention, in another post (which you can read here) I showed how Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon” derived from the religious, social and even military realities of France in his day. Well, a genius such as Picasso can be seen as a sort of permanent exception to every rule, so I thought I’d illustrate the virtues of localism in art—especially in Modern Art—with a more everyday example: the Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven. Before I get to their paintings, however, I want to sketch in some of the political, economic and geographic background and how it impacted the evolution of Canadian art. Although Canada’s history goes back many centuries, its "national consciousness" is quite a recent phenomenon. Beginning only in 1867 (when the British glued together the previously separate colonies of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, & Nova Scotia and called them “the Dominion of Canada”), the new country expanded across the continent, signing on other British colonies as provinces. Manitoba, for example, came on board in 1870 and British Columbia in 1871, although thereafter the process slowed down; Alberta and Saskatchewan dragged their feet until 1905. During this first generation of nation-building, Canadian politics were an east-west matter but Canadian culture was oriented southward. This was, in part, a consequence of transportation: for much of the 19th century Canadians often found it easier to get to the U.S. than to other parts of Canada. As Dennis Reid remarks in his essay, “Impressionism in Canada,” during this era Canadians found it natural to express their national ambitions by borrowing the monumental landscape tradition developed by the American Hudson Valley School: …Canadian art was dominated by artists in the two principal cities of Montreal and Toronto who, following confederation some fifteen years before, had been systematically exploring the new national landscape. Their detailed, heroically scaled pictures, inspired by the work of recent British artists in the thrall of John Ruskin’s dictum of truth to nature and influenced as well by [American] luminist painters and Albert Bierstadt…embodied the optimistic expansionism of the age. L. O'Brien, Sunrise on the Saguenay, 1880 The Canadian Pacific Railway, finished—after a slow start—in 1886, finally provided a physical link for the new nation. The impact of the railroad on the Canadian art scene was intense: [The heroic landscape’s popularity peaked] in the years following the opening of the transcontinental railway in 1886—more than a third of the Art Association of Montreal’s annual spring exhibition of 1888 consisted of scenes of the newly accessible Rocky Mountains and West Coast… J. A. Fraser, The Sun's Last Kiss On The Crest of Mt. Stephen, British Columbia, 1886 The draw of America (economically and culturally) also rose to new heights in the 1880s as the Canadian economy fell into the doldrums. Large numbers of Canadians, particularly from English-speaking Ontario, migrated south... posted by Friedrich at September 25, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Friday, September 19, 2003


True Art School Tales
A new installment in John Leavitt's ongoing True Art School Tales, an irregular, illustrated diary about life as an art-school student. John's currently studying at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology. His own website -- where he shows off his witty and elegant art, as well as his prowess as a designer and cartoonist -- is here. If you click on the thumbnails of the drawings John has included in his diary, you'll get to enjoy most of them at a more sensible size. *** True Art School Tales Why am I at this art school? Well, the main reason is because I'm poor -- and, being a state institution, FIT costs almost nothing. After a disastrous first year, feeling discouraged by the quality of the education I was getting, I looked into other art schools. What my explorations taught me was that, despite its drawbacks, FIT is one of the better technically-oriented schools in the NYC area. I visited the student shows at Parsons, Pratt, Studio School, Cooper and SVA. Only SVA (which is outside my price range) and FIT had pieces that demonstrated that their students had been taught some skills. *** Why do I stay? Life-drawing classes. I'm one of those traditionalists who thinks that the essence of an arts education is draftsmanship. It teaches technique and artistry both. It requires keen observation, skill, and grace, and putting them all too work in a short time. Life-drawing artistry requires you to leave out things, to make choices. One of those things that are generally known is that drawing's the thing that attracts many people to art in the first place. How many kids say "I love watercolors!" Very few. How many say "I love to draw"? Quite a number. *** At FIT, I have always been able to find some life-drawing classes to work in. What I love about life drawing is the immediacy. I'm a fidgety person, so I'm terrible at the "patience" disciplines of oil-painting and sculpture. I also like the economy of means drawing requires. All I need is my pad and pencil, maybe a pen and some charcoal. Thus equipped, I am my own walking art studio, unencumbered and free. Drawings from life also turns out to be the one thing everyone asks to see when they want to evaluate your skill level. They're the one thing everything agrees should be required of an art school. *** One of the un-PC secrets of life drawing classes, and one that professors will barely acknowledge, is this: Students tend to make better drawings when they're drawing beautiful models. Pretty models are a pleasure to draw, a fact that sticks in the craw of The Politically-Minded teachers, the ones who insist on having us draw such themes as Despair, or The Immigrant's Plight, or The Struggle Of Woman. There really are such professors. I had one who kept assigning socially-redeeming work and couldn't understand why the students weren't eager to avail themselves of her offer to raise... posted by Michael at September 19, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, September 18, 2003


Sculpture and the Inner Child
Michael: My feelings about sculpture seem tied up with my inner child. The other day a little boy came over to our house with a pair of Hulk fists. (I don’t know what the official brand name is.) They are enormous foam-rubber fists, which are hollowed out inside so you can reach in and grab onto a handle embedded in the rubber. They also have a noise-making module in there, so you can slam the fists against things and get a “Hulk smash!” sound effect and a Hulk-like roar. The roar and the smashing noise were pretty entertaining, but I immediately fell in love with the fists as sculptures. I was just tickled by the way the Hulk fists show how a clenched hand turns from a sort of irregular two-dimensional shape into a series of semi-abstract masses defined by squared off planes. The Hulk fists also instantly reminded me of Michelangelo. Not that any of Old Mike’s sculpted figures have clenched fists (that I remember), but somehow the designer of the Hulk fists, by working on over-life-size scale, by giving the suggestion of great muscular power and by exaggerating the shapes into slightly abstracted masses has managed to work the same vein of ore as did the Tuscan Titan. I also think the exaggerated qualities of the Hulk fists and of Michelangelo's sculptures send my brain into a state of heightened perception that reminds me of early childhood; just being around Michelangelo's scuptures usually puts me into a kind of dreamstate. Michelangelo, Moses, 1515 If memory serves, you once compared the experience of looking at Michelangelo sculpture to being a small child looking (with awe) at the size and muscularity of adults. That line pretty well sums up the experience, for me at least, of playing with the Hulk fists. It also seems integral to the experience of looking at most sculpture I really love. Go figure. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 18, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, September 17, 2003


And The Nominees Are...
Michael: A week ago I asked you (and our readers) to nominate favorite female nudes, choosing among the products of HFOP (i.e., High-Falutin’ Oil Painting). I also promised to put up the suggested artworks. Well, here goes. They are listed, as best I can tell, in date order--which is my way of saying I don’t have date information for all of them. This presentation order just happens to put your nomination first. (As we know, Blowhards have their privileges.) Correggio, Jupiter and Io, 1531-2; Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 Rembrandt, Bathseba At Her Bath, 1654; J.A.D. Ingres, Valpincon Bather, 1808 E. Manet, Olympia, 1863; G. Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866 E. Degas, Woman Combing Her Hair, 1887-90; J. S. Sargent, Egyptian Girl (Study from Life), 1891 L. Corinth, Female Nude Lying Down, 1899; G. Klimt, Goldfische, 1901-2 G. Klimt, Danae, 1907-8; A. Zorn, Helga, 1917 A. Modigliani, Standing Nude Elvira, 1918; T. Lempicka, Andromede, 1929 L. Laserstein, Traute Washing, c. 1930; T. Wesselman, Great American Nude, #57, 1964 G. Richter, Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1966; Mahgameh Parvaneh, Untitled(?), 2003. As the careful reader will no doubt be aware, we've got a few ringers in there--one pastel and one photograph. But what the heck, I can bend the rules if I want to. Votes for one of the above, or nominations for further favorite female nudes--and let's try to stick to oil paintings in the future, okay?--should be registered via comments. Let the contest begin! Cheers, Friedrich P.S. If anyone can contribute the missing information for any of the above images, I will be grateful. P.P.S. Nominations for male nudes will be accepted for next week's contest.... posted by Friedrich at September 17, 2003 | perma-link | (13) comments





Friday, September 12, 2003


Religion, Mud Wrestling and Art
Michael: If the French in the first decade of the 20th century could create Modern Art that accurately mirrored their social anxieties and burning issues, why has most Modern and contemporary American art has turned out to be so emotionally distant, muffled and, well, wise-ass? I can only suspect it’s because Americans naively believed the academic line that Modern Art was a self-contained, largely formal exercise in which the only subject matter was an ever-purer understanding of Modernity Itself (generally conceived of as an extended acid bath of Marxist alienation). Alternatively, if they couldn't handle such austerity, they embraced the Duchampian notion that what made a something “art” was the privileged (and presumably superior) consciousness the artist brought to contemplating it. To illustrate how damaging both these theories of art have been to American art, I’d like to highlight just how differently one artist responded to all manner of real-world human preoccupations in Modern Art’s country of origin. To give you a sense of the social context this artist was working with, I’m going to be sketching out a little history of religion in the Third Republic. Then I’ll show how in 1907 several issues that were either directly religious or bound up with religion were successfully incorporated into an iconic modern painting, Picasso’s “Demoiselles D’Avignon.” P. Picasso, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, 1907 The Third Republic was born in 1871 as the result of the collapse of the authoritarian Second Empire of Napoleon III. After a decade or so of political infighting, the Third Republic came to be dominated by France’s rising “new class,” the urban bourgeoisie. However, powerful groups—the Catholic Church, the large rural landowners and the army, among others—were never reconciled to the largely secular, religiously pluralistic and democratic views of the urban bourgeois republicans. Bourgeois republican politicians reciprocated this hostility. They retaliated by attacking what they felt was the most vulnerable symbol of the unreconstructed right—the Catholic Church. These bourgeois republicans figured they’d go after two birds with one stone. The first bird was a religious “gender gap”: the Catholic Church in the latter 19th century was far more popular among the women of France than among the men. The second bird they aimed at was the Catholic Church’s almost complete control of education in France. In 1880 the bourgeois republicans passed a law that established a system of secular public secondary education for girls. In 1882 they passed a law making elementary education free, compulsory and notably lacking in religious instruction. In 1886 republicans passed a law that prohibited Catholic priests or nuns from teaching in the public schools. Combined with the 1884 passage of a law permitting divorce—which, after being legalized during the Revolution, had been banned again under ecclesiastical pressure since the restoration of the Monarchy in 1816—the republicans were determined to pry the fingers of the Church away from their children and, especially, their women. These reforms however, had unintended consequences. Women didn’t merely use their secondary and, eventually, university educations to “take an... posted by Friedrich at September 12, 2003 | perma-link | (16) comments





Thursday, September 11, 2003


Frank Lloyd Wright Redux
Friedrich -- It's been fun to watch the Frank Lloyd Wright discussion make its rounds through the blogosphere. Culturegab -- all right! Participants have seemed to fall into two camps: the "it leaks, therefore the hell with it" camp; and the "its beauty trumps all its other faults" camp. I'd like to think I hit a slightly more subtle note in my own posting (here), something perhaps along the lines of "he's a major figure, sure, and his work is often beautiful, sure; but it's often more troublesome and rigid than its reputation indicates, and than many people would be willing to put up with for long." But maybe I didn't. Anyway, many interesting contributions from every which where. It's heartening to see such a conversation take off at all, come to think of it. Oftentimes when the name of one of the Greats comes up, the conversation stops dead in its tracks -- the word "great" too often seems to have that effect, doesn't it? I for one much prefer taking part in a lively and open conversation to bickering over whether something or someone is Great. There's one thing that I do think it's worth trying to straighten out. Some of the "beauty trumps all else" crowd seem under the impression that their opponents are weirdos for raising such questions as livability and flexibility, let alone whether or not you're going to go broke trying to keep the place together -- why, they're just missing the point of True Architecture (let alone True Greatness)! Um, er. What's weird isn't worrying about bumping your head, or the rising damp, or whether you're going to have to put out buckets in the middle of the living room to catch the leaking rainwater -- these are normal concerns, and more than valid in a discussion of a building's worth. What's weird is trying to confine a discussion about an architect's work to the sole question of whether or not it's beautiful. This isn't just my perverse opinion, by the way. Here are the terms by which architecture has almost always been discussed: "Commodity, firmness and delight." (From Vitruvius, the earliest ancient whose writings on architecture we have.) Which means: the appropriateness and fitness of the design to what it's intended for; the quality of its construction; and its beauty. (And notice the order these criteria are presented in.) Through all of recorded history -- the modernist era aside, of course -- these are the terms by which the judgment and discussion of architecture have taken place. That's a couple of millenia vs. one century, by the way. So, focusing on beauty and beauty alone in a discussion of architecture? OK, sure, fine, and I'd be the last person to try to pass a law against it. But let's get one thing straight: historically speaking, it's weird. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2003 | perma-link | (30) comments




Milwaukee Art Museum
Friedrich -- Bilbao on Lake Michigan? Ever since Frank Gehry put Bilbao on the art-tourist map, small cities have dreamed of commissioning a piece of starchitecture that'll attract moneyed throngs. And a number have actually gone ahead and built themselves fancy-schmancey new buildings, mostly museums. How are they working out? Deborah Wilk has written a good piece for Chicago magazine about the Quadracci Pavilion, an addition to Milwaukee's Art Museum that opened in late 2001. Designed by Spanish starchitect Santiago Calatrava, it's a swooshy, swoopy, white-on-glass-on-steel, '30s-sci-fi-meets-contempo-cruise-liner thing -- half a clamshell, half a suspension bridge -- featuring a couple of giant seagull-like wings that open and close, and an eye-popping great hall with floor-to-ceiling windows. (I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall when Calatrava was pitching his ideas to the museum's trustees. What a salesman he must be.) Chicago magazine hasn't put Wilk's piece online, so I'll summarize some of it. On the plus side: Lots of approving national press. Big attendance figures for the first shows it has housed. The restaurant and gift shop are prospering. A feeling of civic accomplishment. The city has a striking new landmark on its skyline. And a chic factor that's undeniable: Porsche and Lexus have both shot car ads in the Pavilion's parking garage. On the not-so-plus side: The project, initially expected to cost around $50 million, wound up costing more than $120 million. Fundraising went well but still came up $20 million short where the building itself is concerned ... and another $5 million short where the endowment is concerned ... and the Pavilion turns out to be a lot more expensive to operate than was expected, and ... Well, depending on how you look at it, the Museum, in Wilk's words, "is arguably close to $50 million short of where it ought to be." There's also the matter of staff morale: Wilk learned that during the building's construction the Museum lost four of its six curators, and that within months of the building's opening the Museum's Director and his main sidekick also left. Has it been worth the effort? Me, I haven't visited and so reserve judgment. Porsche and Lexus would probably say yes. I'm enjoying my copy of Chicago magazine, by the way, which has an especially lively and well-edited front of the book. Their website is here. Mary Ann Sullivan took the photo above, and has put up five pages' worth of images of the Quadracci Pavilion here. Here's an enthusiastic user's review of the Quadracci from Epinions. The Milwaukee Art Museum's website is here -- at the bottom of the page you can take a photo tour of the Quadracci. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments




Pic of the Day -- Romare Bearden
Friedrich -- Reading the NYTimes' arts section over lunch. Step one: groaning through another piece of Herbert Muschamp's high-falutin' nonsense-poetry masquerading as architecture criticism. I used to enjoy hating his writing more than I do now -- the spectacle of his self-exhilarated grandstanding used to make me giggle uncontrollably. (The Wife remembers these fits.) These days, I'm a little weary of his preening. But -- hats off to him -- he still does manage to generate more gasp-inducing sentences than any other arts writer I'm aware of. My favorite from this morning's column (about an Ellsworth Kelly proposal for the WTC site): "But New Yorkers have developed an extraordinarily supple attitude toward reality in the past two years." What's this man on? Step two: enjoying this informative Felicia Lee piece about Romare Bearden (here), who's being given a solo retrospective at the National Gallery. Are you a Bearden fan? I am. He lived from 1911 to 1988; studied for a while under George Grosz; was part of the Ralph Ellison/Albert Murray set of African-American intellectuals and writers, to my mind one of the most wonderful and admirable of all American art-intellectual movements; and has been an inspiration to such relative youngsters as Wynton Marsalis and August Wilson. When it's weak, his work -- which fuses African-American folk qualities with early-modernist techniques -- can get a little Sunday supplement-ish and family-of-man-ish. But at its strongest, I find it as formally interesting as Braque's, and as magical and sweet as the best Chagall. Here's an example, a 1969 collage on board entitled "Black Manhattan." Clicking on the thumbnail below will bring up a larger version of the picture. There's no shortage of Bearden online to be enjoyed. Here's the site of the National Gallery's show. Here's the website of the Romare Bearden Foundation. Here's Artcyclopedia's page. And now back to work ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, September 10, 2003


True Art School Tales
Friedrich -- With this posting, we're pleased to kick off a new feature, True Art School Tales, an irregular, ongoing illustrated diary about life as an art-school student by John Leavitt, who's currently studying at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology. John's own website -- where he shows off his witty and elegant art, as well as his prowess as a designer and cartoonist -- is here. If you click on the thumbnails of the drawings John has included in his diary, you'll get to enjoy them at a more sensible size. True Art School Tales Yesterday was my first day back at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where I'm a student in my sophomore year. Nothing had changed, least of all the setting -- the FIT Buildings are windowless gray boxes, featureless and dumb. (Of course, the same could be said about the students.) The insides are no better -- nothing but high-school-yellow linoleum and concrete walls. How a school supposedly devoted to beauty could have one the most famously ugly buildings in NYC, I'll never know. It's telling that it was built with city money during the '70s, when the city had no money to pass out. Architecture like this makes people forget that they live in a democracy. FIT doesn't resemble a college. Rather, it looks like the bank I once worked at. One summer I did data entry for Fleet Bank. It was an old building, built in the heat of the Cold War, and was designed to protect the records and money against a nuclear attack. The entry labs were 5 stories under the earth, accessible only through long, over-lit corridors and interlocking rooms with low ceilings. During the two weeks I was there, I wondered, what good are the records with everyone blasted to radioactive dust? Buildings like this dull the senses, not something you'd want an art school to do. *** The day was spent in lines trying to change my forced schedule. Every semester you're given a block of required courses that is set in stone, and some limited Liberal Art electives -- apparently art students can't be trusted to choose their own classes. Also, they keep the identity of the teacher hidden until the first day of class. Which means that unlike at other schools, you can't pick your teachers. I've been told, with a straight face, that this is a good policy because otherwise "everyone would want the good teachers." In any case, I got most of the changes I wanted made, though I wasn't able to remove one terrible teacher from my list, the ancient Professor R--. In every college teachers get a reputation, and some come to be regarded as blockages in the collegiate colon. There are teachers who fall asleep, make lecherous advances on models. Or, in the case of Prof. R--, prattle on about tedious political matters and social consciousness without teaching a goddamned thing. I'm not paying for her soapbox. Or rather, yes: apparently I am.... posted by Michael at September 10, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, September 9, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: Choosing solely among the products of HFOP (i.e., High-Falutin' Oil Painting), what would you choose as your favorite female nude? Obviously this is an impossible question, but I would have to nominate the following as among my very most favorites along this line. J. Ingres, Woman Bathing, 1807 I think this beauty by Ingres gets the nod from me because of (1) the tenderness--I can think of no better word--of the depiction, and (2) the combination of her body language and her facial expression (she's hunched over in a bit of a defensive crouch, but she doesn't seem to be in distress; it's more as if she is shielding something of value--her physical beauty--that should be, deserves to be protected.) Enjoy. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. Michael--Per your suggestion in the comments, I will post all nominated paintings in another post. Everybody else--Keep those cards and letters coming! See your favorite enshrined at 2blowhards!... posted by Friedrich at September 9, 2003 | perma-link | (21) comments





Monday, September 8, 2003


Can We Just Take a Do-Over?
Michael: As you know, I’ve been doing a lot of reading in French history and trying to link it up with the rise and development of Modern Art. All of my reading convinces me that the relationships between French social, economic, political and religious history on the one hand and French art history on the other are too clear cut to ignore. (I intend to give a very specific, concrete example of these correspondences in an upcoming posting.) The more I read, the more I am convinced that the dogma fed to us in our Lousy Ivy University in the 1970s (i.e., the notion that Modern Art developed as the result of a purely internal dialogue held within the arts community, chiefly about formal issues like color and “flatness”) is hogwash. The first fifty or so years of Modern Art, from Courbet to the death of Cezanne, was an entirely French affair, very local in character, very idiomatic. What we think of as Modern Art during this period was one subset of French art that reflected French concerns and was created for French consumption. The formal strategies that were adopted, as well as altered, played with, and tossed on the trash heap, don’t derive from each other via some form of immaculate conception, but were glommed on to by artists attempting to find a way of engaging the concerns (and often, but not always, the francs) of the French art-buying public. This is not to denigrate the incredible creativity involved, nor to criticize the French for the particular set of social, religious, economic, military and political problems they had to confront. I’m simply trying to point out that while the French had a particular clutch of problems to deal with, the rest of humanity had its own set of social, economic, political and religious issues, which were by no means identical to those of the French. Despite this not very controversial truth, one of the main tenets of the standard, formalist-oriented story of Modern Art (promoted by, say, the Museum of Modern Art throughout most of its existence) is the notion that the experience of Modernity was more or less the same everywhere. (Or at least, it was implied—if not explicitly stated—that the experience of Modernity was, or sooner-or-later would be, identical among urban elites in the Western World). Consequently there was a strong tendency to ignore, bulldoze and generally denigrate local differences and traditions. Of course, anyone could play in the game of Modernism as long as they paid homage to a set of issues that were, at root, French in origin. To get good at Modernism, one had to first soak up sufficient French-ness to become able to beat the French to the next space on the game board. Picasso perfectly illustrates what was required from a successful non-French player of the Modern French Art Game. For a generation of American artists born early in the 20th century, their opportunity came when the Surrealists fled to New York... posted by Friedrich at September 8, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Thursday, September 4, 2003


More on Sidewalks and Waistlines
Friedrich -- A few days ago I cited a study linking urban sprawl to obesity and high blood pressure. Bradford McKee in the NYTimes discusses the studies here, and does a good job of consulting with skeptics as well as public-health and New-Urbanist types. Sample passage: Stay-at-home wives have often complained about the isolation of suburbia, working parents point to the killer commutes and teenagers moan about the boredom. Now Dr. Jackson believes there are persuasive, if yet circumstantial, links between the suburbs and certain physical and mental diseases. If so, he said, the building of larger and larger suburbs might be viewed as a colossal mistake. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 4, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Art Joke
Friedrich -- Q. What's the difference between a fine artist and a commercial artist? A. One of them has to make a living. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 4, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, September 3, 2003


Did I Mention the 12.3% Rate of Return?
Michael: Psssst. Let me give you a little investment advice. Forget stocks and bonds: go with art. According to a little graph in the August 23-29 issue of The Economist , over the past 50 years art has significantly outperformed the S&P 500, to say nothing of U.S. 10-year Treasury bonds. If this little chart is to be believed, $100 invested in fine art in 1952 would have grown to approximately $33,000 in 2002. According to a handly little compound growth calculator I found on the Internet, that figures out to around a 12.3% annual compounded rate of return. (And by the way, while the art market is down since its late ‘90’s peak, it’s only down 10%, not the roughly 33% the S&P 500 is down.) Of course, like any other investment advisor, I have a little fine print to disclose. These numbers come from a study performed by Michael Moses at New York University’s Stern School of Business and Jianping Mei. They tracked the prices of some 5,000 paintings that have been repeatedly sold at auction since 1875. My suspicion is that most of these repeatedly auctioned 5,000 paintings are probably Old Master efforts, not your art student brother-in-law's paintings. Oh, yeah, another thing, art prices are kind of volatile, at least since the late 1980s, so if you had to sell at the wrong moment, you probably wouldn't do quite this well. And, one more thing: it might be a good idea to put out a sign saying “For Sale by Owner” if you want to get out of the market without paying extortionate commissions. If you sell at auction, you and the buyer together will have to shell out 25% of the sales price to the auction house. Well, who said getting rich was ever easy? And think about this: while your investments in art won’t pay you any cash income while you own them, they will certainly impress your friends and neighbors, especially if you mention that Rembrandt over there on the wall is earning you a 12.3% compounded annual rate of return. And the best part is, when you know people are seething with envy, you can look noble and say, “Of course, I bought it for the aesthetic returns.” Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 3, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, September 1, 2003


Parking Lots and Downtowns
Friedrich -- A while back, Brian Micklethwait (here) and David Sucher (here) put up some memorable postings about car parks. As I recall, their main question was, Why can't car parks be more attractive? I love it when people notice overlooked things such as car parks, and even more when they go on and ask sensible questions about them. Valiantly bringing up the rear, I'm here to pitch in too. What got me thinking my own thoughts about car parks (as well as snapping my own lousy photos of them) was a visit to Santa Barbara, one of America's prettiest small cities (and one that I've blogged about, sort of, here and here). A bit of background. 30-40 years ago, State St., the city's main downtown drag, was dreary and on the decline. Malls were drawing the easy shopping traffic away, and the town decided it was time to act. It was clear that decaying and inconvenient couldn't compete against the siren song of the shopping centers. What to do? According to highly-placed, hush-hush sources speaking exclusively to 2Blowhards -- my in-laws, actually, who are longtime S.B. residents -- the town's strategy centered on reorganizing parking on State St. In the '60s and early '70s, cars parked on State at an angle, with their snouts facing the stores. The result was a tangle of drivers jockeying for space and an ocean of cars where you might hope to see a bit of downtown instead. The city chose to banish parking entirely from much of State St., and to construct a bunch of car parks. But not just any ol' car parks. Nope: nice ones, and only a block or two at most off State. To illustrate, here are a few examples of typical crap American car parks. Drearily familiar -- functional, but nothing you'd want to live close to, nothing you'd care to share a block with, and nothing that you'd ever consider remembering fondly. To my mind, these car parks say, This city is losing jobs and people, and is unlikely ever to recover. Now here are a few pix of the attractive-in-their-own-right car parks that Santa Barbara built. Nicely executed California/Spanish theme, no? Plus, what a nice addition to the neighborhood. Facing the street aren't concrete and ramps and a dumb piece of bent metal mesh pretending to be a swell design feature -- instead, there are shops, arches, and stucco. The blocks these facilities help define have their own cheery life. You're happy to be walking along them. The city even showered some thoughtfulness on the interiors. Here's a typical American car park interior: oppressive and ugly, ready to be used as the setting for a kidnapping scene in a crime movie. Here are some pix of S.B. car-park interiors. Amazing how a little stucco, some arches and columns, and a nicely-chosen typeface can turn help turn industrial-style gloom into friendliness. The result of all this car park monkeying-around (and much else I'm not aware of)? A... posted by Michael at September 1, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, August 30, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: I stumbled across a fascinating book today entitled “The Secret Art of Dr. Suess.” I didn’t realize that Theodor Geisel had done a good deal of art outside of his labors as a cartoonist and the illustrator of his own children’s books. Looking through the book also made me realize (I guess I’m just slow to the party) how thoroughly libidinous his art was, and at the same time how elegant. The book contains a picture of Geisel painting in his studio when he appears north of sixty, yet he’s got quite a sense of style (to say nothing of a terrific head of hair.) I know nothing about his private life, but one would have to guess that, at least if he had wanted to, he could have cut quite a swath as a ladies’ man. I also had no idea that he was a sculptor as well as a painter and a draftsman, which is where today’s picture comes in. The following is made from plaster, real animal horns, oil paint and a wooden base. It is not only, of course, a witty comment on the whole notion of hunting trophy heads, but also confirms that he certainly didn’t condescend stylistically to children; this predates his first published children’s book by three years. T. Geisel, Semi-Normal Green Lidded Fawn, 1934 Enjoy, Friedrich P.S. You've got to click on the thumbnail above to see a big enough picture to appreciate the fawn's eyelids.... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, August 29, 2003


Chaos of History: Art from 1920
Michael: This is the next posting in my continuing, if wildly idiosyncratic, survey of art. My organizational method is not narrative, but strictly chronological, with the goal of showing something of the diversity of painting from a given moment in time. Although previously I’ve been moving forward in time decade by decade, I realized that I somehow skipped over art from around the year 1920, so I’ve decided to back up and fill in this gap. The dominant formal characteristic of art c. 1920 was linear design. As you can see below, most of the paintings function as something closely akin to colored drawings. Even the Guy Rose, in his painting of Point Lobos has, for all his Impressionist technique, emphasized the linear quality of his composition, rather than its atmospheric effects. (Partly, one suspects, that this is a tribute to the cultural prestige enjoyed in 1920 by Cubism, and partially the mediumistic quality of visual artists, always testing the art-ether with their antennae.) FEMALE PORTRAITS J. Gris, Portrait of Josette Gris, 1916; E. Coonan, Girl in Dotted Dress, 1923 LANDSCAPE C. Burchfield, Noontide in Late May, 1917; G. Rose, Point Lobos, Carmel, 1918 FEMALE NUDES P. Picasso, Large Bather, 1921; A. Modigliani, Standing Nude (Elvira), 1918 METAPHYSICAL MOOD PIECES W. Kandinsky, Yellow, Red, Blue, 1925; F. Johnston, Serenity:Lake of the Woods, 1922 Be honest: doesn’t that “Serenity: Lake of the Woods” make you want to move to Canada and take up painting? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 29, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, August 27, 2003


Guest Posting -- Charles Sestok
Friedrich -- An on-the-front-lines report about the New Urbanism from 2Blowhards visitor Charles Sestok, who left a comment that I can't resist copying and pasting into its own posting. Charles is currently an electrical-engineering graduate student in Boston, but he has split time the last few years between his studies in Boston and summer consulting stints at a large electronics firm in Dallas. I spent time as a summer intern living in an apartment development designed with some of the New Urbanist ideas in mind. The design ideas produced a more livable community than any of the other apartment "complexes" I've called home. A typical apartment complex in Dallas is an archipelago of identical two-story buildings surrounded with a sea of asphalt parking lots. A cheap fence rings the complex; the illusion of security it provides is insufficient compensation for the daily difficulties of coming and going by car. Not only is this design pattern bland, the heat capacity of the asphalt and the lack of trees and grass multiply the unpleasant summer heat. The new development I resided in, Post Addison Circle, struck a balance between a viable street-level pedestrian existence and the realities of life in car-centric Dallas. The buildings, while constructed wholesale on a formerly vacant lot next to a major highway, each had individual style. Each building is four stories high, covers an entire block, and has a parking structure in the rear, disguised to match the style of the front. The buildings of the development center on a boulevard with a park in the middle. Near the intersection of the development's main street with the highway, the ground floor of the buildings had restaurants and convenience stores as tenants. During the day, they drew customers from surrounding offices, and attracted foot-traffic from residents at night. The design of each individual building enhanced the experience of the residents. The buildings focus inwards on central plazas. The apartments were built on three sides of the square with the parking forming the fourth. The central plazas had either swimming pools or gardens, and an effort to provide harmonious sculpture had been made. The design focused recreational activites and improved my opportunity to socialize with my neighbors. In total, I thought that the development used several of the concepts advocated by Alexander and Salingaros effectively. It was a terrific improvement over my prior residence, which had a design allusive of Le Corbusier's antiseptic plans. Now that I live in Boston, I live in a city that embodies these ideas naturally. Actually I prefer the design of Addison circle because it effectively incorporated the use of a car. Ample parking was available there, but was cleverly concealed. The same isn't true in Boston, where car ownership is simultaneously necessity and nuisance. Additionally, the central park of the main boulevard and the plazas gave the development more public space than a comparably dense neighborhood here. I think that both the Addison Circle apartment development and the Boston walk-up where I currently... posted by Michael at August 27, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, August 22, 2003


Frank Lloyd Wright Isn't God
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Live here? Thanks but ... I know I'm committing art-fan-heresy if not actual art-fan-treason by admitting this, but I'm not a Frank Lloyd Wright fan. Yesyesyes, he was a giant and a mega-talent, and his buildings are often beautiful. (I'm not blind.) But while they're beautiful as structures, they're often absurd as buildings. Happy to admit that I'm semi-qualifed at best to make pronouncements about FLW; I've toured maybe a half-dozen of the houses, visited Taliesin East and West, have strolled through a few of the public buildings, and have read only a few books about him and his work. (I'm proud, on the other hand, to have had a few actual conversations with people who live and work in his buildings.) But what the hell: I'm not playing critic and 2Blowhards isn't The New Yorker. So why not be frank and honest, eh? An aside I can't resist: Why don't more opinions like "I don't like FLW" come along in the mainstream press? Do you think it's entirely because everyone, just everyone, loves FLW's work? Or might it also have to do with career and social anxieties -- ie., with people in the culture-opinion-and-ideas class being terrified of making fools of themselves and thereby losing social and career credibility? A question for a good sociologist to look into: What exactly are the outlines of the opinions-and-ideas mindset that you must, you absolutely must, subscribe to in order to find a comfy place within the culture-opinions-and-ideas world? But back to FLW. I do get fascinated by the way so many people worship him, as well as by the existence of the thriving FLW industry. He's become a kind of pop icon -- he and his work mean something to a lot of people that goes beyond mere architecture. What is it? I'm guessing it's something like: he's the real-American modern architect (an eccentric individualist, using natural materials, making forms well-suited to our landscape) you root for against all those geometric, rationalistic, borderline-totalitarian Eurojerks. He may be modern, grumble grumble, but he's still our guy -- cussed, down-home, rough-hewn. A poster boy for values we real people cheer, in other words. All of which is sweet and amusing. But how does his work actually measure up? The more I see of it (and the more I read about him), the less deserving of worship do I think he is. Granted that some of his creations are lovely things of one sort or another, most of the buildings I've visited have struck me as stiff, badly made, and close to unusable. Simple question: Would you want to live in one of his houses? I wouldn't, for two main reasons. Most important is the way a Frank Lloyd Wright house never becomes your home; instead, you move in and become the curator of one branch of the Frank Lloyd Wright museum. You're just the custodian in a monument to his genius. For the other, I wouldn't want... posted by Michael at August 22, 2003 | perma-link | (49) comments





Wednesday, August 20, 2003


James Howard Kunstler
Friedrich -- Mark Hurst does a short, helpful q&a with urban critic, New Urbanism advocate, and all-around firebrand James Howard Kunstler here. Sample passage: Kunstler: One of the other strange unforeseen consequences of the modernist movement was that it gave corporate America an excuse to build cheap and ugly buildings. When ornament has been outlawed and is deemed incorrect, you can just put up boxes. The more utilitarian the box, the less money you'll put into it. If you go back to a differentculture, the Beaux Arts period in America a hundred years ago, even a businessman would be persecuted for putting up a building that wasn't attractive. Look at any business building put up in 1905: a beautiful building, beautifully decorated and proportioned. Even the fire houses. But it was all thrown in the garbage in the post-war years. Michael Totten comments enthusiastically here. David Sucher, via whose blog I found this q&a, comments less favorably here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 20, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, August 15, 2003


David Sucher, Day Two
This is Day Two of our conversation with "City Comforts" author and blogger David Sucher. For Day One, click here. To visit David's site (highly recommended!), click here. To read his blog, click here. 2B: The town where I grew up was a small town that was in the process of being turned into a suburb. These days it's gone beyond that. And now it's really just a drive-through place with a bunch of cul-de-sacs. DS: Yup. I been there. 2B: How do these things happen? And once it has happened, what can be done to bring it back to something more livable? DS: I think it's a slippery slope. Take a traditional Main Street from the '20s or '30s or even earlier. Now it’s the 1950s. There's a vacant lot, and somebody says, I might as well set my new building back and use the front for parking. And no one gives it a thought. And it's probably benign because the rest of the block is traditional Main Street. Then over time, the State Highway Department comes along and says, We don't want on-street parking. It becomes busier and busier and they start to restrict parking hours. 2B: Or they broaden the streets. DS: It becomes a practical necessity to park onsite. I think it happens in a way that's invisible. We're like frogs in boiling water. Nobody realized it was happening. If you look at social commentary from the '30s to the '60s, to my understanding, nobody noticed. It was so subtle -- lot by lot, property by property. The way to reverse it, as with most important things, is to start with a consciousness change. But first, let's be clear about something: no one wants to give up their cars. They want both: they want the car, but they also want commercial areas that are pedestrian-oriented. That latter desire is a big change. It isn't universal, but compared even to 20 years ago, it's quite a difference. Today, you have people talking about pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Nobody was talking that way 20 or 25 years ago. 2B: Minds are changing. DS: There's the development of a large shared goal: changing cities. So now people are grappling with how to do it. They're talking about it at the most complex level possible: Let's develop a regional plan -- mass transit, growth management. I'm saying, You may want to do these things. You may decide that an urban containment policy is a good idea. And you may decide that you want good public transit. But those per se don't get you pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods. The Washington D.C. transit system is a good example of that. Where there were dense neighborhoods, there are still dense neighborhoods. But where the trains go out into the suburbs? There's a huge parking lot. Out there, it hasn't created a dense neighborhood, it's facilitated suburban expansion. 2B: Not what was expected. DS: Not at all. We've associated high-density cities with public transportation -- trains, a subway.... posted by Friedrich at August 15, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments




Was It Really Progress?
Michael: Do you like looking at the juvenilia of famous artists? It’s a total weakness of mine. I love looking into all the little nooks and crannies that artists poke their heads into before they get a haircut and a real job, so to speak. For example, everyone knows Vladimir Tatlin’s famous work as a Russian Constructivist. But would you have guessed that he also could produce a tender nude like this one? V. Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919 (Copy of 1967-8); V. Tatlin, Female Bather, ? And while Mondrian’s mature work is instantly identifiable, I find the styles of his earlier work to be in many respects more seductive: P. Mondrian, Tableau No. IV, 1924; P. Mondrian, Chrysanthemum, 1908-9; P. Mondrian, Still Life With Ginger Pot I, 1911-2 And of course everyone knows that the AbEx painting at the upper left is by Mark Rothko. But would you guess that he had earlier produced an urban genre scene or landscapes like this? M. Rothko, Untitled, 1953; M. Rothko, Underground Fantasy (Subway), 1940; M. Rothko, Untitled, Late 1920s It makes me wonder, frankly, if the categorical imperative of the 20th century artist—to develop a unique and fully realized style—is all that conducive to letting the full humanity of artists come out and play. I won’t deny that the early work of each of these artists contains the seeds of their later work (Tatlin’s evolution is a bit mysterious, I grant you, except for an evident interest in, er, male and female principles). But there are many, many other roads that could have been taken in the early work of each of these artists which were ultimately suppressed to create the final signature style. Is this really a gain—except for the artist’s reputation and pocketbook? (Is a signature style really a form of self-parody?) Anyway, I have my doubts. Where do you come down on all this? Do you see a similar sacrifice being made in, say, literature? Movies? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 15, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Thursday, August 14, 2003


David Sucher, Day One
Friedrich As you've gathered from some recent postings of mine, I'm a big fan of David Sucher and his website, book and blog, all of which go by the name City Comforts (the main page is here; the blog is here). David's a building and architecture buff -- but that's not quite right. He's an unusual and refreshing one, because he doesn't fixate on celebrity buildings, on what he calls "the building as precious object." And he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about the usual architecture-crit stuff -- building as self-expression, or as expression of its era. As the words "City" and "Comforts" suggest, what David's mostly concerned with is the background and fabric: neighborhoods, blocks. The first thing he'll do when confronted with a new building is ask if it contributes to or detracts from its neighborhood. (This should be the first question any commentator on architecture asks.) Here's a wonderful sentence from a piece David wrote about superstar Rem Koolhaas' in-construction Seattle Public Library: "We pay too much attention to how a building appears; the central question for every building is how it behaves." Can’t beat that for substantial and succinct. I love David's style and approach. He resolutely avoids the theoretical and the intellectualized; he's always dragging the conversation back to practical matters. He's an obsessive, but in the most agreeable and modest way. In the tradition of people like William Whyte and Jane Jacobs, he's fascinated by what works and what doesn't. The kernel of his advice is what he refers to as the Three Rules. (Read more about them here.) They're simple guidelines (with complex implications and consequences) that'll drastically increase the chances a retail neighborhood will be a lively, pedestrian-oriented one -- the kind of place people go a little out of their way to visit and enjoy. Readers who value pleasure and comfort more than brilliance and self-conscious style should be delighted by David's work. It's about the basics: why is this neighborhood popular, and why is that one not? Why do people use this park and not that one? Why is this sidewalk bustling and lively, and that one bleak and empty? You'd think architects and critics would be more concerned with such subjects, woudn't you? And would see their own jobs as beginning with these questions, too. David's been blogging now for a couple of months, and he's finishing revisions and tweaks on a new edition of his book. (I’ll run an announcement when it goes on sale.) He sweetly sent me a PDF of the book, and I'm mega-enthused -- copies ought to be given out wholesale to planners and local politicians everywhere. It's full of pictures, examples, and discussions of things and approaches that work -- benches, doorways, parking arrangements. Feet-on-the-ground, commonsense stuff, the architecture-and-building equivalent of basic good manners. Like his blog, the book is an easy-reading, attractive, casual-seeming thing that -- in a quiet way -- expresses an amazingly well-developed point of view. Which boils... posted by Friedrich at August 14, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments





Wednesday, August 13, 2003


Art--An Extension of War By Other Means?
Michael: Glancing over the newspapers of the past six months or so I've noticed an almost complete disconnect between the "arts" page and the front page--that is, between the arts and the war in Iraq. (I understand many artists have expressed opinions about the war, but I don't see much difference in the art being produced.) This got me to thinking about the relationship between war and shifts in “dominant” visual styles. The historical record would suggest that it's more accurate to say that it’s not war, per se, that alters visual styles, but rather losing a war. For example, there weren’t a lot of wars between 1815 and 1914 in Europe. By far the biggest was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Is it an accident that Modern Art first started to flourish in France (the loser country) during the era immediately following that defeat? The End of the Commune, 1871; C. Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1872 (NB: these two pictures show the same part of Paris) While Germany, the victor of that war, wasn’t exactly a hotbed of Modern Art until…after its defeat in World War I, when it took over from France as the leader of Modernity (think the Bauhaus, abstract painting, etc., etc.) German Battery on the Move, WWI; W. Kandinsky, On White II, 1923 And how about the “takeoff” of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S.—which didn’t happen in a big way until the Korean War and its aftermath? (To say nothing of how AbEx had been “fertilized” by European refugees from countries already defeated in WWII.) North of the Chongchon River, November 20, 1950; J. Pollack, Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), 1950 And the practitioners of Minimalism and Conceptualism would seem to owe a major debt to the Vietnam War--if the U.S. had been triumphant in that one, I suspect we'd still be looking at versions of Abstract Expressionism. (I’ll acknowledge, by the way, that the seeds of these movements were all around and struggling to grow before the war in question. But I would point out that they didn’t seem to find the soil in which to flourish until defeat in war.) Of course, the "losing war" theory doesn’t explain everything. The tie between visual styles and defeat in war seems, at a minimum, to have been weaker in the more distant past, which may well reflect the pre-democratic isolation of the mass of the population from the institutions, if not the effects, of war. Still, positive examples to support this theory can easily be found. The High Renaissance was clearly brought to an abrupt end (and Mannerism enthroned) by the Sack of Rome in 1527, which signaled the end of the autonomy of the Italian city-states in a world of competing European empires. Rococo painting seems to have replaced French classical baroque painting as a consequence of the disastrous wars at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. French Romantic painting seems strongly connected with the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. The much greater impact of... posted by Friedrich at August 13, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, August 12, 2003


Contempo Figurative Art
Friedrich -- I confess that I rather enjoy moaning and bitching about standards and the arts and how it's all going to hell -- and I'll defend this as a pleasure every arts person is entitled to enjoy. (You'd be a fool not to.) For a simple example: can't anybody really paint or draw anymore? Is a little recognizable technique and skill in art TOO DAMN MUCH TO ASK FOR???!!! And then I stumble into an art show that makes me eat my grumpiest words. I recently dropped by one such at New York's Forum Gallery (here). Dazzling stuff, even if most of it's in a tightly-focused realistic style that doesn't speak to me. But, hey: you want talent? You want technique? These artists got both, and in spades. The samples I'm passing along here aren't the exact works that were in the show, but they give a good taste of some of the artists' work. Be sure to click on these images, which will pop up slightly larger than they appear now. By Cesar Galicia By G. Daniel Massad By Kent Bellows By Robert Cottingham By Peter Greaves Don't miss sampling the work of another one of the artists who's in the show, Alan Magee, a page of whose paintings is here. That Massad image is a pastel, by the way. The textures and details he creates out of colored dust are really something to see live and up close. And the Peter Greaves? It's about the size of a postage stamp -- one intense little drawing. Well, feeling ashamed of being such a fuddyduddy and a complainer can be a kind of pleasure too. Best, Michael... posted by Friedrich at August 12, 2003 | perma-link | (16) comments





Sunday, August 10, 2003


Cole, Gilpin, Burke & Romantic Evo-Bio
Michael: A few weeks ago I made a trip over to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to check out the Indian sculpture, as you may recall from my posting, East Meets West (which you can read here.) While I was there, I was quite happy to notice that LACMA has been beefing up its collection of American art. In particular, I was pleased to notice that several California Impressionist paintings that the museum has parked in storage for decades have been re-hung. Also, LACMA has spirited up a number of Hudson River school landscapes. I vote a Blowhardy to whatever member of the curatorial staff is responsible. One of these newly materialized paintings, and a quite impressive one at that, is by Thomas Cole, the Godfather of Hudson River painters. (I was doubly pleased to learn that this delightful effort belonged to him because I had written on Cole’s place in American landscape painting in another posting, Hudson River School, Part I, which you can read here.) Since I was armed with my digital camera, I took a shot of it; given that it was taken in ambient light, I was quite pleased how the image came out. T. Cole, ?, Date Unknown Regrettably, however, not having pencil or paper with me, I didn’t get the title or date of this painting. Ergo, I know nothing about it, not even whether it is a topographical, a pastiche of various real places or just plain made up. But trying to penetrate a little deeper into the painting, I turned to my handy one-volume guide to American art, “American Visions” by Robert Hughes. In it, I found this rather intriguing quote: The idea of landscape, as distinct from mere territory, was imported from England and it appeared quite late in America; Thomas Cole, an English import, was its first bearer in painting. Through him, Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime, along with the ideas of the English school of picturesque landscape (William Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight), passed into America. Checking into William Gilpin (who was new to me) I discovered several landscape drawings by him online, which appear below: W. Gilpin, Landscape Cliffs and Trees and Landscape River Between Hills, c. 1790 Cole’s visual debt to Gilpin is indeed obvious; the composition of his painting visibly incorporates elements that appear in both these drawings—foreground trees, a river, steep hills rising cliff like near the water’s edge, and a stormy sky. But Gilpin’s influence was richer for Cole, I suspect, than merely providing him with compositional elements to rip off. Gilpin, an amateur artist, churchman, philanthropist and innovative educator, had worked out a practical methodology for creating “picturesque” landscapes, which embodied both Edmund Burke’s notion of “The Sublime” and which possessed a specifically English character. Gilpin’s program was based on rough subject matter—including, if possible, elements referring to England’s storied past like castles (he had been born in one himself). These subjects were painted in broad and simplified contrasts of value,... posted by Friedrich at August 10, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Saturday, August 9, 2003


Free Reads -- Housing in NYC
Friedrich -- I have a theory -- I'm not sure it's defensible, but it's mine and it gives me pleasure -- that politics in America during the last 35ish years boils down to this: that everything is a reaction to the '60s. There's been nothing new, nothing really different. Just a bunch of reactions. The problem is that the programs of the '60s went too far; no, the problem is they didn't go far enough. The solution is they need to be reformed; no, the solution is they need to be ditched entirely. And meanwhile the bills for what was put in place during the '60s continue to pile up ... An example? Here's an amazing article by Alan Feuer in the NYTimes about Co-op City, a 35-building neighborhood in the Bronx. Built in 1968 and currently home to 50,000 people, it was one of those we-can-do-anything postwar government projects, and was intended to create "affordable housing" for low- and middle-class families. A state program oversaw construction, and state money was used to make the whole thing happen. All very huge, as well as very idealistic and ambitious. Ie., very '60s. (Tarzan yodel here.) Today, only 36 years later, Co-op City is falling apart. Roofs leak. Pieces of concrete are falling off of balconies. The garages, which are crumbling, have had to close. Co-op City faces a repair bill of $500 million -- $500 million! -- yet its tenant corporation is running an annual deficit of $7 million. ($7 million!) So the inevitable ugly arguments are multiplying: time to privatize? Time for the state to rush in with yet more money? A working class utopia indeed. Me, I think we should just forward the bills along to Nelson Rockefeller's grandkids. Best, Michael Dept. of Government Boondoggles UPDATE: There's a lot of money sloshing around lower Manhattan that's meant to right some of the wrongs of 9/11, and no doubt the WTC area does need the help. But does Chinatown? Does the Lower East Side? Felix Salmon reviews the facts and the evidence, and does a lot of sensible thinking about these questions (here).... posted by Michael at August 9, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Friday, August 8, 2003


Notes on the Word "Intellectual"
Friedrich -- I was cooking up an elaborate posting on "intellectuals." A little history, some research. What do we mean by the word, where do intellectuals come from, what's the best way to deal with them? The public-intellectual question. The American-anti-intellectualism question. Links to a few key books and sites. Etc., etc. I was stoked, I'm tellin' you. But every time I sat at the keyboard the posting gave way beneath me. Why? Why? Well, partly because my ambitious postings usually do give way beneath me. Planning too much and getting too excited are, for me, surefire signs that I'll soon abandon something. But what else? ... Finally I realized what was behind my failure, which was that I really only have a couple of disjointed things I want to say on the subject. Why not take the easy way out? Ie., ditch the research and the hard work, and cut directly to the opinionating, musing and wise-assing? OK, then ... * It was a pleasant moment -- no, make that "a rare triumphant moment" -- for me when I finally understood that "intellectual" isn't a synonym for "smart." How does that work? I'm not talking about waking up to the fact that eggheads can be loony and impractical; I mean that over and over again I met people who were undoubtedly intellectuals yet who were dumb. Flat out dumb. Mentally underpowered. And over and over again, I also met people who struck me as very smart yet who clearly weren't intellectuals. What to make of this? Like you and everyone else with the sense and wit to drop by this blog, I'm aware myself of having a few spare mental horsepower lurking around; I know I can pull out into the fast lane when I need to. (At least I've got the self-deluded arrogance to enjoy imagining that I can.) Yet I know damn well I'm no intellectual. I'm glad of this -- in fact, I'd find it displeasing to be mistaken for one. Hmmmm. (Sound of mind churning away, or attempting to.) Ding! It's a matter of temperament, not IQ points! That's the solution I finally arrived at, and thanks to it my life has been a little simpler and calmer. Here's how it goes: an intellectual is an intellectual not because she's a smart person but because she's got an intellectual temperament. Ie., she's someone who lives in her brain. An athlete or ballerina lives in her body. A painter really lives in her eyes and hands. A lawyer -- well, who knows where lawyers live? But an intellectual? We call 'em that because they do their real living in their brains. Whether it's a lousy brain or a good brain is irrelevant; it's just the place where an intellectual processes what needs processing. A matter of temperament, in other words. That's it. Since coming to this conclusion, I've been a slightly more relaxed person. You can be an idiot yet also be an intellectual. You can... posted by Michael at August 8, 2003 | perma-link | (17) comments




The Chaos of History; Art circa 1940
Michael: After a laughably long gap, I resume my demonstration of the variety of art since 1900. (Completely unscientific and idiosyncratic surveys of the years 1900, 1910 and 1930 can be seen here, here and here. I can no longer remember why I skipped 1920.) This survey is of the years around 1940, a time which, after spending an hour or so looking through my art books, I would have to dub the era of Picasso. His influence was at its peak during this era; interestingly, I would say that it served mostly to intimidate and constrict the output of other artists. Still, there was quite a good crop of painting and drawing produced, particularly in styles of art that were somewhat distant from Picasso’s specialities. (I had to illustrate Pablo's own work with L'Aubade, probably one of my three or four favorite works by Sr. Picasso. It has a truly monumental tenderness and a stillness that seems charged with emotion.) STILL LIFE G. Braque, Black Fish, 1942 GENRE P. Picasso, L'Aubade, 1942 SELF-PORTRAIT O. Kokoschka, Self Portrait As a Degenerate Artist, 1937-9 SOCIAL COMMENT L. Muhlstock, William O'Brien, Unemployed, c. 1935 LANDSCAPE G. Wood, Iowa Landscape, 1941 ILLUSTRATION Unknown, Dime Mystery Magazine Cover, 1938 I had to sneak that illustration in; I think because of its conceptual distance from the Spanish Overlord of Art, it is probably as lively a piece as any in the survey. Do you agree? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 8, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments





Saturday, August 2, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: I was leafing through a book of Holbein portraits I own when I came across this picture of the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII. H. Holbein, Charles de Solier, Sire de Morette, c. 1534 Hey, talk about not making ‘em the way they used to. Can you imagine a portrait painted in the past, say, 25 years having the same kind of impact this one has? Is it just that people in the 16th century dressed better than we do? Is it that we no longer consider it socially acceptable to display weapons, even ceremonial ones, in our portraits? Has the whole notion of masculine authority been rendered culturally unacceptable? (Admit it, isn’t this the ultimate artistic statement of the expression you used to see on grown-up men’s faces when you went to retrieve your ball from their perfectly manicured lawns?) Or is it simply an erosion in human dignity? This portrait actually has more expression than most of Holbein’s; he obviously considered a monumental presentation of the topology of the ‘composed’ human face to be sufficient subject matter for serious painting. Why is it that we don’t? Anyway, thought you’d get a kick out of the old Frenchman. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 2, 2003 | perma-link | (15) comments





Friday, August 1, 2003


Elsewhere
Friedrich -- * Philip Hensher thinks that the glory days of the French cinema are long gone, here. I find it harder than he does to sneeze at such current talents as Breillat, Ozon, Denis and Assayas. But he's written a drily funny piece that's well worth reading. * I managed to avoid the recent Matthew Barney extravaganza at the Guggenheim, so I've got no opinion about it myself. But I found this acidic NY Press review of the show (here) by Christian Viveros-Faune very amusing. He gets off some hard-to-resist cracks about Conceptualism. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 1, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, July 31, 2003


Free Reads -- Toni Bentley
Friedrich -- Ah, the ballerina Toni Bentley! Sexy, passionate, brilliant -- and I've never seen her dance. I'm a huge fan of her writing, though. Bentley was a Balanchine ballerina, but began writing about dance even before she hurt herself and had to retire. To my shame, I've read only one of her books, Sisters of Salome (buyable here), but I thought it was one of the best new books I've read in recent years. From the opening chapter, I was full of excitement and admiration. I was thinking, "This is sensational!," and "Why aren't lots of people talking about this?" But, a few nice reviews aside, they weren't. A sign of ... what? How peculiar my tastes are? (Always a possibility.) How clueless the books press is? (My generally-preferred theory.) But maybe uptightness played a role too, because what the book is about is dancing and nudity. Really: it's a high-toned, refined, intellectual (though earthy) book about dancing and nudity -- one of the clearest, most level-headed and best-informed discussions about the connections between art and sex that I've ever run across. It's a study of the lives of four turn-of-the-century women (that's the 1800/1900 turn, youngsters) who danced the role of Salome in various productions, and who helped give birth to the striptease. What made them do it? What was it like for them? Why then and there? Fascinating stuff, and written about not only with brains and style but rare from-the-inside knowledge and insight. "Rare"? Well, if you look at most movie, theater or dance reviews, you'll notice that even the featured performers don't often get more than a sentence or two -- yet the performers are usually the real reason audiences go to shows. I've read entire biographies of performers that -- while often worthwhile on the lives and personalities of their subjects -- had virtually nothing to say about what made the performer an interesting one. Why should this be so? The answer, I'm convinced, is simple: because writing about performers and performance is hard. There aren't, and have never been, many people who do it well. A fair number of writers can do a decent job of evoking a performer or a performance; some, like Kenneth Tynan, do so beautifully. But being able to discuss the work of performers with the same kind of depth and respect that's often accorded painters and writers is a much rarer talent. The writers I'm aware of who can illuminate from the inside? Just a few: Steve Vineberg in Method Actors (here). Simon Callow in his biographies of Charles Laughton (here) and Orson Welles (here). Eileen Whitfield in her biography of Mary Pickford (here). And Toni Bentley. No surprise that one thing all these writers have in common is that they've been performers themselves. (Without having taken some acting classes, I'd be even less interesting on performers than I already am.) They know what the experience of performing feels like, as well as the kind of work, thought... posted by Michael at July 31, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, July 29, 2003


Free Reads -- Chris Bertram on Stewart Brand
Friedrich -- An excellent posting by Chis Bertram at Crooked Timber about Stewart Brand's essential book How Buildings Learn, here. Sample passage: Most basically the book is about adaptation and flexibility and the need to design in ways that permit change. Most architects build to a conception of a building’s purpose. But two things are likely to happen after a building gets built: people start to use it in ways that the architect didn’t predict (will the building help or hinder their preferred ways of working or living) or the building gets sold and used for some quite different purpose. As Brand puts it “All buildings are predictions. All buildings are wrong.” Link found thanks to David Sucher (here). Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 29, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, July 24, 2003


Free Reads -- Brian on Arts Subsidies
Friedrich -- One of the innumerable postings I haven't yet been able to pull myself together to write is on the theme of "Government arts funding ought to be cut off -- and not because I dislike the arts, but for the good of the arts." The NEA has done some very fine things and it's also sponsored some very bad art, but in my posting I focus on neither of these facts. What I dwell on instead is the bureaucratizing of the arts; the spawning and feeding of a huge arts-administrator class; the politicizing of art. Funny how it's all happened during the exact years that the NEA has been in existence, no? Let's pull that feeding tube, and enjoy watching that awful beast die. Part 2 of this unwritten posting would argue that lots of arts support is inevitably needed -- while the market is great, it's still hard to dispute that much terrific art doesn't do so well in the market. So let's have lots more private-sector arts support. I picture myself teasing Hollywood especially. Imagine the arts foundation that Eisner, Streisand, Spielberg and Geffen could put together. Why don't they stop bitching about what the government doesn't do and start sponsoring the kind of art they themselves approve of? Identity-centric performance art? Go wild, avant-gardists. Not only could no taxpayer complain, it'd act as an incentive for art-loving righties to pull together a competing arts foundation -- bring on the nautical watercolors and duck paintings! If Latina lesbians think their own art isn't getting enough support -- well, start your own damn foundation. May the NEA die, and may a thousand competing private arts foundations flourish, in other words. Brian Micklethwait's 'way ahead of me on all this, I'm pleased to report. You can read his pro-art arguments against government subsidies for the arts here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 24, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments




Free Reads -- Phillip De Vous on Portland
Friedrich -- Oh, it's a conundrum, isn't it? I mean, here I am, all in favor of strong property rights and more modest government. Yet here I am as well, a fan of two heavily-regulated cities, Portland and Santa Barbara. Too bad about all those drive-you-nuts rules -- yet they sure do have nice downtowns. Phillip De Vous at the Acton Institute warns that the New Urbanism is in danger of playing footsie with regulation-lovin' socialists. Why, just look at Portland! A few readers tell him to chill, and that Portland's a nice place. Sample De Vous passage: In recent years there has been no better example of the pernicious effects of the sustainable development and smart growth agendas than the city of Portland, Oregon. So bad are the effects of the smart-growth plan adopted by Portland, that in policy circles the term “Portlandization” has been coined as a shorthand reference for a set of policies that lead to increased housing costs, artificially inflated property values, lower rates of home ownership... Sample reader comment: I am having trouble understanding your objection to the Urban planning that has occured in Portland over the past few decades. You state that one problem has been the increased housing costs. I assume you are referring to the increased cost of housing in the city and areas within the land use regulation district around Portland. It seems to me that this could also be looked at as a positive development. Resolvable or not? You can read the article here. Link thanks to John Ray, here. The Acton Institute's publication Markets & Morality also features some other pieces on the New Urbanism here and here. Best, Michael UPDATE: J.W. of Forager23 reports from Burlington, here.... posted by Michael at July 24, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, July 22, 2003


East Meets West
Michael: Ever since you quoted from Alistair Shearer's The Hindu Vision: Forms of the Formless (in your posting Hindu Art which can be read here), I’ve been chewing over the contrast that Mr. Shearer draws between Indian and Western sculpture. Is Indian sculpture really so completely opposed to the Western sculptural tradition? I even made an hour-long trek from the wilderness of the western San Fernando Valley where I live to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to visit their collection of Indian sculpture so I could check out the evidence “in the flesh.” My conclusion after this visit is that while these two sculptural traditions obviously derive their content from different cultures, religions, etc., I would assert they are both governed by the same formal logic. In other words, good Indian sculpture is good for the same reasons as good Western sculpture. Sculpture is, of course, about images that actually occupy real three-dimensional space. Historically, sculpture comes in two main varieties: carved (usually from stone or wood) or modeled (usually in a soft substance which is eventually replaced with metal). As Michelangelo put it, there is sculpture that comes about from “taking away” and sculpture that comes about from “adding on.” Old Mike was in no doubt that the “taking away” variety was the dominant form. While this is a value judgment that we don’t have to follow, it derives from a logical view of how the two different traditions engage space and treat human flesh. Spatially, carved stone sculpture has to work inside the limits of the un-carved stone mass. Traditionally, this has set up a dialogue between the carved image and the shape of the block it was carved from. Why? The essence of a stone sculpture is the conversion of flesh-and-bone into stone. Thus the transience of human flesh is dignified with the weight and permanency of stone. But this sense of transubstantiation can only work if a sense of the original stone block survives in the final sculpture. This sense of "stoniness" is more or less the same thing as being aware, if only dimly, of the material has been removed to make the image. This awareness of the removed material creates a sort of charged space around carved sculpture--or, at least, in those carved sculptures that communicate a feeling for the size and shape of their original blocks. Sculpture as Boulder: Front & Side Views of a Ganeesha Sculpture These sculptures of the Hindu god Ganeesha above illustrate how a carved sculptural image, designed as a series of rectangular masses, can preserve the mental qualities of stone—mass, weight, permanence. Of course, many design elements are the result of the specifically Indian religious tradition. The basic symmetry and frontality of the image are intended to suggest the eternal being of divinity, while the slight deviations from symmetry (the trunk held to one side, the different postures of the feet, etc.) suggest life. The decorative treatment of the back plane suggests its symbolic nature as... posted by Friedrich at July 22, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Cars or People?
Friedrich -- For whose benefit are suburbs built -- people? Or their cars? Lisa Rein and Robin Shulman report in the July 19 Washington Post that Americans continue to buy more cars per family, creating ever-more-challenging design problems, and causing ever more changes in the way suburbs look. Sample passage: Having so many cars has changed the aesthetics of how people live. Builders say they now must design two-car-garage homes at a minimum -- though three is often preferred -- and allow for wider driveways for all those vehicles. "The real demand is around four parking spaces. Or five," said John Regan, executive vice president for the Christopher Cos., a leading developer of high-end homes. "There's a lot of frustrated Fairfax County people who bought homes and can't park [at] them." The additional concrete comes at a price: fewer trees and less grass. "You have a lot more impervious space," Regan acknowledged. "Instead of it being a garden, you have two concrete pads." The piece doesn't seem to be available online for free, alas. Best, Michael UPDATE: Felix, a more resourceful researcher than I am, found the piece online. It can be read here.... posted by Michael at July 22, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, July 18, 2003


Paul Johnson on art
Friedrich -- I know you're as much of a fan of the British historian Paul Johnson as I am. What has he been up to recently, you may wonder? Writing a history of art. Yippee! I feel safe in predicting that the book will be A) a blast to read and look at, and B) anything but a po-mo jargonfest. Can't wait to get my hands on it, in fact. Its American publication date is October, which means it should be available in early-to-mid September. The publisher compares the book to Gombrich, and describes it as a comprehensive history of art that covers everything from rock painting up the present. I seem to remember that Johnson himself is a serious watercolorist and art fanatic, so I wouldn't be surprised if the art-crit part of the book is as good as the history-telling will no doubt be. I'm also betting that the view he delivers of art history won't be the standard one, to say the least. I'm especially curious to see how he treats the 20th century -- a little birdy has already told me that Warhol gets not much more than one sentence in the book. You can read a bit more about Johnson's book and even have the fun of pre-ordering it here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 18, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, July 14, 2003


What I Did on my Summer Vacation
Michael: As you know, sometimes it takes a while to get your film developed and show people what you did on vacation. Well, the same is true of me; I took a while to take pictures of some of the sketches I made on my recent Hawaiian vacation. So what did I and my lovely wife do with ourselves for the week (in the absence of our three dearly beloved but quite purposefully left behind children?) Well, I got up early and went walking along the shore watching the sun come up over the rocks… My wife, who is much more energetic than I, spent time playing tennis near the beach (this is the court; I was going to put some players in but I had a few too many tropical drinks and decided to leave well enough alone)… We lolled around watching the ocean (while drinking, of course) under the trees… And I stole a floral arrangement from the hotel and spent an afternoon working in the room (while still, of course, drinking), as my appetite for painting under the mid-day sun had waned somewhat. Hope this is no more boring than looking at photographs of somebody else’s vacation. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at July 14, 2003 | perma-link | (13) comments





Saturday, July 12, 2003


Hindu Art
Friedrich -- Ommmmmmmmm I've stumbled across an excellent book on Indian art, Alistair Shearer's The Hindu Vision: Forms of the Formless (buyable here). Well-illustrated and well-produced; terrific on the effects and the principles of Indian art; inexpensive, compact and snappily written. Altogether a treat. But I admit that if I'm enthralled it's partly because, as you know, I'm indulging in a little Hindu phase of my own. I've gotten intrigued by the meta-religion/philosophy known as Vedanta specifically, and have been curious about how to synch up what I'm reading with Indian visual art, about which I know nothing but which I've always loved. I'm seldom art-happier than I am when I'm nosing through the Indian rooms at the Metropolitan Museum. Part of why Vedanta has me hooked is that it discusses -- easily, forthrightly, modestly -- an awful lot of what's on my mind day-to-day but which I've always had trouble finding words for. (Let alone listeners tolerant and patient enough to put up with my fumblings.) Listening to, or reading, the Vedanta crowd? Goll-lee, these people must really be onto something -- such is my (probably primitive and laughable) response. This book's author, Alistair Shearer, also has the knack for making discussable what's usually deemed impossible even to name. As far as I can tell, it's a necessary skill if you're going to make any kind of verbal sense out of Indian art. What a book. Well, I'm enchanted, in any case, as well as learning much. So why not pass along some nice passages? Here's hoping I'm within my Fair Use rights. ... The role of the artist in this vast scheme of things is thus not to redraw the parameters of possibility in perception or expression, or to criticize the inherited tradition or society, but rather to create those time-honoured forms which reiterate, glorify and perpetuate the Cosmic Law that upholds all life ... ... The Sanskrit term used to describe creation and the journey of the soul is lila, 'the divine play,' using the word in both its joyful and its dramatic senses. In truth, the universe is nothing more or less than the Divine playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with itself ... ... [in the Hindu world] cultural life serves to bridge the gap between the relatively gross level of mankind, restricted within boundaries of time, space and causation, and the transcendent Divine, which is unbounded and eternally free ... ... Aesthetically, we in the West are the heirs of the European Renaissance and a Classical standard of beauty based squarely on the human figure ... However idealized the canon of beauty set by the Greeks may have been, it belonged squarely to the world of flesh and blood, faithfully recording the taut sinews of a daylight, human reality. Hindu art, by contrast, is in no way anthropocentric. It celebrates not the perfectibility of man, but the already perfect realms of the gods; it eschews the clear certainties of daylight reality and floats in... posted by Michael at July 12, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments




Free Reads -- Emily Eakin on Christopher Alexander
Friedrich -- Dept. of Wonders Never Cease: The New York Times, showing a little respect (if grudging) for Christopher Alexander -- who'd a thunk it? Emily Eakin meets with the great man and casts a very wary eye on what he's been up to, here. Sample passage: "Architecture is a very strange field," Mr. Alexander said over lunch here in the medieval town not far from West Dean Gardens where he grew up and has lately been spending much of his time. "It's almost as though they've induced a mass psychosis in society by introducing a point of view that has no common sense and no bearing on any deeper feeling." Credit where credit's due: at least they've taken note. I wonder how someone slipped this piece past Herbert Muschamp. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 12, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, July 11, 2003


Free Reads -- The Man Who Made the Interstates
Friedrich -- David Sucher (here) spotted a US News and World Report special package on building and architecture here. I found this piece by David Lagesse (here) especially interesting. It's about Frank Turner, the engineer who guided the construction of the US interstate system, which is coming to final completion next year. Hard to underestimate the impact of this project, set off in 1956 by Dwight Eisenhower. Sample passage: Safety and efficiency were the guiding principles, says Frank Griggs, a transportation engineer who also worked on the New York State Thruway. "The engineers were trained in getting people from point A to point B in the cheapest, fastest, and safest manner." Cheap often meant through wetlands, only later recognized as valuable, or through slums, bulldozed before residents could organize. "We didn't realize that poor people might not want to move--even if we thought it was for their own good," Griggs says. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 11, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, July 8, 2003


El Grullo
Friedrich -- I've noticed something, I'm wondering how to explain it, and I'm hoping you've got some ideas. What I've noticed is that people are more open-minded and adventurous where some art forms are concerned than others. Where music's concerned, for instance, it seems that almost everyone is comfortable with the idea that there are many different musics: western-art, rock, folk, rap, jazz, the infinite number of different "world" musics ... You may prefer one or the other, and you have have secret feelings about the innate superiority of the ones you prefer. But I'm deliberately dodging lots of important aesthetic/critical arguments here to focus on my main point, which is: almost no one, as far as I can tell, would argue that any of these "aren't music." You'd be laughed out of the room if you tried to. People seem supercomfy interacting with music as they see fit. You may (or may not) think that Pierre Boulez is the greatest living musical genius -- but, hey, that one Shakira song is silly but also pretty sexy, and that collection of Handel arias makes life seem a little sadder but richer. There's nothing like soukous when you want to dance a little, or Mahalia Jackson when your spirits need lifting, or Townes van Zandt when you want to wallow in the blues, or Barry White to put you and your sweetie in the mood. Many people are even familiar with the pleasures of sincere insincerity. I know serious people who adore -- I assume in a semi-camp way -- Britney, and as far as I know there are still downtown cool cats who dig lounge music. We all seem to know that we left school long ago, that we don't have to spend our lives aspiring to appreciate only the greats, and that it's up to us to pick and choose. As I say, we just go ahead and put it together for ourselves where music is concerned. We've got the confidence to do this; anyone who claimed that one, and only one, kind of music is "really music" and the rest of it "isn't music" would be dismissed as a superpriss. Yet we put up with exactly that kind of outlook where some of the other arts are concerned. Books I've blabbed about before and will no doubt return to in the future. (Comes from spending years following the biz.) People often seem to think that writing that appears in books is automatically more weighty than writing that appears elsewhere, and that some books -- by mere virtue of the kind of book they are -- are automatically more important ("more worthy of serious consideration") than other books. Often very bright people let themselves get blinded by the idea of the "real book" vs. all those books that apparently aren't real books, let alone all the other reading and writing in the world. How about the multitude of ways in which we actually interact with reading and writing? Nope,... posted by Michael at July 8, 2003 | perma-link | (15) comments





Monday, July 7, 2003


Rethinking "Kitsch"
Michael: As I was glancing through the July-August issue of The American Scientist I came across an interesting article on “The Value of Positive Emotions” by Barbara L. Fredrickson, director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Michigan. She points out that the study of negative emotions—anger, fear, sadness—has far outstripped the study of the positive emotions—joy, contentment, gratitude and love. Her explanation of the difference in attention struck me as having “cultural” implications far beyond the sociology of science: The study of optimism and positive emotions was seen by some as a frivolous pursuit. However, she summarizes the benefits that recent research has shown to accrue to positive emotions. Some are medical: Back in the 1930s some young Catholic nuns were asked to write short, personal essays about their lives…More than 60 years later the nuns’ writings surfaced again when three psychologists at the University of Kentucky reviewed the essays as part of a larger study on aging and Alzheimer’s disease…What [the researchers] found was remarkable: The nuns who expressed the most positive emotions lived up to 10 years longer than those who expressed the fewest. This gain in life expectancy is considerably larger than the gain achieved by those who quit smoking. The nun case study is not an isolated case. Several other scientists have found that people who feel good live longer. Some benefits are cognitive: Two decades of experiments of Alice Isen of Cornell University and her colleagues have shown that people experiencing positive affect (feelings) think differently. One series of experiments [involved] such tests as Mednick’s Remote Associates Test, which asks people to think of a word that relates to each of three other worlds. So, for example, given the words mower, atomic and foreign, [a] correct answer is power…Isen and colleagues showed that people experiencing positive affect [i.e., happiness] perform better on this test than people in neutral states. In other experiments, Isen and colleagues tested the clinical reasoning of practicing physicians…physicans who felt good were faster to integrate case information and less likely to become anchored on initial thoughts or come to premature closure in their diagnosis. In yet another experiment, Isen and colleagues showed that negotiators induced to feel good were more likely to discover integrative solutions in a complex bargaining task. Overall, 20 years of experiments by Isen and her colleagues show that when people feel good, their thinking becomes more creative, integrative, flexible and open to information. Finally, some of the benefits are social: Isen demonstrated people who experience positive emotions become more helpful to others. Naturally, being a Blowhard, my thoughts turned to the topic of happiness and positive emotion in art. Scanning quickly through my mental databanks of contemporary high culture for examples of positive emotion, I drew a blank. Granted, there is a fair amount of jokey art, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. There are bushel baskets full of art loaded with a rather smirky self-satisfaction at how much... posted by Friedrich at July 7, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Friday, July 4, 2003


More on Libeskind
Friedrich -- Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen to design what's to be constructed at the WTC site, has written some peculiar poetry, and has never built a skyscraper. Deroy Murdock at National Review Online has details as well as some more interesting information here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 4, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, July 2, 2003


New Traditionalist Art
Friedrich -- You -- and anyone else who's interested in the phenomenon of tradition re-asserting itself in the arts -- might be interested in this transcript from a Think Tank show (here), hosted by Ben Wattenberg. It's a one-time-over-lightly treatment, a little odd in the way it mixes up the kind of art a critic like Jed Perl champions with flat-out traditionalist stuff, and you do have to kick your reading brain into that state it needs to be in when you're reading a transcript instead of really-written prose. But, that said, it's a good intro to some of the movement's big names and bright lights. The academic/avant-garde/mediaworld crowd spits on these people, by the way. No surprise there. Given their bile, it's satisfying to read these artists' reasons for working the way they do. It isn't out of ignorance or stupidity. They just like it better than doing avant-garde art. Here's the composer Stefania de Kenessy, for example: As a child I grew up knowing so-called avant-garde or so-called 20th century music as much as I did 18th, 19th or 16th century musics. So for me the idea of having dissonant music at my fingertips was nothing new. And I always loved beautiful music more than I loved the dissonant, harsh stuff. Direct, intelligent, and why not? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 2, 2003 | perma-link | (0)
Warner Brothers Cartoons and the Business of Art
Michael: Have you ever considered how peculiar a phenomenon the artistic quality of Warner Brothers’ cartoons of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s was? I was just reading Hugh Kenner's book, "Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings," and got to wondering what this data point means for theories about the business of art. First, whatever artistic quality was produced was not as the result of any conscious intent on the part of Warner Brothers. By the early 1940s the studio owned 17,000 movie-houses in 7,500 cities, which gave them a total of 10,500,000 possible paying seats. They needed a stream of product to fill those seats. This included a new cartoon every couple of weeks because their customers expected to see them. Apparently, nobody in the corporate hierarchy of the Warner’s empire cared a hoot about animation as long as the cartoons showed up on time—an attitude quite different from the micro-management Jack Warner and his brothers applied to their feature films. Warner’s thinking regarding these cartoons was purely economic, as they were, effectively, a cost center. Originally these cartoons apparently ran around 7 minutes, as Mr. Kenner explains: At 420 seconds, that's 10,080 frames, or 5,040 drawings when we shoot each of them twice. A lot of drawings. Even at starvation wages, a lot of money: say $30,000 per Looney Tune: say three-quarters of a million bucks annually, plus change...Cartoons being trivial, something seemed out of balance. Seven minutes per product: might [patrons] stand for less? It turned out they'd regard five minutes as short weight. The compromise was six; six minutes plus or minus a grotesquely specified two-thirds of a second. A consequence of these unbelievably precise time limits coupled with the notorious cheapness of the Warner corporate machine was a higher degree of pre-planning than was practiced at any of the other cartoon shops in Hollywood. At Disney, for example, the practice was to shoot animated footage at the length of its internal logic and then edit things down to meet the running time of a cartoon. Penny-pinching Warner executives, however, regarded drawing, inking, and shooting frames as a waste of money, which meant everything had to be laid out, in advance, to an unbelievably exacting tolerance. The need to lay out the action with such precision seems to have focused the directors’ attention to a far more mechanical notion of timing than would have happened otherwise. Chuck Jones, for example, arrived at an interval of precisely 14 frames between the time Wiley Cayote disappeared from sight in his vertiginous falls and the time a puff of dust suggested he had hit the ground. He had to repeatedly tell his animators that it wasn’t funny at either 13 or 15 frames—it had to be 14. Presumably because the design of these precision machines became so essential to their success, the director became the total boss of the projects, as Mr. Kenner describes: That system was firmly in place by 1944...By 1947 the three directors were Isadore (Friz) Freleng,... posted by Friedrich at July 2, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Tuesday, July 1, 2003


Brian on Bridget
Friedrich -- Brian Micklethwait does some mischievous writing here. Hard to summarize exactly what he's up to, but he manages to fisk an art critic, puzzle over the abstract painter Bridget Riley, and do some thinking about paintings and computer screens, and somehow make it all hang together. Well, maybe almost hang together. But that's part of the posting's charm. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 1, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, June 23, 2003


The Evo-Bio of Impressionism, Part I
Michael: In many posts since we started this blog we’ve predicted that evo-bio would begin to impact how we view our own culture. In a series of posts I’d like to offer a small demonstration of how that might work by discussing the way in which changing relations between the sexes in the 19th century affected Impressionist art. The French Revolution, in addition to ushering in nearly a century of political turmoil in France, also ushered in a quieter—but perhaps more humanly significant—shift. Starting in the 1790s, French women were the first in the world to deliberately and significantly limit their national birthrate via contraception—and not as a passing response to war, famine, pestilence, etc., but as a permanent part of a new reproductive order. From 1790 to 1850 the average number of children born to French women fell from approximately 5 to 3.5. The fact this shift occurred is unquestionable; the reasons for it are still debated vigorously. It wasn’t, for example, because of dramatic reductions in infant mortality: those only came as a result of Pasteur’s “microbe revolution” of the 1870s. Other public health changes may have played a role in reducing the perceived need for spare children, such as the gradual lengthening of the average French lifespan during the 18th century—from a truly horrific 25 years in 1700 (life in Louis XIV’s France was nasty, brutish and short) to 35 years in 1800 (still several years less of the average British or American lifespan.) Political conditions undoubtedly played a role. After the Terror and during the Napoleonic Empire, French society's treatment of sex underwent a “libertarian” interlude; both divorce and prostitution were legalized, while the influence of the Church was greatly reduced. The net result may have been to provide loose enough social conditions to permit the knowledge of contraception to spread and for women to begin to rebel against traditional value systems that relegated them to roles as baby factories. J. L. David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817 Economic factors also seem to have played a role. France grew economically at only half the rate of Great Britain at the start of the 19th century, and even slower relative to Germany or the U.S. at the century’s end. Without limitations on fertility, living standards for the French middle and upper classes might well have fallen in absolute terms. This may explain why the trend towards restricted fertility seems to have originated within the bourgeoisie. Economic incentives certainly encouraged the spread of contraception among the peasantry. France was a largely agrarian country with no tradition of primogeniture, and there was a need to reduce number of children born in the countryside so as to prevent farms from being splintered by inheritance, thus causing whole families to slide out of the landowning class. Economic factors also explain why the haute bourgeoisie and wealthy aristocrats were “holdouts” from the trend to restricted fertility; apparently plentiful children became a form of conspicuous consumption for the rich. It also explains the continued... posted by Friedrich at June 23, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Saturday, June 21, 2003


Prisoner's Dilemma: Inmate Art
Michael: A story in the L.A. Times of June 21, “Inmate Artists Won’t Be Brushed Off,” discusses the effects of cutbacks caused by California’s state budget crisis on an inmate arts program at the maximum security state prison in Lancaster. The focus of the story (which you can read here) is on the effects of continued funding cuts—first the program lost its paid civilian teachers, and now may shut down entirely for lack of dough to pay for art supplies—but along the way it also provides an interesting glimpse into the mindset of artists under relatively unique circumstances. Two inmate artists are discussed: Mitch Smiley and Cole Bienek. Both are in for second-degree murder; Mr. Bienek has been in prison for 15 years. Both are painters. Mr. Smiley focuses on figurative subjects, most recently on images derived from Orthodox Christian icons. Mr. Bienek is partial to landscape painting on the lines of the California Impressionists. M. Smiley at work Now these are only two men, not any kind of representative sample of the population, and I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that neither has a great deal of education. Nonetheless, they are both living out what would be for most of us a thought experiment: if locked up in prison, what kind of art would one choose to make? Mr. Bienek’s and Mr. Smiley’s choices are therefore intriguing to me. I notice that they are not spending time making abstract paintings or Duschampian ready-mades or conceptual art or any of the dominant modes of 20th century art. Mr. Bienek is trying to make representations of a nature he cannot currently experience and Mr. Smiley is trying to make representations of what, one assumes, is his form of ultimate reality. As Mr. Smiley explains: When you're painting, you're not here...You're in your own world, you know? I know very little about prison art; I wonder what choices other artists in this situation have made. Perhaps more to the point, what kind of art would you choose to make in this situation—and why? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 21, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, June 20, 2003


California, Religion and Art
Friedrich -- Every time I come to California, it happens. A few days pass, and my stern, Northeast mental wranglings start to relent. I give up grim resolutions. Why not sniff the beautiful eucalyptus-and-sea-salt air instead? Why not sip some chilled white wine and watch the waves break? If all else fails, there’s always the hot tub. No wonder so many Californians walk around wearing an expression of inane, self-pleased untroubledness. I’m wearing it myself, and I’ve only been here a week. As my mind gets driftier and more relaxed, it also starts to muse -- or Muse, with a capital M. I start to think what strike me as Big Thoughts. I think about religion. It’s not as though I don’t think about religion when I’m back home, although I do it in a scrappy, off-and-on way. I meditate; I drag my sorry butt to the occasional tai chi class; I’ve attended a handful of Zen and Tibetan Buddhist classes and lectures. (A tip to single guys: an amazing number of the women who are attracted to Tibetan Buddhism are really good lookin’.) I’ve dragged The Wife to services at a couple of the more beautiful NYC churches and cathedrals, although largely in the spirit of an architecture buff and an amateur anthropologist. Do any religions speak to you? I can get fascinated, for a short while anyway, by almost any of them: the various Christiainities and Jewishnesses and paganisms and animisms and Native Americanisms, etc. The mythologies are interesting, it’s fascinating to watch different cultures wrestle with the Big Questions, etc. But it’s an intellectual/esthetic fascination for me, because none of them resonate -- certainly not the smalltown Presbyterianism I was raised in. And the idea of buying into their doctrines and creeds? All due respect to people’s religious preferences, but I’d as soon choose to believe in a Marvel comic book. Miracles? Virgin births? Coyote spirits? Puh-leeze. Then I visit California, and every time, I get intrigued all over again by the Eastern philosophy/religions: Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism. They speak to me. When I read about them and explore them, I’m not just intellectually fascinated, but moved and hypnotized; I feel like I’m in private conversation with someone who knows exactly what concerns me on the deepest levels, and who has sifted and sorted these questions out far better than I ever will. These religion/philosophies seem full of good sense, and also seem based in certain experiences that I recognize as fundamental. I can never find my footing with, say, Christianity or Judaism; what seems to concern them most urgently are questions I respect but have little feeling for. With the Eastern philosophy/religions, I feel right at home. I also find it appealing, or at least convenient, that the gods and mythologies these Eastern approaches peddle seem optional -- I once saw Buddhism described as “religion for atheists.” Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism -- I’m happy bouncing from one to the other, which is apparently yet another demonstration... posted by Michael at June 20, 2003 | perma-link | (19) comments





Saturday, June 14, 2003


Some Half-Baked Notions I Couldn't Figure Out How to Fit in Other Postings
Friedrich -- * American pop culture is like junk food. Here and there, some of it's fun and good. Here and there, some of it's really terrific. But most of it's lousy, and should be avoided. (The young, the poor and the hurried? Why not? But the rest of us?) Do you have any problem with this notion? I don't. * Part of what some Americans envy about Euro-cultures is that they have stable, well-defined fine-arts traditions. England and France, for instance, have secure, largely unquestioned art traditions. Art values are prized, a literary culture is taken for granted, artistic forms and cultural institutions are in firmly in place. Americans who move overseas rave about the food, the cities, the art, the buildings, the "quality of life" ... * Many of these things, we American simply don't have. Instead, we zigzag back and forth between an aggressive, dynamic commercial-arts world and a self-righteous, ever-in-fear-for-its-very-life fine-arts world. There never seems to be an halfway stable resting place where you can catch your breath. And isn't the art thing partly about finding a center? We so seldom seem to be able to. This can be exhausting, annoying and boring. We get frantic, we feel we're missing the point of life. * We seem to be at one of those awful moments when the fine-art and the commercial-art worlds have almost nothing to do with each other -- when things between them have gotten downright antagonistic, in fact. Too bad. Some of the great eras in American art -- the late 1800s, the '20s and '30s, the '60s-'70s -- happened when a real, eager conversation fired up between masscult and elite cult. * But maybe I'm silly to be dismayed by this. Digital technology seems to be bringing a lot of the old barriers down. Perhaps in a couple of decades it'll have long been forgotten that there ever was such a divide. Will that become its own problem? I kind of like the divide. I just wish more genial, respectful and helpful exchanges were taking place back and forth. * The American commercial-art world is often amazingly proficient and impressively dynamic. It's also, or so many people find, scarily aggressive. Its values, it seems to me, are basically the values of money, technology and business, with even sex and art put at the service of them. Plus, if you're a creative person making a living there, the chances that you'll ever be able to do much of your own thing are pretty slim. You'll be putting your talent and energy to work selling business values instead. * Our fine-arts world -- feeling itself to be under siege and carrying on histrionically -- is 'way overprone to get caught up in anti-capitalist protest politics, as well as 'way overprone to make absurd claims for what art can do for a person. It's a hysterical pretentiousness that's self-defeating. Finally, all it accomplishes is to make even more Americans turn against the fine arts. *... posted by Michael at June 14, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments





Friday, June 13, 2003


Ripped From the Pages of Friedrich's Sketchbooks...
Michael: This little doodle dates from the era when my girls were young enough that I had both Barbie dolls and little wooden train cars lying around when I went looking for something to draw. Technically, this is mildly interesting because there’s no linear under-drawing involved; it was all done with overlapping patches of acrylic paint, in which an original shape could be corrected only by changing the shapes around it. I remember it more for it's rather sinister mood: I remember that as I was painting away, it started dawning on me that that Barbie, in contrast to the straightforward, four-square train car, was a bit of a schemer. As is fairly obvious from the background it was painted at night; I guess somehow a certain late night cynicism worked its way into the painting. Sorry, Barbie. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at June 13, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, June 12, 2003


The Frame Around the Picture
Friedrich -- The Wife and I caught a couple of movies the other night, one right after the other. First we saw L'Auberge Espagnole, then we walked over to Finding Nemo. An interesting contrast. "L'Auberge Espagnole" does a good job of updating and purveying French post-grad charm -- cafes, airports, affairs, heartbreak, and larky absurdity, with a good helping of ideas (about multiculturalism, "Europe," sex and computers) in there spicing the lot of it up. Very French, yet very of-this-moment too. I seem to remember reading that the film was shot in a semi-improv style on digi-cams. The editing has been souped up here and there with computer tricks: with multiple windows, with the screen treated as a desktop, with quicked-up motion, etc. A perfectly fine, novel-like, lightweight-but-touching Euro-art film, if 20 minutes too long. "Finding Nemo"? Well... Pixar does a good, meticulous job, but as I've got almost no taste for this kind of thing I don't have much to say. Had an OK time, I guess, even if the film didn't click along as confidently as the "Toy Story" movies did. Impressive, sometimes beautiful. I give it three "Whoa"s. But I couldn't have cared less, to tell you the truth, despite the fact that it was a much more complete digital experience than the French movie was: computer animation, of course, plus we went out of our way to see the movie digitally projected -- thrown up on screen by the Texas Instruments DLP system, while a phenomenal sound system was showing off its stuff. An ideal viewing environment for a computer-animated film, in other words: a clear, detailed, hyper-controlled total sensorium. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. But what the evening left me thinking about most was "immersiveness." (Prodded and guided by some of our blog's visitors, I've been dabbling -- ineptly, hesitantly -- with a couple of computer games, Nanosaur and Doom, and they've got me thinking about the topic of immersiveness too.) How immersive is a movie or other art experience? How immersive do you want it to be? Is immersiveness always a good thing? To cut directly to my own preferences: I don't crave immersiveness, at least not in the literal sense -- and the literal sense (as in physically larger, more "realistic," with everything made more impressive and explicit) seems to be what people mean when they talk about immersiveness. I sometimes wonder if I'm a freak and an exception. While I certainly appreciate a well-projected film, once the projection-quality has hit the acceptable level, my brain is on to questions about subject and style instead. And I confess that I'm surprised by how many people seem to crave immersive experiences. I suppose what most of them are saying is that they love the feeling of being imaginatively transported, and simply want more such. But there seems to be a sizable number of people who want more than that; they seem to want to be made to feel like they're in the action, in the most... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (14) comments




Everything You Wanted to Know About Design
Michael: When researching Carl Rungius for my posting on his retrospective, I came across this rather snappy animated introduction to design principles that uses his paintings as illustrations. You don’t have to be in love with Carl Rungius to enjoy this little tutorial. Check it out here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, June 10, 2003


Free Reads -- Postwar architecture
Friedrich -- Two terrific finds, both of which I ran across thanks to David Sucher's superb new blog, City Comforts, here. Roger Scruton and Sophie Jeffreys argue that "The Future is Classical," here. Fabulous stuff, clearer and brainier than which it would be hard to be, and well worth a look no matter what your feelings about classicism. Sample passage: The critical orthodoxy that established modernism in architecture takes its inspiration from impressionist painting, symbolist poetry, and atonal music – in other words, from artistic movements addressed to an elite. The modern architect was likened to the modern painter – dedicated to re-shaping the language of his art, so as to explore new regions of the human psyche and new possibilities of expression. Aesthetic freedom and experiment were held to be, in architecture as in the other arts, the pre-conditions of authentic utterance. Classical architecture was therefore seen in the same light as figurative painting and tonal music: the last gasp of a culture from which the life had fled. The fact that the classical tradition is popular, functional, and pleasing to the eye did not deter the modernists: on the contrary, this was simply the final proof that classicism was kitsch. And one of the best uses of a blog I've ever run across: using Portland as his example, Michael Totten tells -- and shows! -- you almost everything you need to know about American cities and buildings since World War II here. If the permalink doesn't take you directly to the posting, do a search on "modernism." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments




Guest Posting -- John Leavitt on art students
Friedrich -- John Leavitt, a student at the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, dropped us an email that included some nifty observations about life at art school. I asked if we could run an excerpt, and he's given us his OK. As a current art student at a not-so-bad state-arts trade school, I can say with arrogant confidence that the bulk of fine art students are out of their frigging minds. Drug-addled and insular, a whole system of classes and teachers support and indulge their whims and fancies without any grounding in technical or economic reality. You'd think they'd teach about the gallery system, how to land a show, or how to make slides for presentation. I'm a refugee from the Fine Arts dept. myself, who settled in the much more stable and levelheaded Illustration dept. The courses there at least give the students a grounding in reality (draftsmanship, painting, how to copy a photograph or paint features), in addition to teaching how to get a job. They don't teach concepts or composition though, so the result is many a technically wonderful but dead senior show -- an award-winning photorealistic painting of a brick wall sums it up nicely. In my experience, the Fine Art students are incoherent, insular, and ignorant even about modern art. The illustration students are, as a whole, more realistic about their careers, more technically skilled, and less attitude-driven. I do lament a kind of "Illustration-guy" template I see walking down the street, or in every autobiographical indie comic. A flannel-wearing, lanky, insecure guy with thick glasses and an interest in Japanese prints and 1900 recordings. But I digress. Graphic designers, on the other hand, have always seemed more snot-nosed than illustrators, and hostile toward anything done by hand. Of course, that could just be my own prejudices talking. But I don't like the modern computer-ready aesthetic and think that graphic design is just a subcategory of illustration, unworthy of its own field. The endless minutiae of graphic design theory seems to support this -- no place to go but into the fractal esoteric. And, as a type, the graphic designer seems like a wormy bald man with big earphones and a Gnostic attitude. An extension of the digitizing trend to turn all gross matter into pure light? An offshoot of the puritan-minimalist movement, white walls to shut out sensuality? There you have it, the 3 types of artists I meet in art school. Our thanks to John Leavitt. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Critical Standards
Dear Michael: After our own Blowhardy examination of the Louis and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cinncinnati (which you can read here), I found it particularly amusing, and instructional, to examine Paul Goldberger’s take on this building and on Frank Gehry’s recently opened Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. (Mr. Goldberger’s essay, “Artistic License,” appears in The New Yorker of June 2) It will not come as a surprise to you that Mr. Goldberger gives both of these buildings big sloppy wet kisses of adoration. What is surprising is that he admits to having had a spasm of (understandable) doubt about the Rosenthal Center at the drawing stage: Hadid’s first designs, which were shown in 1998, were conceptually heavy and were difficult to understand except as a series of fragmented, disconnected masses floating in space. Z. Hadid, Design for Rosenthal Center, 1998 However, the redoubtable Mr. Goldberger triumphantly overcomes this shameful “O ye of little faith” moment and finds the final result a triumph: From the outside, the building looks like a mixture of concrete and black aluminum boxes that float over a glass-enclosed base…This is a virtuouso composition, in which the masses hover in graceful counterpoint to one another. Golly, the final building sounds as if it is…well…exactly what Mr. Goldberger thought the plans suggested: a series of fragmented, disconnected masses floating in space. It kind of makes you wonder what set of aesthetic or practical criteria a critic is using when his criticisms and his praise arise from exactly the same phenomena. Z. Hadid, Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003 Moreover, I must admit to a difficulty in conceptualizing how large concrete and metal boxes can be said to “float” or “hover.” One wonders how the notion of “floating” or “hovering” masses squares with the old Modernist notion of (1) truth to materials and (2) having the design of the building express its structural reality. And yet, in a manner that only a master-critic such as Mr. Goldberger can observe, this squaring must have taken place, as he places Ms. Hadid squarely in that venerable tradition: Hadid is expanding the notions of interpenetrating space and geometric composition that have preoccupied modernist architects for more than a hundred years. In any event, he makes it clear that petty caviling about the building simply won’t be tolerated, at least around the New Yorker: The Contemporary Arts Center ought to stifle doubts about Zaha Hadid’s work being either buildable or workable. This has been built, and it works. (For some reason, this sentence reminds me of an old 1950s TV series, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon; at the end of every episode, with the villain safely behind bars, Sgt. Preston would turn to his trusty canine companion and, while literally shutting the RMP version of an attaché case, remark: “Wolf, this case is closed!” ) F. Gehry, 2003, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College Then Mr. Goldberger turns... posted by Friedrich at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, June 5, 2003


Torn from the Pages of Friedrich's Sketchbooks
Michael: Again, as I threatened, I’m sharing some of the contents of my sketchbooks. Both of my examples today are copies after paintings. I make such a copy from a desire to explore the visual logic of an artist—how does he or she produce their signature effects? I suspect some part of my brain thinks it knows and wants to test its hypothesis, although my “normal” consciousness hasn’t a clue (as usual). So I get a sketchbook and start drawing, and see what comes out. The first sketch is after “The Felicity of the Regency” by Peter Paul Rubens. The original is with the rest of Rubens’ Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre, which I’m sorry to say, is not where I made this drawing. I believe Ingres as he led his pupils through the halls of the museum forced them to shade their eyes so they wouldn’t see these paintings, claiming that Rubens couldn’t draw, which Ingres must have known was nonsense, and that he was “a butcher” which I suspect is much closer to the truth—for Ingres, anyway. In any event, I made this as a pencil drawing and went over it with acrylic paints, because I was investigating how Rubens modeled his heroic nudes, which are both incredibly three dimensional and full of muscular energy (not bad for patches of paint on a 375-year-old-canvas.) Moreover, I had noticed that despite creating terrific heroic nudes in one painting after another—figures that in anybody else’s paintings would have hogged the limelight and turned everything else into mere background—Rubens somehow integrated these figures into the rest of the image so that you looked at the whole canvas. What I discovered is that Rubens used his modeling, and particular his highlights, to create linear webs all over the canvas that channel the eye to and fro, around and down, loop the loop. I first noticed this when I realized that his highlights weren’t isolated little puddles of paint, but either physically or by extension connected to each other, pulling your attention along with them. In short, there’s more than a little Jackson Pollock in Rubens (or possibly vice versa, considering their dates.) The second copy is after “Pregnant Girl” by Lucian Freud, a somewhat more contemporary effort (1960-1). Again, I had been very struck by the plasticity of Freud’s modeling, and surprised myself by reaching for a colored pencil to make a copy (remember about my conscious mind not having a clue. Oh, heck, just assume I never have a clue.) What I discovered is that Freud’s modeling is a sort of jigsaw-puzzle affair, in which rather than blending his various color-tones into each other, he uses them to make quite distinct shapes on the canvas…think of picking up a brush loaded with a yellowish skin tone and drawing a triangle, then using a brush with a grayish tone to create a long, narrow patch, then mixing some pinkish paint to create a lozenge-shaped area, etc. It’s very much drawing... posted by Friedrich at June 5, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, June 3, 2003


Rungius, Hunting and the Roots of Art
Michael: I’ve written a couple postings on the topic of the “primitive” issues that lurk underneath our modern notions of aesthetics. I didn’t expect to visit this topic again but I ran smack into it in the art of Carl Rungius. I caught an exhibit of his work—the largest ever assembled—at the Gene Autry Museum. (I should note that the show was organized as a traveling exhibition by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, which contributed the lion’s share of the paintings.) I’d heard vaguely of Rungius (pronounced “Rungus”) before. When I was in art school, I got very interested in drawing animals at zoos, and spent some time learning about wildlife art. My impression of Rungius was as an animal painter from the era—the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th –when not-quite-Modern artists were still trying to blend academic drawing with Impressionist color. In other words, Rungius was a rough contemporary of the California Impressionists, Joaquin Sorolla and John Singer Sargent, who just happened to paint animals in the woods. Rungius, along with the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors, also seemed to form a link in a chain between the Barbizon animal painters of the mid-19th century and 20th century American wildlife artists like Bob Kuhn and Robert Bateman. As far as it went, this was correct. But that understated the truth by a lot. Carl Rungius—who was born in Germany and educated in Berlin—actually single handedly transplanted the very German tradition of Jagdmalerei (the representation of hunting scenes and game animals) to America. And, because at this very moment hunters (including Teddy Roosevelt) were creating the modern notion of conservation, Rungius also invented modern American wildlife painting, albeit more or less by accident. But I don’t want to focus on the social role of Rungius’ art in this post. Rather, I want to focus on a disturbing quality in his art that I first noticed in this drawing: C. Rungius, Skinned Feline, 1893 The label next to this drawing politely informed me that Rungius had hunted stray cats in order to obtain specimens for these anatomical studies. (Apparently there was some family background in taxidermy.) I could understand the passion of an animal artist to learn anatomy by dissection—not an ambition for the faint of heart, but fairly common since the Renaissance—but I have to admit the idea of deliberately stalking domestic cats struck me as a trifle outré. I took a closer look into his biography, and discovered that it wasn’t the artistic opportunities of America that lured this German artist to America—it was the opportunity for hunting big game! According to Dr. Karen Wonders in her essay, “Big Game Hunting and the Birth of Wildlife Art” in the show catalogue: By the end of the nineteenth century, hunting in Germany, for the average citizen, was an activity carefully controlled by local authorities who granted access to the land and by scientists responsible for managing the state forests and game animals. For an... posted by Friedrich at June 3, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments





Monday, June 2, 2003


Outsider Art--Watts Towers
Michael: Being the worst tourist in the world, after twenty years in Southern California I finally made my first visit to Watts Towers. I went along as a chauffeur for my daughter, who was bribed by her art teacher to attend a ceremony honoring high school art students who were the winners of an “expressionistic portrait” contest. (My daughter seemed rather relieved that her own expressionistic portrait, which she found a bit embarassing, hadn’t been selected for the contest.) The ceremony was held at the Watts Towers Art Center, a building right next door to the Towers themselves. The student art on display at the Center demonstrated to my satisfaction that (1) there are many talented young artists out there and (2) expressionism is not a mode of art making that I would recommend to the young. It’s hard to invest distortion with meaning when there isn’t a context of “standard” representation to play off of, and most of these kids are not yet sufficient masters of mimesis to provide this context. Likewise, the notion of having adolescents make art out of anguish is like throwing gasoline on fires—the outcome is rather too predictable for the creation of great art. I suspect trying to get giddy and tormented adolescents to create art in a classical vein would produce more interesting final results, as it would involve a far bigger imaginative stretch for teenagers. S. Rodia, Watts Towers (Nuestro Pueblo), 1921-54 While I was there, of course, I had to go check out the famous towers, which are just as surreal and yet oddly serene as reproductions would suggest. As I’m sure everyone has heard, they were the creations of Simon Rodia, who in 1921, at the age of 42, decided to leave a legacy of himself to the world and built his own quasi-architectural sculptures on a lot next door to his suburban house for the next 33 years. A construction worker and apparently the only Italian living in Watts (at the time not yet an African American community), Rodia began to build his unique sculptures out of rebar and concrete, decorated with glass bottles, sea shells, and various objects his highly irritated neighbors routinely threw at him. The structures grew and overlapped so that that the final result includes more than just towers; rather touchingly his “Nuestro Pueblo” includes walkways and seating areas for a social life that apparently eluded the solitary Rodia. In short, the creation of a true original, a folk artist, a nut-job, an “outsider,” despised by all of his right-thinking, upwardly mobile neighbors. But wait, he ultimately won that battle, didn’t he? His art is world famous, a scene of pilgrimage. Well, not exactly. Local politicians and community leaders have clearly clasped Mr. Rodia’s creation to their bosoms, but one suspects that their interest in his art is rather more superficial than Mr. Rodia would have preferred. The community has memorialized the site by surrounding it with a huge metal fence, knocking down other homes... posted by Friedrich at June 2, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Sunday, June 1, 2003


Manny Farber
Friedrich -- I know you read Manny Farber's film criticism back in our movie-nut college days, but I forget whether or not you were a fanatical Farber-head. Did his writing speak to you much? Has it stayed with you? (Isn't it funny, by the way, to remember how important a half a dozen film critics seemed not just to film buffs but to the culture more generally in those days? Unimaginable today.) If I remember right, during our years in college Farber was making a hard-to-explain turn. He'd become known in the '50s and '60s for championing little, masculine B-movies -- guy-stuff, often directed by people like Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel. But in the mid-'70s, his interests were turning to hardcore art movies, Straub and Huillet, Akerman, Herzog... My mind's on Manny Farber today because I noticed that a show of his paintings is going to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's La Jolla location in September. Have you ever paid attention to Farber's paintings? I like them even better than I like his criticism, which I like plenty. Manny Farber: "Story of the Eye" But it's fun to think about his criticism too. It's all in that one book, a collection of essays and reviews that's been published several times, each time with a few new pieces added. (It's best known as "Negative Space," though it was once published, if I remember right, as "Manny Farber on Movies." His more recent essays and reviews were co-written with his wife, the painter Patricia Patterson.) I suspect I've stayed in closer touch with the battier reaches of the filmbuff world than you have since college, and it's been interesting to take note of how immensely much Farber's writing means to a certain class of film geek. I love Farber's writing and brain. But for some film geeks, his criticism isn't simply what I take it to be -- the journal of a brilliant crackpot, full of bizarrely wonderful perceptions about the visual and rhythmic qualities of movies. It means a whole lot more than that to them. Which isn't to say I'm not a fan. Farber can go off on speedy jags that make your head buzz, and make you think you're seeing movies in a whole new way. His writing is, as far as I'm concerned, about the excitement of getting off on your own intellect -- it's an intellectual-on-a-roll high: all mental/visual crackle. He's freewheeling in a west-coast way. People I know who took his classes and attended his lectures remember how intuitive they were. He didn't do anything systematic, let alone pedantic; instead, he made one nutty, provocative connection after another. He was famous among buffs for not studying movies as whole entities, but for making comparisons between bits of them -- drawing a line between a shot in Herzog and some lighting in an American crime movie, for instance. He was famous as well for letting a passage run unsually long --... posted by Michael at June 1, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, May 30, 2003


Yet More Blowhard "Art"
Friedrich -- I'm feelin' the power now! M. Blowhard: Thinking about Vaporware (2003) M. Blowhard: Jazz in St. Tropez (19whenever) Stop me before I post again. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 30, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments




More Blowhard "Art"
Friedrich -- OK, you and Felicity have shamed me into it. Herewith a couple of Michael Blowhard doodlings. Both, fyi, done not in traditional media but in the computer using Painter, a software package that specializes in mimicking natural media. No muss, no fuss, no annoying the spouse with spills and smells. M. Blowhard: Beat Buddies (1999) M. Blowhard: Mr. Intensity (1998) Blush, shucks, etc. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at May 30, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Art Forms vs. Genre Forms
Friedrich -- America and the arts. American art. America vs. the arts. The arts vs. America ... Hmm. The usual arts thing is to bemoan America. We don't really care about the arts. We're too damn materialistic and money-driven. The media crap up everything they touch. Why aren't we more like Europe? Etc., etc. Perhaps because I've lived in the arty/media part of the country for the last couple of decades (and thus am more fed up with it than I am with America per se), I have a different primary gripe. Mine is that the American arts (arts people and arts fans) make too damn much out of all this. There's too much breastbeating and not nearly enough art. Too much self-righteousness, too much politics, too much puffing up. And all of it unhealthy for the arts, I'm convinced. It's a mistake to consider the arts as anything near as urgent as such issues as curing cancer, providing healthy drinking water, or relieving poverty. When the importance of the arts is oversold, people will tend to turn on them. A little perspective would help, not hurt, the arts in this country. Such is my perhaps idiot conviction, anyway. But other questions arise too. Basic stuff: Why does this self-inflation happen? Where does it come from? It's neurotic, it's tedious, and it saps the arts themselves of energy and time. Yet it's also neverending. The fraught relationship between America and the arts is, and has long been, one of the major themes of American art. And as a consequence, the American arts often turn in circles. Art crumbles. Art fights the system. Art has to reinvent itself once again. Art is self-righteously self-important; art is bizarrely gloomy. Art in America is always convinced that it's fighting for its very existence. Am I alone in thinking, "Sheesh, enough with the manic-depressive mood swings. A little less heat and a little more light, please"? I think this kind of reaction helps explain why arty Americans sometimes look enviously to Europe, where countries have genuine and un-embattled fine-art traditions -- ongoing literary forms, ongoing paint-on-canvas forms, ongoing art-music forms. Arty Europeans can take so much more for granted than arty Amerians can, and partly as a consequence get to immerse themselves in the arts in ways we seldom can. Sigh. And then it's back to the usual America vs. the arts cycle, only this time with envy-of-Europe mixed in. We're so damn earnest. For one thing, we're forever making the mistake of taking Euro ways of thinking about the arts (deconstruction, structuralism, existentialism) far too seriously. During my brief time in France a hundred years ago, one of the few things I came to understand was that the French don't take the carryings-on of intellectuals nearly as seriously as Americans like to imagine they do. Sure, on the one hand, strange creatures known as "intellectuals" really do roam the French countryside. But on the other: what they say isn't taken as gospel, or... posted by Michael at May 30, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments




Building Blocks
Michael: I didn’t eat breakfast today; I was too busy with the building blocks. The blocks in question belong, of course, to my son, who assumes (at the age of 2) that the only purpose of other people’s block structures is to provide him with an opportunity to play Godzilla. However, he slept in this morning (ha! you snooze, you lose) prompting his father to furiously assemble a miniature Greek temple structure. This, of course, raises two questions (entirely ignoring issues of my sanity or maturity): (1) why is playing with blocks fun? and (2) what accounts for the enduring appeal of the classical architectural style? I would offer that these two questions are very closely related. The appeal of playing with blocks is that they form a modular design system, a flexible yet predictable vocabulary of thought. The same, I would suggest, is true of the elements of classical architecture. Both building blocks and classical architecture are essentially visual languages, and have the central appeal of languages—to wit: they allow us to compose private thoughts in a code that enables these thoughts to be read by strangers. F. Geary, Guggenheim Museum, Balboa And this strongly suggests the difficulties of using architectural styles that are based on a design logic that does not derive from an underlying set of commonly understood formal modules (i.e., building blocks.) Something interesting can come out of such designs, but they will lack the obvious intent to speak comprehensibly to strangers that is implicit in classical architecture. Such designs reject open discourse in favor of private poetry, a stance which may be provocative or may be hostile, but in either case is somewhat antisocial. Or so it strikes me as I rush to put my block structure in place. Incidently, I left half the roof off because (1) it shows my deeply considered three dimensional design, and (2) because my son has hidden the blocks necessary to finish the roof. Dang. I guess I’ll have to buy him another set (heh, heh.) Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at May 30, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, May 29, 2003


Ripped from the pages of Friedrich’s sketchbooks…
Michael: The other day, I was glancing at my collection of sketchbooks from the past 15 years or so. As best as I can tell, sketchbooks have two main uses: for professional artists, a collection of visual motifs they can steal for their paintings or other finished work; for amateurs with day jobs—like me—they become a sort of visual journal. When you go back and look at them later, you can remember the whole complex of thoughts and feelings that went into each drawing and sometimes see patterns that you weren’t aware of at the time. Anyway, looking at this patient heap of paper sitting on a shelf (I have about one sketchbook per year for this period), I thought: I know, I’ll save all this effort from utter oblivion by posting some of the sketches. (There’s gotta be some advantages to being a Blowhard, after all.) This first effort dates from the first half of the 1990s, and started out when I was looking for something to draw one Sunday afternoon. At the time, my two girls were preschoolers and they kept a pretty good collection of stuffed animals lying around. I picked up three samples and made a little composition on the sofa in front of our TV, and started noodling away. This is one of those drawings that pretty much drew itself, technically speaking; by which I mean that when I look at it closely I notice that it’s neither a strict line drawing or a strict tonal drawing, but a hybrid effort that combines both techniques in a kind of logic that I’ve probably never used before or since. The best I can do to describe it is to say that the tone is used locally to tunnel cracks and crevasses into the picture plane, but not according to any strict light-and-shadow schema. While I had no realization of it at the time, the three stuffed animals clearly represent my older brother, my younger sister and I watching television as children some 40 years ago. My sister is the cute, attention-getting tiger; my brother is the large, self-satisfied and mischievous rabbit. I am, of course, the teddy bear, reticent in the corner and not even trying to catch the eye of the viewer. In short, the picture is a joke-y but caustic view of my situation as a middle child. (I have often found unexpected currents of what I can only describe as political satire when I make still-lives from the toys and games of children.) You must have a few drawings stashed away yourself. Don’t hold back: we Blowhards are notorious exhibitionists. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at May 29, 2003 | perma-link | (17) comments





Wednesday, May 28, 2003


The Arts Litany Redux
Friedrich von Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Your recent posting, The Arts Litany, got me to thinking of two individuals I knew as teachers. Both were lifetime participants in the art world. One was Emerson Woelffer, a painter and a maker of Dada collages; the other I'll call Painter X. I knew both these men as teachers of life drawing. I ran into Emerson Wolfer at art school in the early 1980s, and encountered Painter X at a university extension course in the late 1980s. Both have now passed away: Emerson Woelffer only a few months ago, and Painter X nearly a decade ago. Emerson, who appeared to be in his 70s at the time I knew him, was very relaxed and low key kind of guy. Despite his personal adherence to High Modernist art-making approaches (in his own work at the time, he was tearing up colored paper and let pieces fall at random on another sheet, gluing them down where they fell), he was pretty much a traditionalist regarding life drawing. He expected a likeness, and would encourage you to work at getting one. He himself, if his stories were accurate, had received a pretty traditional art education at the Art Institute of Chicago many years before; and he clearly thought that the "up-to-date" curriculum of my art school, in which students were rotated (rapidly) through classes in color, sculpture, photography, video production, art theory, etc., etc., was far too fragmented. His own art education had apparently consisted of three hours of life drawing in charcoal every morning, and three hours of figure painting in oils every afternoon, producing five drawings and one painting per week, week after week, year after year. As he admitted, when he was a student (in the 1930s?) the only safe way to make a good living at fine art was to paint portraits, and you had to be able to render very professionally to pull that off. Perhaps it was the natural conservatism of age, but Emerson seemed to get a kick out of telling us stories of his days at Black Mountain College where Willem de Kooning had shocked his students (who were expecting an initiation into wild man action painting) by making them create the most meticulous kind of still-life drawings in his class. E. Woelffer, Rush Street, 1951 Whatever mischief Emerson could get up to, however (which I suspect in his youth was considerable), he was very gentlemanly and polite to everyone, and absolutely didn't ram his ideas down your throat; he simply offered his observations and let you accept them or not. And he seemed to have relatively little ego about his own work; when he discussed his own career -- which had been quite successful, placing pictures in many, many museum collections around the country -- he did so only to give us novices some slight clue as to how one builds a career so that it might last decades, and not months. (Remember, at the time,... posted by Friedrich at May 28, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, May 26, 2003


Artchat Survival Guide -- "Postmodernism"
Friedrich -- Disagreements in the arts can be a source of humor and enlightenment. Misunderstandings generate little but wasted energy and busted friendships. If you're talking about art in the anthropological sense and your bud is talking about art in the high-art sense, and you never manage to uncross those signals, one of you is likely to wind up sore and furious. And the fun of gabbing about the arts won't have been had. The victim of innumerable artchat broken noses and skinned knees myself, I find that these days -- older and cannier, or maybe just numb and exhausted -- I can make it through most art conversations unscathed, and occasionally even get a little something out of them. Immensely pleased with myself, I occasionally put on my humanitarian hat -- or my pompous one, I can never be sure -- and try to pass along a few of the rules of thumb that help me get by. In previous postings (paid attention to by no one, but which I had a good time composing), I've presented my Artchat Survival Guide to the word "art" (here), and to the idea of "greatness" (here). Today: Postmodernism. First, a preemptive admission. This isn't an attempt at aesthetic philosophy, or at contributing to a for-the-ages dictionary. It's simply a presentation of one broken-down old coot's ideas, observations and definitions -- what I hope is a workable, rule-of-thumb-y guide to the various uses of the word "postmodernism." A partychat guide. A cafechat guide. You find some of this useful? Great! You don't? Well, why not pass along a few tips of your own? Why is it that the word "postmodernism" can be so damn annoying? Overuse, mostly. But I suspect it's also because it's often used at cross purposes with itself. For starters, I'm going to suggest viewing "postmodernism" as having four primary meanings. It goes without saying that it's always a good idea to ask yourself which one is being used. *Postmodernism as a condition. This is postmodernism as a fact of life -- a label to put to the kinds of lives many people lead these days. Globalization, increased migration, and new developments in technology mean that many of us are regularly dealing with different cultures, different times zones, different media. We're juggling different realities. An example: You might be eating some Chinese food while surfing a porn website devoted to interracial sex (and made in who knows which country) while talking on your cell phone to a friend who's on a sailboat off Australia. Things seem to overlap, collapse, interpenetrate, and dissolve. Your own focus seems to flit around and through things at the speed of light. *Postmodernism as an attitude. On the one hand, David Letterman, hosting a talk show while putting quote marks around what he's doing at the same time: "I'm a smart guy doing a dumb thing, and I know it, and don't you forget it." (Not a generous interpretation of his show, but then again... posted by Michael at May 26, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Friday, May 23, 2003


Doodles & Their Uses
Michael: Do you doodle when you’re on the phone? I do, especially when I’m on an important business call. This may seem goofy, but I do it for two reasons. One is to avoid talking out of nervousness (a bad habit of mine and a definite obstacle in being a tough negotiator) and to provide me with some insight into my feelings about how the call went after the fact. I usually find that my subconscious is busy giving me a message via the doodle, and one I usually often find fairly easy to interpret. Here is a sample from a call I was on yesterday. To understand it, you need to have some background. We had been working with a business ally on developing one of our projects. I thought both parties had a pretty good understanding of what benefits each of us would be getting from the project, as well as our responsibilities, and that we were both on board with that. In the past few days, however, I received some pieces of information that suggested that our deal was not quite as “done” as I had thought. Wanting to clarify this issue, as we are counting on this guy to do handle some significant aspects of the project, I gave him a call. We had a long and fairly amiable conversation during which he was working hard to convince me that he was still on the same page. I cranked out this doodle in ballpoint pen and whiteout (some of my favorite art supplies) during the conversation, drawing at random out of my head. After the conversation ended, apparently in total accord, I looked down at the doodle and thought, now what’s the title of this little effort? The answer came back immediately: “And There Was a Crooked Man.” F. Von Blowhard, And There Was a Crooked Man, 2003 About an hour later one of my employees came in to tell me that he had just gotten off the phone with this same guy, and that the guy confessed after a bit of hemming and hawing that he wasn’t really happy with the deal as structured. I replied to my employee: “Ah, I knew that.” It may not lead to great art, but doodling can certainly be a management tool. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at May 23, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, May 22, 2003


The Arts Litany
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I'm just back in the city after a few days visiting Western New York, my old stomping grounds. Back to blogging! Many thanks for being such a blogging he-man while I was gone. My visit was refreshing and renewing. Shhh -- Western New York is a beautiful part of the country, in a modest, storybook-endearing kind of way. For one thing, once you drive out of the Catskills, you exit the NYC orbit, always a delight. For another, well: the Finger Lakes. Apple orchards and other flowering trees. Real live small towns. Vineyards and cornfields. An utter lack of style and self-consciousness. Seneca Lake: Small-town America really does exist The ever-collapsing economy, the rotten weather, and the really lousy cooking can be a little off-putting, granted. But the place is still blissfully wonderful, at least in my eyes, and will always be home for me. "It's, it's, it's, well, it's like Middle Earth, and it's full of hairy-toed eccentrics, and I'm a Hobbit returning to his cave," I blurted to the Wife at one point. "That's what it's like!" And it's true. Western New York is a little like Middle Earth. The Wife sweetly pretended to see my point. On the way back to the city, we stopped in Ithaca for lunch. Have you ever visited? An amazingly pretty hill-and-water academic town at the south end of Cayuga Lake, like a small San Francisco, full of old houses, beautiful churches and proudly repurposed commercial buildings. (I'll pass lightly over the really awful more recent buildings.) Culture, too -- bookstores, clubs, concerts, foreign movies. The biggest downside to life in most of Western New York is what at other moments can be its sweet upside: the pleasant boringness of it all. (I came to the big city not out of dislike for the small Republican town where I grew up but in order to have easier access to the kinds of art-and-ideas things that get my motor going.) And then there's Ithaca -- everything that's great about Western New York, plus culture. Unfortunately, plus much else too: tie dyes, white kids with dreadlocks, older balding guys with ponytails, local "characters" on bicycles, brown rice, scary postgrad hangers-on -- a little too much Berkeley, in other words. The Wife and I looked at each other at one point and rolled our eyes. "Good Christ," I said. "Just for the sake of a little culture, you don't have to buy the whole package, do you?" Ithaca: Spot the white kid's dreadlocks This is part of what annoys me about America and the arts -- the way they come so encrusted with superstitions, styles, and beliefs, so many of them boring and unattractive. I like the arts, when it really comes down to it, because they're sexy. They can be a turn-on; they can touch my emotions; they can get my senses buzzing and my head spinning. And the basic appeal for me of living an arts life... posted by Michael at May 22, 2003 | perma-link | (35) comments




Postcards from L.A.
Michael: I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 22 years now, and while the man-made environment can often be described (in my father’s phrase) as “pretty miscellaneous,” the natural environment has always struck me as God’s country. To keep my feelings about the local landscape from being completely buried under the detritus of everyday life, I thought I might make some “picture postcard views” of it from time to time for this ‘blog. My View When Picking My Daughter Up from Middle School My Route to the Beach Looking forward to your views of Manhattan. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at May 22, 2003 | perma-link | (23) comments





Monday, May 19, 2003


Test, this is only a test
Michael: I was just trying to figure out if our blog mechanics had figured out how to let us create thumbnails yet. Evidently they haven't, which is why the following picture is so big. C. Oldenburg, Soft Light Switches, 1963-9 (Anyway, as you and our loyal readers have long since figured out, I only blog in order to illustrate, so I don't really mind putting up oversize pictures.) The above "soft" sculpture by Claes Oldenburg (the inventor of the genre and all-round King of Pop Art) was auctioned off on May 14 for a record price of $574,500. While that's good news for Claes, it also turns out to be good news for the creditors of none other than corporate bad-guy Enron. Yep, Enron was actually investing some of its ill-gotten loot in art, and made money on the deal too. So next time somebody criticizes the social utility of art, tell them that at least it makes a better investment than, say, electricity futures. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at May 19, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, May 15, 2003


Government Help for the Arts
Friedrich -- How to keep up an interest -- let alone some active participation -- in the arts once you're a grown-up? It's a puzzle, isn't it? The time constraints, the energy limitations ... It amazes me that the arts (especially the non-commercial arts) flourish at all. So far as I'm concerned, "how to find time for the arts" is one of the most important of all arts questions. I find it bizarre that it's so little discussed. Say you're a grownup arts nut. You've got a bit of a private life. You've got to make a living. (Trust-fund babies not welcome here.) The bills have to be paid, the laundry has to be done, home repairs have to be attended to, doctors have to be seen. There goes 90%, maybe 95%, of your time and energy. And who knows what you'll really feel like doing with that remaining 5%? Maybe you try to tackle the problem by getting a job in the arts: Combine the job with the passion! But you wake up to discover that you're support staff, getting paid to help people with family money or better connections look good. Perhaps you polish up your skills and go into commercial art -- design, copywriting, restaurants, clothing. Combine your moneymaking with your interest in the arts, this time as the creative one! But you wind up bitter from doing the bidding of sleazeballs, and the job pressures kill your pleasure in your abilities. (Why don't more graphics people spend free time doing their own fine-arts painting? Because they're burned-out at the end of the week, and need a break.) So you plug away at whatever half-assed job you've settled into, you attend to the friends and family and house and repairs and emergencies, and you dream fondly of those days in college when your hours were your own, when you could finish a book or two, and when you could see a foreign film and talk it over with friends afterwards ... You're a person with a fulltime job and an arts hobby, that's what you are. You read a bit, and you feel lucky to have one friend who you can swap a little email with about books. You take a writing or painting class every year or two. If you're musical and you have some discipline, you play with a local band or quartet. But weren't you once really serious about the arts? Jesus, how do other people manage? And, worse, you can't keep away an occasional nagging thought along the lines of: Sheesh, if I'd known my energies would be so totally consumed by making a living, I'd have ditched the arts long ago and gotten a sensible degree and entered a sensible profession and made some real money and then maybe I'd be able to take up watercolors once I retired. But you can't turn it all around now because it's too late, and because, well, you aren't really an arts hobbyist, you're an... posted by Michael at May 15, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments




Guest posting -- Andre Hattingh on Salingaros
Friedrich -- Lots of responses, via comments and email, to our interview with Nikos Salingaros -- lovely to see the interest and to take part in all the conversations. We'll soon do a followup interview with Prof. Salingaros. Meanwhile, I want to pass along one of the most eloquent responses, which came in as email from Andre Hattingh, writing from South Africa. Andre gave me permission to post it here on the blog: Many thanks for the interview with Prof. Salingaros. He and his interlocutors have articulated my own long-harboured misgivings about the evident lack and/or denial of human scale and/or interests which have pervaded the field for much of the past century. We have tolerated the risible aesthetics of a despotic illiteracy for far too long. The recent competition for a WTC twin towers replacement has made that all too clear: the finalists and commission winner only serving to underline the prevalent denial of the humane dimension. I was relieved to find at the tail end of the interview a reference to “ … some truths that religion has to offer are inevitable." Why is it that the 'R' word brings out, if the not the worst; then an all too often negative or skewed response in intellectually active people? Most of what we admire in and from the past was often prompted and inspired by the religions of their artisan creators. Nowhere more so than in the twin fields of art and architecture. (And this while these skills were still considered crafts as opposed to professions.) The current position of our civilization has grown out of and is rooted in that inspired foundation. Why, in hindsight, deny it? If, when searching for simple solutions to Life’s mysteries, you omit religion -- in arrogance or fear -- from the equation, the result, though overtly convincing, seldom satisfies that search. In its long and arduous struggle up from ignorance, humankind adapted to, first, an awareness of and then an acceptance that the five empirical senses are not capable of explaining the questions that cloud our limited view of the horizon, let alone the universe. For some time biological scientists, in particular, have sought to remove those clouds and expose the mysteries of life and the nature of all things to the bright light of knowledge as a concatenation of accidental principles. Yet the brighter the light and the thinner the clouds, the deeper the pervading mystery extends. These fundamentalist high priests [sic] of science, however, continue in their efforts to lay waste to humanity’s concept of any universal mystery; in its attempts to replace faith with a prosthetic and self-replicating fallacy: man is the measure all things … each unto his or her forgone conclusion. In, namely, what is not empirically explicit cannot therefore exist. Least of all a God, whatever any reactionary dissenter might conceive it, him or her to be. Q.E.D. Any society without religion or at least a faith in transcendence inevitably disintegrates into a morass of... posted by Michael at May 15, 2003 | perma-link | (23) comments





Tuesday, May 13, 2003


Our Evil Agenda
Maximum Leader Michael: I am writing to report on the recent incident in which a certain individual tried to alert the world to the vast danger posed by the writings on our website. Fortunately, it appears that so far he has merely claimed that we have a hidden political agenda, which he accuses us of trying to covertly put over on the architectural world. (His pitiful attempts to alert the Mandarins of Modernism, the Paladins of PoMo and the Dukes of Decon to the danger represented by 2blowhards can be read here, here and here.) Hah, if the pathetic fool only knew the full truth about our sinister plans! When your Supreme Maximalness gives the word, our minions will use our advanced mind control technology to brainwash university architecture faculty members and reprogram the editorial staff of every architectural magazine! I include a picture from a recent “test” of our mind control technology below, which, as you recall, was terrifically successful. Victim: Oooh, I feel so funny! Maximum Leader Michael: Remember, my dear, brick is the building material of the future! Once we have reduced all architectural authority figures to mere zombies like the young lady above, we will order them to plug our wildly reactionary philosophy, stressing that BRICK and only BRICK is the architectural material of the future. As a result the demand for brick will soar, and the value of our secret investments in the nation's brickyards will skyrocket, granting us vast riches! Bwah hah hah! While premature discovery of our plans could be fatal, I believe our cover story of being a harmless, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly culture blog will continue to disguise our fiendish plans. Yours in world domination, Evil Doktor Friedrich P.S. In groveling subservience to Your Supreme Maximum-osity, may I ask if you’re completely finished with our female brainwashing victim? (It’s only that I’ve been working so hard on our evil plans lately, and I feel the need of some relaxation.)... posted by Friedrich at May 13, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, May 7, 2003


A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part Five
2Blowhards is taking a break from the usual to devote a week to a conversation with the architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. This is Part Five, and the last installment in the series. Part One is here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. Part Four is here. Many thanks to Prof. Salingaros. PART FIVE of FIVE 2B: What makes you sure you're right and the orthodox architectural establishment is wrong? NS: I'm trained as a scientist. Incidentally, so is Christopher Alexander. And scientists are trained to discover facts about the universe. When we think we have discovered something and it is tested by scientific methods, as opposed to political methods, then we are absolutely secure in our convictions. We are aware of entire fields of civilization based on myths and superstitution. So we are ready to defend a scientifically-derived idea against millions of people, and certainly against other so-called established disciplines, because we know that ideas are selected, like in a Darwinian process. The scientific arena is a fierce and highly competitive arena in which ideas are selected by means of verification and reproduceability of results. All the scientists attack the ideas, but those that survive, that means they are verified by the scientific method. The method of selection of ideas in the architectural world is chiefly authority. Architects and architectural students believe something because it is given by a figure of authority. Scientists, on the other hand, believe something because it has been attacked by other scientists and it has survived. It has survived because you can do an experiment and test it, or because 60 other people have done the calculations and said, Yes, this is correct. That's totally different. After it has passed this process it goes into the textbooks and it becomes authority. 2B: You, Leon Krier and Christopher Alexander could be seen as thinking that you know better than people do themselves how they prefer to live. Who's to say they don't like living the way they're living right now? NS: It's true that Alexander, Krier, myself and our friends, who are a considerable number, we believe very strongly that we know what most people would prefer if those people were not brainwashed. Now, many people around the world have been brainwashed by these images and by their education. For the last 60 years or so our schools have been saying that modernist architecture is the future, and they have been propagating the propaganda of the modernists, linking modernist architecture with progress, with hygiene -- 2B: With beauty and glamor. NS: Sure. And with personal economic success, rational thinking -- also mathematically pure forms. All this is very positive stuff. They have made a very strong political linking between their kind of architecture and freedom, with emancipation from the tyranny of previous years. Of course, all this is phony. All these are lies. But they have made their way into our culture. We, on the other hand, claim to know what most people are... posted by Michael at May 7, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, May 6, 2003


A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part Four
2Blowhards is taking a break from the usual to devote a week to a conversation with the architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. This is Part Four of Five. Part One is here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. PART FOUR of FIVE 2B: I take it that as a scientist you've been helping Christopher Alexander make sure that his science is good. What's your own proudest contribution to this kind of approach? NS: Wait a minute. Alexander doesn't need my checking. Alexander is a scientist. My role is not to check his science. My role is to be a friend, and to edit the text and to bounce ideas off of. I will describe the role for posterity. (Laughs.) For the last 20 years, I've been working with Christopher Alexander on The Nature of Order (here). I realized early on that his book is going to be as important as "The Origin of Species" and the "Principia." I didn't want to mix myself up in it -- this is Christopher's baby. But I will help him with editing. So I would visit with him in Berkeley or England, or he would send me the manuscript. And I would go through it and edit it, and cut out redundancies, or suggest rewriting to get the thought across. Strictly editing. The next time I would get it back and it would be double the size! However, I would compare and I would feel that he had in fact followed my suggestions for deletions, but had also written brilliant new material. I kept pruning it in order to encourage him to develop his ideas, and we would have conversations about how to present his point of view in the best possible way. 2B: That must have been great fun. NS: Great fun. So Alexander did not need my checking in the science, he's every bit as good a scientist as I am. Now, for these 20 years I have been having my own ideas and jotting them down on yellow notepads. And when the dam overflowed I thought, Well, it's time to publish all this stuff -- ideas that I have gotten from my collaboration with Alexander that are different, because I'm a different person and think in a different way. I think it will be very complementary to Alexander and will certainly help. I'm saying different things in a different way but supporting exactly the same goal. 2B: I was most struck in your work by the way you'd worked out the question of scaling and hierarchy. NS: The number should not be taken as too exact. The important thing is the existence of hierarchy, not the number. Hierarchy is such a key feature in nature and the universe. It's so important, and it's another thing the modernists erased, both on the architectural scale and on the urban scale. And that has done much damage everywhere. Luxembourg's Heritage District shows hierarchies of scale; the new Arts Museum lacks them (Photo by... posted by Michael at May 6, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments





Monday, May 5, 2003


A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part Three
2Blowhards is taking a hiatus from the usual to devote a week to a conversation with the architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. This is Part Three. Part One is here. Part Two is here. PART THREE of FIVE 2B: From a practical point of view, some of the things you advocate don't seem very practical. No skyscrapers, for instance. NS: Well, no one has asked, "What is a skyscraper?" It's just a very large construction that requires the very latest technology to make it work. Let's look at other large constructions mankind has built -- say, a petrochemical plant. Now a petrochemical plant brings together things that necessarily interact, pieces of chemical processes and pipes, because they connect with each other to perform a technological and industrial task. And every piece of the petrochemical plant is there to interact with every other piece. Self-organization: Parts interacting with other parts 2B: The purpose provides the organization. NS: Right, it is self-organized. Not that things snap into place by themselves, but every piece is necessary because the pieces form part of a larger whole. Because of the nature of the petrochemical plant it has to be a huge thing. So human beings construct a petrochemical plant -- horizontally -- and it has a specific function. Now when you look at every complex structure in nature it's of that type. The pieces come together because they interact. And they stay together because they interact. And they form a large complex whole that does something. And the pieces are there because they contribute something to the larger emergent structure of the whole. 2B: Again, the purpose. NS: Right. And let me get to the modern skyscraper. What does it contain? It contains non-interacting parts. None of those parts are there because they need to interact with each other inside the skyscraper. Today's skyscrapers, like the defunct World Trade Center, contain people in non-interacting offices. They interact electronically with other people outside that building. There's absolutely no reason for all those people to be there together. It is the antithesis of the formation of a complex system. 2B: They're just a bunch of monads that have been stacked on top of each other. NS: It's called a heap -- a bunch of non-interacting nodes that are just pushed together. An enormous amount of advanced technology is required just to keep them geographically and geometrically together. But there's no reason for them to be together, and absolutely no reason for them to go up. A heap: Pushed-together, non-interacting parts 2B: What are the disadvantages of going up? NS: The disadvantage is that a skyscraper is like a tree with leaves -- what you see up top represents something even bigger down below. The skyscraper has to be fed. It exists as a concentration of nodes in the network -- the electricity, the sewage, the transport. So there's a concentration of nodes there, and when you concentrate nodes things become singular. Too many, and the thing becomes unmanageable.... posted by Michael at May 5, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, May 1, 2003


A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part Two
2Blowhards is taking a hiatus from the usual to devote a week to a conversation with the architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. This is Part Two. Part One is here. PART TWO of FIVE 2B: How do you and your wife live? NS: We live in a small European-size apartment, and endure continuous criticism from friends, acquaintances and colleagues because we so flagrantly violate the life-style of living in a suburban ranch-style house. While I was single, I did own a historic turn-of-the-century Southern Mansion on a vast lot, whose spaces and carved wood, and trees I enjoyed. But it is not for long-term use. 2B: Have you always been an arts buff? NS: I started out as an artist. I was a painter. In high school, I competed with professional painters. I had commissions -- I did portraits, and rather successfully. I had one-man shows. But because of my very early success, I got involved in the field, and I found it was a dog-eat-dog field and not a very good profession. So I decided to go into science instead, which seems to be much more stable as a profession. 2B: I know a lot of people who looked into the arts and found it too nutty a place to spend a lifetime there. NS: As far as getting into architecture, I met Christopher Alexander about 20 years ago. He asked me to help him on "The Nature of Order," which he was writing and re-writing. So I let him bounce ideas off me, and I helped with editing. This thing sort of took me over. After 15 years, it had completely taken over my life. What I had been doing was working to develop a thermonuclear fusion reactor to give cheap electricity for mankind. And now I had the thought, Well, what Christopher is doing is more important than this. An Alexander thought being thought; an Alexander building being built 2B: How did you and Christopher Alexander happen to meet? NS: I was in Berkeley to meet a mathematician friend, and I had read Christopher's books "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" and "A Pattern Language." I had even given a talk on "A Pattern Language" when I was visiting Greece. So I called the great man. His wife answered and said, "He cannot possibly meet you." And I said, "But I'm a physicist and a mathematician." And she said, "Well, hold on ... Can you come tomorrow and have coffee with him?" I went to meet him, and he said, "I'm glad you came. I have many things I want to discuss with you. With my fellow architects, it's like talking to a blank wall. I cannot get anything across, and can't get anything useful out of them. So I want to talk to someone like you." That's how our friendship got started. 2B: What kind of attention had you paid to architecture before becoming friends with Christopher Alexander? NS: When I was a graduate student I went... posted by Michael at May 1, 2003 | perma-link | (15) comments




A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part One
2Blowhards is taking a break from our usual format. If you've surfed through this blog before, you may have run across postings devoted to Professor Nikos Salingaros, the University of Texas mathematican who has become, in our opinion, one of the world's most interesting and provocative writers on architecture. (You can see previous postings about him here and here.) We were tickled a few months ago to hear from Prof. Salingaros himself, who got in touch to say that he enjoys our blog. Shameless opportunists that we are (at least at our best), we took advantage of the moment to ask him if he'd consent to be interviewed. To our delight he agreed, and starting today and continuing for the next four days, we're devoting our blog to this conversation. Dr. Salingaros, 51, was born in Perth, Australia. He grew up in Greece and the Bahamas, got degrees from the University of Miami and SUNY Stony Brook, and has been teaching at the University of Texas since 1983. He lives in San Antonio with his physician wife, Dr. Marielle Blum, and their two daughters. He painted professionally – portraits, landscapes -- as a young man, and is also an avid classical music buff. Twenty years ago he met the architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, best known for his books "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building." They became friends and colleagues. Dr. Salingaros has worked with Alexander since on the editing and shaping of Alexander's long-brewing, long-awaited "The Nature of Order," a four-volume work on art, science, nature and beauty. (Volume One, which should cause quite a commotion, will go on sale soon here and here.) Over the years, Dr. Salingaros found himself more and more preoccupied with architecture, building, living form, and the foolishness of modernism. About five years ago he began publishing his own papers on these topics. We Blowhards have been fans since we first ran across his work. His tiptop website is here. You say you aren't all that interested in architecture? Well, please read this q&a anyway. We can pretty much guarantee that -- agree with Salingaros or not -- it'll get your head buzzing about any number of art-related topics. In all earnestness, and just between you and us, this is a hideously embarrassing time to be involved in the arts. What a bunch of preening stick-in-the-muds, still devoted to carrying on as though it’s still 1970. The worlds of physics, biology, computer science and technology are abuzz with fresh and useful new thinking, yet the world of the arts circles round and round about the same damn topics, and then presents itself as though it's onto something new. The geo-political Iron Curtain may have come down over a decade ago, but the art worlds are still doing their best to keep their own versions of the Iron Curtain up and in good repair. They seem to love walling themselves in. (Why? One might wonder -- and we do.) But, despite all... posted by Michael at May 1, 2003 | perma-link | (26) comments





Saturday, April 26, 2003


Hot New Buildings
Friedrich -- What the heck, why not a change of pace? Here's news from the establishment (ie., avant-garde/big-media/prizewinning) architecture world about two of that world's hottest new buildings. Holl's MIT dormitory In Cambridge, MIT is winding up a 15-building, billion-dollar construction campaign with a heavy emphasis on innovation and "reinventing the student experience." The anodized-aluminum-covered dormitory Simmons Hall, by Steven Holl, is one of its showpieces. It cost $68 million, houses about 350 students, and opened last fall. It's a "vertical slice of a city," it has a "sponge" concept, and "porosity" is its theme. (Holl's firm presents the building here.) MIT's gigantic new-building program has been masterminded by the university's Dean of Architecture (interesting to learn that he's now moving over to head the school's department of Media Arts), who has this to say about what all this new work has in common: The consistent use of transparency throughout the area and the creation of prominent presentation spaces have made the work of the departments much more visible. All this has done a great deal to strengthen the sense of community and common purpose. Hadid's Cincinnati Arts Center The Baghdad-born, British-based deconstructivist star Zaha Hadid -- routinely referred to as a "visionary" -- is finishing up her first building in America, the $34 million Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. It opens on May 3rd. Here's a description from the Art and Culture Network: From the outside, the building looks like a wacky tower of variously sized boxes. The boxes fit together in a weighty collage that appears to hang precariously over the intersection below. The whole resembles an abstract piece of contemporary sculpture, a larger version of the works inside. Inside, this boxy jumble turns out to be made up of separate rooms meant to function specifically with different art pieces. The environment for each work complements the work itself. Here are some words of description, meant in praise, from the CAC's own director, as quoted by Jeffrey Stein in the Cincinnati Post:  "The entire ground floor is surrounded with very high 18- to 20-foot windows,'' Desmarais said. "There also is to be what Hadid is calling an `urban carpet' or molded concrete that begins outside the building as a sidewalk and then flows into the interior of the Rosenthal Center." The visual experience for visitors won't stop with the urban concrete carpet. Desmarais said: "Crisscrossing in front of you in the (large interior) space are gigantic staircases that seem to be suspended in space because they don't need any columns to hold them up. "The staircases are supported at each end by one floor to the next.'' Visual interest continues with the ceiling, Desmarais explained. "The ceiling isn't one flat space above you, but, in fact, it's several different levels." Desmarais said the center, while quite sturdy and safe, gives "this sense of not danger but a slight insecurity about the building. Here it is this big, heavy concrete building suspended on a fragile glass base. "It's a building... posted by Michael at April 26, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Friday, April 25, 2003


Architecture and Sex
Michael: Thanks for putting me onto Hugh Ferriss, the great architectural draftsman and illustrator. (Well, I guess I should say thanks, although you made me spend at least an hour last night when I should have been asleep scouring the web for images of Ferriss’ work.) Although I have a dim memory of an article in my childhood Encyclopedia Britannica on architectural draftsmanship by either Ferriss or one of his imitators, I was largely ignorant of the scope of his accomplishment—yes, I know, a sad admission for a Blowhard. Hugh Ferriss, High Priest of the New York Skyscraper Sex Cult Contemplating his images, my first reaction was the sheer Romance of Ferriss’s vision of New York. Adroitly managing plunging perspective lines, celestial illumination, and carefully parceled out detail, he manages to make New York skyscrapers look, well, pulsating with sex appeal. In his illustrations these buildings, real or imagined, look like altars to a particularly voluptuous primitive religion, bursting with blood and other bodily fluids. Thinking historically (which, to paraphrase J.M.W. Turner, is either my fault or my forte), the wild men of architectural drawing (Ferriss, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, G. B. Piranesi, Antonio Sant'Elia, etc.) all demonstrate the close link between architectural fantasies and sex fantasies. But only Piranesi seems to have been honest enough to admit that these fantasies have a masochistic quality to them, with the building becoming the ultimate dominating authority figure, the god or goddess we can only be overwhelmed by. C. N. Ledoux and G. B. Piranesi-- Wild Men of Architectural Illustration I have much the same reaction when I’m in real life Manhattan. I feel a mix of exhilaration wandering amid the superhuman shapes and oppression at being forced to scurry antlike through mazes of other people's architectural and economic power structures. I guess my ultimate reaction is to prefer such fantasies on paper or via aerial photography in movies or on TV rather than in reality—I found living in New York a bit like being trapped in somebody else’s wet dream. I guess that probably explains why I moved to suburban Los Angeles and why even there I go downtown as rarely as possible. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. Ladies, I just wanted you to know that Mr. Ferriss was not quite as exclusively wedded to masculine sexual metaphors as the above might make it seem: he was, on occasion at least, an equal opportunity fantasist:... posted by Friedrich at April 25, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Thursday, April 24, 2003


I don't know why I worry
Friedrich -- You're no doubt tired of hearing me complain about how the poohbahs of the architecture world refuse to engage in any critical discussion of such interesting recent developments as the New Urbanism and the New Classicism. And you're right: Why waste energy worrying about the silliness of the poohbahs? They're only choking off their own air passages anyway; all their uptightness accomplishes is to make establishment architecture seem ever more removed from common concerns. Meanwhile, the rest of us -- and god bless us -- seem to be as busy as ever getting on with life. Porphyrios's Grove Quadrangle at Oxford On which theme I did a little idle websurfing today, and in just a few minutes turned up the following: One article in USA Today ( ">here) discussing current efforts that some American cities, towns and neighborhoods are making to become more walkable. New Urbanists are being consulted. Another USA Today article ( ">here) about how many of the old '60s and '70s-era shopping malls are being converted into mini-urban developments along -- you guessed it -- New Urbanist lines. A piece ">here about how Princeton University has signed up the Greek-American-British New Classicist Demetri Porphyrios to build a $100 million new residential quad in collegiate-gothic style. The bulk of the money for the project is coming from Meg Whitman of Ebay, who loved the style when she was a student there, and who says she doesn't want the campus -- which has been cluttered up with a variety of loudly new buildings in recent decades -- to lose its identity. Porphyrios, by the way, is the author of a very good book about classical architecture, buyable here. A gallery of student work from the school of architecture at Notre Dame, here. Although nearly all of America's architecture schools remain modernist in outlook and approach, a few have gone a different route. One is the University of Miami, which has a New Urbanist flavor. Another is Notre Dame, which re-made itself about a decade ago into a traditional Beaux-Arts-style school of architecture, where students immerse themselves in the history of architecture, where they get familiar with traditional forms, and where they actually learn how to draw and render by hand. An article by Catesby Leigh ( ">here), the only American architecture critic to my knowledge to give this kind of work any actual critical consideration, about Leon Krier's Poundbury, a new village in Britain that's being constructed along traditional lines. Sneered at by modernist architects and critics for being Disneylandish, widely expected to prove an embarrassment and a failure, it has in fact turned out to be a spanking success where the houses sell at a premium. According to Leigh, "Tony Blair's New Labour government has directed local planning authorities to consider the village a pattern for environmentally sensible town planning." Could this really be the same Tony Blair who began his tenure as a great sponsor of Richard Rogers' flop-eroo Millenium Dome? Krier's Poundbury All this... posted by Michael at April 24, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments




Tacit Knowledge -- 30
Friedrich -- Much as you do, I enjoy taking note of the rules of thumb people in entertainment, the media and the arts work by. Why? Because they're the folk knowledge of these industries, and because they help people get oriented. I confess I also enjoy the existence of these rules of thumb partly because they confirm a conviction of mine: that art isn't and has never been a matter of free expression, that there are always rules (whether explicit or not) that people play by, and that without rules art play is impossible. In any case, I was thinking about a few such rules of thumb, and was struck by the fact that a few of them shared something in common -- they all concern people turning 30. Here they are. Pop music biz people say that many pop music fans start to lose interest in new pop music at about the age of 30. Book publishing people have told me that it's much easier to make readers in their 20s feel that they really, really have to read the latest hot literary novel than it is to make people over 30 feel any such thing. (The general hunch seems to be that people over 30 have realized that they're no longer in school, that they're free of reading assignments, and that they can now read to please themselves.) The final one comes from movie sound engineers, several of whom told me that it's at about the age of 30 that people start to find loud noises annoying. Younger people find loudness exciting; older people find loud noises downright painful. (In fact, the Dolbyizing of movie theaters is partly to blame for the low level of movie-theater attendance by older people, who just don't like exposing themselves to anything that loud.) Boys, I was also told, find loud noises more exciting than girls. But at about the age of 30, both sexes start to find loud noises annoying, and stop searching them out. I wonder what it is about the age of 30. Any thoughts? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 24, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments




Pic of the Day
Michael: Your posting on Art Deco led me, by some mental alchemy, to remember the architectural drawings of Antonio Sant’Elia. He was an immensely gifted young Italian, associated with Futurism, who cranked out a series of visionary architectural drawings before being killed in World War I at the age of 28. (I’m not aware of his having built anything, but a great many famous architects would be in the same boat if they too had died at 28.) His drawings are simply amazing. The implied tensions, dynamism and thrust are absolutely on a par with the most audacious abstract art. As architecture, however, they leave me with mixed feelings; I suspect I would react to some of his more flamboyant designs (if actually built) with a degree of horror. Several of his designs suggest a kind of 20th century, reinforced concrete version of the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle in the Wizard of Oz. (And they wouldn’t need flying monkeys to seem creepy.) So what does that make Sant’Elia—a proto Fascist? The world’s greatest set designer? (He’d get my vote.) A passionate young man who saw in industrial architecture a metaphor for his own boundless nervous energy? What would he have become had he lived? Would he have become more of a humanist? I don’t know, but it’s fun to speculate. What do you think? Some more of his efforts are in the small thumbnails below. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at April 24, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, April 23, 2003


Art Deco
Friedrich -- So I notice that there's a big Art Deco show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, here. And there's a lot of press about it, for example here, here, here, and here. Lots of perfectly good coverage. Nothing to get indignant and Blowhardish about, in other words. And I'm thinking: Art Deco! Swanky but populist. Sensual, glamorous, and a little absurd. Evening-out, romantic-date architecture and design ... But I can't do any better than that. Yet I'm eager to pitch in, so I'm searching for a connection. And I remember that, years ago, I took one of those architecture tours of Chicago. And it was really, really, proud-to-be-an-American great -- Chicago's buildings really are everything they're said to be. Most of them, anyway. I remember the thought crossing my mind, "You know, I'm with all of this, all these buildings, they're all so cool, they make my heart beat faster -- right up through Art Deco. And after that? Well, may it all crumble and disappear." In fact, I told the lady at the desk when the tour was over about my reaction, and she told me it wasn't an uncommon one. So, buildings ... Deco ... And I remember that one of my favorite New York buildings is 500 5th, a 1930 Deco charmer by the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates. Fun to walk by. Fun to see from a distance. I've never been inside, I've never talked to anyone who works there, I'm just talking eye candy. And there it is, right across the street from the NY Public Library, looking like a 3D incarnation of a fabulous Deco poster, or the backdrop of a Cary Grant movie. A cocktail dream of a cityscape, all by its lonesome. Everything good And now the brain is beginning to buzz. I've just watched a perfectly OK A&E documentary about the making of the Empire State Building, which was also designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. Amazing stuff. The building was built in two years -- two years! -- using all sorts of innovative techniques. It was proposed before the Depression and finished during the Depression, and it took decades -- decades! -- for it to begin making its investors a little money. For years (years!), the owners employed someone whose job it was to go to all the empty floors after dark and turn the lights on, to give the impression the mostly-empty building was full and busy. OK, it's not that I'm that fond of the Empire State Building in pure design terms. It kind of sits there, huge but dorky. But still, let's face it, this is the Empire State Building. And this Shreve, Lamb & Harmon firm that designed 500 5th as well as the Empire State -- wow, they must really have been something. So I'm looking into them and their work. I click around and poke into websites. And the bottom drops out. The firm does perfectly fine buildings... posted by Michael at April 23, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments




One of My Rave Faves
Michael: The New York Times of April 23 has a special section entitled “Museums.” Since museums are some of my favorite places (art, science, history, you name it, I like ‘em all) I eagerly scanned through the piece. While many of the ads and the stories seemed tantalizing to my museum-junky brain, the most intriguing was the ad for—of all places—the Cleveland Museum of Art: I don't know from art, but I know what I like! Not that I have anything against Cleveland’s art museum (I’ve never visited it); it just wasn't an institution I expected to see advertising in the New York Times or one that would showcase Indian sculpture. But if they wanted my attention, they made the right choice. I just love Indian sculpture. I’m crazy about the stuff. The combination of monumentality and cartoon-y design, of significant form and sexiness, of charged energy radiating out into space and the calm self-sufficiency of the design knocks me out. But perhaps the ultimate seductive aspect of this stuff is its ability to be wildly flamboyant (six arms! elephant heads! spherical breasts and buttocks! impossible contortions!) and at the same time totally disinterested in shock or confrontation. I assume that some unique combination of Indian culture, history, religion and whatnot allowed this spectacularly un-prudish—and yet unprurient—art of carnal and spiritual celebration to flourish, but that’s just a guess. Another unique aspect of this art for me is that I’ve never had the slightest interest in “studying” it. I know nothing—nada, zip, zilch, zero—about the artists, the dates, the periods, the styles, the iconography. I just walk around exhibits of this stuff (almost never well attended—I’ve no clue why) with a big smile on my face. Perhaps you remember our conversation during our West Coast Blowhard Convention back a few weeks ago, when we wandered around the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and its whole blissful department of Indian sculpture. As I recall, our conclusion was that on the one hand, this stuff comes awfully close to convincing you that further effort in the art of sculpture is no longer required (everything meaningful having already been accomplished), while on the other, it makes you want to immediately rush out and attack a piece of stone with a hammer and a chisel, it looks so darn fun. I know you have some brilliant pent-up piece about eroticism, India and art in you—when are you going to share it with the world? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at April 23, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Saturday, April 19, 2003


Free Reads -- "Theory" in crisis
Friedrich -- Good news from Emily Eakins in today's New York Times: the literary "theory" biz is in crisis. (You can read it here.) An academic journal invited a couple of dozen lib-arts professorial heavyweights to wonder out loud about the future of theory. Where can it go? What's its point? Has it, in fact, accomplished much of anything? The surprise is that these advocates and partisans of theory have serious doubts themselves. Stanley Fish is eager to "deny the effectiveness of intellectual work." Henry Louis Gates confesses, "I really didn't see it: the liberation of people of color because of deconstruction or poststructuralism." Too bad no one raised the obvious question: So, given the total ineffectuality of what you've spent decades advocating, have you decided to resign in shame? Anyone who ever doubted that the whole "critical theory" movement had a strong political basis might take note of the way the panelists at this meeting got sidetracked -- for more than an hour -- into lamenting GW Bush and the war in Iraq. Eakins reports that a student in the audience rose at one point and asked, "So is theory simply just a nice, simple intellectual exercise?" Well, maybe something more like a complicated, destructive and pointless intellectual exercise. Lovely, though, to watch the edifice start to crumble, isn't it? Lovely as well to see the Times giving it fair-minded coverage. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 19, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, April 18, 2003


What I Owe to Peter Paul Rubens
Michael: Art of whatever stripe (paintings, music, movies, etc., etc.) can and often does infuriate, frustrate, bore and generally make me wonder why I bother, but I have to acknowledge that it has also saved my ass on at least one occasion. In my 20’s, broke, broken-hearted and generally feeling crumpled up and thrown away, I stupidly enrolled in law school. While the law may be some people’s catnip, I found the whole legal world to be completely soul-killing, an absolute wrong turn and, for me anyway, a dead end. But I felt so disempowered at that moment (being, among other things, utterly without dough) that I had no confidence in my ability to seize any realistic alternative. I was going to school at Wayne State University in Detroit, and my law school was a few blocks walk away from the Detroit Public Library. I wandered over one day out of boredom, and walked up a marble staircase to a room full of art history books. That room must have had a thousand art books in it. I soon started spending more time in that room than in the law library. Well, as you can easily guess, eventually this led to an emotional crisis. What brought this crisis to a head was a drawing, oddly enough. It was a study by Peter Paul Rubens of a single figure from an Andrea del Sarto fresco entitled “The Dance of Salome.” It was not a study of either Salome or Herod, but rather of a serving man seen from the back. Here is a thumbnail of it: P. Rubens, A Figure From 'The Dance of Salome' by Andrea Del Sarto, 1604 What intrigued me at the time, having done a small amount of figure drawing, was how Rubens could have simultaneously emphasized the rhythmic energy of the pose (it was more emphatic, in fact, in Ruben’s drawing than in the original fresco, which I had also looked up) while also pushing the three-dimensional volume of the figure up a notch. I was scratching my head over this conundrum when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go to lecture. As I walked through the halls of the law school, my spirits were at their lowest point. I was going to take notes in a subject I had zero interest in. For the first and only time in my life, I seriously thought, “I’ll have to kill myself—it’s my only escape.” After a few seconds of despair, I suddenly heard another voice in my head: “Ah, screw that—I’m going to live a long time and study Rubens!” I knew then that I was on my way out of that place and onto a more congenial life. A few weeks later I got the check for my second semester law school student loan and promptly signed it over—but not to the law school. Instead it went as a down payment on a very small car. I drove my new wheels to... posted by Friedrich at April 18, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments





Wednesday, April 16, 2003


Idolatry Redux
Michael: I know you’ll be glad to hear that the “mainstream” press is slowly but surely following the lead of 2Blowhards. In the Wall Street Journal of April 16, David Freedberg (a professor of art history at Columbia University) makes many of the same points as my posting of January 6, Idolatry. (You can read the original in all its glory here.) J. Delay, Toppling Saddam, 2003 To wit, the fascination with the toppling of a heroic statue of Saddam Hussein last week reflects the fact that—as modern as we like to think ourselves—our appreciation of art has chiefly to do with very primitive notions about the links between images and reality. In other words, people all around the world reacted to the toppling of the statue as if it were the toppling of Saddam Himself. According to Professor Freedberg: For years it has been fashionable to claim that the modern multiplication of images by photography, by the computer, and now on the Web, have drained images of their force. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once implied that in the age of mechanical reproduction images lose the aura they had when they were at the center of religion and ritual. Susan Sontag implied this too in a famous essay on photography. Not surprisingly, especially in the light of the strength of our reactions to images of atrocity, even when multiplied by the million, she has revised her views. She too has come to recognize something about images that we all know in our bones: that statues, like pictures and photographs, become compelling because of our inesacapable tendency to invest images of people (and sometimes things too) with the lives of those they represent. Hey, what can I say? Another example of great minds running in similar paths. Of course, some of us run a little faster... Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at April 16, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, April 11, 2003


Art and Religion in the Dia Generation
Michael: Did you see the story in the New York Times Magazine of April 6 on “The Dia Generation”? (You can read it here.) Not only does it contain some good gossip about the peerless egotism of individual artists (we get to hear Donald Judd fulminating about how stupid he had been to ever trust Heiner Friedrich, Dia’s founder, after receiving $5 million in grants and a monthly stipend of $17,500 from the foundation), but it also highlights the religious dimension of Minimalism, a topic I hadn’t considered much before. If the impression given by the article is correct, Mr. Friedrich (who conceived Dia along with his heiress wife, Philippa de Menil) is a prototypical Romantic: …born in Germany in 1938, [Friedrich] liked to describe how seeing the destruction during the Nazi years inspired him to want to create things that would last forever. One recent morning, at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, he told me that ''living in the countryside after the war in purest relation to nature, in great peace, made a huge impression on me -- seeing the manifestation of the divine.'' Bespectacled, dressed in a black suit and black shirt, a large, sturdy man with a lined face, Friedrich today looks more forbidding than he is. He is a dreamer, prone to verbal flights of near-spiritual reverie. In a Goethe-like fashion, Friedrich (whose Christian name really should have been Caspar David) got the inspiration for Dia from trips he made to Italy: Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua ''became for me the true insight for the unfolding and development of Dia.'' The chapel was the work of a single artist: a singular site, complex, revolutionary, preserved in perpetuity, a pilgrimage destination both cultural and spiritual. Dia’s first big project was Walter De Maria's ''Lightning Field'': 400 stainless-steel poles, up to 20 feet tall, arranged over nearly a square mile in New Mexico. Interestingly, if you wanted to visit the site, you were required to spend 24 hours in a cabin onsite. Calling Down the Fires of Heaven: W. De Maria, Lightning Field, 1971-77 [Despite being built at a cost of roughly $5 million in 2003 dollars)]…[w]hat was incalculable…was its artistic value. The work required a journey, a pilgrimage, the sacrifice and effort being part of the philosophy of immersion in the art. There was something manipulative, even prescriptive, about that idea, but also something deeply liberating about the experience. While I am tempted to scoff about how liberating such an experience would be—it sounds as if it would feel more like Stockholm syndrome than liberation—when I think back to the 1970s I realize how welcome that very rigor must have been to eager art pilgrim-flagellants. America in the Vietnam/Watergate/disco era had suffered a terrible wound to its spiritual self-image, and organized religion lacked the conviction and self-confidence to provide any relief. The public turned to art with religious themes like “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” (a phenomenon best understood not as cinema but as... posted by Friedrich at April 11, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments




Michael Polanyi
Friedrich -- Thinking about the "tacit dimension" Do you still read much philosophy? I do, though in spasms. But I've come to realize I'm not a true philosophy person, enjoyable as I can find it. Real philosophy people engage with the ideas deeply, deeply. They seem to feel that by doing so they’re really getting somewhere, and they relish the fun of quarreling over each split hair. Me? I’m happy enough with a solid general impression of what’s up ideawise. What I get taken by tends to be either a philosopher’s literary qualities (Schopenhauer; Kierkegaard), or his usefulness (Aristotle, Hume). Call me superficial. Recently I've been thumbing through some of the work of the Hungarian chemist and philsopher of science Michael Polanyi, who I first read some years ago. I like him still. He's one of the useful ones, and I think you'd get a kick out of his writing and thinking -- he's likely to be of interest to anyone who's ever flipped for Popper, Gombrich, Hayek, or Oakeshott. What he's best known for is his idea that we have different ways of knowing. One way depends on explicit training and conscious skill; it's technical. The other ("tacit knowledge") consists of what we know but probably can't express -- everything that goes into "having a knack for it," "knowing what feels right," etc. One of his examples is driving a nail into a board. You know this is a hammer; this is a nail; this is a board. You hold the hammer; you know how to hammer. All this is technical knowledge. But when you actually perform the activity, all you know is that you're driving the nail into the board. If you were to focus on your hammer technique, you'd be likely to screw the task up. Polanyi extends this kind of thinking into meditations (convincing, to my mind) on the role in science of such (non-"objective") factors as personal commitment, inspiration, insight, imagination and faith. As you'd guess, and like Hayek and Oakeshott, he had a great deal of respect for tradition and common sense, both of which he saw as embodying far more in the way of knowledge and experience than we'll probably ever be able to uncover. He seems solid and down to earth to me, which is probably partly because before turning to the philosophy of science he spent a couple of decades as a topnotch chemist. He had concrete experience of what he was philosophizing about. And -- amazingly enough -- whenever he felt he didn't have the information or evidence he knew he needed, he actually went out and got it. At one point, for example, he wanted to know how craftspeople worked, and how they managed their skills and their knowledge. What did he do? By god if he didn't go out and do extensive interviews with craftspeople. No empty theory here, in other words. Does his work provide literary thrills? Nope, though he wrote unpretentiously and straightforwardly. What it does... posted by Michael at April 11, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, April 9, 2003


A Nagging Question
Michael: My little boy is at an age (he’s pushing two) where an extra foot or so in height opens up a lot of horizons, so my wife went looking for a step-stool for him. She found some that were cute, stained wood with hand-painted pictures on them. Unfortunately, they cost $700. So my wife came up with a different plan: she bought an unfinished $45 stool, got my 13-year-old daughter to sand it and stain it (which she did admirably) and then assigned me to decorate said stool. Being a patron in the Renaissance manner, my wife also had a program worked out: my decorations should feature one of my son’s favorite scenes, the cow jumping over the moon. (My son finds the moon very, very intriguing. He asks me to take him outside almost every night to inspect it; once he’s taken a good long look, he then waves goodbye to it as we go back in the house.) Since I don’t recall ever seeing a cow walk fast, let alone attempt to jump (they don’t seem particularly well-designed for levitation) I turned to the Internet to obtain some reference material. I found a nice little design, which I copied reasonably accurately onto the stool. That left me with the moon, which in my reference material was a simple circle. I put in a shadow on one side of the moon and a cast shadow of the cow’s front legs to link the cow and the moon spatially, and then stopped. I was unsure how far to go with the whole spherical aspect of the moon, since the cow was resolutely a two-dimensional pattern, rendered in flat black and flat white. I pulled up a large scale astronomical photo of the moon, and stared at it for a while, not coming up with a solution. Suddenly, I realized that I had picked up my brush and some white paint and I was in the process of adding a highlight to my moon—a highlight that wasn’t present in the photograph. Then, mysteriously, the highlight kept getting bigger and bigger. I mixed some more intermediate greys and started adding craters along the shadow line and unspecified dark shapes in the lighted zone. I kept working lighter, then darker, then lighter and generally making my previously nice perfect sphere all beat up and lumpy--also slightly out of round. Finally, it appeared I was done, having created a moon that was extremely tactile, thus “resolving” the problem of a flat cow and a round moon only through an opposition so extreme it made the question pointless. By Popular Demand: Contemporary Cow with 1960s Sci-Fi Moon I’m not bringing all this up out of any idea that what I created was an artistic masterpiece, but simply because when I started working over the moon I recognized the presence of an aspect of my personality that always has violently strong opinions on aesthetic matters. I first became aware of this aspect of my personality... posted by Friedrich at April 9, 2003 | perma-link | (19) comments





Monday, April 7, 2003


Battle of the Metaphors
Michael: In another 2blowhards investigative reporting coup, I’ve gotten my hands on some top-secret L.A. City Government emails about Frank Gehry’s new Walt Disney Concert Hall. *** From: Mayor of Los Angeles To: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government I was at a party the other night, and somebody compared the new Disney Hall design to a bunch of crumpled up aluminum foil. They hinted that it was symbolic of our declining aerospace industry. What the hell is that design supposed to be about, anyway? Do we have a public relations nightmare on our hands here, or what? *** From: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government To: Mayor of Los Angeles I don’t think it looks like a heap of crumpled up airplane parts. Well, at least not a whole lot like crumpled up airplane parts. I think the design suggests something more organic and natural, like fish from the ocean. *** From: Mayor of Los Angeles To: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government Fish! We’re not some little fishing village! We’re the goddamn gateway to the Pacific Rim! Our big downtown development project can’t be based on some stinking fish! This architect, Gehry, he’s supposed to be some kinda hotshot artist! Find me some art that served as his inspiration. Jeesus, do I have to think of everything! *** From: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government To: Mayor of Los Angeles We did some research and came up with a few antecedents. They're by some English artist. See the connections? Pretty neat, huh? B. Hepworth, Forms in Movement, 1956; F. Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 1991 B. Hepworth, Kyoto, 1970; F. Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 1991 *** From: Mayor of Los Angeles To: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government You moron! This center is supposed to be cutting edge stuff. It's bad enough it's taken us over a decade to come up with the dough to build this thing. Telling me it was inspired by some art from the 1950s is like saying we’re the avant-garde of the hicks! I’m going to have that architect’s head on a stick! Think of something else we can talk about, dammit! *** From: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government To: Mayor of Los Angeles How about surfing? Surfing and L.A. are a good mix. We can tell everyone all those bulgy shapes are, you know, waves. So the building’s metaphor is like riding the waves. *** From: Mayor of Los Angeles To: Director for the Arts, Los Angeles City Government Hmmmm. Sufing. I like surfing. It’s a bit retro but we can make it work. Just be sure to stay on message here. None of that fish stuff, you understand? I got an election coming up in a few years, and if you want to keep your ass employed around here, you spread the word: we’re riding the waves of the new millennium! *** Hey, you can't complain that... posted by Friedrich at April 7, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Pix for the Day -- Robert A.M. Stern
Friedrich -- I'm often puzzled by the architectural press. Why aren't they giving regular coverage not just to the thinking and building that interests me most, but to the thinking and building that's going on all around them? Isn't that part of what the press is supposed to do? Instead, usual suspects drone on about other usual suspects, and then all the usual suspects award each other prizes and carry on as though it's all been not just well-deserved but inevitable. But I'm just as puzzled by the general public's ... Well, what? Indifference? Gullibility? In any case, by how un-bugged civilians are by this state of affairs. Why aren't they 1) outraged by what's being foisted on them? and 2) interested in what's actually going on all around them? Such as the New Urbanism, the various other new traditionalisms, the new Christopher Alexander-derived ways of seeing neighborhoods and buildings. This rejection of modernism/po-mo and fashion is an impressively large-scale phenomenon. Yet it's so little discussed and so seldom acknowledged that I sometimes sense myself being looked at like a freak when I call it to people's attention. It's as though everyone's concluded that it's just some fringe, passing thing. So I present today's images simply to bolster two simple, easy-to-digest points: hey, it's happening, and hey, it's major. These are images of a new building designed by the architecture firm of Robert A.M. Stern. Note the use of traditional forms. Note the efforts to engage in conversation both with history and environment. What is Stern? Some reactionary Tory? Some nostalgic hippie gone neocon? No, Stern's a bona fide, ever-in-demand, well-established bigshot. He's on the board of the Disney Company, he co-masterplanned the Florida town of Celebration, he's written a number of excellent books, including several good ones about the architectural history of New York City. He's designed buildings for the Gap as well as for Columbia University. (He made what were apparently extraordinary efforts to consult with people living on New York's Upper West Side to ensure that his Columbia dormitory would jibe with what they want from, and how they see, their neighborhood.) Oh, and he's just been re-appointed as Dean of Yale's School of Architecture, where he's said to have kicked around some modernist/po-mo butt, and to have brought some innovative energy into the place. Anyway, a few views of a recent project in Nashville. This is a new building by a big-shot architect that's part of a large-scale movement. (Sound of shoe pounding on tabletop.) Sorry, almost lost my composure there. Anyway, please click on the images for a better look. Stern's Nashville Public Library Some fringe phenom, eh? The website for Robert A.M. Stern Architects (where I found these images) is here. Rebecca Tolley-Stokes, a Tennessee librarian, has put up a page of black and white photos of the Nashville library here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at April 7, 2003 | perma-link | (13) comments





Thursday, April 3, 2003


New and Improved
Michael: Just thought I'd drop you a note that I've added a lot of pix to my posting on Lucian Freud's retrospective at the Los Angeles MOCA. Taking a look (which you can do here) will provide the following benefits: (1) You'll see the best pictures of Lucian Freud's recent work now viewable on the Web (a lot of his paintings have been pulled from museum websites, presumably for the duration of this show)! (2) You'll get brilliant insight and commentary by yours truly! (3) And if that wasn't enough, you'll see art by famous guest stars, including: MICHELANGELO! CARAVAGGIO! VAN DYKE! BOUCHER! RODIN! Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime chance to educate your eyeballs! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at April 3, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, April 1, 2003


Salingaros on Deconstruction
Friedrich -- If you’ve got a little curiosity about contempo architecture and you take a peek at its coverage in the mainstream press (as well as the specialist architectural press), you’re probably running into names like Daniel (WTC-site) Libeskind, Herbert Muschamp, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Coop Himmelblau. You’re probably also running into a lot of photos of zigzaggy, blown-to-bits buildings that look a bit like an L.A. kitchen the morning after the big one. Chances are that, unless you’ve gone to architecture school or have been otherwise marinated in contempo "theory," you probably have some variation on what I think of as the "Huh? What the fuck?" response. The writing and thinking seem almost incomprehensible and, when comprehensible, engaged with issues and ideas that seem of no conceivable human interest whatsoever. The designs themselves sometimes seem kind of cool and flashy -- but, lordy, imagine having to live in, or work in, or even have to pass regularly by such heaps of self-referential showboating. (As for the recently-selected WTC-replacement design: nice going, New York. That Daniel Libeskind design you’ve chosen? It’s untried, radical architecture, to which the daily lives of tens of thousands of people are going to have no choice but to submit. Remember the debacle of Richard Serra’s "Tilted Arc"? Well, I may certainly be proven wrong, but my bet is that the WTC rebuilding will be the Serra fiasco multiplied many times over. Serra’s piece just made a pain of itself in the middle of one modest public plaza, while thousands and thousands of people are actually going to have to work in, and live around, Libeskind’s design.) Those weirdo interruptions, disruptions and breaks in po-mo/decon design? (Which, by the way, often strike me as pretty neat in a design sense -- ie., so long as they’re on a book jacket or in a movie poster and not bending and distorting the lives of people who've got better things to do than fret over edgy art issues.) They’ve got nothing whatsoever to do with people, and with how people like to work, live, shop or simply spend time in the city. They aren’t the result of any concern with or respect for daily life, let alone other human beings. Instead, they’re hijinks -- fashion, really -- derived from French theory and naive interpretations of up-to-date science. Showing off, basically, and being brilliant -- and, as far as I’m concerned, irresponsibly so, and usually at the expense of the rest of us. Many people who encounter this kind of thing abandon their interest in buildings and architecture, figuring either that they just aren’t getting it or that the inmates are clearly running the asylum and who needs that. Luckily, there is in fact an alternative, an entire world of building and thinking that’s concerned with beauty and human values. You won’t find much mention of it in the mainstream art and architecture press -- a sign of how topsy-turvy that world is, at least by my lights.... posted by Michael at April 1, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Monday, March 31, 2003


Lucian Freud on Tape
Michael: After months of shilly-shallying, I finally took a few hours, drove downtown to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, plunked down my eight bucks and saw the Lucian Freud retrospective. As an experiment, I took along a tape recorder and mumbled notes into it. Since I clearly ended up looking even more eccentric than I normally do at an art exhibit, I’ve decided that I’m entitled to skip trying to write up something and just share some of my incredibly insightful on-the-spot comments: *** Freud’s early work is intriguing, off-beat, modestly original etc., etc., but it doesn’t look like highly saleable art. I wonder how he paid the bills during, say, the first ten years of his career? Family money? Rich girlfriends? L. Freud, Woman with a Daffodil, 1945; L. Freud, Girl by the Sea, 1956 *** Okay, okay, I’ve got to confess: I do wonder how good the likenesses in Freud’s portraits really are. L. Freud, Head of the Big Man, 1975 *** The reclining figures seem to have been an attempt to extend his treatment of flesh into space, as opposed to his early portraits, which are just three-dimensionally modeled heads against a blank ground. L. Freud, John Deakin, 1963-4; L. Freud, Naked Girl Asleep, 1968 Idea for a piece: From the Famous Painter’s School, Lucian Freud shows you how to paint a reclining nude! *** The funny thing is, along with his distortions, he achieves some marvelous anatomical drawing and modeling. L. Freud, Guy and Speck, 1980-1 *** I understood Lucian is a rather slow worker. I’m fascinated that he can get the damn dog to lie still for so long. L. Freud, Double Portrait, 1985-6 (Detail) *** “Leigh Bowery Seated,” 1990, makes you wonder if Freud was looking at Jusepe de Ribera. The painting must be 8 feet, maybe 10 feet high. The figure is well over life size. He’s sitting, looking directly up at you, which gives the sense that you’re interrogating him. Ribera’s paintings often show saints being worked over by a gang of highly amused thugs, and convey the insinuation that you—the viewer—are among the rotten scum enjoying the spectacle. Freud’s painting has a little of this complicit cruelty. *** Freud has, in his own way, resuscitated the heroic nude. *** His stuff of the last ten years or so feels like history painting with no “overt” history. I guess we supply the history. He’s giving us hints, of course. There’s an extremely long-haired guy in one picture who looks like Jesus being mocked, all he needs is a crown of thorns. (Umm, let’s see, the painting is called “Freddy Standing.”) L. Freud, Freddy Standing, 2001; M. Caravaggio, Ecce Homo The painting “And the Bridegroom” could just as easily be titled “Samson and Delilah.” L. Freud, And the Bridegroom, 1993 (Detail); A. Van Dyck, Samson and Delilah, 1630-2 “Sunny Morning, Eight Legs” could be “St. Paul on the Road to Damascus Holding a Dog” (although the two legs sticking out from under... posted by Friedrich at March 31, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Friday, March 28, 2003


Schiele, Fashion...Feminism?
Michael: A few weeks ago I got a picture from Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue via email from a friend. I was reminded of an Egon Schiele drawing I’ve had stashed on my hard drive for a while. I pulled it up and was struck by the similarities between two images which were created almost a century apart. E. Schiele, Female Nude, 1910; E. Badulescu, Photo of Anna Beatriz Barros, 2002 Since that time, I’ve spent a few hours reading about Schiele and wondering about the following questions: Schiele’s brief career as an artist (and his equally brief life) seem to have revolved around issues of sexuality. One discussion, which you can read here, touches on the following subjects: incest, narcissism, homosexuality, masturbation, androgyny, pedophilia and veneral disease. The biographies of Schiele explain this artistic focus on sexuality as a reaction to late Victorian sexual immorality and dishonesty. However, this type of sexual “immorality”—by which writers seem to be alluding to the double standard of married men having extramarital sex with prostitutes or lower-class women—hardly seems to have been a phenomena unique to the early 20th century. (The 18th century comes to mind as another era in which the double standard was triumphant and yet sexual anguish was not particularly visible). What would seem to set Schiele's era far apart from its many predecessor eras, for me anyway, was the presence of feminism as a social trend. Was there a connection between the sudden interest in “anguished” adolescent sexuality in the early 1900s and feminism? Was Schiele struggling to grow up in a world in which masculinity had suddenly been called into question? What is the connection between Schiele’s focus on adolescent (and pre-adolescent) bodies and fashion’s (currently) similar focus? The slender adolescent body is both sexualized (body hair, breasts) and androgenous (models of both sexes are generally selected with similar builds—long limbs, small hips). Does image making around adolescent sexuality suggest an essentially auto-erotic view of sex? Ads for Calvin Klein As much as I regret it, I can’t provide anything like definitive answers to these questions. Have you got any answers? How about our readers? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 28, 2003 | perma-link | (14) comments




Artchat Survival Guide 3 -- The Word "Art"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- In middle age I find that I have much less interest in aesthetic theory than I once did, and much more interest in general rules of thumb -- survival guides, tips that help get me into the ball park. Just about anything that's based in practical experience, in fact. The word "art," unsurprisingly, is one of those words I've had to learn to be very careful around. "Is it art?" "But it's not really art?" "Who are you to say it's art?" Etc., etc. I was thinking about how I think of the word these days as opposed to how I thought of the word back in our days at our Lousy Ivy College. And I realized that, without having given it much systematic thought, I've evolved some strategies for dealing with the word -- ways of dodging pointless arguments as well as making what for me is good use of the word. I scratched my chin, I made a few notes, and came up with this: my rough guide to the word "art." I find it useful to think of the word as having three main meanings. 1) Small-a "art." It's a technical term, nothing more than a description of a certain class of activity.This is very evo-bio: art is anything above and beyond pure functionality. (I'm deliberately ignoring here any and all muddyings of form and function. It doesn't make serious sense to do so, but, hey, I'm trying to draw a useful distinction here...) In this meaning, "art" has nothing to do with indicating quality and everything to do with the kind of activity it describes. Think of the word "sport" for a comparison. It describes a certain kind of activity without telling you how good any example of such an activity is. Playing marbles or recreational waterskiing are examples of "sport" every bit as much as an NBA playoff game is. The same with this use of the word "art." Every society sings, dances, decorates, and tells stories. And it's all small-a art. This jug isn't just a container for water. It's blue, it's shaped like a duck, and it has feather patterns on it -- that's the art. People decorate themselves, they stitch and dye cloth, they put colored mud on their animal-skin huts. They get dressed up nice for rituals where they dance, make noise, and eat specially-prepared food -- it's all art. All societies (except those entirely caught up in a battle for survival) have and make art in this sense. Fun consequence: look around you. Art is everywhere! Your wife's earrings are small-a art. Your shoes are small-a art. The design of that brochure is art. If you think they aren't, ask yourself why the Met Museum is full of cups, saucers, fabrics, rugs, knives, etc. Why do we accept that a fork from Malawi is art, but think that the fork in our own kitchen drawer isn't? 2) Big-A "Art." As technical a term as... posted by Michael at March 28, 2003 | perma-link | (14) comments





Wednesday, March 26, 2003


Forms of Self-Expression I Will Never, Ever Make Use Of
Friedrich -- Yikes. And double-yikes. Best, Michael DO NOT OPEN AT WORK UPDATE: Yahmdallah rightly points out that, hey, many blogsurfers do their surfing at work, if you know what I mean. So, everyone, before you click on the above links, consider yourself warned. 2Blowhards will not be held responsible for fainting co-workers, let alone wrathful bosses.... posted by Michael at March 26, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments




Free Reads -- Saddam's Painter
Friedrich -- Those giant images of Saddam? The heroic, neo-Stalinist ones that hang apparently everywhere in Iraq? They had to have been made by someone, right? But who? The Financial Times' Roula Khalaf had the wit to track down Salam Abed, a painter whose work has contributed much to the Saddam myth. The piece can be read here. Best Michael... posted by Michael at March 26, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, March 22, 2003


Genghis Khan, America, and "Fine Art"
Friedrich -- The Wife and I recently saw the Genghis Khan art exhibit at the Met. (Here's a good Web representation of the show).) A dazzler, focusing on the impact of the Mongol invasions on Iranian art circa 1300. (Did you know that Mongols had made it to Iran? I certainly didn't.) Chinese and Islamic art all swirled up together, in a word. But, "art"? Well, this was the Met, so everything was under glass, in cases and on walls, and there were labels. Yet what was on display were combs, rugs, belt buckles, pages from books -- high end consumer goods, really. There wasn't an item of what we would today consider "fine art" to be seen. Yet there The Wife and I were, along with hundreds of other art fans, oohing and aahhing over these treasures. Mongol saddle circa 1300: Fine art? Or fancy saddle? Which makes me wonder why we modern Americans don't give our own high-end consumer goods as much respect. Is it because of the antiquity of the Mongol/Persian objects? I don't think that fully explains it. I think it also has something to do with our attachment to "fine art." An Audi or a fine meal at a chic restaurant are marvelous things, yet when pushed we're prone to say "But of course they aren't art." Art is that ... other thing. Higher. Hushed. More rewarding. High-art fan though I am, I can't help but suspect that many people use the "but it's not art" objection to make themselves feel, if not miserable, then perpetually spiritually hungry. It's something that almost never quite happens. We think, yeah, that may be nice, but it isn't art. To which I now reply: Hey, a swatch of Mongolian/Persian fabric isn't fine art either, yet there we Manhattanites were, oohing and ahhing at the Met over it. All of which got me thinking one of those thoughts-that-are-so-basic-you-can't-believe-you-never-had-it-before. This one's about that perennial "America and the fine arts" question: why are the fine arts always so embattled and imperiled in this country? Commercialism vs. ideals, the bad taste of New-World rubes vs the strivings of the cultured, etc etc. Is it because, as many fine-arts people like to believe, we're just a bunch of coarse, money-centric vulgarians? Or is it because, as many mainstream people feel, American fine artists so often carry on like a bunch of shrill adolescents? These battles go on and on throughout American art history with only the occasional break -- Beaux-Arts architecture, for instance, or the Arts and Crafts movement, a few moments when artists found a semi-popular groove and the public saw fit to spend a few extra bucks on aesthetic and quality-of-life items. Otherwise it's one wild mood swing after another. Here's the obvious thing that finally struck me: what's often forgotten is that part of what distinguishes America from Europe where art is concerned is that IN AMERICA FINE ART IS ALWAYS OPTIONAL. In Europe, this isn't the case. You're surrounded... posted by Michael at March 22, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, March 21, 2003


Ignored no more
Michael: In 2blowhard’s eternal quest to poke into the nooks and corners of the arts, fearlessly setting aside blinkered prejudice and received dogma, I would like to announce the first public recognition of an entirely (heretofore) ignored genre of painting: the art-instruction-book illustration. As you know, these proletarian products of the art publishing industry are ubiquitous. Just about anywhere books on art are sold, books on the technique of art crop up. They crowd the shelves of book stores, libraries and art supply shops. And yet, to date, they have been the Rodney Dangerfield of the art world, getting no respect. Well, by God, I’m here to change that. Granted, their careful, step-by-step illustrations often look better at step #2 (the rough blocking-in) than at step #6 (the finished composition, with all the wood-grain of barns, trees or tabletops fetishistically rendered). Granted, they often have strange ellipses from one step to another in which simple egg-shaped heads miraculously transform themselves into recognizable likenesses. Granted, even the more accomplished artists in this tradition have generally worked up their way through the history of art no farther than a sort of shadowy Baroque Realism (with a heavy emphasis on dark brown backgrounds) or to a sort of relaxed Impressionism. Nonetheless, at times the illustrations have a genuine charm, or at least oddity, that makes them worth looking at. For example, Joseph Sheppard manages to highlight the spatial contradictions of the “free floating” or context-less nude in a demonstration from his book, “How to Paint Like the Old Masters.” J. Sheppard, How to Paint Like The Old Masters, 1983 While the rather silvery young lady in his illustration appears, at first glance, as a sort of bas-relief against the picture plane, closer inspection reveals that she’s not “glued on” to a horizontal background but rather slightly “sunk into” a substance below her, even though I can’t make myself read the orange-brown background as a receding horizontal plane. So an intellectual food fight occurs, in which part of my brain says “no, the background is perpendicular to my line of sight and thus vertical” and in which another part of my brain says “it must be horizontal because it’s holding up her obviously volumetric mass” and another says “I wonder if I could get my wife to look into silvery body makeup for special occasions.” And as we all know, such unresolved contradictions are the heart and soul of the true artistic experience. In another example, Charles Sovek in his book, “Catching Light in Your Paintings” wins my plaudits for his still life illustrating the impact of reflected light off of highly colored substances. C. Sovek, Catching Light In Your Paintings, 1984 First, Mr. Sovek rather wittily points out the significant stylistic continuities between Impressionism and Rococo painting (and does so while managing an overall cool color scheme, always one of my favorites.) Second, his bravura brush treatment adds to the spatial ambiguities of the right-hand portion of the picture, in which the red... posted by Friedrich at March 21, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, March 20, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: In researching material for my series of postings on Impressionism, I must say that French painting of the second half of the 19th century is truly remarkable stuff. Yes, it was made up of various rather politicized and contending schools, but I'll let you in on a little secret--more or less every approach (hyper innovative to ultra-conservative) yielded its share of pretty fantastic imagery. Today's image is by a painter--Henri Fantin-Latour--who is by no means unrepresented in art museums. Still, he always feels a bit marginalized in curatorial presentation. His work is not in step with the radical experiments of his friends the New Painters (whose works are always the real point of the rooms in which his paintings hang.) Still lifes and portraits by Fantin-Latour lack any of the blunt, manifesto-like quality so highly valued by the museum mandarinate. They hang back, full of modesty and unobtrusive good taste, like well-bred guests. They are almost nothing but exhilations of aesthetic sensibility, offered with no armor plating of significance or theory. And yet, how terrific they are. H. Fantin-Latour, Still Life with Flowers, 1881 I cannot resist including a small anecdote about the painter. To appreciate it, you must understand that Fantin-Latour hung out as a student at the Cafe Moliere with a crew of exiled Irish Nationalists in the 1850s, attended the Lesjosnes Salon with its marked republican atmosphere in the 1860s, was an intimate of the most famous bohemians of his day, including Rimbaud and Verlaine, in the 1870s, and a supporter of Dreyfus in the 1890s--in short, someone with a full artistic and political life. Nonetheless, after witnessing a discussion between Manet and Felix Bracquemond on the relationship between art and politics, he wrote to a friend: I share none of these ideas and I say that Art has nothing to do with such matters. Perhaps we should enlist him in your legion of not-primarily-political individuals. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 20, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, March 18, 2003


Artistic Quote of the Day
Michael: As you recall, we were laughing at a statement by Degas yesterday during our West Coast Blowhards Seminar, conducted at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Given your enjoyment of Degas' cranky pith, I thought you'd get a kick out of an (apparently approving) remark he made in his 80s, regarding Cubism: ..[I]t seems even more difficult than painting. If I could be sure of finding such wit, I'd start my own damn salon. Cheers, Friedrich P.S.--Exclusive photo documentation of this great inaugural Blowhard Seminar will be forthcoming as soon as we Blowhards get our acts together. (Hey, we're working on it.)... posted by Friedrich at March 18, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, March 14, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: We’ve touched on the strange neglect suffered by 19th century academic painting once or twice, but a picture I came across researching material for my series on Impressionism makes me want to beat this horse a few more times. The painter, Paul Baudry (1828-1886), was once a fairly well known academician (he was, in fact, Napoleon III’s favorite painter.) He was primarily a portrait painter, although he essayed mythological scenes as well. Based on the work I’ve seen on Web, he is by no means a member of the Great Painters of History Club—his multifigure compositions are weak and a bit confused, and he frankly doesn’t seem to have an idea in his head. However, at least in this picture, Baudry illustrates how the technical discipline of academic painting can facilitate the expression of a painter’s genuine emotional response to a subject: P. Baudry, The Wrestler Meissonier, 1848 The handling of the fall of light over the figure is simply magnificent, and the harmonization of the light with the shifting of local skin tones from one part of the body to another to create a maximal aesthetic effect is something that requires, I think it’s fair to say, a great deal of practice to deliver. (At least in my experience, nobody picks up a brush for the first time and knocks out something like this.) Academic painting is like a lot of things in life: if you approach it for what it can give you as opposed to being frustrated by what’s not there, you can have a pretty good night on the town. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 14, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Thursday, March 13, 2003


Bipolar Elvis
Michael: As you know, I’m both a big Elvis fan and a depressive personality. I always thought these were unrelated phenomena, but I’m beginning to wonder. This line of speculation derives from driving around in my car, listening to a CD of Elvis’ number one hits that I received at my company’s Christmas party (my musical tastes are no secret, obviously). As a result of repeat listening, I’ve begun to appreciate the Elvis song released at the same time as his death, “Way on Down.” It’s impossible—for me anyway—to avoid thinking about Elvis’ death when listening to the song. The title, with its double (triple?) entendre reference to dying, is only the start. The song also includes lyrics about “lying on the floor” and something about what the doctor could prescribe. One could go on in this vein. Is the final result morbid? Oddly enough, no. Apparently Elvis had stared into the abyss long enough that he could derive a certain entertainment value out of it. I recall seeing some extreme close up shots of “fat” Elvis performing in a film documentary, and being struck by (1) the cosmic extent of Elvis’ alienation and (2) the way he seemed to find his own alienation amusing. All his life, Elvis seemed to be enjoying a private joke, which he was willing to let the world about halfway in on. Apparently his impending death struck him the same way his ridiculous stardom had struck him two decades before—as a goofy joke. If it turned out to be a joke on him, well, that was okay too. The King's Sense of Humor in Action However, listening to the song, it did suddenly dawn on me that the way Elvis’ periods of extremely high energy—creatively, career-wise, in his personal life—alternated with periods of extreme passivity, secrecy and “ah, screw it”-ism suggested attacks of depression or, possibly, manic depression. So I did a google search to see if anyone else had voiced thoughts along these lines. As it turns out, within a minute or two I found a conversation between Time Magazine and Vernon Chadwick, the chairman of the fourth annual “Conference on Elvis Presley” which occurred in 1998. It included the following quote: This morning one of our speakers, a therapist from Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, advanced the thesis that Elvis suffered bipolar disorder, which is a more technical name for manic depression. And that Elvis' substance abuse, eating disorders, and chronic depression should be placed in the larger context of a personality disorder. I guess all this should get filed in preparation for my ultimate tract, “Mental Health and Creativity: Is It Possible to Have Both?” A hunk a hunk of burning cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 13, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Tuesday, March 11, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part VII
Michael: This is the next in a series of my postings on what Impressionism meant to its contemporaries and creators. Having disposed of what I’ve described as the Standard Account of Impressionism in my previous posts, let’s move on to what I think is a more accurate explanation of the phenomenon known as the New Painting (a term that, like its synonym, the jeune ecole, subsumes the Impressionists along with fellow-travellers like Manet, Fantin-Latour and others): In the 1860s, the urban bourgeoisie were political underdogs to the rural landowning class, who were the key supporters and beneficiaries of both the 2nd Empire of Napoleon III and the authoritarian governments of the 1870s. Frustrated by a slowing economy and their subordinate political position, the urban bourgeoisie began trying to gain power by pushing a capitalist-republican political “uprising.” This uprising was encouraged by the “railroad revolution” of the previous decade that had encouraged a general belief in the virtues of technology and commercial progress, convincing the urban bourgeoisie that history was on their side. At the same time, there was a significant oversupply of artists and paintings in the French art industry. This led to a greater diversification of subject matter by artists, as they attempted to sell into the genre, landscape and still life niche art markets where growing numbers of bourgeois art buyers had unmet demands. This effort was de-legitimized by the Academy because it would reduce painting to mere craftwork (unlike the Academic specialty, history painting, which by theory and tradition possessed an elevated intellectual dimension.) This was accomplished by denying such paintings opportunities to be seen at the Salon, and by denying any that did get seen any official recognition. Because the Academy and the Salon were government institutions, the battle between artists eager to tap new niche art markets and the Academicians who were working to deny them artistic legitimacy in this effort became politicized. This intensified as republican journalists used the issue to attack Napoleon III’s regime at the end of the 1860s. The Impressionists, as ambitious painter-businessmen with chiefly urban bourgeois backgrounds and sympathies, recognized that there was a market for pictures of the environment and daily life of the urban bourgeoisie, and wanted to tap it. Finding the Academy was blocking their efforts to supply this market, they set out—with help from critics and dealers—to break the commercial monopoly enjoyed by the governmentally organized Salon. Their eventual success created the modern art market. The last paragraph provides a nice climax to my version of events. The only question (all the other paragraphs having been addressed in my previous posts) is: do the facts support this last paragraph? Well, let’s see. Did the Impressionists have chiefly urban bourgeois backgrounds and republican political sympathies? As far as background goes, calling the Impressionists urban bourgeoisie was a pretty fair statement. Edouard Manet’s father was a wealthy Parisian judge. Berthe Morisot father was a well-to-do official at the Cour des Comptes (the financial agency auditing public expenditures) in... posted by Friedrich at March 11, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, March 7, 2003


Free Views -- Ken Kewley
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- For all the bitching I do, and enjoy doing, about the carrying-on of the self-proclaimed art world, I nonetheless fairly often run across current artists whose work I enjoy. (My batting average may be lousy, but I do occasionally connect.) Surprise: they often aren't artists whom the critics or profs take much -- or any -- note of, which sometimes makes me wonder if my real complaint isn't so much with the art world itself as with the opinion-making class. But -- hurried, cowardly and lazy soul that I am -- I'm not going to wrestle with that question now. Back to the talent. Ken Kewley is one of my recent finds. I saw one of his shows about a year ago. Here's a decent selection of his work; here's his own website, also featuring a good selection. These are pop-up images, so be sure to click on them to see larger versions of these images. But the pictures in real life are also very small -- about three by five inches. Kewley reminds me, in a good way, of the Bloomsbury painters -- modest, yet saturated and aglow with pattern and color. He cuts so directly to what's pleasing and interesting that it's easy to ignore how good he is at dodging and avoiding self-importance and would-be momentousness. He seems to want nothing to do with the "gotta be great" game, and intead seems to want to work some early-modernist turf -- ie., to approach his art not as breakthrough or liberation but as style and exploration. Which strikes me as a daring and witty choice in itself. Modernism has so often made itself out to be -- has made art itself out to be -- a matter of anxieties, breakthroughs and innovations (and baloney to that, is my view) that it comes as a luscious suprise to see it treated as a given, an established style as open to being mined for pleasure as, say, classicism. To my mind, this is terrific. It's like accepting and working with a movie genre -- occupying your imagination and skills with finding ways of making it yield something fresh and vivid, rather with than (yawn) undermining and subverting it. Anyway, fancy blah-blah to one side: a luscious and pleasing clarity of color and idea! Witty formats! A serene and poised yet alert gestalt! Nice balance between abstraction and representation! The beauty of early modernism minus the stress and bombast! I'm probably missing a lot of what's there -- but that's great too. Words now fail me -- but I'm happy to report that I get a lot out of looking and re-looking at Kewley's paintings and collages, and that I'd love to live with a bunch of them. Any current artists you're crazy about? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 7, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, March 4, 2003


Modern Architecture and Sexual Anxiety
Michael: Perhaps you recognize the author of the following quote: The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects. It was of course Adolf Loos, Viennese architect and architectural theorist who uttered those words. Through his 1908 article, “Ornament and Crime,” (which is almost certainly the most influential piece of architectural writing ever) this anti-ornamental bias became embedded in Modern architecture and in the buildings we see around us every day. A book which I read recently, “The Evolution of Allure” by George L. Hersey, points out that the actual source of Loos’ concept (which was by no means merely aesthetic) was the writings of Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909.) Lombroso was one of the pieces of flotsam and jetsam tossed up by the tidal wave of Darwinian thought in the latter 19th century. His concern, which was by no means unique to him personally, was with the downside of evolution. If species could evolve and thrive, they could also devolve, degenerate and become extinct. And of course the fossil record of vast numbers of now extinct species suggested that such would almost certainly be humanity’s fate. Unless, of course, humanity followed the eugenic advice of the good Dr. Lombroso, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia, professor of forensic medicine, hygiene, psychiatry and criminal anthropology at the University of Turin and director of a mental asylum in Pesaro, Italy. Lombroso’s starting place was the concept put forth in the 1870s by the embryologist Haekel: that just as each embryo recapitulated its evolutionary history in utero, that each human being’s life recapitulated its genetic past. Those (like criminals) with poor breeding which either conserved or advanced their atavistic features would never reach the evolutionary stage where they could participate in civilized life. Fortunately for civilization however, Lombroso was on the case, as Mr. Hersey notes: Thanks to Lombroso’s research these antievolutionary types could easily be spotted…Lombroso’s “atavists,” as he calls them, meaning evolutionary throwbacks, reproduced in their persons the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and of the inferior animals who lie behind them in the evolutionary cladogram. And humanity’s upward climb is not just threatened by the genetic heritage of the “atavistically criminal”—it was also threatened by, well, women. As Mr. Hersey notes: La donna delinquente, first published by Lombroso and G. Ferrero in 1893, deals with sexual selection from a potential husband’s point of view. The authors’ purpose is to establish that women are biologically inferior to men, and this must be taken into account whenever sexual selection, or rejection, occur…[T]he lower in the evolutionary ladder a species is, the less dominant are its males, and vice versa; so that male dominance is, again, the sign of humanity’s more evolved state. The authors also cite Darwin and the French biologist Milne Edwards to the effect that in the higher species the “atavistic force,” that is, the conservative tendency to keep things as they are and avoid progress, is stronger in females than in males. That is... posted by Friedrich at March 4, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, March 3, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael: About 20 years ago I stumbled across the work of photographer Darius Kinsey in a beautifully printed paperback edition of his photos. He was a commercial photographer in Washington State (headquartered out of Sedro-Woolley, about 50 miles north of Seattle) in the early years of the 20th century. In addition to all types of conventional subject matter, he made apparently endless trips to the logging camps. Hauling his collection of very large glass plate cameras up into the woods, he took remarkable group portrait shots of the loggers and other workers, taking orders which were then mailed out by his long-suffering wife, who did the darkroom work back at home. According to a website (which you can visit here) Kinsey routinely carried in excess of one hundred pounds of photographic equipment, often traveling with 2 cameras, and occasionally three, which meant a lot of moving around via horse and buggy or pack mules in the woods. By 1902 he was working with a camera utilizing enormous 20” by 24” glass plates. Despite the fact that his lenses were primitive, the size of the resulting negatives allowed him to produce images that combined panoramic views with extraordinary detail. Regrettably, the reproductions of his work I’ve seen since my encounter with that paperback edition (a library book) have not done justice to the beauty and delicacy of the photos. To me, his work has always been special in that it breaks through the tendency of “fine art” photography to focus on creating beautiful photo-objects as an end in itself and manages to show an interest in the real people he was photographing in a real (work) situation. Because of his slow exposures he requires everyone to stop what they’re doing and pose, which his loggers, cooks and railroad crew members do with a mixture of stoicism, dignity and—occasionally—goofiness. (There’s no trickiness about his methodology here; it’s formal portrait photography of people who know they’re posing for a camera.) The ultra-fine detail in many of his prints allows us to take in the astonishingly varied and interesting faces on view in the midst of their work environment. In short, he somehow transcended many of the technical restrictions of photography and made it serve of an extraordinarily humanistic vision of mankind. His subjects aren’t being anatomized by their profession, or condescended to, or used as subjects a visual essay on the heroic working class—they have the dignity of being themselves. Which seems to be all they need. D. Kinsey, Loggers Posing with Big Wheels, date unknown Anyway, here is one of his pictures (and it is a thumbnail--you won't get the real impact without clicking on it); sorry that the enormous finesse and beauty of his original prints doesn’t come through, but maybe you can imagine it. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at March 3, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, March 1, 2003


Bad Meditator
Friedrich -- Have you ever been a meditator? I've had stretches when I've done it regularly. I get a lot out of it, though saying that apparently makes me a bad meditator -- a true Zen type doesn't have reasons to meditate, he just meditates. Me, I meditate for more than a few reasons, and probably wouldn't meditate at all if I didn't have them. Nonetheless, I've still managed to have the occasional meditation-bestowed moment of revelation. The latest: that, while I'll certainly never reach enlightenment in this lifetime (because I meditate for reasons), maybe that's OK. Well, anyway, in Michael Blowhard-land, that's the kind of thing I choose to regard as a revelation. Superficial soul that I am, I meditate because, when I do, I'm a little happier, a little more resilient, a little less bugged by ego-nagging; I'm probably a little nicer to other people, too. Those are the main benefits. Another benefit -- much more minor, but one that I still appreciate -- is the way it helps me deal with dead time. A meeting has gotten boring? The subway is taking its time showing up? A friend is late for lunch? Instead of tapping my foot and nursing a feeling of annoyance, I'll try to pay attention to my breath. Which is still, admittedly, a very boring way to spend time. But it's something to do that's presumably worthwhile, and it's not boring/boring. It's interesting/boring. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at March 1, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, February 28, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part VI
Michael: This is the next installment in my attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#5, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following (essentially Marxist) social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire] was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. After examining each point of this analysis (and finding it wanting), I’ve developed a less schematic but more factual version of the social background to Impressionism: Friedrich’s Revised Account of Impressionism: Under the 2nd Empire, France entered the railway age. This didn’t create wrenching new social conditions but did provide many highly visible symbols of modernism—promoting a belief in progress and modernity as a positive force. As the rapid growth of the 1850s petered out during the 1860s, the urban bourgeoisie, which lagged the rural landowning class both financially and in terms of political influence, began to think that it could do better under a republican system of government. Meanwhile, although the financial lot of the Parisian proletariat was improving relative to its miserable conditions of the 1840s, it was deeply alienated by being exiled to the suburban wasteland by the urban renewal programs known as Haussmannization. Under the leadership of a socialist labor movement encouraged by Napoleon III, the politicized working classes attempted to seize control of the country via the Paris Commune (during an extraordinary vacuum of power caused by the Franco-Prussian War). The defeat of the Commune and its savage repression however, no matter how dramatic, were essentially distractions and only temporarily obscured the "slow revolution" by which the moderate republican ideal was gaining traction against the dominant political class, the rural landowners. The struggle of urban bourgeoisie to implement their “revolutionary” ideal (i.e., a capitalist democracy,... posted by Friedrich at February 28, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, February 26, 2003


Doing What You Love for a Living Redux
Friedrich -- As you know, one of the issues I return to over and over again (apologies for the monotony of this, by the way) is whether or not it makes sense to try to turn doing what you love into a career. Whether or not it makes sense even to imagine making a living by doing what you already love, in fact. We're encouraged (by parents, schools, friends, movies, our own dopey fantasies) to think in these terms, even to be unhappy if the dream hasn't yet come true. Yet, IMHO, it can be a ruinous and destructive way to think, especially about a life in the arts. Why? In the first place, there's next to no chance it'll happen. In the second place, if it does happen -- or if something like it does happen -- there's a good chance that the very act of doing it for money will ruin the pleasure. You're likely to wind up with the worst of both worlds -- a perilous and not-great job doing something that has ceased to mean anything to you. (Yet what you're selling has got to seem special -- and where does that special touch come from if you've lost that special feeling? So you fake an emotion, then wind up feeling like you've betrayed a lover. And on and on the heartbreaking cycle goes ....) A few notes from the outside world to give my argument a little weight. The gifted erotic-art photographer (I don't know his name and can't find it on his website) who runs Eumorphia (here) is closing up the commercial side of his shop. (But be sure to visit: there's much still there at the site to explore.) Why? In his words: I've decided to shut down the pay side of things. There are many reasons for this which I'm just not really wanting to talk about but the main issue is this: Doing photography as a commercial enterprise is not doing photography as an artform. I'm giving up the commercial side of things and going back to making art. The very funny and industrious Andrew Marlatt ran SatireWire (here) for almost three years. Recently he quit. Take a guess why. Here's the way he puts it: It's not about the money. The site actually makes money ... Nice little setup, actually. I've been very lucky. But the bottom line is, it has ceased to be fun. My heart is not in it. My head is not in it... The thing is, SatireWire, successful as it has been, is also suffocating. I work best tangentially, meaning I work best when I let ideas just come at me, flitting about my head like confetti as I marvel at all the pretty colors, the way they turned in the wind. I would pick out the ones I liked, put them together, make a story. But the confetti no longer falls. It's all on the ground now. The parade is over. I'm just sweeping up... posted by Michael at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments




Oil Painting and Sex
Michael: I hear you're doing some oil painting. A bit daunting, isn't it, with paints and medium and turpentine and all. I've done oil painting, although I was never systematically instructed in it (another legacy of going to a contemporary art school.) I remember being quite frustrated by the complexity of oil-paint "logistics" when I was first forced to confront them. And I'll admit that over the years I've had a few paintings go down into a death spiral when I simply couldn't get parts of them to dry in a reasonable time frame. Of course, I seem to have a strange fascination with painting wet-into-wet, which can create some dazzling passages when it's working but invites problems when its not. As a result, I've generally chosen to paint in acrylic, since I know it'll dry pretty fast and I won't be smelling up the house with turpentine. The downside of spending time painting in acrylics is that it hasn't trained me to pay close attention to the whole very important issue of thick paint vs. thin paint, smooth-paint vs. textured-paint which is a natural part of oil painting. I gained a greater interest in this particular painting issue when I recently visited a traveling show of the Phillips collection at the Phoenix Art Museum. I spent my time in the exhibit looking at how the paintings were painted and how that process impacted their sense of space. I also tried to figure out why the painters had chosen to paint them the way they did, although this is a much tougher intellectual problem. For example, I know that early in his career Monet often started his paintings with thin, semi transparent washes which he then overlaid with heavier, more textural touches. [Note from an irritated art-school student: "Classic" or 1870s Impressionism is all about layering--don't let sloppy instructors pawn off that nonsense on you about broken brushstrokes being the essence of the Impressionist style. As a practical matter, broken brushwork won't work unless it's been set up by layering. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.] In painting this way, Monet was following "standard" oil painting practice, since the human eye perceives heavily textured objects as close at hand, while distant objects are much more purely visual, like thin washes of color (objects in the distance always have a kind of watercolor-y look). Granted, Monet applied more visible brushstrokes (both thick-and-meaty and runny-uneven) than was standard in his day, but he was still respecting the process and visual principle of thin/distant and thick/close. Then, as he got older, he started to use heavy, chalky paint throughout his image. There's a grey-day landscape looking over cliffs along the Normandy seacoast and then out to sea in the Phillips collection (painted around 1890, I think) which was a bit startling. Although it "read" properly in the line drawing sense, when you squinted at the painting and deliberately ignored the "subject matter" the whole painting sort of bulged forward around the linear... posted by Friedrich at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Monday, February 24, 2003


Free Reads -- Corby Kummer on Slow Food
Friedrich -- As long as I'm crashing around The Atlantic's site... Here's a good long q&a with The Atlantic's tiptop food writer Corby Kummer, who recently published a lavish book about the Slow Food movement (buyable here). Have you heard of Slow Food? Begun in Italy, it's a worldwide network of people devoted to artisanal food -- home-made cheeses, by-the-case wines, "heritage" poultry, etc. Slow down, take your time, sink into things, recover the good old qualities, savor life ... That's the general idea. Kind of the equivalent in the field of food to what the New Urbanism is in architecture, and just as admirably entrepreneurial. Sample passage: Europeans are pretty much converted already. In Europe almost everyone has memories going back over generations of food with actual flavor, food that's carefully raised. So Slow Food has appealed not just to rich people who like better things but to pretty much everybody who knows that there was once actually good food... There's a real problem with Slow Food in America, and it's this: we don't have that memory bred into us, so it's still a movement of the elite...Generally, once people taste eggs, cheese, barbecue, beer, bread, that has real flavor, they understand that this is something they'd like to have again, and that might be better than what they're having every day. But you have to organize events that will reach a wide range of people and give them something for a really reasonable cost. Or else they're not going to try it, and they're not going to know it, and it's going to seem like an elitist movement. I'm all for Slow Food even if, like the New Urbanism, it sometimes shades into yuppie-Volvo do-goodism. It's a little like the old Arts and Crafts movement, organizing and promoting, and helping a decent number of people take note of what's around them and start to appreciate quality of life issues. The q&a with Kummer reminds me of a blog posting I may never get around to writing, which is on this topic: that of all the high-end art forms these days in this country, the one that's in the best shape is cooking. I'm not much of a foodie myself, but The Wife is. So I've tagged along to an amazing number of amazing meals and have this to report: there are a lot of brilliant high-end cooks and kitchens at work these days. It wasn't all that many decades ago that good eating was in very short supply in this country. Today, you can do pretty well for yourself in many places, and superlatively well in quite a few. That's quite a change. How has this happened? Heaven praise Julia Child and Alice Waters, of course. But other elements have fallen into place too: look at the good craft-and-trade-oriented schools, for instance. Places like the French Culinary Institute and the CIA turn out class after class of well-trained grads. Look at the quality of the journalism about the... posted by Michael at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, February 21, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part V
Michael: Here’s yet another installment in my (ongoing) attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#4, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire] was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with Mr. Harris’ claims of “economic and social transformation” (overstated), “bourgeois wealth and power” (obscures critical conflict between rurals and urban bourgeoisie), and “bourgeois responsibility for the creation of a revolutionary proletariat” (largely a consequence of Napoleon III’s activities) in Parts II, III and IV. Now we’ll deal with his next claim: Did the bourgeoisie shun “exposes of economic realities” and did they possess a “deep fear of revolution in any form”? The claim that the bourgeoisie couldn’t handle economic realities is a little hard to understand. The bourgeoisie were professionals or business people; generally, I think it’s safe to say they had a pretty clear idea of economic realities. Presumably, however, Mr. Harris is implying by the word “expose” that the bourgeoisie (being, in his opinion, morally stunted creatures) disliked being exposed to ridicule or moral criticism. Well, nobody likes to be ridiculed or criticized, but the urban bourgeoisie, anyway, seems to have born up under such criticism fairly well. To select one example of this out of many in 19th century Paris, I would call attention of the career of political and social caricaturist Honore Daumier, whose humor came chiefly at the expense of the urban bourgeoisie. H. Daumier, News bulletin: Scenes of Paris life since we played the moral comedy entitled "The Stock Exchange" H. Daumier, To Anyone With Capital To Lose The readers of Charivari and the other publications for which Daumier drew were,... posted by Friedrich at February 21, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, February 20, 2003


Bulletins from the Sickbed
Friedrich -- I'm home with the flu, and am feeling even more scatterbrained and stupid than usual. Hey, why fight it? So, a bit of this 'n' that. * I caught up with Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone on DVD, and can recommend it. Horror fantasy from a Mexican film poet/intellectual whose movies ("Cronos," "Mimic," "Blade 2") I generally like. This one's set in a boy's boarding school way out in the middle of nowhere during the Spanish Civil War, and it's a little "Zero for Conduct," a little Fritz Lang, and a little post-'60s trash fantasia. The storytelling isn't of much interest, but the movie is a gorgeous and spooky film-buff tone poem. Where did all these gifted Spanish/Latino filmmakers come from, by the way? There's Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama, A Little Princess), Alex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango, 800 Bullets), Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), the guy who made "The Others," which I loved ... Spanish and South American directors used to be awful, with very rare exceptions. These days there's a ton of them, apparently all bursting with talent. Odd the way these waves happen. The British cinema used to have little to brag about apart from Hitchcock, Ealing and Carol Reed. Then in the '80s, it was like a whole bunch of them popped out of the womb knowing how to make movies. Why? How? *Saw a fascinating small piece in a U.K. magazine called Digital Photography Made Easy (a first-rate how-to mag, perfect for morons like me) talking about holographic computer memory. Can't find a link to it online, so I'll type out a passage from Cliff Smith's article: The commercial release of such devices is closer than you think. Researchers at IBM claim they will have small holographic units available by 2003, with the first devices storing 125 Gb at transfer rates of 40Mb per second. They believe that, before long, 1,000 Gb units will be avilable that can transfer 1Gb of data per second -- that's fast enough to record a DVD movie in about 30 seconds. And these holographic storage devices are apparently the size of sugar cubes. Heavens! OK, let's say the IBM people are being 'way too optimistic, and we finally get only half of what they promise, and a couple of years later than expected. Still! That means you'll be able to take a few lifetimes' worth of photos with your digicam before having to download them onto your computer. It means you'll be able to record hours and hours of high-quality video onto teeny-tiny devices. Oh, why aren't I younger? Ten or so years ago I visited the editing suite of a Major Motion Picture that was one of the first to be edited on computer. They'd put all their footage onto video and thence onto hard drives -- I seem to remember they had something like 100 hours on 90 Gb. Though image quality wasn't great -- about standard VCR level -- they were just... posted by Michael at February 20, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Wednesday, February 19, 2003


Free Reads -- Wendy Kohn on Christopher Alexander
Friedrich -- The subject matter of Christopher Alexander's 1977 A Pattern Language (here) and its followup The Timeless Way of Building (here) is architecture, but they're also among the most provocative and useful books about the arts generally I've ever read. I'm far from alone in feeling this way. "A Pattern Language" especially has been phenomenally popular, outselling almost all other books on architecture year after year since its publication. I've talked to poets who found the book eye-opening; software designers have conferences where they discuss Alexander's concept of "patterns"; I've even met architects who have told me they didn't really "get" architecture until they read the book. I once gave a copy of Alexander's perfectly amazing book on Turkish rugs to a theater-critic friend, and it blew his mind; he was babbling about it (and about the new thoughts it was making him have about the theater!) for weeks afterwards. A visit to Alexander's website, here, will give you an OK taste of his mind, but it's probably more fun to sample what reader/reviewers on Amazon have had to say. Here's a typical Reader's Comment: "The book's main idea is much more powerful than that. It applies to almost every aspect of life, not just to architecture. This is definitely one of the best books on my shelf. It has really changed the way I look at...everything." Great stuff, and stuff that hits many brainy and interested people on a deep level. Yet neither book -- both of them concerned with what you might think of as harmless and useful topics such as beauty, usability, and evolved form and knowledge -- is used in architecture schools. Why? As far as I can tell, quite simply because the official architecture world is demented. Alexander (along with such thinkers and writers as Tom Wolfe, Jane Jacobs, Nikos Salingaros, Lucien Steil, Leon Krier, Philip Langdon, and William Whyte) is part of a dissident strain in architecture that's trying to bring the building crafts (and, yes, arts) back to their senses. Why should the academic (ie., "avant-garde") establishment be open to this? Christopher Alexander It'll be fun to see what gets made of his next publication, The Nature of Order, which is due out in July. This is his magnum opus, a four-volume, several-thousand-page-long monster in which he's summing it all up -- beauty, science, order, nature, pattern itself. (The book's publication has been put off several times before, so let's see if it actually is published on time. Its Amazon page, in any case, is here.) On this occasion, Wendy Kohn has written a good introduction to Alexander and his work for The Wilson Quarterly. It's readable here. Sample passage: Yet Alexander’s own colleagues in the American architectural establishment will have nothing to do with him. After warmly embracing Alexander early in his career, his most natural audience has effectively airbrushed him out of its current canon. In the past 15 years, few undergraduate or graduate architecture programs have included A Pattern... posted by Michael at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, February 12, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part IV
Michael: Sorry for the delay, but here’s the next installment in my (ongoing) attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#3 I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with Mr. Harris’ claims of “economic and social transformation” and “bourgeois wealth and power” in Parts II and III and found his ideas both simplistic and overstated. Now we’ll deal with his next claim: did the inequities of industrial capitalism create a resentful proletariat who eventually rose against their repressive bourgeois overlords during the Commune? Mr. Harris’ view of the French masses as being masticated by the iron teeth of 2nd Empire modernization, creating huge social turmoil, appears more than a bit overstated. In the countryside, life was difficult—as it had been for centuries—but was slowly improving. During the period 1852-1871, the intake of calories of the average Frenchman rose about 16%. As a result, by the end of the 2nd Empire the French were—for the first time in history—getting enough to eat. The improved diet showed up in various ways: the height of the peasantry increased and vitamin deficiency diseases were gradually disappearing. There was an increase in agricultural yields, although Frenchmen could achieve only half to two-thirds the yields obtained by contemporary Dutch or German farmers. (Fertilizers were very sparsely used, chiefly on a few large and very up-to-date farms.) J. Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 (Detail) While only one peasant in four made a living cultivating his own land, the numbers of the more impoverished grades of peasantry (such as small landowners who had been forced into day labor) decreased and the... posted by Friedrich at February 12, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, February 10, 2003


Free Views -- Business Card Art
Friedrich -- A charmer: Hugh Macleod's website, here, where he shows off his one-of-a-kind artform -- art on the back of business cards. Using a Rotring technical pen, he makes little drawings, writes a few words, scribbles some patterns. I see a little Ralph Steadman, a little Saul Steinberg, a little John Callahan -- this is fine-art cartooning, basically -- and I like it a lot. I'm hoping he won't mind my posting an example of his work. Click on the image for a bigger view. Thanks to Thomas Hobbs (here), and Out of Lascaux (here). Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments




Pix of the Day -- Donald Evans
Friedrich -- Have you ever run across the art of Donald Evans? Of artists from the last 30 or 40 years, he's one of my faves. He painted stamps -- that was his art form. Thousands of them, watercolor on tiny little squares, triangles, and rectangles. Sometimes entire sheets of stamps. The painting itself, as I hope is visible from the scans I've included in this posting, is charming. But the painting per se is only half of what makes Evans' art so lovable. The other half is that these were stamps for countries he dreamed up. So the art wasn't just in the design/drawing/painting, it was also in the world behind the stamps (as well as in the idea of using stamps-from-imaginary-countries in the first place). An example: stamps from Mangiare ("Lo Stato di Mangiare"), where the government named the country's geographical features after items on restaurant menus from Florence: a hill town called Side Dish ("Contorno"), a countryside named after a sausage ("Mortadella"). (The images below are popups. Be sure to click on them.) Messages from the land of "Amis et Amants" -- "friends and lovers" A bit of biography: Evans was born in 1945, the dreamy only child of a middle-class New Jersey couple. He had an idyllic childhood, during which he was introduced to stamps and stamp collecting at the age of 6 by a neighbor. He took to them instantly --  they seemed to him little portals to the world at large as well as to his own imagination.  He collected stamps, and soon started designing and making his own. He outgrew the passion in adolescence, and went to Cornell to study architecture. He had a vague feeling he wanted to be an artist, though, and he painted (big Ab-Ex paintings!) and learned about various crafts -- fabric and collage, for example. But he also knew he'd have to make a living, and did well at his architecture studies. In the early '60s, he moved to NYC and got a job in an architect's office as a renderer. Evenings, he explored the art world, collecting modestly, getting to know real artists (Marisol, Robert Indiana), and painting sets for small dance and theater troupes. He began to show some of the stamps he'd painted as a kid to friends. They liked 'em. He painted a few more. He was feeling ... Well, something had to happen. And what finally did happen was that a friend invited him to Holland. Evans, who always lived frugally, saved a little more money, packed up and went. There, while staying with a group of friends, he found his metier.  He loved the quaint and miniature quality of Holland's countryside. He started selling a few of the stamps, then a few more. He practiced old-looking handwriting, and he used X-acto knives to erasers; inked, he could use them to mimic the postmarked look of a postcard that had been through the mail. Careerwise, nothing ever broke or burst for him on... posted by Michael at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Ansel Adams at 100
Michael: The other day I made the hour-long drive from my suburban fastness to see a good-sized retrospective of the work of Ansel Adams at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I did so because ever since high school I’ve always half-deliberately steered clear of art photography. However, when I heard about the Adams exhibit, I thought: Aha! Here’s a serious artist—I’ve seen his work in calendars and art books, and they are nothin’ if not serious. So I forked out $15, stood patiently in line (I really hate lines) and filed through the show, only occasionally cutting ahead to escape from male retirees lecturing their friends loudly on the facts of Adams’ life or camera technique. I didn’t even strangle these “helpful” lecturers, a feat which I considered either (1) a moral victory for me or (2) a victory for the manufacturers of my anti-depressant drugs. Mr. Adams turned out, rather to my surprise, to be several different artists. The first “Ansel Adams” did his work during the 1920s (when his “official” artistic goal was to be a Classical pianist), chiefly during breaks while shepherding Sierra Club camping trips through the California mountains he loved, and while wooing his girlfriend who actually lived in Yosemite Park. Interestingly, the photographs he made at this time—while still an amateur—were very small scale, intimate and quiet. At the time he was primarily interested in finding fairly simple abstract and emphatically flat patterns in nature. These pieces made me think of certain Dada collages made from found or random elements—they appear to be the work of a young man who was conscientiously keeping up with current developments in Modernism. The photos obviously are based on mountain or otherwise wilderness scenery, but the obvious attraction this subject matter holds for him is left implicit, rather than being insisted upon. I found photographs made during this era to be extremely pleasurable. ANSEL: THE EARLY YEARS Vernal Falls Through Tree, Yosemite Valley, California, 1920; Fall in Upper Tenaya Canyon, Yosemite National Park, California, c. 1920 The Back of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park California, c. 1920; Suguaro Near Phoenix, Arizona, c. 1932 Regrettably, around 1930 Mr. Adams apparently decided to become a professional photographer (abandoning his musical ambitions) and paid a visit to the leading American art photographer of the day, Paul Strand. Apparently while hanging out at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s house in Taos, the older man showed Adams the negatives of his recent work, which seem to have stupefied the younger photographer. He later recalled the …full, luminous shadows and strong high values in which subtle passages of tone were preserved. Here our hero got himself entangled—in my opinion, fatally—in two diversions. The first diversion is what I call the “well-made photograph.” Black and white photography is an oddly Platonic art form. It can deliver an immense amount of visual information—far more than your eyes take in—which is perfectly ordered for your absorption, so that the enormous excess of detail remains, astonishingly, subordinate to... posted by Friedrich at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, February 6, 2003


Free Reads -- Felix on Muschamp
Friedrich -- The alert Felix Salmon has caught the NYTimes' ludicrous (scandalous? soi-disant? evil?) architecture critic Herbert Muschamp stepping on his own toes. It's readable here. Hey, maybe Felix is ready to join Philip Murphy, Paul Mansour and me in our Anti-Herbert-Muschamp Webring. Or maybe not. Felix has put up his own posting about the WTC finalists here. He likes the THINK proposal a lot. Wrong wrong wrong! But nicely done. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Doing It For a Living
Friedrich -- Your recent postings about Impressionism have reminded me of a question I've always wanted to raise about art. It's the question of doing it for a living. There tends to be an assumption that if you're good at something, you should (or could) turn it into a job, you should do it professionally. Having a job that you love doing (and are well-paid for) is a widespread fantasy, and one that's taken very seriously; if you have a talent or an activity you enjoy doing for its own sake, you're likely to receive a lot of encouragement to turn it into a job. Yet is this always good advice? I wonder. It strikes me as more than likely that the process of turning an activity you love into your means of making a living might very well kill your enjoyment in the activity. Why should it be otherwise? Something you do freely, and purely for the pleasure of it -- isn't this chemical formula necessarily going to be modified if you add "now go make money with it" to the mix? It might change for the better, but it might very well change for the worse. How so? Imagine loving making furniture. You love the wood, the concentration, the process of design, the tactility, the sawdust, the tools and machines, the planning, the smiles on people's faces when you give them a gift ... Now imagine making furniture for a living. Bosses, possibly -- always a joy. Accountants and bookkeeping in any case. Clients making demands instead of friends delighted to receive gifts. Competition and compromises. (After all, the more straightforwardly market-economy a field is, the more you're stuck servicing your customers -- a good thing generally, but is there any reason to assume that it'll enhance the pleasure you take in your craft?) Even if you're financially successfully, you might very well wake up one day wishing you'd never followed your bliss. You've spoiled your pleasure in something you used to love. Yet the fantasy persists. I think it's partly because we're Americans, and we have dreams about finding joy and satisfaction (redemption, really) in our jobs. I think it's also partly human and completely understandable. It isn't easy -- in a life that includes job, family, friends, and routine maintenance -- to squeeze in much of anything else at all. So it may be natural to fantasize about getting pleasure and "fulfillment" (whatever that means) in addition to a salary from the workplace. That way, at least you'll have a little leisure time at the end of the day. Without a fulfilling job, you're stuck: use the spare time for leisure, or for what you love? Splitting those precious hours half and half doesn't leave a lot for either. Another example is blogging. I contribute to this blog for fun and pleasure. If someone loves my work and wants to throw money at me, I'm certainly not going to refuse to cash the checks. But such... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part III
Michael: As you've probably caught on by now, this is the next installment in my attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1 and #2, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with the somewhat questionable accuracy of Mr. Harris’ “economic and social transformation” in Part #1. Next we have the question: did the middle class, or bourgeoisie, grow rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade, as Mr. Harris maintains? The early years, at least, of the 2nd Empire were undeniably prosperous. Apart from the effects of the government’s economic program, France benefited from the discovery of gold in California (1848) and later in Australia. As a consequence prices, which had generally been falling since 1815, rose sharply until 1856, and remained thereafter at those levels, which, until the price increases percolated through the economy, provoked a sharp increase in entrepreneurial profits and thus triggered a rapid expansion. However, neither this favorable effect nor the impact of the government’s economic program lasted past the 1850s. As Alain Plessis notes in his book, “The Rise & Fall of the Second Empire 1852-1871”: …[O]ne can distinguish two successive and very different rhythms in this expansion…[T]he production indexes seem to show that growth was more rapid at the beginning of the Empire, until 1858-60, than after. The early years were also marked by steadily rising prices. Hence an undeniable euphoria among businessmen that consolidated the new political regime. Napoleon III Thereafter, however, things clearly slowed down, causing a clear loss of support for the Imperial regime among the urban business classes:... posted by Friedrich at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (0)
Art Class
Friedrich -- Have you taken any art-making classes recently? I was away from them for a couple years and missed them, so I'm treating myself to one this term, an intro to oil painting. I've never done any oil painting. If not in a classroom, where would I do it? The Wife and I share about 3 square feet of apartment space, and I'm not eager to inflict the fumes on her. I went to the first class last night, and was reminded of what a ripoff most art classes are. The woman teaching it seems nice and for all I know is a good artist, so I have nothing against this class specifically -- it seems like an OK version of the standard thing. It's the standard thing that's a ripoff (and that, in a sane art world, would be a scandal). Last night's class, like about 3/4 of the art classes I've taken, followed this model: the teacher has set up a subject, whether a model or a still life. You bring a bunch of art materials with you. You draw and paint. The teacher wanders around, giving each person a little time and a few hints. You pack up and go home. Like I say: what a ripoff. It's amazing the schools charge for this, and just as amazing that eager students put up with it. Would it be too much ask an art teacher to do a little actual art instruction? To have a little something prepared? To structure a series of classes so that the bit you learn this week joins together with the bit you learned last week, and you leave the term having acquired some genuinely new skills, and able to do things you hadn't previously been able to do? You wouldn't think it would be such a challenge to put together such a course. OK, class, this week we're going to study negative space. I've prepared six exercises. Next week we're going to focus on the way warm colors pull and cold colors push. And I've prepared six exercises to ram that home. What could be so hard about preparing and delivering such a course? I tolerate this nonsense because there seem to be so few alternatives and I like drawing and painting, lousy as I am at both. I have been lucky enough to stumble into a few classes where the teachers, bless 'em, did approach art instruction as a matter of conveying finite, definable skills, and I've learned probably 95% of the little I've managed to learn about art-making from them. Has this kind of thing plagued your art-class-taking life too? I guess I assume that what it represents is a coming-together of four things: asinine progressive-education ideas (let the student discover art for himself!), laziness and convenience, the continuing-ed business, and annoying modernist (ie., anti-technique, anti-skill, pro-self-expression) ideas about art. Do you think I'm off here? Or that I'm missing some other element? I'll probably stick the class out... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments





Wednesday, February 5, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism Part II
Michael: As I promised in my previous posting, this is the second part of my series attempting to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Let’s take a closer look at this one point at a time. Did France undergo during the 2nd Empire an economic and social transformation sufficiently drastic to merit the title of an industrial revolution? The Second Empire came into existence as a sort of delayed result of the revolutionary uprisings of working class Parisians in 1848. The urban proletariat, enraged by its declining economic prospects (wages had been falling for decades), and inspired by similar uprisings throughout Europe, forced the then-constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe to abdicate. H. Vernet, Barricade in the Rue Sufflot, Paris, 25 June 1848, 1848-50 (Detail) The Second Republic that followed immediately thereafter was ill-starred; Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the famous Corsican military adventurer, was elected president. When the public became disenchanted with the Republic’s ineffectual political squabbling, Louis Napoleon proceeded to organize a coup in 1851 to seize supreme power. (Gee, who could have seen that one coming?) Napoleon III, as he became known, set up a proto-Fascist government: authoritarian with an emphasis on public order to placate the property owners, and with close ties to big business in order to (hopefully) force the pace of economic growth and keep the masses happy. The masses that Napoleon III was particularly interested in were not, however, urban but rural, since his imperial status had been validated by a plebiscite with a universal male franchise, and France remained a predominantly rural country. H. Flandrin, Portrait of Napoleon III, 1862 (Detail) In practice, Napoleon III’s economic program... posted by Friedrich at February 5, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, February 4, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part I
Michael: In a previous posting I suggested that visual art is a way of talking about sources of power (or perceived power) that people are either unwilling or unable to discuss openly. After I wrote that post I ran down a mental list of art-historical movements which this idea seemed to account for properly enough, but I quickly ran up against one famous example that I couldn’t fit into my shiny new theory: Impressionism. What kind of “not-openly-discussable” subject matter, if any, was hiding in this sunny painting of people enjoying themselves in and around Paris? Unfortunately, in trying to puzzle this out, I realized that my only knowledge of France in this period had come from art books, which gave what I would call the Standard Account of Impressionism. But the more I pondered this Account the less it seemed to make sense to me. H. Daumier, Just Look At Where They've Stuck My Picture, 1859 I mean, say you were a young man who wanted to be a professional painter in mid-19th century France. You lived in a country with the best-developed art market and institutions in the world. Artistic taste and standards were clearly articulated in your society, which was wealthy enough to reward its favorites richly. There was even the possibility of a certain level of government patronage if you played ball with the system. At the same time, however, the system tended to withhold rewards from those who deviated from these standards. Why on earth would you have gone out of your way to introduce an unfamiliar style of painting and use it to describe non-traditional subject matter? Just to make your already difficult task —making a living at painting—a nearly impossible one? Surely few people would take self-expression that far, and especially few people who were as ambitious as the Impressionist painters. And yet the Standard Account never seems to treat this as a question that even needs an answer: apparently, according to this account, the Impressionists were simply born to paint modern life with broken color and a lack of "finish." The closest the Account edges to an explanation (which it never quite says explicitly, but heavily implies) is that the Impressionists were just too darn manly to settle for the watered down formulae of a decrepit Academicism. And they rejected these timeworn formulae even though doing so meant they couldn’t count of the support of their era’s blinkered and timid art consumers. Alternatively, the Marxist Variant of the Standard Account suggests that the Impressionists, like all Modernists, were just too darn manly to put up with the degrading aspects of industrial capitalism and created new aesthetic formulae to take critical potshots at it. Of course, the fact that the Impressionist paintings (with or without “critical” content, depending on your point of view) were then sold to the very bourgeoisie that was supporting the Academy as well as cracking the whip of industrial capitalism is a bit of conundrum neither seem to address.... posted by Friedrich at February 4, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, January 31, 2003


These Kids These Days, chapter whatever
Friedrich -- I spent more art-going time than usual this past week out on the further edges -- oddball gallery art, a poetry reading, some performance art. A few quick observations: Young people these days must have grown up watching even more television than we boomers did. The old frameworks (whether fictional or not) are in tatters. Or perhaps it's just that the fashion ot the moment is post-ironic horsing around in a deconstructed (ie., blown to smithereens) media junkheap. Installation art? An MTV set. An MTV show? Half performance art. Which I take to mean that TV is the source and mother of all things to young people. A few years ago I finally noticed that, where the boomers loved to bitch about their parents, the new young people love to bitch about television. My theory? That the formative art experience for these kids was hanging out in front of the TV with friends, making fun of what was on while secretly fantasizing about being a star. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 31, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Thursday, January 30, 2003


Art Survival Tips
Friedrich -- I notice that as the years have gone by I've developed a certain number of art-going tricks. One I'm especially semi-proud of helps me get over some of the snottiness I can be prone to. A lot of people get pissy about art things, come to think of it. They read a new book or look at a new painting and think, sheesh, piece of shit, what the hell's becoming of the world, what is it here that's being foisted on the world, etc. I used to be prone to reacting in this way too. Actually, I still am: Your mind's on the greats, and you feel you're defending standards, and what's before you is so transparently ... not great. But why not be a little kinder? Though I'm not sure that "trying to be kinder" would have occurred to me had I not had to read lots of fiction by friends and go to lots of art and music by friends. And with friends, of course, you tend to be a little kinder. You make the effort. So it came to me: why not, at a concert or play or art show, pretend that the person behind it is a good friend? If, when I read or see something by an actual friend, I really am kinder, maybe pretending the artist is a friend can make me kinder too. And it works. I've found that, if I pretend the artist is a good friend, my mind will always relax and shift into a more open state. I start seeing the point of the work before me more accurately and generously. Instead of doing nothing but harumphing, my inner monologue might go something like this: "OK, what if she's a friend, what if she were a friend... Well, OK, she's doing something media-driven and didactic, and trying to update it with a kind of street rhythm that doesn't turn its back on rap. That's clear. I'm not crazy about this kind of thing myself, but she is, and why not? Plus, she's playing the contempo harsh-and-confrontational game. And why not? Me, I generally think this kind of thing is a pain, but hey, it's something some people seem to like to do. And I can certainly see a few new twists that she's making happen here, and the craft level's kind of impressive. I certainly don't know how she did it, in any case...." Etc., etc. So when I go to an art show or theater piece these days, I always remind myself to pretend a good friend did it. And I have a much better time than I'd have otherwise. Unless, that is, what I've gone to is a big corporate commercial thing, in which case I let myself razz it to my heart's content, if that's my reaction. Who cares about the feelings of a committee? Who even wants to bother seeing a committee's point of view? But if it's a performance? Or a poem? A... posted by Michael at January 30, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments




Pic of the Day
Michael: For my pic of the day, I’m returning to Wayne Thiebaud. W. Thiebaud, Flatland River, 1997 In my posting earlier in the week, “Food as Art, Art as Food” I neglected to mention that Wayne was born in 1920[!], and he’s still knocking out pretty good paintings as we speak. So I hereby award Mr. Thiebaud a Blowhardy Award for pushing on against the winds of age—an accomplishment I appreciate more the closer I get to my own half-century. Wayne Thiebaud, Over 80 and Still Painting Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 30, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Wednesday, January 29, 2003


Free Reads -- Philip Murphy on Herbert Muschamp
Friedrich -- On his blog The Invisible Hand, Philip Murphy has posted a blistering attack on the latest ravings of the NYTimes' architecture "critic" Herbert Muschamp. Brilliant stuff -- though I'm feeling envious, I confess; for some years I've enjoyed hating Muschamp's writing and have fantasized about taking him down. But I have to admit that Murphy, who has let fly at Muschamp with both barrels before, has claimed the franchise decisively for himself. Let's hope this posting is just part of an ongoing series. Sample passage: The Muschamp Seven – with the notable exception of the Peterson/Littenberg team – are all of the radically pluralist school of architecture. To them everything but the past, especially the Western past, is valid. They believe in the Hetropolis, a vast interconnected multicultural urban landscape where the oppressive strictures of gender, morality, capitalism, culture and language melt away to reveal people in their common essence. Muschamp is disappointed that New York has taken so long to accept its role as the global Hetropolis. Instead, it has shortsightedly looked to its own vernacular tradition for cues about what to build next. Never mind that that vernacular includes some of the most beautiful buildings in the world – the Empire State, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Center – these are building that could only be in New York. Notice how Muschamp’s favorites would look more at home in Singapore or Shanghai. The posting is readable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 29, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Guest Posting -- Andre Hattingh
Friedrich -- Some comments came in from Andre Hattingh, whose email address indicates that he's in Africa. Imagine, 2blowhards is read (if occasionally) by someone who lives (as he informs me) "near Johannesburg"! Amazing. In any event, Andre's a brainy guy, as well as a world-class, and often hilarious, curmudgeon. Picasso? No way. Abstract art? Nope -- Andre makes you and me look like edgy progressives and eager-beaver scene-makers and wannabes. Here he is on the fad for "reality TV": Surely "Reality TV" is a gross misnomer. In my limited experience 'reality' comes somewhat tiresomely unedited, unpackaged and without an inappropriate marketing splurge or inconvenient ad breaks. Or do they do life differently in the States? (A double decaf latté?) The correct title for this sort of entertainment [sic] would surely be Prurience TV. Its content (?) appeals to those types who gather at the fringes of highway accidents to view the latest unedited road kill and Jerry Springer junkies. It used to be called 'bread and circuses.' Now it's Macs and reality TV. I've urged Andre to begin blogging himself -- clearly flair and point of view aren't a problem. But he's playing coy for the moment. Too bad: he's someone who can really dish it out. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 29, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments




Exclusive -- Salingaros and Hanson
Friedrich -- I'm pleased -- thrilled, really -- to present a 2Blowhards exclusive. We've been given an advance glimpse of a brilliant new essay on architecture by Nikos Salingaros, a University of Texas mathematician and architectural theorist (and frequent collaborator with Christopher Alexander), and Brian Hanson, an architectural historian and former advisor to Prince Charles. Their topic? Daniel Libeskind's proposal for the WTC site. Their topic is really much more than that, as anyone who has followed their work would expect. Along with Alexander and some other thinkers, Hanson and Salingaros are looking at building (and, implicitly, at art more generally) and urbanism in terms of patterns. What does this mean? To simplify drastically a set of complex and infinitely-suggestive ideas: much as there are biological patterns that give rise to life and biological patterns that go nowhere, so too are there patterns of building (and of urbanism and art) that give rise to something we experience as "life" and patterns of building (and urbanism and art) that essentially go nowhere -- that lead not to life but to death. "Beauty" is a word we use to describe the leading-to-life quality that some artworks have. It's something real, and something whose presence can be felt. Another way of looking at what these thinkers are saying is to consider the computer universe. There are some patterns (the desktop metaphor, for instance, or the Web itself) that lead to a flourishing, and many, many patterns that lead to nothing but dead ends (no matter how brilliant they may be). These kinds of ideas lie behind, for instance, the New Urbanism, one thrust of which is to attempt to harness the dynamism of developers and the market to more human ends by transforming restrictive zoning laws into algorithms that result in both beauty and growth. I don't know about you, but my thoughts spin happily off in many directions when presented with these ideas: chaos and evolutionary theory, the emergence and utility of traditional artistic forms, self-organizing complexity, the growth of language, the role of the individual artist in the midst of all this ... Whew. For my money, this is some of the most exciting thinking going on in the arts anywhere today. In any case, the full Salingaros and Hanson essay is much longer than the appetizer here. It hasn't yet been scheduled for publication; we promise to alert readers where and when the whole thing does become available. But the appetizer, which we've been given permission to reprint here, is itself pretty great. We're pleased to present it. Daniel Libeskind's Architecture of Death by Brian Hanson and Nikos Salingaros. We contrast two distinct threads in the architecture of Daniel Libeskind -- the geometry employed in his Holocaust Memorials, and the geometry of those buildings whose purpose is life and regeneration. We find no difference whatsoever between the two types, thus concluding that Libeskind's buildings cannot serve to bring architecture to life. Daniel Libeskind's participation in the World Trade Center project... posted by Michael at January 29, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, January 28, 2003


The Unbearable Lightness of Stucco
Michael: As you know, I live in Southern California. What you may not know is this is the world capital for wood-framed, stucco-walled buildings. As a result of seeing so much of this style of construction, I’ve noticed two things: first, I find the framing for such buildings more interesting than the buildings themselves and second, I prefer the buildings when they are in the earlier, monochromatic stages of stucco than when they have their “finish coat” on. While I know these preferences to be a fact, I don’t know why I react the way I do. I’ve come up with several hypotheses to explain them: 1) My grandparents' house in Toledo Ohio was stucco, and I’m still suffering from a forgotten trauma connected to their choice of building material. 2) I’ve developed a case of postmodern blues, in which I prefer an unfinished building to a finished building for reasons of irony, or something. 3) The grey undercoat of stucco, known as “mud” reminds of the happy days I spent digging a moat around my childhood home. 4) Stucco, as a finished architectural material, appears so “weightless” that I’m subconsciously afraid that it will blow away, and I’m more comfortable with its earlier state, which looks like reinforced concrete. (You can never tell when the Big Bad Wolf will show up.) I considered, and rejected, the hypothesis that I have a hankering for Modernist simplicity, since I actually find the ornamentation on these buildings--in its monochromatic state--intriguing. Do you share my weirdo preferences? Can you at least explain them? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 28, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, January 27, 2003


Food As Art; Art As Food
Michael— I just spent a pleasant, if somewhat hungry, hour in the company of Wayne Thiebaud at an exhibit of his works from 1955 to 2003 at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. This is the first time I have seen a large amount of Thiebaud’s art "in the flesh." Although I’ve long admired his work in reproduction, Thiebaud’s canvases, with his exuberant, almost gluttonous approach to applying oil paint, are much easier to read in person. Thiebaud puts his butter-creamy oil paint on very, very thickly, and then pushes it around with stiff brushes so the manner of its application is still visible, like frosting on a cake. Or he applies it thinly, in which case it is gloppy, drippy, so diluted with medium that it gleams out of the final painting like a glaze on top of a fruity desert. In short, Thiebaud is a kind of highly intellectual pastry chef of a painter. W. Thiebaud, Bread, Butter and Knife, 1962; W. Thiebaud, Rosebud Cakes, 1991-5 Since he evidently wants to eat his own paintings, he tends to be a bit fastidious, even when things get messy. The discipline in Thiebaud’s paintings—which they desperately need—is his confident and assured drawing, which is fortunately up to the task of organizing his “oral id.” Thiebaud began his artistic life as a cartoonist, animator, designer and commercial artist, and many of his drawings still have the relaxed authority of the noodlings of the more talented art directors I’ve known. W. Thiebaud, Cafe Flowers, Caged Condiments, Cream Pie, Java and Sinkers, etc., 1995 Since the “gut-level” aspect of his art is so completely unambiguous, Thiebaud’s conscious mind has been quite free to develop fairly complex rationales regarding his art. For example, he refers to his tendency towards inventive distortion in drawing as caricature. According to Thiebaud, however, he doesn’t mean caricature in the ordinary sense—i.e., mere disproportion of body parts, which has a deliberately comic effect. Caricature to Thiebaud means “specific formal changes in size, scale, etc., relationships that combine the perceptual with the conceptual.” Thiebaud opposes his idea of caricature on the one hand to “simple cartooning” and on the other hand to what he terms “taxidermy”: By taxidermy I mean the redundant visual recording of a dead image. The downside of realism is taxidermy. The way to escape that, it seems to me, is to collate a series of different perceptual responses into a single image. The horror of creating a dead image is fairly understandable if one assumes, on some level (as Thiebaud clearly does) that one is going to have to ingest everything one paints. While Thiebaud is clearly fascinated by the technical facility of great Baroque painting, one presumes that he would be physically ill at the thought of tackling Caravaggio’s subject matter. The dominance of “frivolous” subject matter—deserts, food, fashion, still life, pretty girls—in his work is obviously safe ground for an artist of his compulsions. Thiebaud’s artistic influences are an eclectic... posted by Friedrich at January 27, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Friday, January 24, 2003


Free Views -- Stop-Action Webographs
Friedrich -- Is it a new art form? An online show of Parisian-street photography by David Crawford -- only they aren't photographs, really. They're like stop-action micro-movies -- three or four frames sequenced, with the sequence repeating over and over, and presented as a kind of individual photograph. Words, as ever, fail me, but the exhibit is worth checking out. It's here. The usual slow-connection warning pertains here... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 24, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, January 23, 2003


WTC -- Gaudi's Entry
Friedrich -- A design by Antonio Gaudi has been resurrected by a Boston architect who wants to place it in the competition for the WTC site. You can see a nothing-if-not-striking image -- one that suggests that, like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi too went through a Ming-the-Merciless phase -- here. Link thanks to Jim Ryan at Philosoblog (here), who loves the design. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 23, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, January 21, 2003


Artchat Survival Tips -- "Greatness"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- It's been years since I've enjoyed some of the typical old arguments about art. It's been years since I've enjoyed arguing about the arts period, come to think of it. "Is it art?" "Is it great art?" -- to my mind, at least these days, who cares? Or rather: I prefer to see conversations about art not get hung up on such questions. Do you still enjoy the old freshman-in-college quarrels? Why do I suspect the answer is "No"? I wouldn't for an instant pose as a professional aesthetician. But, as a practical matter, I find that after decades in the arts and media worlds I've developed some survival strategies. A few of them are useful (at least for me) in terms of avoiding dullness and unpleasantness in discussions about the arts. I'm sure you have many such too. What do you say we A) compare notes about these tricks, and B) Pass a few of them along? Hey, we're getting gray and grizzled; it's time for us to enter our wise-and-tiresome phase. So, in that wise-but-tiresome spirit, here's the first such trick that occurs to me. Purely out of laziness, I'm going to assume that the reader in fact wants to avoid overfamiliar art quarrels. Given how ready to rumble many blogsurfers seem to be, that could be a mistake. Even so ... Today's 2Blowhards Artchat Tip for avoiding tedious arguments concerns the "greatness" question. Everyone has stumbled into this morass: "Elvis is greater than Mozart!" "Are you out of your mind?!!!" "But I really love his music. How can you say it isn't great?" "And what right do you have to call it great anyway?" "Harold Bloom says it's great, that's who!" "Well, Greil Marcus blah blah." And then up pops the voice of the Predictable Radical: "Greatness is just a dead-white-male construct anyway..." Snooze-ola. Spare me. Puh-leeze. I'm outta here. But how to handle, and avoid, such moments? Here are my (possibly lame-o) tips and reflections. First, remember that the fact that you love a given work doesn't mean it's great. Second, remember that the fact that a given work is great doesn't mean you have to love it. What is it about "great" anyway? If we're talking about "great" in the sense of "it's part of the canon," then this is simply a consensus opinion that has evolved over time. Lots of smart and informed people have agreed that this is the case -- which doesn't mean that this opinion won't slowly change with the passage of more time, or that there haven't been dissenters. This is art, not science, as we've stressed on this blog several times. It's an ongoing discussion, not a hard and firm body of objective knowledge. (And please, let's for the moment overlook the fuzzy edges of science and the more intricate arguments about the philosophy of science. Art is simply softer than science.) So is "greatness" in the arts meaningless, or completely subjective? And... posted by Michael at January 21, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments




Appropriation Takes It Up a Notch
Michael— I was quite intrigued to read Jennifer Ordonez’ story in the Wall Street Journal of January 21 about a music producer known as 7 Aurelius. Mr. Aurelius (who started out in life as Marcus Vest) is a hot producer who co-wrote and co-produced songs that were No. 1 on Billboard’s singles chart for 23 weeks in 2002. He is now attempting to cut a $10 million deal with a record company to create his own label, and to raise his profile, has embarked on a publicity campaign featuring, oddly enough, himself. As Ms. Ordonez remarks: Not too long ago, musicians were the stars of the music business. Producers, with rare exceptions, labored behind the scenes. But these days a new breed of producer has learned to spin hit-making acumen into fame, fortune and influence, sometimes rivaling the performer at the microphone. Part of the reason is that the music industry is desperate for hits…producers who consistently please fickle audiences get supersized deals from hit-hungry record companies and often command hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few days work. And a few days is often all it takes. Producers create songs at warp speeds using advanced digital technology. Lots of songs are driven by “beats,” or electronic riffs, and are based on recordings of old hits, interpreted anew in part to avoid having to make certain royalty payments. I had heard of the concept of “appropriation” in the visual arts, but I hadn’t quite realized how far the music industry had taken it: Although Mr. Aurelius is a musician, some of his writing is derivative. He sometimes holes up in the studio and uses other artists’ recordings to help him conceive new songs. On a recent evening, he popped discs by Prince, Phil Collins and Norah Jones into a CD player before settling on “Cherish the Day,” a song by pop vocalist Sade. His fingers moved across the keyboards composing a melody that was similar, but different—the key, he says, to creating hits that will resonate with listeners. Twenty minutes later, it was a “beat.” Maybe someday soon we’ll have discussions of how 7 Aurelius has produced a significant social comment by recycling and “draining the meaning” out of previous pop songs. (Hey, it worked for those visual art guys.) But you kind of wonder if this very trend doesn’t have something to do with the declining fortunes of the music industry these days. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 21, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, January 20, 2003


Tacit Knowledge -- Noise, age, fiction, pop
Friedrich -- As you know, I like folk wisdom, professional knowledge, rules of thumb -- the things people know but often don't get around to expressing, the general rules that can be such a help in getting you into the ballpark. Partly this is me, I'm sure. Partly this is because of the nature of the arts -- a field in which personal responses, quirkiness, feelings and sensations play an important role. Loose rules of thumb are often all there is to go on. Exceptions allowed, of course, for those extremely-formal art forms, such as ballet or the writing and performing of fugues, where correctness and strict technical knowledge play a large role... In any case, in years and years of following the arts, I've talked to a lot of people in the field and scribbled down a few of their rules of thumb. As these rules come back to me, I'll pass them along. Hey, a few came back to me today as I was doing some shopping. Loud noises. Young people like 'em better than old people. Boys like 'em better than girls. People generally start disliking loud noise in their late 20s -- it stops being experienced as exciting and starts being experienced as annoying and painful. Women like fiction more than men do. Many people start losing interest in new pop music in their late 20s. In middle age, many people who read a lot of fiction in their youth turn to nonfiction, especially history. Is any of this backed up by deep, serious sociological studies? Possibly, though I don't know of any. But these are a few of the loose rules that people in the entertainment, culture, and arts biz find useful, and some of the bedrock of common sense on which culture is built. Got any to add? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 20, 2003 | perma-link | (19) comments




Artfight Update
Friedrich -- I notice that the entertaining fisticuffs that broke out in the comments section a few postings down ("Guest Posting -- Michael L. etc") have spread over to Andrea Harris' blog Spleenville, here. As my grandmother used to say, "That's quite a to-do!" Many thanks to everyone for joining in, by the way. It's heartening, if rather overwhelming, to be reminded of how much many people care about these questions -- let alone how fervently they they hold and express their positions. Who says that juicy discussions about art don't take place anymore? Now: how about Friedrich on the new LA Cathedral? Or me on the LA City Hall and Addison Mizner? Hey, readers: It took Friedrich and me years to 1) Find our way around the box that is Modern Architecture, and 2) Actually come out the other side. Years! And much in the way of (probably wasted) time spent thinking and researching! And where are the comments, I ask you? No one's even left a comment saying something along the lines of, "Gosh, you know, the 2Blowhards have half a point here: the scholars and experts talk about all these weirdo/nightmare glass and steel and concrete boxes and experiments as the only Modern Architecture, and actually there are lots of nifty other kinds of recent buildings, including many that are really attractive and pleasant, that fit in yet add a little something, that I could even dig living in, or working in, or walking by! Cool! Whaddya know: There's a lot more to Modern Architecture than Modernism!" Not one such comment! Sheesh. But not bitter or anything, no sirree, Michael UPDATE: I can't seem to make the link to the Spleenville posting itself work -- the one above is a dud. So, many apologies. But those interested in following this dispute can use this link here to get to Spleenville, and can then do a search on "Blowhard." That'll do ya. Or so I hope. UPDATE #2: Andrea Harris, the queen of Spleenville, has delivered herself of another terrific posting on the topic, readable here.... posted by Michael at January 20, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, January 18, 2003


1000 Words: Addison Mizner
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I see I've been sneaking in references to what I think of as "the other modern architecture" in recent postings. But why sneak? Why not just tell the tale? I'll start with Addison Mizner. When we think of Florida architecture, one of the styles that comes quickest to mind is Mediterranean Revival. Arches, stucco, porches, red tiles, courtyards ... It seems so much part of the climate that it's hard to imagine it didn't just spring up alongside the palm trees, a natural outgrowth of the heat and the water. In fact, most buildings in Florida prior to the end of World War I were in styles we associate with the Northeast. Amazingly enough, the Mediterranean (Spanish and Italian, mainly) Revival was brought to Florida and established as a style there by one man: Addison Mizner (1872-1933). Mizner grew up in California and adventured his way around much of the world before settling in NYC in his 30s, ambitious to become a society architect like his idol Stanford White. He was an eccentric yet debonair man who eventually weighed more than 300 pounds, and he dazzled and charmed high society with his wit and foibles. He filled scrapbooks with images he liked, from castles to Moorish ceilings to tables to fountains. He did some building and interior-decorating around NYC, then went to Florida in 1918 at the urging of a friend (an heir to the Singer fortune), set up shop there as a kind of developer/architect/bon-vivant, and became the preferred architect of the rich, who were for the first time traveling south during the cold months in great and regular numbers. His houses, hotels and clubs set the style for Palm Beach and Boca Raton -- which means that when we think "vacation in Florida" or "retiring to somewhere warm," some of the "Venice on the Atlantic" mental pictures that come to mind are pictures we owe to Mizner. He established businesses to produce the materials he demanded for his buildings -- fixtures, stucco and tiling, for instance -- and was happily making even bigger plans when the Depression wiped him out. By the time he died he was bankrupt. Many of the buildings he built are still standing, and the houses he made still command a premium. Mizner did nothing to "advance" architecture -- he had no formal training, and no interest whatsoever in innovation. He wanted swank and panache, lots of it, and his buildings bring together dignity and fantasy in ways that have proved hard to surpass. They struck a nerve, helped set a style that endures to this day, and they're still loved. Some of the best-known are the Cloister Inn and the Boca Raton Club; the Via Mizner is sometimes spoken of as America's first open-air shopping mall. (In pictures it looks classier and more pleasing than any recent mall I know of.) If some of the movies we love best are Dream Factory product, well, why shouldn't we... posted by Michael at January 18, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments




Earthquakes and Traditional Building Styles
Friedrich -- I've been happily following discussion of your review of the Moneo-designed new L.A. Cathedral, and was struck by a comment from one of your readers, Alicia Huntley (her website is here). She writes that earthquakes are an explanation for the non-traditional style in which the Cathedral was built. For one thing, the building itself has to be able to survive such big shocks; for another, traditional ornament is best avoided, for fear of it shaking loose. I know nothing about such technical matters myself, although I spent part of a recent dinner talking to a San Francisco architect most of whose business consists of earthquake-proofing older buildings. (I now know that many of them need help. I also know that they've done pretty well to last this long.) Still, I wonder ... At least a few of the buildings L.A. is proudest of are old (by L.A. standards), tall and in traditional styles. (And the Moneo Cathedral isn't even especially tall.) A couple of for-instances: Pasadena City Hall, 1927 The Pasadena City Hall , designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown and finished in 1927. It's a beautiful landmark, exuberant but classy, a good-spirited old dowager decked out in her best jewelry, and dripping with traditional detail, from arches to domes to lanterns to urns. Los Angeles City Hall, 1928 And the Los Angeles City Hall itself, designed by John Parkinson and completed in 1928. It's a glamorous, streamlined exercise in Art Deco, and was the tallest building in L.A. until the 1960s. Google tells me that the LA City Hall got a "seismic retrofit" (there's some jargon that's just too good to be avoided) a few years ago -- but, heck, these two buildings are over 70 years old and are still standing. So I'm impressed. I'm also thinking: there doesn't seem to be all that much conflict between "building in traditional styles" and "surviving earthquakes." And I'm wondering if the Moneo is likely to be here in 70 years. But, as I say, I have no idea whether these buildings have been near-disaster areas during the big earthquakes or not, and I imagine that Alicia Huntley knows much more about the subject than I do. Do you have any knowledge about this? Do any of our readers? Alicia? I smilingly note that both of these much-loved 20th century (and hence "modern," though not "modernist") buildings make not only free but enthusiastic and un-ironic use of historical precedents. The Pasadena City Hall re-works quite faithfully some ideas of Palladio, while the top of the LA City Hall is meant to evoke what's known of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. (Thank you, Google.) Bizarre, isn't it, how we've allowed ourselves to be talked into the idea that you can't build in this way anymore? You simply can't, argue the apologists for modernism: Modern life, modern consciousness, etc., etc. Hmm. Yet these buildings were completed in 1927 and 1928. When do we suppose this all-changing "modernity" rupture-thingee occurred? Perhaps in... posted by Michael at January 18, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, January 17, 2003


Guest Posting -- Michael L. on the Mystique of the Artist
Friedrich -- It's always fun to try to puzzle out what the figure of "the artist" means to people, and to marvel at how attached people are to their fantasies about art and artists. Michael L., a reader from Boston, took note of an offhand sentence in one of my postings on the topic and sent in a fine anecdote and reflection: You say "Perhaps the general public likes having an "artist" figure out there -- perhaps it means something to the general public." I think you're right, and I'll give you an example. My wife is an artist, and recently I acquired work space in the building where her studio is located. I'm playing around with wood and polymer clay sculpture. The artists in the building had an open studio event. During that weekend I was in and out of my workshop, but not a part of the open studios. The public dropped in to my space anyway since it was warm and I had the door ajar. Other than workbenches I had built, there were just some figures in progress on my worktable. I talked to whoever came in, telling them I was not an artist nor a part of the open studios but merely a hobbyist and a beginning one at that. To a person, they insisted that I was an artist because I was doing something creative -- and not because I had produced any art. Even the most generous of critics could not have said that with any seriousness. They were in love with the idea of "artist" and had a need to democratize that idea as much as possible. (Which may explain why some horrible "art" gets sold.) However, I think the romantic idea of artist as individual creator in his/her garret is a pervasive part of our modern culture. Isn't that great? They couldn't be talked out of believing that he's an artist. They'd come to meet and see artists -- so, by god, they were going to have themselves an artist. Many thanks to Michael L. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 17, 2003 | perma-link | (26) comments




Free Reads -- Apple on Maybeck
Friedrich -- The Times' R.W. Apple writes a good introduction to the work of the great, playful, mystical and zany west coast architect Bernard Maybeck. Maybeck was a wonderfully eccentric figure who lived into the 1950s, and built many beautiful San Francisco-area buildings, mixing styles from Arts and Crafts to NeoClassical to Meditearranean. Apple's piece is readable here. Sample passage: Maybeck's roots were in the Arts and Crafts movement. Along with a poet, publisher and aesthetic theorist named Charles Keeler, and others, he worked to turn the "seismically unstable and intellectually volatile Berkeley hills," as the architecture writer Allen Freeman described them, into an Arcadian garden landscape, dotted with rustic wooden houses. They were guided by Keeler's injunction to "let the work be simple and genuine, let it be a genuine expression of the life which it is to environ" — a sentiment worthy of an American William Morris. In the strait-laced Victorian era, their counter-cultural way of life must have seemed almost as far out as the present-day pageant of nonconformity on Telegraph Avenue, between Bancroft Way and Dwight Way, where hippies, punks, Rastafarians, Trotskyites and anarchists mingle with students. And where does the Times run this piece? In the Architecture pages? Nope: in its Travel section. Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1915 Maybeck, by the way, is on the list of the architects I'm hoping to profile as examples of "the other modern architecture" -- great artists, builders and buildings from the 20th century that share very little with the official (ie., Modernism to Post-Modernism and beyond) story of recent architecture. Maybeck, like many others, is modern -- but not Modernist. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 17, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, January 16, 2003


Tacit Knowledge -- Authors and money
Friedrich -- A woman I was lunching with who works at a large literary agency told me an amazing fact. Her agency represents over 3000 authors. Guess how much of the agency's income is brought in by their top 10 authors. Ready? The answer is 25%. Wow: 1/4 of the money this company makes is brought in by 1/300th of its authors. (And one of their top 10 authors has been dead for some years now.) I wonder what percentage of their revenue is brought in by the bottom 1500 of their authors? And people talk about book-writing as though it's a career. It isn't a career; it's a crapshoot. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 16, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments




L. A. Cathedral
Michael— At long, long last I have made a pilgrimage to the new Los Angeles Cathedral (formally, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels). I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not an expert on religious architecture--although I'm not sure who would qualify as such an expert--but with those provisos I will simply report my impressions of the site and the building. The exterior of the Cathedral makes a fairly powerful statement from the preferred angle of approach, which is out of the parking garage. J. Moneo, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 2002 However, from the exterior the building strikes me as being in a bit of a defensive crouch, showing massive, largely featureless walls to the street and making sure its vulnerable “cross” window is carefully placed where its hard for people to chuck rocks at it. This “defensive” impression is reinforced by the fact that the church is walled off to the street most of the time; a combination of permanent wall and retractable metal gates—which are no doubt opened prior to services—restricts access at other times to entry points which are manned by security guards. (The security guards themselves seem very pleasant and are eager to discuss the building, by the way—I hope the Cathedral keeps the current crop of guys around permanently.) Interior Looking Away From Altar Inside, the Cathedral is a rather hushed, contemplative space. The walls are clad in warm concrete panels. Despite the large size of the interior and its very high ceiling, the effect is not at all overwhelming. In fact, the feeling of the space is oddly horizontal, even a bit compressed. Windows, South Wall The windows give the interior of the Cathedral a feeling of being underground, a sensation reinforced by a ceiling that doesn’t vault upwards, but actually sags downwards. A friend I visited with commented that the effect was a bit like being in somebody’s basement. I assume the cave or cell-like quality is intentional and, as I mentioned, promotes a quietist atmosphere. I’m not sure how well it would accommodate something a bit more activist, like an actual service. (Of course, I visited during the week, so I can’t really comment definitively on that.) Interior Facing Altar One actively annoying feature is the way the overhead space is filled with chandeliers. They’re not very attractive (although I'm sure their design has symbolic significance) and they just seem to clutter up what needs to be a more visually free and open space. Another questionable decision is the obviously carefully calculated asymmetry of the front (altar) end of the Cathedral. Presumably hoping to avoid forcing the eye towards the altar and the priests conducting the service, this non-hierarchical design unfortunately just ends up drawing attention to how clever it is, which seems rather beside the point in such a setting. (After our visit was over, it provoked a discussion between my friend and I over the use of symmetry in religious architecture. He approves of such symmetry... posted by Friedrich at January 16, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments





Wednesday, January 15, 2003


Free Reads -- Murphy on Muschamp
Friedrich -- Philip Murphy at his blog The Invisible Hand (dedicated to "Vital Information About Islamofascism, Euro-snobbery and Lousy Modern Architecture"), in an eloquent rant about most of the new WTC design proposals, takes some well-aimed shots at the New York Times' ludicrous "architecture critic," Herbert Muschamp. The posting is readable here. Sample passage: I’d love for Muschamp to occupy an office on the 120th floor of Norman Foster’s absurdly inhumane “kissing towers.” Yeah Herb, just take this express elevator to the sky lobby, then wait for the local, walk down a couple of dark over-air conditioned corridors, and your desk is right up against that inward-slanting plate glass window with southern exposure. A bit hot in there? Oh well, that’s the price you pay for culture. Do you enjoy hating Muschamp's work as much as I, and apparently Philip Murphy, do? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 15, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments




Energy Efficient Mysteries
Michael— As part of our continuing coverage of architectural issues, I want to ask why one design element of any major building—energy efficiency—doesn’t seem to be making more headway. A story in the New York Times of January 15, which you can read here, discusses the limited headway so called “building green” had made: [The lack of energy-efficient commercial architecture] is a phenomenon with parallels to the popularity of sport utility vehicles, except that buildings are responsible for more than 36 percent of the country's energy consumption, and transportation only 27 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy. While the headline for the Times article stresses that developers’ lack of interest is “a Matter of Economics” this doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Energy efficiency is, of course, a self-financing improvement…over time. While the original cost of such buildings seems to be modestly higher than “standard” commercial construction—the article cites costs that are anywhere from $0.45 to $2.00 a foot higher (although it doesn’t specify how much energy efficiency this buys)—such expense would seem easily recoverable from lower operating costs. I know studies have revealed that manufacturing businesses often demand insanely high internal rates of return on energy efficiency expenditures—50% or more per annum has been quoted—but one would assume that real estate investors with an even medium-term outlook would be willing to accept more modest returns. (Interestingly, several of the companies that seem most active in this area tend to be well established organizations that presumably do take a longer-term view of these questions.) If 4 Times Square Can Do Solar, Why Not the Sun Belt? I remember while walking around Las Vegas last summer wondering why the casinos, which must have enormous energy costs, weren’t trying to offset them with photovoltaic panels. The issue seemed even more odd because I had read only a few days previously that such panels are now less expensive than an equivalent square footage of polished stone, the kind that fronts many of the newer casinos. While photovoltaics may not be as terribly practical outside the sun belt, I have seen few applications of them even there. Odd, isn’t it, that even in a capitalist society many economically justifiable improvements seem to languish because of, what—inertia? fashion? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 15, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, January 13, 2003


Pic of the Day--Ambiguities of Reproduction
Michael— I’ve always enjoyed the paintings of Edward Hopper, both of the “direct (or apparently direct) from nature” and the “anecdotal” varieties. Of course the story lines of his “anecdotal” paintings are never very clear, which allows viewers to project meanings into what they see as well as forcing them to contemplate the ambiguities of what’s going on. I liken the more successful of the “anecdotal” paintings to glimpses into other people’s lives seen from a passing car—a nanosecond view of something too complex to be fully understood, but which is embedded in a suggestive context. Today’s pic of the day is one of these little not-entirely-to-be-understood dramas. Painted a few years after World War II, it seems to show a middle-aged working man raking the lawn of his not-very-new, not-very-expensive house. In my imaginative construction, it seemed to be a view of a modest life lived in discipline and dignity. While it doesn’t appear at all condescending, the accent in the painting seems on the “modesty” of the life in question. However, an odd effect made me reconsider my view of this painting. When I was scanning an illustration of a book on Hopper, I first chose a software setting that created a fairly “objective” scan (i.e., one that looks pretty much like the illustration): E. Hopper, Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947 ("Objective" scan) Then I chose another software setting (the “automatic” brightness level) just to see what it looked like: E. Hopper, Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947 ("Bright" scan) This brighter picture suddenly suggested an altogether different reading of the picture (which, of course, you may find just as goofy as the first.) In this version, the man raking his lawn is staring directly at the source of the light on his house—which we cannot see. Rather than bent over his mechanical task, the man seems to be transfixed by the sight of the radiance. In short, rather than being a picture of a man living in modest, somewhat claustrophobic circumstances (a person who we see but who does not see us), it suddenly became a picture of a man who is experiencing some revelation denied to us. I have doubts if this is the meaning that Hopper intended for this painting. (Given his lifelong fascination with painting light, though, it’s not easy to be sure that this interpretation is completely off base, either.) But equally, given the extremely open-ended structures Hopper creates, it’s not clear to me that any interpretation of one of his pictures (assuming it doesn’t ignore what’s actually in the picture) is entirely wrong. Odd, isn’t it, how subtleties of reproduction can shift perceived meanings so dramatically. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 13, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Friday, January 10, 2003


Free Views -- Jim Strickland
Friedrich -- Lordy, I did that long posting about modernist architecture without providing a single image of the kind of thing any of the new traditionalists are doing. Where's my editor when I need one? To kick things off, here's a porch and two houses by Historical Concepts, a firm in Georgia. (These are pop-up images, so you can click on them and have a better look.) There's no irony or attitude in sight, just attractive new work in traditional styles. Jim Strickland is the firm's president. Their website can be enjoyed here. And where do you find coverage of what they build? Not in architecture magazines, but in Southern Accents. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 10, 2003 | perma-link | (19) comments




Free Reads -- Jerry Saltz
Friedrich -- The Village Voice's Jerry Saltz takes a look back over his years as an art critic (here), and is frank and funny about what it has been like. Sample passage: Despite what people think, art critics don't have power—at least not in the bullying, Greenbergian way we did in the past. We may have some effect, or be able to turn the spotlight on an artist; we can trash or praise exhibitions, raise questions, and cast doubt, but we can't make or break careers, or close shows the way theater critics can. If I had that kind of power, a certain museum director would no longer have his job, several careers would be over that aren't, and a number of artists would be more recognized than they are. Nowadays, power is seen to be in the hands of curators, dealers, collectors, and museum execs. Something he doesn't touch on, perhaps because he's in the thick of the weekly grind, is how your reactions are affected by the endless looking-and-searching you (as a pro) have to do for something to write about. I found that covering the arts as a pro enforced a kind of restless agitation on me, as well as constant prodding and testing of my reactions. All of which did alter the flavor of the art experience somewhat. But I don't think I've ever run across a piece on that topic. Have you? But Saltz's piece is first-rate. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 10, 2003 | perma-link | (0)
Pics of the Day: Contempo Realism
Friedrich -- Some email has come in from readers curious about contemporary art, and who wonder: What's become of skill and craft in a traditional sense? In fact, there's a lot of it out there to be enjoyed. You have to know where to look, though, because (generally speaking) the people and outlets that cover the contempo scene don't pay attention to this work, and so aren't providing guidance (or much in the way of service) to many people who might, if they knew about this stuff, enjoy current visual art. I thought I'd pass along a few links, so the curious can begin exploring: By Edward Schmidt * San Francisco's Hackett-Freedman Gallery (here) specializes in what they call "modern realism," and their artists range from the very precise to the loosey goosey. It's a terrific website, full of information about painting and art generally, and the artists they represent are all first-rate. For starters, try the dazzling landscape artist Steven Bigler; Carlo Maria Mariani, who works a style that might be called surreal classicism; Costa Vavagiakis, for a display of raw portrait-painting firepower; and Edward Schmidt, whose paintings I'm not wild about but whose drawings have a luscious, erotic solemnity. By Raymond Han * The Forum Gallery (here), with branches in L.A. and NYC, shows a very classy selection of contempo-realist painters and artists. Their website is also a generous one. I've seen shows by Kent Bellows, William Beckman, Raymond Han, and Robert Cottingham, and enjoyed them all. By David Ligare * It's fun to wrestle with the phenomenon that is David Ligare, who's a classical painter with a capital C. He really does it up, painting Arcadian landscapes, idealized townscapes, and allegorical compositions. The modernist art world looks at his work and sees nothing but kitsch. I don't resonate deeply to what he does, but I'm glad he's doing it, and I find the skill and conviction he puts on display hard to dismiss. His website is here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 10, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Thursday, January 9, 2003


Free Reads -- Philosoblog
Friedrich -- Jim Ryan at Philosoblog (here) has put up a posting that's a real one-of-a-kind beauty entitled "Why Did Oakeshott Quote Chuang-Tzu." A must read. Sample passage: Chuang-tzu was nihilistic about all traditionally cherished moral values and virtues. Why did Oakeshott quote him? Because the conservative shares with him the idea of a life lived in a way such that the parts of your life come together in a beautiful harmony, such that you have no need to attain anything further. Whew! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 9, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments




Mies Redux
Friedrich -- Felix Salmon, our very own gadfly, left a typically provocative comment on a posting of mine about Mies van der Rohe. "Which leaves the building design to, um, the developers," wrote Felix. "And if there's one thing worse than a building designed by an architect, it's a building not designed by an architect." We Blowhards do wonder sometimes about Felix. Given how deeply and often he disagrees with -- and even objects to -- us, well, why does he even bother stopping by? But he's intelligent and provocative, and he doesn't mind a good dust-up. So I'm going to take the bait once more. Felix will object that I'm tilting at straw men, and he'll be right. But what the heck, what interests me is taking advantage of the chance he's offered me to spell out some fundamentals. My first, and most important, point is that 99% of what I'm writing here when I write about buildings and architecture isn't remotely controversial, despite how some people (ahem, Felix) seem to take it. Not everyone agrees with me, obviously, but plenty do. I like to think I have a couple of contributions to make to the discussion, but I'm mostly just passing along information. The fact that anyone would consider the information I'm passing along to be controversial, let alone disputable, amazes me, and is for me a sad sign of how passively we accept an academic-media-lefty establishment that is still (if by now somewhat frantically) clinging to its sense of self-importance. So, a few basic facts. 1. Traditionalist architecture? New-traditionalist architecture? Huh? Wha'? No, I didn't make these movements up. They've been flourishing since the 1980s, and are flourishing today. There have always, of course, been architects and builders (and developers and homeowners) building in traditional ways, even during the heyday of High Modernism. What's new (or newish, given that this particular movement began quite a while ago now) is that people graduating from fancy schools are doing it. Self-conscious people are doing it. High-end people are doing it. People who you wouldn't expect it of are doing it in conscious reaction against the academic/media/institutional establishment. People with brainwashings from snazzy schools like Yale, Princeton and Berkeley have turned against their modernist training in order to embrace traditional styles. They aren't reacting against modernism by advocating post-modernism (although there are certainly many people who are doing this). Instead, they're learning how to design and build traditionally. No tongue in cheek, no irony. They're simply saying, Gee, IMHO the whole Modernist thing was a great big mistake, and rather than try to patch it up or redeem it, I'm just giving up on it. And they're proceeding ahead from there. Some examples: There's a new-Classicism movement (that's right: columns, lintels, pediments, the whole shmear) pepping along quite successfully. There's the New Urbanism, led by some Yale-Princeton grads, which makes an ideal of the American small town, and is one of the more successful recent movements in neighborhood development. (Do... posted by Michael at January 9, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments




Pic of the Day
Michael— Today’s pic of the day is from Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), who is generally treated in histories of art as a sort of transitional figure. He first pops up as a virtuouso printmaker from the sticks (Holland) with a Mannerist taste for Michelangelesque nudes. After a trip to Italy in the early 1590s, he becomes the medium through which the Dutch artistic community is introduced to a more classical visual language. Finally, his drawings of the Dutch countryside begin the naturalistic tradition of Netherlandish landscape art. In short, he is presented as either a “behind-the-times provincial,” a “conduit” or a “forerunner.” Ouch. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile his “B” team status with the power of many of his images. For example, our selection today is an engraving made from the Farnese Hercules. While this statue has been drawn and engraved countless times, I’ve never seen a presentation that matches the unique power of this one. Goltzius has presented us with an utterly convincing image of masculinity as a force of nature (note the way the muscles of the upper back rhyme with the cloud patterns in the sky above.) H. Goltzius, Farnese Hercules, ca. 1592 (detail) Goltzius was also an astonishingly gifted portrait artist, who gives his portrait heads a remarkable combination of sculptural clarity and living intimacy. Along with the full image of "The Farnese Hercules" are two examples from his Italian sojourn, presented below as thumbnails. (On the left of the "Hercules" is a portrait of the sculptor Giambologna, and on the right a self portrait.) Enjoy, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 9, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, January 8, 2003


Free Reads -- Worsley on Mies
Friedrich -- Giles Worsley in the Telegraph (here) has a good review of the Mies van der Rohe show that originated at MOMA and has now opened in London. (You may have to register, but it's worth doing.) Here's a long passage: It also becomes clear that what motivated Mies, and what drove him into his Modernist experiments, was neither the search for a supposedly logical, rational architecture, nor a socially driven desire to reform the world, but a fascination with architecture as art. Mies had no underlying programme. The social underpinning of Modernist architecture left him unmoved and you have only to look at his designs in the light of a different century to realise there was nothing rational about them. They are fabulous, beautiful plays on light, space, materials and transparency.... This is a reverential exhibition, so there is no insensitive questioning of practicality, no raised eyebrows about leaking flat roofs or whether those great walls of thin glass might make the rooms a little cold. Mies is treated as the artist he was. And, like many artists across history, Mies was essentially amoral. He was prepared to work for whoever would pay for the buildings he wanted to design. In his early career, that was the moneyed classes of Berlin. He built his largest house in 1915-17 for a wealthy banker who was clearly doing well out of the First World War. Given the chance, Mies would even have worked for the Nazis. One of the most extraordinary drawings is his 1934 design for the German Pavilion at the Brussels International Exhibition, complete with swastikas. Goebbels was keen on his work, but Hitler preferred Albert Speer. Mies hung around until 1937, then he finally came to realise he was never going to build. Instead, he emigrated to America and created the house style of international capitalism. A few points I'd like to add to, or at least bring out from, Worsley's first-rate piece: * Modernist architects and their defenders have always been quick to play the progressive-politics card: we're on the side of the angels, therefore everyone who prefers other styles isn't. It can be quite astounding how quickly and ferevently this move comes at you, as though architecture is something more than a "mere" matter of crafting buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods -- and as though modernist architecture (like progressive politics itself) is on the verge of setting us "free." (Baloney, of course. But even accepting the promise, it pays to ask: free from what, exactly? As it often turns out in practice, from much of what we love -- nooks, crannies, windows that open, textures, comprehensible space, gardens, quirks, bustling blocks, and neighborhoods with character.) Well, so much for modernist architecture's political pretentions. How awful, yet how lovely, to discover that the modernist god-head Mies had, essentially, no political programme at all. Mies' Farnsworth House: A pity about the chilliness. And leakiness too. * I also want to pounce on something I was trying to point... posted by Michael at January 8, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments





Tuesday, January 7, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael-- I don't know if anyone else has inserted the following image into an art context, but if not then, what the heck, here goes. The following is a portrait of George Washington if I say it is. Hubble Space Telescope Image of the Constellation Serpens Okay, so the nose isn't quite right, but I still say it's a good likeness. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 7, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments





Monday, January 6, 2003


Idolatry
Michael— At various times in my postings for this 'blog, I’ve emphasized the importance of religion for art. In a world and a century that defines the “secular” as being in opposition to “organized religion” and in which the secular seems firmly in the driver’s seat, this may seem to be an odd idea. We have plenty of art, and yet we live in a secular age. Picasso may have been a Spanish Catholic, but he didn’t paint altarpieces. Matisse may have decorated a chapel, but he was not a devout Christian; rather, a devout artist. When the art-consuming public sees a painting by Gary Hume entitled “Messiah” of a small boy with a zone of reflective metal left around his head, their first impression (accurate or not) will probably be that Mr. Hume is making an art-historical, not a religious reference; if religion is involved at all, it is probably ironically. In fact, for many educated people, I would hazard the notion that their knowledge of religion derives more from their knowledge of art than vice versa. So why do I keep going on about religion as the critical infrastructure of art? Well, first, I have to explain that when I use the term religion I don’t mean organized religion (or at least not only organized religion). By religion I mean any source of power recognized by a society that is "hidden," or "not-to-be-discussed-openly," or that is known "only to initiated." Perhaps magic would be a better term. The anecdote about the tribesmen who didn’t want people taking photographs of them comes to mind: the one where they thought the camera would steal their souls. When I first heard this story as a child I thought the tribesman were just humorously unsophisticated about cameras. As the years went by, however, I began to think that these pictorial bumpkins were on to something. Why did we bother to take or make pictures? Maybe we weren’t trying to steal souls, exactly, but then again maybe we were. We certainly enjoyed the power that resulted from making pictures—at the most innocent level we liked using photographs to defeat time and distance, to see things beyond the immediate range of our eyes. At a rather less innocent level, we understood that via these pictures we had created replicas of things, replicas that were now under our control. The sense of power connected with the creation and manipulation of replicas would seem to lie behind the prohibitions on idolatry and of graven images in Judaism—as well as the periodic episodes of iconoclasm that have popped up over the centuries. Any reduction of the godhead to an image suggests the potential for its manipulation by artist-magicians, and the ancient Hebrews made far too sweeping claims for their Deity to permit any artist-magicians to muck about with Him. (It's interesting that the written word doesn't seem to carry this potency in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition: the prohibition on pictures of God isn't matched by a prohibition on... posted by Friedrich at January 6, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments





Sunday, January 5, 2003


What I did on my Winter Vacation
Michael, dude-- So there I was, out in the middle of the desert near Palm Springs, taking this picture for you. But right after I snapped it I was attacked by giant ants, man. I had to haul out of there on foot and by the time I got to civilization I was dehydrated and they put me in the hospital and I just got out and now I'm sending it, okay? Sorry to miss the holidays, but it's the thought that counts, right? Later, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at January 5, 2003 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, January 4, 2003


Pic of the Day
Michael— As I wander about the Internet, I keep coming across JPEGs that just knock me out. Naturally, I want to squirrel them away until I can do loads and loads of research and then say something at least modestly serious about them, but it has begun to dawn on me that between work, family and doing a little painting of my own, I’m never going to get around to writing up all this stuff. So, what the heck, I thought—why hoard ‘em? I’m a Blowhard, I can just post some of these terrific images from time to time, and maybe somebody else will take up the cause of writing a good essay on them. Here’s one: S. Macdonald-Wright, Raigo,1955 In case you're wondering, this is a thumbnail and enlarges quite nicely when clicked on. For anybody who wants to learn more about Stan, this is a good place to start. You can check out some more of his stuff below, from (left to right) 1919, 1920, 1930 and 1950: Cheers, Friedrich P.S. Who knew that Stan was still busily at work in the Fifties! You just can't trust standard art history: too thematic, not sufficiently chronologic.... posted by Friedrich at January 4, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments




Free Reads Benjamin Campaine on media concentration
Friedrich -- Benjamin Compaine in Foreign Policy (here) bursts a lot of PC bubbles about the supposed evils of what's imagined to be ever-increasing media concentration. Are the News Corps and AOL/Time-Warners just inches from establishing total control over each and every one of our thoughts? Er, no. Sample passage: Media companies have indeed grown over the past 15 years, but this growth should be understood in context. Developed economies have grown, so expanding enterprises are often simply standing still in relative terms. Or their growth looks less weighty. For example, measured by revenue, Gannett was the largest U.S. newspaper publisher in 1986, its sales accounting for 3.4 percent of all media revenue that year. In 1997, it accounted for less than 2 percent of total media revenue. Helped by major acquisitions, Gannett's revenue had actually increased by 69 percent, but the U.S. economy had grown 86 percent. The media industry itself had grown 188 percent, making a "bigger" Gannett smaller in relative terms. Link found thanks to the ever-essential Arts & Letters Daily, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 4, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, January 3, 2003


1000 Words -- Piero's Reputation
Friedrich -- Are you a big fan of Piero della Francesca's paintings? I always have been, if in a fairly casual way. I get fascinated by the tensions in his work -- the eroticism vs. the formality, the design-y qualities vs. the painstaking modeling, the emphasis on placement of mass vs. the emphasis on living-and-breathing flesh. My mind dives into thoughts and memories of artists I know more about -- Ingres, Degas, Puvis -- and swims around that pond very happily. Madonna and Child With Saints, early 1470s What I hadn't been aware of is the ups and downs of his critical reputation. Over the holidays, though, I was leafing around a collection of his work and brought myself up to date. Since the tale makes for a nice example of some of the themes we seem to return to on this blog -- the fluidity of the "canon," the fecundity of art and lit history, the way reputations come and go, the ways artists use other art, etc. -- I thought I'd pass it along. People who are better Renaissance-arts buffs than I am may be fully aware of this story, but for the sake of my fellow amateurs out there, here it is ... These days, Piero is considered one of the established greats, right up there with such giants as Botticelli and Giotto, a humanist pioneer in the development and use of perspective and 3D effects. Yet at the time he worked (the mid-1400s), he was barely noticed. He seems to have had a relatively successful painting career, although he gave it up late in life to devote himself to writing about math and perspective. Vasari did give him a nod in 1568, but after that, notice of Piero simply petered out; when he was thought of at all, it was as a kind of primitive. Then, in the mid-1800s, a guy named James Dennistoun rediscovered Piero -- sorry, I wish I had more information about this -- and promoted him. Even so, Piero's work seems to have bewildered many art fans until the late 1800s. You can sense a bit of this struggle in an otherwise perceptive passage by a writer named G.F. Pighi: Pighi wrote that Piero, through "improving upon the traditional Greco-Roman type of the Sienese school, and, divesting it of a certain nebulosity in which Sienese art had restricted it, made the type more human ..." Even the facts of Piero's biography weren't assembled until 1913. But by then, early modernist art was well underway, cubism was cooking, and Piero's spatial obsessions hit a nerve. Color reproductions began circulating, and after nearly 400 years, Piero finally had himself a name. Through the rest of the 20th century, his reputation did nothing but grow. There have been lengthy debates about his real achievement -- was it in color? Perspective? Characterization? By 1951, Kenneth Clark was writing (convincingly, to my mind) that Piero was "in the full, critical sense of the word, a classic artist,... posted by Michael at January 3, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, January 2, 2003


Art Imponderables
Friedrich -- Why is it that the ugliest building on campus is so often the architecture building? Why is it that the most nightmarishly-designed magazines are so often the graphic-design magazines? Why is the writing in literary magazines generally so much worse than the writing on sitcoms? Further contributions to this list appreciated. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at January 2, 2003 | perma-link | (13) comments




Moran, Turner and "Influence"
Michael— Does it ever strike you that the topic of artistic influence seems to be a touchy one in today’s culture? For an artist to be seen as being “influenced,” especially by a famous predecessor, is a sort of reputation-lowering event, unless he or she either “transcends,” “subverts” or otherwise “overcomes” the predecessor. To use a medical analogy, it’s as if there’s a sort of taint connected with influence that must be disinfected. The oddities of this cultural attitude have been brought home to me over the past few weeks as I have pondered the art and career of landscape painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926) who was profoundly influenced by a famous predecessor, J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). Moran was originally born in England, but he ended up in America when his father, a hand-loom weaver, was “economically displaced” by industrialization. The family arrived in a small town near Philadelphia when the young boy was seven. After Moran completed grammar school, he immediately—presumably for financial reasons—began an apprenticeship with a local engraver. He didn’t complete his apprenticeship, however. When his older brother, Edward, decided to pursue a career as an artist, Moran abandoned the path of prudence and joined Edward in his studio. Other than his brother’s lessons and what he had learned as an engraver, Moran’s artistic training consisted solely of informal lessons from several Philadelphia painters. However, this didn’t stop the young boy from harboring a mighty ambition—to become a great painter. It was especially mighty for a boy whose family had been squeezed out of England, and who was living in semi-poverty in the culture boondocks of Pennsylvania. His ambition was stoked to a still-higher pitch when Moran fell in love with the work of the recently deceased British artist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Lacking access to Turner’s paintings, Moran’s infatuation seems to have been fed with prints, engravings and—most of all—with Ruskin’s Modern Painters, then being published in multiple volumes. In the pages of Modern Painters, Ruskin represented Turner as the high point of artistic evolution. The writer based this claim for Turner’s greatness on the painter’s unsurpassed fidelity to nature, declaring that Turner painted more of nature than any man who ever lived. Throughout the several thousand pages of Modern Painters, Ruskin urges young artists to follow Turner’s example in accurately depicting nature: Every class of rock, every kind of earth, every form of cloud must be studied with equal industry, and rendered with equal precision…It is not detail sought for its own sake…but it is detail referred to a great end, sought for the sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest and least of God’s works, and treated in a manly, broad and impressive manner. J. Turner, The Upper Falls of the Tees, Yorkshire (engraved by E. Goodall) 1827 (Note--as always, all illustrations are thumbnails and I would urge you to check out the illustrations at a larger size by clicking on them.) In his book, Ruskin illustrated Turner’s supreme truth to nature... posted by Friedrich at January 2, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, December 23, 2002


Artistic Temperaments
Michael— Sorry about being missing in action for the last little bit. I’m afraid real life—in the form of my daughter’s birthday, my wedding anniversary and shopping for a new car—intervened. (Having a real life is a terrible obstacle to ‘blog production.) Anyway, I’m back to continue my noodlings about Myers-Briggs personality types and artists. To simplify, the 16 Myers Briggs categories are often combined into 4 main temperaments. (The descriptions that follow are from the “Temperament: Different Drums, Different Drummers” website which you can see here.) Just to start thinking about how these personality categories might function in terms of the arts I had a go at putting a few prominent artists into each of the four main groupings: RATIONAL NTs [are] ABSTRACT in communicating and UTILITARIAN in implementing goals…Thus their most practiced and developed intelligent operations tend to be marshalling and planning (NTJ organizing), or inventing and configuring (NTP engineering)…They are proud of themselves in the degree they are competent in action, respect themselves in the degree they are autonomous, and feel confident of themselves in the degree they are strong willed...[T]his is the "Knowledge Seeking Personality" -- trusting in reason and hungering for achievement. They are usually pragmatic about the present, skeptical about the future, solipsistic about the past, and their preferred time and place are the interval and the intersection. Rationals: Picasso, Degas, Da Vinci, Delacroix IDEALIST NFs [are] ABSTRACT in communicating and COOPERATIVE in implementing goals…Thus their most practiced and developed intelligent operations are usually teaching and counseling…or conferring and tutoring…The Idealist temperament have an instinct for interpersonal integration, learn ethics with ever increasing zeal, sometimes become diplomatic leaders, and often speak interpretively and metaphorically of the abstract world of their imagination. They are proud of themselves in the degree they are empathic in action, respect themselves in the degree they are benevolent, and feel confident of themselves in the degree they are authentic. Idealist types search for their unique identity, hunger for deep and meaningful relationships, wish for a little romance each day, trust their intuitive feelings implicitly, aspire for profundity. This is the "Identity Seeking Personality" -- credulous about the future, mystical about the past, and their preferred time and place are the future and the pathway. Idealists: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Friedrich, David ARTISAN SPs [are] CONCRETE in communicating and UTILITARIAN in implementing goals…Thus their most practiced and developed intelligent operations are usually promoting and operating…or displaying and composing…Artisans are proud of themselves in the degree they are graceful in action, respect themselves in the degree they are daring, and feel confident of themselves in the degree they are adaptable. This is the "Sensation Seeking Personality" -- trusting in spontaniety and hungering for impact on others. They are usually hedonic about the present, optimistic about the future, cynical about the past, and their preferred time and place is the here and now… Artisans: Pollock, Rubens, Raphael, Renoir GUARDIAN SJs [are] CONCRETE in communicating and COOPERATIVE in implementing goals…Thus their most practiced and developed intelligent... posted by Friedrich at December 23, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, December 21, 2002


WTC Plans Redux
Friedrich -- I won't I won't I won't I won't I won't --- OK, I will, but just for a few paragraphs. Sigh. Our resident provocateur, Felix Salmon, had a go at me in the comments section of my posting about the design proposals for the rebuilding of the WTC site. As always, I enjoyed Felix's brains, his writing and his hotheadedness. The easiest stuff first: At one moment Felix is sarcastic about me supposedly being a man of the people (me? living a Greenwich Village life surrounded by artists and intellectuals?); at another he's speaking in the voice of the people himself, letting me know that "New Yorkers" demand gigantic buildings. I'll let that go with a "Huh?" Next, Felix jumps on me for writing a review of the WTC proposals without having plunged as deep into the design briefs as he has. He also seems to feel that since I wasn't at the presentation of the designs, my opinion is invalid. But it was part of my posting to argue that it's irresponsible for anyone to write architecture reviews (except from a forthrightly strictly-design point of view) without having spent some serious time in and around the building or neighborhood under consideration. As for my utter unfamiliarity with the design specs and briefs and my non-attendance at the proposals' presentation: I don't have to have met the chef, reviewed his lease, interviewed his investors or scrutinized his recipes to know whether or not I like the food his restaurant serves. Felix may object that I'm simply excusing my own laziness, and he certainly has me there. But to my mind, it's often wise to avoid too much immersion in the artist/entertainer/architect's point of view. While it can be interesting to see what the people involved are contending with, you can also lose your grip on your reactions as a user/consumer/spectator. I don't doubt that Felix's reactions to the work presented are his own reactions -- which he does a brilliant job of spelling out on his own blog, here. Felix, like AC Douglas (who writes enthusiastically about some of the proposals at his blog, here), really does seem to have a taste for this kind of building. Hey, some people do, though I suspect that most people would admit they don't if they were pressed. But I think Felix might give a moment's reflection to the similarity between architectural presentations and movie junkets. In the movie biz, studios sometimes fly critics and reporters to glamorous places, hand out glossy production information, allow the journalists access to stars, serve up snazzily-catered food, and present their movies in luxurious conditions. Hey, Felix! Movie junkets, architects' presentations? They're trying to buy positive press! Bigshot architects, like film directors and producers, are among the world's best salesmen. Let me spell that out: S-A-L-E-S-M-E-N. They have to be great salesmen; they're trying to inspire someone to give them tens of millions of dollars. So they're putting the best face on everything, they're avoiding... posted by Michael at December 21, 2002 | perma-link | (11) comments





Thursday, December 19, 2002


Guest posting -- Chris Bertram
Friedrich -- Chris Bertram, whose classy blog Junius can be read here, emailed me an especially interesting note about my earlier posting "Art is Not Science." I asked for permission to reprint it here, and he gave me permission. So 2Blowhards is pleased to present the words and thoughts of Chris Bertram: Dear Michael I very much enjoyed your recent post on taste and the differences between science and art. I was surprised to find one of the commenters recommending Feyerabend: you had me scurrying off to consult David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste". In particular, I was drawn to this paragraph, where Hume makes a nice point which is somewhat spoilt for us by his choice of poets: "Though in speculation, we may readily avow a certain criterion in science and deny it in sentiment, the matter is found in practice to be much more hard to ascertain in the former case than in the latter. Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, these have been universally exploded: Their absurdity has been detected: Other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave place to their successors: And nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry. Just expressions of passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public applause, which they maintain for ever. ARISTOTLE, and PLATO, and EPICURUS, and DESCARTES, may successively yield to each other: But TERENCE and VIRGIL maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. The abstract philosophy of CICERO has lost its credit: The vehemence of his oratory is still the object of our admiration." There is, as you probably know, much much more in there. No doubt you attribute your not getting Mahler and Dostoyevsky to what Hume calls "the different humours of particular men". I think there's still something to the idea that you are missing out on something when you don't appreciate, say, Mahler or Dostoyevsky and that comes out in the language we employ to persuade one another of the merits of some artwork. An interesting question - at least I think so! - is this: are there necessarily limitations of our sensibilities such that receptivity to some types of artwork precludes "getting" some others, and vice versa? Are there people who "get" both David Hockney (YUK!) and Burne-Jones (HOORAY)? Maybe, and maybe these aren't good examples, but I hope you can see my point. Best wishes Chris For what it's worth, I second Chris's high opinion of the Hume essay. I asked Chris to elaborate a bit on what he meant by the language question, and got back this reply: On the language thing I was thinking of a terrific paper I read this year by a philosopher called Mark Johnston. The paper, entitled "The Authority of Affect"... posted by Michael at December 19, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments




One Size Doesn't Fit All
Michael— Going through the deluge of comments on my recent posting on Photography and Painting, what struck me most, other than the degree of passion aroused by the discussion, was the way in which many of the comments restated the drawing vs. color debates of the French Academy of the 18th and 19th centuries. (To ultra-briefly recapitulate the war of the Rubenistes and the Poussinistes: does color make a shoddy appeal to our base, sensual natures while drawing speaks to our nobler, intellectual selves, or is color a critical artistic means of avoiding our overly rational intellects and communicating directly with our deeper emotions? In actuality, this discussion was by no means new even three hundred years ago: I recall a remark by Tintoretto to his son in the 16th century: “While beautiful color may sell paintings down by the Grand Canal, great art is made by strong drawing, which can only be learned by laboring deep into the night.”) It was one of those great controversies that can go on forever—and will, because both positions are right, or can be for different people. There is a line of dialogue from Pulp Fiction which goes (more or less): “Which do you like better, Elvis or the Beatles? A lot of people like both, but nobody ever liked them exactly the same.” In the film two people who had been thrown together were using this distinction as a useful shortcut to learn more about each other. Elvis people, in other words, are a different subspecies from Beatles people. The same could be said about the two camps in the centuries-old Raphael vs. Michelangelo debate. I remember following one critic who was obviously intelligent, broadly knowledgeable about art and in love with the subject, and being puzzled because I never once agreed with his opinion over many years. It was all explained one day when he admitted to an instinctive preference for Raphael over Michelangelo (the reverse of my instinctive preference.) Eureka! I thought. He belongs to the other tribe of humanity! This principle is by no means limited to art. The Myers-Briggs personality test, for example, sorts people into some 16 different categories as a result of four polarities (introvert-extrovert, sensory-intuitive, thinking-feeling, judgmental-pragmatic.) What’s interesting is exactly how different, in terms of social behavior and motivations, the people in these different categories are. One of those ideas I’ve always wanted to pursue-–but never quite got around to—was figuring out if artistic taste corresponds to these Myers-Briggs categories. (I have a sneaking suspicion that some graduate student wrote his Ph.D. thesis on this subject back in 1958, but I can dream of having an original thought, can’t I?) It would make sense to extend this idea to politics. For a large chunk of humanity, the main motivation in their work life is a desire for security—beginning, middle and end. Others are driven to make their own ideas and thoughts (good or bad) a reality. Is it wise to have one “welfare state”... posted by Friedrich at December 19, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments




WTC Candidates
Friedrich -- Have you looked at the new set of proposals for the WTC site? Viewable here. As for my opinion, I'll say "Ahem," lift an eyebrow, give modest voice to the question "Whatever happened to such values as neighborhood, human-scaled streets and workable office buildings?" And I'll leave it at that. And, leaving it at that, I decided to bypass the critic/intellectual/elite class and go directly, man, right to the people. Ie., I skipped away from the opinion-makers and content folks here where I work and went to hang out for a while with the production people. They were leafing through the local papers and eyeballing the WTC proposals. Here's some of what they said: "That's just goofy!" "It's horrible! Horrible!" "Can you imagine asking someone to go work in a place like that every day?" "This is what happens when too much money and too much self-consciousness come together on the same project." "They want us to choose between those?" "Hmm, let's see. A bullshit 'pound' sign. A bullshit bunch of twisted glass. A bullshit bunch of ropes of Christmas lights ... " "Oh, yeah, and I'll just bet you can really open those windows!" The conviction that the money/ego/avant (ha-ha) garde/intellectual classes are once again on their narcissistic way to putting over yet another outrage was unanimous. And, hey, the following question, which has popped up in my mind many times over the years, pops up again. Semi-unrelated, I know, because the WTC proposals are proposals and not actual buildings, but even so: Isn't it plain weird that architectural reviewers and critics feel that it's OK to review a building without a) talking to people who work or live in it, b) talking with people who work or live near it, and c) spending serious time living and/or working in and near the building themselves? I do understand writing about buildings entirely from the point of view of "the building as free-standing aesthetic statement" -- but only for limited-audience, specialist design publications. When writing for the general public, doesn't it seem not just key but absolutely essential to discuss such topics as the building's functionality, its civility (or lack thereof) to its neighbors, and whether or not the windows can be opened? How would a newspaper's readers react if they noticed that the newspaper's car reviewer wasn't taking the car under review for lots of test drives, was concerned only with discussing the car's aesthetic qualities, and looked down on the rest of us for not "getting" his judgments? Yet we let writers about buildings and architecture get away with something exactly analogous. Outraged, sputtering and overcaffeinated, though doing my best to regain my usual worldly Zen detachment, Michael... posted by Michael at December 19, 2002 | perma-link | (10) comments





Wednesday, December 18, 2002


Modern Art 101
Friedrich -- Modern Art, in a very cute Flash nutshell, here. Link thanks to Velvet Hammers, here. Best, Michael Update on Thursday afternoon: The people sponsoring the animation seem to have taken down everything but a few screen captures. Nice while it lasted...... posted by Michael at December 18, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, December 16, 2002


Art is Not Science
Friedrich -- I was kicking around a few notions for the last week or so. Then this morning they came into focus and spilled out of me in the form of a kinda-essay. Ever have that happen? Strange, but fun. Rather than re-jigger it into a piece of correspondence, I thought I'd just run it as is. Forgive the length -- this morning I was too-much-coffee-man. Very curious to know your thoughts about it. In this country, many of us come to the arts through school. Thank heavens for the opportunity -- but there are downsides to this too. One is that we’re often left with an academic/professorial view of the arts that it can take years to shake. Another is that too many of us wind up feeling too deferential to the academic/professorial class. They were in charge when we learned about the field; why shouldn’t they continue to be in charge now? I take it that part of the mission (if you’ll forgive the term) of 2Blowhards is to contribute in some small way to the busting-up of the modernist/academic mafia. A quick aside to readers: you’re likely to encounter something called “postmodernism” being offered as a remedy. It doesn’t hurt to be wary of the claims made for it, because in practice postmodernism is too often just another academic theory. It bears the same relationship to actual freedom as a theory of humor does to a joke. One of the ways in which the taste mafia (the academics, the foundation people, the gallery owners, magazine editors, publishers, collectors and more) maintains its control is to present the arts as something like science -- deeply serious and very complex, and with a linear history leading to present-day theories and concerns. Their goal is to make contemporary art seem not just exciting, difficult and advanced (and thus in need of explicating and promoting by -- you guessed it -- the taste mafia), but also the inevitable consequence of a long and complicated history. We have no choice but to accept this vision -- to grovel, agree, and try to live up to its demands. We can be forgiven, I think, if we suspect that one of the arts mafia’s real goals is to maintain its own monopoly on taste. In fact, art and science have little in common. However much science is influenced by such factors as personality and culture, it’s empirically based; it’s testable. The powder goes ka-boom when a match is touched to it or it doesn’t. Actual progress is made; disputes between rival views are finally adjudicated. If you understand the science of today, you basically understand all of science. (And let’s set aside for the moment the kind of babble about “uncertainty” and “chaos” that art intellectuals love to indulge in. As far as I can tell, they’ve got no better a grasp on the scientific meaning of those terms than I do.) In art, none of this is the case. Testable? Well, the success... posted by Michael at December 16, 2002 | perma-link | (17) comments





Sunday, December 15, 2002


Free Reads -- Reclining Nudes
Friedrich -- Are you fascinated by the way art and pornography quarrel, feud, and occasionally make nice? I am, so much so that I sometimes wonder how much of an art fan I'd be if it weren't for the dicey relations between and art and porn. I mean, a still life can be a mighty pretty thing, but even so ... The Guardian recently ran a crisp and helpful introduction to the history of the reclining-nude genre by Frances Borzello, readable here. Bizarrely, the online version of Borzello's piece is unillustrated. 2Blowhards is more than happy to correct that oversight. (These images are pop-ups, so click on them and treat yourself to bigger versions.) Giorgione's elegance sets the pattern; Manet and his riot grrrl break the fourth wall Sample passage: Its own set of conventions: historically, reclining nudes are presented in the guise of a classical goddess. Its own poses: she tends to lie with her eyes turned from the spectator, or even closed, offering no obstacle to his free-ranging glances over her body. Its own compositional devices: an impish figure may hold aside the drapery to frame the body and create a display for the viewer's delectation. Its own set of similes: she often stretches out in a landscape whose hummocks and valleys metaphorically echo her curves. Photography carried this to extremes in the 20th century by depicting female bodies as smooth-surfaced boulders in a landscape. And its own taboos: pubic hair stays resolutely out of the picture because it signified the woman's own demanding sexuality, which could be felt as threatening. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 15, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, December 13, 2002


Photography and Painting
Michael— Steve Sailer, in a comment on my posting “The Hudson River School, Part II” suggested that readers who enjoy 19th century landscape painting, might well get a kick out of the mountain photographs of Galen Rowell. Mr. Rowell and his photographer wife, Barbara Cushman Rowell, tragically died in a plane accident this last August, but they left behind hundreds of thousands of photographs. Here is one that set me musing about the whole art/nature who-is-imitating-who question. G. Rowell, Untitled (AA957), date unknown This image immediately reminded me of one of my favorite landscapes, “Large Enclosure” (by one of my favorite artists, Caspar David Friedrich.) While these images are actually responses to two very different landscapes, the parallels are too numerous to ignore (for me, anyway): the crack-of-dawn lighting, the vertical dark oblong masses pushing up above the horizon, the compositional scheme of two “mirrored” arcs in place of a simple horizon line, one pointing down and enclosing the earth and one pointing up to enclose the sky, the patchy foreground “immersed” in water or mist, etc. Of course, I have no idea if Mr. Rowell, about whom I know almost nothing, ever saw the C. D. Friedrich painting. But assuming he did, it gets me wondering: does the photograph then serve to “document” the objectivity of the artist’s vision? ("See, this isn't a fantasy, this is the way it REALLY LOOKS!") Or has the photographer been so taken with the artist’s “subjective” image that he makes choices to deliberately override the so-called objectivity of the camera? ("Wouldn't it be cool to arrange things so my photograph will look like a famous old painting?") C. D. Friedrich, Large Enclosure, 1832 Other photographs on Mr. Rowell’s website, which you can visit here, got me to pondering your comment on the “borderline overripe palette” of Frederick Church. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painting with color effects as strong as those common in nature photography. Does that mean painters are too timid with color? Or that photographers deliberately use the technical limitations or effects of photography to pander to our lascivious desire for ever-more voluptuous color effects? Or that painters using restrained colors are really playing it smart, because they know our visual memory corrects for over-saturated color (that's why green trees in the sunset--which aren't really green, but brown--still look green) and this mentally corrected vision is what they want to replicate? Or...? Interesting questions which I’ve never been able to fully resolve. Any thoughts? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at December 13, 2002 | perma-link | (25) comments




Free Reads -- Fred Reed
Friedrich -- However inclined I may be to libertarianism, I still can't help wincing at a lot of what tends to happen when business and money values trump all others. Economic efficiency is a good thing in many cases -- but in all cases? Where family life is concerned? Where friends are concerned? Where art is concerned? And I do know that libertarianism isn't just about economic efficiency, and yes, I'm all for freedom and choice. But isn't it remarkable how often arguments made in the name of libertarianism turn out to really concern economic efficiency? Hmmmm. Given my suspicion that I'm not alone in wondering about this kind of thing, I also wonder: Why are so many libertarians such eager-beaver, everything's-always-for-the-better-when-the-market-takes-over, Pangloss types? Optimism is good; idiotic optimism is idiotic. It might be a sensible and necessary thing to argue that some things that are ugly (strip malls, etc) can be a sign of economic vitality. But it's absurd to argue that blatantly ugly things aren't ugly. (Although, come to think of it, much of the official -- ie., avant-garde -- art world has been getting away with this for years.) But there are some ugly things that everyone knows are ugly. Ask random people if they'd ever, given a choice, choose to live or work in a strip mall. Despite this, some libertarians continue to insist on arguing that pigs are gazelles. After all, they have good scientific proof, or at least a wonderful theory, that predicts that even if the pig's looking a trifle piggy today, by tomorrow it'll be a thing of wealth, elegance, etc. Meanwhile, anyone who happens to be listening takes a good look, thinks, "That's a pig if I ever saw one," and leaves. So a few questions arise: do the hyper libertarians know they look like, and are behaving like, aliens? Perhaps they are aliens -- or possibly Arizona used-car salesmen. If this is indeed what they are (aliens/used-car salesman), why do they think anyone else would ever trust them, or their arguments? I mean, don't they have any audience sense? Of course, there's always the chance that the hard-core libertarians don't actually want to win people over -- that what they really enjoy is hanging with fellow-aliens and griping about what irrational idiots the rest of us are. I say all this as someone whose temperament tends to anti-statism, or at least strongly-suspicious-of-statism. It also tends, however, to adore friendship, love, art, and beauty. A long prologue to a link -- Fred Reed, having some fun with freedom and how it so often seems to play out, here. Sample passage: [Wal-Mart} puts most of the stores in the country seat out of business. With them go the restaurants, which no longer have the walk-by traffic previously generated by the stores. With the restaurants goes the sense of community that flourishes in a town with eateries and stores and a town square. But this is granola philosophy, appealing only to meddlesome lefties.... posted by Michael at December 13, 2002 | perma-link | (16) comments





Thursday, December 12, 2002


Milton Glaser on art
Friedrich -- Have you ever read an interview with the ad guy/illustrator Milton Glaser? I talked to him once and found him amazingly thoughtful and insightful, and far more cultured than most fine-arts people I've run into. I was just reading a q&a with him in the March-April 2002 issue of the magazine Step-by-Step Graphics, and he said something that reaffirms the gist of what I was saying in my previous posting, about art and making a living. Attaboy, Milton. He says it better, of course. He's asked about the Van Gogh model of painting, and says this: Unfortunately it's a very self-centered model. It says, "Do your work and you will convince the world to love you, pay you a lot of money, and make you famous. All you've got to do is stick to it and wait to be discovered." This is a total delusion about what really happens in the world. Unfortunately, this idea of the primacy of self-expression has infected the schools, which continue this myth. It's such a total, miserable lie. Perhaps it's perpetuated by frustrated academics who encourage the innocent to think it's true so they have the strength to go on themselves. But all it produces is a generation of bitter people who can't figure out why they can't make a living. There is something fundamentally wrong about this way of creating expectations. He's then asked about whether he ever wanted to get out of commercial art. No, I had no other ambitions. But I never fully understood the distinction between being a painter and an applied artist. Admittedly, you more often have to deal with criteria that make it hard to create a work of emotional or aesthetic significance. But once in a while, you do a book jacket, an album cover, an illustration that isn't compromised by its purpose. Some people use commercial considerations as an excuse not to do good work. They say, "Well, we're not really free." But as you know, meaningful work happens as you press through, regardless of the constraints. In fact, for many people constraints make good work possible. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 12, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Writing for a Living
Friedrich -- I'm always pleased to see people taking writing classes, music instruction, art classes. It's a great way to enhance your involvement in the arts, and it can refine and civilize your perceptual and critical apparatus in the most pleasing ways. Plus, it's wonderful fun to make art things. The vibe in an intro-to-oil-painting classroom, in my experience, is very enjoyable and unlike what most people remember of being in class. In school, you were -- to some extent -- there merely because you had to be. In oil-painting class, everyone's there because they want to be. At the same time, it can drive me nuts that so many Americans are prone to base their involvement in the arts on the fantasy of having an arts career. Readers seem to love imagining that they too could score big. If you look at hobbyist magazines, it's incredible how much of what's published caters to (I'll just say it: exploits) the fantasy that there's a career to be had here, and maybe even a killing to be made. I've noticed that English dabbling-in-the-arts magazines don't seem to sell this fantasy quite as hard -- they're straightforwardly publications for amateurs who follow the field because they love it. Are the English more commonsensical and down-to-earth than we are? I've been lucky enough to follow the business of some of the arts pretty closely. (More closely than I ever wanted to, to be truthful.) So I'm going to use this blog occasionally to get down some of what I learned. Today: writing. The boiled-down executive-summary version of what I have to say: writing books as a "career"? Hah. The slightly longer version: English-major rube that I used to be, I early on imagined that the country was awash in busy writers, busily making livings. Then I began to wonder. Finally, I called an acquaintance who runs an authors organization and asked him flat out: how many writers in this country actually make a living at it? We backed and forth-ed a bit. Was I including writers of technical manuals? Sit-com writers? Ad copywriters? Journalists? We finally decided to focus on something along the lines of "authors who write the kinds of books you think of when you think 'books' -- ie., the kinds of books you take out of a library intending to read." So how many of them actually make a living at it? Oh, my friend said, certainly fewer than 200. Like I say: "Career"? Hah. I remember one study that showed that most authors of checking-it-out-from-the-library nonfiction actually lose money on the books they write. Why? Because they pay their own expenses, and books almost always wind up taking more time and research than an author anticipates. And fiction? I just bumped into a friend who's published a couple of books. He's about to finish the first draft of a novel. Unprompted he sighed, "I'll be happy to get $3000 dollars for it." Out of that he'll have to pay... posted by Michael at December 12, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments




Hudson River School, Part II
Michael— As promised, I am continuing with the history of the Hudson River School as the torch was passed from Thomas Cole to the second generation. But before discussing the specific artists, I wanted to sketch out some of the cultural issues that affected their work. The settling (and exploitation) of the West was the great American project of this era. However, the relationship between the wealthy patrons of the Hudson River School—who virtually all lived in the urban East—and the rural or wilderness parts of the country were complex. The landscapes of the Hudson River were originally chosen as motifs because they were easily accessible to New York City-based artists; they are, in essence, tourist vistas. (It’s no accident that commercial tourism and the Hudson River school sprang up at roughly the same time, the 1820s, or that the geographical range of the Hudson River school expanded along with the growth of the railroads and steamship lines.) These paintings embodied the only personal relationship the Eastern urban elite was likely to have with undeveloped nature, i.e., that of a tourist. The Hudson River landscapes also addressed a more general cultural problem of the wealthy, urbanized Eastern elite. For generations European settlers had been used to an essentially practical or “business” relationship with North America—it was a good place to live and extract cash. But now this more leisured elite wanted to find an aesthetic relationship to this vast territory, and their cultural apparatus, oriented towards European models, wasn’t helping. As Rebecca Bedell in her book, “The Anatomy of Nature” notes: Americans had long suffered from an inferiority complex about their continent. It had been stigmatized as “The New World,” a savage place devoid of historical associations and bereft of intellectual and aesthetic stimuli. In…the American landscape many found answers to these accusations…In the great falls of Niagara and in the sculptured towers and ravines of the Southwest, Americans found substitutes for the castles and cathedrals of Europe. They could take pride in the sublimity, vastness and beauty of their country’s natural wonders. More generally still, Americans of this era, being an intensely religious people as well as very interested in science and technology, were seeking to reconcile these two belief systems, an attempt that generated an intense interest in geology. Religion and geology were involved in an exciting dialogue at this time, as Rebecca Bedell points out: …in the early 1820s, it was still widely believed that the earth was approximately six thousand years old, formed, as the Archbishop Ussher of Ireland had calculated, on 26 October 4004 B.C…By the 1830s, however, this view of the earth’s history no longer seemed tenable. In that decade Charles Lyell, in his extraordinarily influential Principles of Geology (1830-33), argued compelling for an earth of immense antiquity, a structurally dynamic earth whose surface had undergone slow but continual transformations since its origins in the almost incalculable depths of the past. Whether or not this new geologic worldview was compatible or incompatible with revealed... posted by Friedrich at December 12, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments





Wednesday, December 11, 2002


PBS Responses
Friedrich -- As you remember, a few weeks ago we were lucky enough to be the first blog linked to by the great Arts & Letters Daily, for a posting griping about how boring PBS documentaries can be. What an honor! And what a treat, too: we got as much traffic over the next 3 days as we usually get over the course of about 25 days. A number of visitors emailed to let us know what they thought of the posting; amazingly, an email or two on the subject is still coming in every few days. But I thought now would be a good time to go back and sum up the response. A total of 64 emails so far. Pro-2Blowhards or anti-PBS: 51. Pro-PBS or anti-2Blowhards: 5. Miscellaneous: 8. Feelin’ good! [Dances end-zone victory dance.] A few comments from the badly outnumbered pro-PBS or anti-2Blowhards faction: At the risk of being labelled by you as some kind of PC ex hippie or the like, I confess to not watching any of the sitcom rubbish churned out by the commercial interests of the US TV industry, and to being a great fan of Ken Burns, and PBS in general. The essay seemed like it was written by an 11th grader who procrastinated too long, and had to finish the 8 page essay before bedtime. I am one of the silent army of PBS viewers who stick with it all, good and bad, because the commercial alternatives are so horrible. Better any amount (well, almost any) of guitar twanging and sepia photos ... than 2 minutes of the Network Horror being shown at the same time. Sorry you were bored, but mayhaps you care not for education, information, or learning in general? Unless it's presented with flashy/speedy/graphics or other computer-generated illusions? PBS is the only channel TV worth watching. (This woman’s email signature included a quote from Gandhi) As a matter of fact, I do enjoy the pace's contrast to commercial TV's rat-a-tat-tat. Also, I can putter on my computer and housework without missing much if I step away from the program. Some comments from the triumphant anti-PBS or pro-2Blowhards faction: They have certainly lost their former hard-core audience, who have fled in disgust from their PBS channels for better fare elsewhere - and it is not difficult to find. At the same time, they have not attracted new audiences simply because their programs are BAD, and no one wants to watch bad and boring programs. I saw this show (the documentary about Stephen Foster we were griping about) quite some time ago. I was amazed at how they got away with running interminable shots of windows and mirrors. Thank you for voicing an opinion many of us keep quietly to ourselves.  I thought I was the only one who thought the same way. I haven't been able to watch any of those documentaries on PBS for years, I have felt that way about PBS for years, but I thought the... posted by Michael at December 11, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, December 9, 2002


American Art, All Wild and Wooly
Friedrich -- Perhaps we ought to come right out and say it: American culture and art are strange and wild. What's best in this culture, and what has the most vitality, often doesn't come in traditional packages -- a fact that can drive people crazy with annoyance and perplexity. American culture can be very hard to comprehend, particuarly for people who yearn for something more respectable, or more Euro-style. But there's another way of viewing this fact, and that's as something marvelous, rich, and forever surprising. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that part of what we're both getting at in our postings about 19th century American art is how far-out and deeply moving that art can be. It's a case that isn't often argued these days. 19th century American art is an era that's frequently looked down on, and even dismissed, by those with modernist and post-modernist educations. It's seen as a matter of lousy imitations of European art. Judged by traditional Euro standards, much of it certainly does look hick. How typical is this attitude? Just yesterday, out for lunch in Chelsea, the Wife and I were seated a few feet away from a couple of women artists. Midway through dessert, I overheard one of them say, "Well, until the '20s and '30s, when we finally got some real art in this country..." It's a common belief among educated people that America just didn't get it until the arrival of modernism. Before the Armory Show, our art was clueless crap; before the Method, our actors were grandstanding naifs. Well, balls to all that. Take a look at pre-modernist American art without the academic and Euro blinders on, and what you discover is a lot of freewheeling and very strange art. It was, it seems to me, a great and adventurous era, many-sided, experimental, democratic, and unself-conscious. The genteel and the rudely populist coexisted in ways that post-modernists can only dream about. It seems to me that Felix (writing a comment in reply to your recent posting on the Hudson River School) falls into the trap of seeing Cole's work, for instance, through academic (ie., "avant-garde") eyes. Felix finds "Victorian kitsch" in Coles' work; he describes Cole as an "autodidact," and a "slightly mad historical curiosity." I think he's being quite perceptive. Where I part company with him is when he concludes that because of this, Cole was a bad artist. The fact has always been that much of the best American art has had elements of kitsch and the sentimental, and many of our best artists could be accurately described as "autodidacts," and "slightly mad historical curiosities." He's the top: Bojangles None of this makes Cole a good artist -- but none of it disqualifies him from being a good artist either. Much of the best American art has always been hard to respect, and hard to rank highly (let alone enjoy), if what you're applying are traditional European terms. The oddballness of much American art... posted by Michael at December 9, 2002 | perma-link | (14) comments




Hudson River School, Part I
Michael— I assume you remember a few weeks ago one of our devoted readers, Felix Salmon, dismissed the Hudson River School as: …a derivative and parochial set of painters taken seriously by almost nobody outside the NE of the US and who have shown their lasting influence precisely nowhere. Not content with that blast, he described the accomplishment of the primary founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, as being limited to: …taking Netherlandish landscape painting, blowing it up a bit in size, and painting medium-sized mountains instead of fields with cows. I’d like to thank Felix for his comment, because it resulted in my spending a lot of time looking at, and reading about, the Hudson River School painters, which I found extremely rewarding. Nonetheless, while Felix will have to make up his own mind about the Hudson River School, I’m not sure his comments constitute the last word on the accomplishments of this group of artists. If Felix had confined his remarks solely to the eldest and least inspired of the Hudson River painters, Thomas Doughty (1793-1856), there wouldn’t be a great deal for me to take issue with. While I would be rather slow to dismiss the human accomplishment involved in making a career as a self-taught painter in America in the first few decades of the nineteenth century—especially as a pioneer in what was at the time a virtually nonexistent genre, landscape—it must be admitted that Doughty was a derivative painter. His work utilizes formulas developed by the Dutch--such as low, rounded hills near water surmounted by large, clear skies--although it owes even more to the works of Claude Lorrain, as the following example will make fairly clear. (As always, these are thumbnails and I would urge you to click on them to see the "big picture.") T. Doughty, Farmstead in the Valley, 1820; Claude,Idyllic Landscape, c. 1663 However, when we get to Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Felix’s description simply won’t do: we’re dealing with a far more ambitious and inventive artist. Cole was born in the English Midlands, in a well-to-do family of textile manufacturers, but his father’s business failed. Cole had to leave school, and was apprenticed to a calico designer and wood engraver in a textile factory, a humiliating and terrifying experience that left him with a life-long horror of sliding into the working class. He migrated to the United States with his family in 1818, where he settled in Philadelphia and worked as an engraver. As Robert Hughes notes: [Cole] saw, in Philadelphia, works by portraitists Gilbert Stuart and Thomas Sully, whose names “came to my ears like the titles of great conquerors.”…Without formal training, he learned the rudiments of oil painting from a traveling portrait limner. But they were only rudiments. Without access to life classes or any intensive advice, he never learned to draw the human face or body competently. (Neither could his hero, Claude Lorrain.) Nonetheless, Cole found in landscape painting an arena for his artistic energies. At the... posted by Friedrich at December 9, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments




Nikos Salingaros, Christopher Alexander
Friedrich -- In my usual wooly-headedness, I overlooked a note left for us a couple of weeks back by Nikos Salingaros, the University of Texas physicist who has been doing such fascinating work on cities, buildings, beauty, and ratios, sometimes in collaboration with Christopher ("A Pattern Language") Alexander. Here's what he wrote: Distinguished colleagues, I read some of the comments about Christopher Alexander, and also on my paper with Bruce West. I'm very pleased to see an interest in these topics. As to Christopher's work, let me give a link to one of my papers on Pattern Languages: http://applied.math.utsa.edu/~salingar/StructurePattern.html It is important to let your group of readers know that a significant convergence is now taking place in our view of the world. Christopher's new book "The Nature of Order" will soon be out (check with natureoforder.com), which will set the tone for an overhaul of current thinking about art, architecture, urbanism, aesthetics, and many other human endeavors. I am pleased to be a part in all of this, having prepared the way with some publications linking human creations to scientific laws. Some of my papers are mentioned occasionally on this site. Let me also mention the forthcoming issue of the webzine Katarxis, which will be released in January (http://luciensteil.tripod.com/katarxis02-1/id51.html), and of which I happen to be co-editor. Best wishes to all, Nikos Salingaros I second, and very loudly, Salingaros' enthusiasm for the webzine Katarxis (readable here), and for Alexander's A Pattern Language (buyable here), which thousands of people have found is capable of blowing open their aesthetic thinking; just as great, it seems to me, is Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander is a gigantic, almost mythical figure -- I've had architects tell me they didn't really get architecture until they read his work. And his thinking resonates in many directions. As Michael Snider pointed out in a comment, there are software developers who are devoted to, and making use of, Alexander's concept of patterns. But I also urge any and all readers interested in such questions as patterns, genetics, beauty, the relationships between chaos theory and art, pleasure, evolved systems, etc, to take a look around Prof. Salingaros' own website, here. His pathbreaking research and thinking will give anyone's brain a firm, enlightening and pleasurable rattle. As for Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, I got a look at a bootleg copy some years ago -- Alexander has been said to be on the verge of publishing the book for a quite a while now, and copies have been circulating. The version I saw was about 1000 pages long. It struck me as very brilliant, quite mad, and possibly a classic -- in its all-encompassing, visionary-oracle, responding-to-everything, once-and-for-all fervor, it put me in mind of Hegel, or of "The City of God." I can't wait to see the version he decides to publish. An interview by Wendy Kohn with Alexander about "The Nature of Order" can be read here. Sample passage: Wendy Kohn: You know, we didn’t... posted by Michael at December 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, December 7, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- It doesn't surprise me that complaining about television is such a beloved ritual -- so much TV really is crap. What does surprise me is how many people let themselves stop there. Are they unaware of how much that's worth watching can be found on cable? As in all things, you just have to go to a little trouble. Such as reading 2Blowhards, for instance, and eyeballing our weekly TV Alert. As far as this film buff is concerned, Turner Classic Movies alone justifies the cost of a cable subscription: miraculously good prints that are far better than what most movie rep houses come up with; no commercial interruptions; an extensive library. They even schedule the occasional silent movie. Is it to Ted Turner that we owe thanks for this? Then: thanks, Ted! Which leads to my Blowhard Pick of the TV Week: The Scarlet Letter (TCM; the midnight between Sunday and Monday). Silent movies were their own art form, somewhat distinct from what we're now used to thinking of as narrative audiovisual entertainment. Speaking super-generally, they were more akin to opera or narrative ballet than to talking pictures; if you think of them as a combination of movement, pantomime, and pictorial material that has been set to music, you'll start to get in the ballpark. If you've never quite found the silent-movie groove, this early adaptation of the Hawthorne novel might help you along. Lillian Gish, a frail, Victorian-tulip type, is surprisingly powerful as Hester; Lars Hanson partners her beautifully. The director, Victor Sjostrom (sometimes spelled Seastrom), was one of the greats of early film -- a precursor of such talents as Bergman, Bresson, and Tarkovsky; his work was spare and intense, yet sensual and mystical. Critics complain about the way the film alters the book's ending, and I know it should have bugged me. But, honestly, it didn't. A fabulous movie. Programs and documentaries Ian McKellan on Inside the Actors Studio (Bravo; Sunday at 8 pm ). Frankly gay, rail-thin, articulate and perverse, McKellan might make a witty and insightful guest. What do you mean, you haven't seen Gods and Monsters? That's the film in which McKellan gave a brilliant performance as the horror-movie director James Whale. Go rent it right now. The movie itself is a gem, fully the equal of a good small literary novel. (To my shame, I haven't read the novel the film is based on.) Rumrunners, Moonshiners and Bootleggers (History Channel, 9 pm Monday, and 2 am Tuesday morning). A 2-hour documentary about Prohibition. I haven't seen it, but I have been having good luck recently with History Channel documentaries, which tend to be crisp and efficient. The E! True Hollywood Story: Whitney Houston (E!, 8 pm Wednesday). This showbiz-documentary series flaunts a trashy, National-Enquirer style but often delivers solid goods. And, you know, ahem, this kind of style isn't all that inappropriate for showbiz subjects... Biography: Billy Barty (A&E, 8 pm Thursday). This episode promises to be an especially fascinating... posted by Michael at December 7, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, December 5, 2002


Continuing Ed -- Architecture Critique
Friedrich -- A game. Guess the political orientation of the British architecture critic who wrote the following: We all like old towns and villages with the continuous street facade and its comfortable sense of enclosure. It was not the perversity of architects that made it impossible in new residential areas to have the same quality, but the fact that the environment in Britain is over-regulated by every kind of authority ... As for the opinions of residents: the most-loved and the least-lovely housing I have ever visited in a New Town were at Runcorn. The least-loved was designed by a world-famous architect, Jim Stirling, the most-loved was by the anonymous architectural staff of the Runcorn Development Corporation. Hmmm. OK, what's your guess? A libertarian? A Prince-of-Wales conservative? Wrong. It's a passage from Talking to Architects, a fab book of lectures on towns and buildings by the British anarchist Colin Ward. I'll repeat that: he's an anarchist. Ward, several of whose books I've read, is a brainy guy with a humane and rumpled soul. And isn't it interesting how his observations about conventional architectural processes come so close to those of such people as Jane Jacobs and Leon Krier? Maybe they're all onto something. The book can be bought here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 5, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Art Critics -- What Are They Like?
Friedrich -- The National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University just released the results of a study they did of art critics. My favorite fact: of the 169 writers they looked at, only 3 claim to be politically conservative. The report goes on: In fact, art critics were more likely to vote for the Green Party in the 2000 presidential election than to vote Republican. Progressive political dispositions underlie art critics' positions on several issues in the visual arts today, including government arts funding and freedom of speech. Time to call in the Diversity Police? Asked whether they agree with the statement "Postmodernist theory has a strong influence on the art being made today," 84% of the critics said they somewhat or strongly agree. Asked whether they agree with the statement "Multiculturalism has a strong influence in today's art world," 96% said they somewhat or strongly agree. 61% of the critics agree that "the federal government should make the support of individual artists a policy priority," and 75% "strongly disagree" with the placing of any constraints on publicly funded art. The writers picked favorites from a limited list of living artists. Their top ten faves from this list are, in this order: Jasper Johns Robert Rauschenberg Claes Oldenburg Maya Lin Louise Bourgeois Chuck Close Ed Ruscha Gerhard Richter Cindy Sherman Frank Stella Their least favorite living artists, also drawn from a prepared list: LeRoy Neiman Thomas Kinkade Julian Schnabel Jeff Koons Dale Chihuly Yoko Ono David Salle William Wegman Damien Hirst Tracey Emin The report can be looked at more closely here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 5, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Wednesday, December 4, 2002


Flash New Urbanism
Friedrich -- National Geographic online has created a Flash animation that provides an introduction to some of the principles of the New Urbanism. It's not that good, honestly, unless you're either about 14 years old and expected to turn in a short paper on the subject, or you're a fretful soccer mom. But I appreciated the effort and enjoy Flash animations generally, so what the heck. It's watchable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 4, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments




Economics and Art Appreciation Redux
Michael— In your posting, “Economics and Art Appreciation,” you ask if my study of economics has had an impact on my appreciation of art. The impact, I would say, has been more on my view of intellectual “fashions.” When I was a junior at our Lousy Ivy College, I took an introductory economics class from a rather famous professor. In the middle of one of his lectures, the professor—a dedicated Keynesian, as were virtually all the academic economists of the mid-1970s—mentioned Milton Friedman’s book: “A Monetary History of the United States” (co-authored with Anna J. Schwartz). The prof pointed out that Friedman’s data suggested that the unusual severity of the Great Depression was linked to the tremendous contraction of the money supply from 1929 to 1933. I sat there thinking: Uh, wait a minute, isn’t the money supply the responsibility of the Federal Reserve? Meanwhile, the prof went on to note that when economic factor data was plugged into Friedman’s monetarist equations, they provided estimates of GNP that were more accurate than those of the then-most-sophisticated Keynesian model—the one the Fed itself used. I must say I sat up straight at that. You mean, I thought hesitantly, that the government—specifically, the Federal Reserve system—screwed up big time back in the Thirties? And even now they aren’t using the best econometric model? And Friedman’s book was published over a decade ago, in 1963? Hey, wait a minute, I’m counting on these guys to keep the economy on an even keel! Well, let’s just say that as the decade of the 1970s continued, I wasn’t provided a whole lot of reassurance that the powers-that-be had the whole economic situation under perfect control. To be fair, a stint of working on an advertising account for one of the Big Three automakers just as quickly deflated any notions that I had of great—and infallible—minds guiding the fortunes of Big Business. But the advantage of starting my adult life in the 1970s was that I got “wised up” regarding the likelihood of authority figures making my life a paradise—i.e., don’t count on it. However, as I went on to start my own business and began hiring employees in the 1980s, I noticed that most people I knew were still quite content with the notion of authority figures—whether in either the public or private sectors—making decisions for them. And while they might grumble about the President’s economic performance, they all, to a person, worshipped the Federal Reserve and its chairman. Every so often I would ask them about the role of the Federal Reserve in the Great Depression, just to tweak them about their “Fed” idolatry. I never got anything but blank looks. Nobody—and they were all intelligent, college educated people—had ever heard of the “Great Contraction” of the money supply in the Depression, or even the failure of the Federal Reserve to act as a lender of last resort to the 5,000 banks that collapsed in the first few years of that lovely era. It... posted by Friedrich at December 4, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Tuesday, December 3, 2002


1000 Words -- John La Farge
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Many thanks for the informative (and beautifully laid-out) excursions into art history. Like you, I've come to understand what a straitjacket the usual academic art-history view of art is -- the one that teaches us that it all leads to the Impressionists, the Cubists, through Abstract Expressionism and to the postmodernism of the present day. It's certainly one take on the history of art, and it can be a helpful one. As the only view of art history, though, it can be maddeningly confining. John La Farge, for instance. How bizarre that many art fans don't know who John La Farge was. You've told me that you don't; the Wife tells me she doesn't. Yet he was one of the stars of one of the biggest, brawniest eras in all of American art. (The images in this posting are mostly pop-ups, so be sure to click on them.) Self-portrait; Studio nude The era was the one generally known as the American Renaissance -- the period from the Civil War to the First World War. Robber baron money; the Newport mansions of Richard Morris Hunt; the churches and houses of Stanford White; the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the time when American artists first learned about Impressionism and Japanese art. It was during these years that America first got interested in its own history, and its artists and architects deliberately set out to create an American public art -- many of our triumphal arches, war memorials, and public sculptures were created during this period. The Beaux-Arts buildings -- the city halls, mansions and courthouses -- that still make so many city neighborhoods so city-like were built during this period. It's one of the most dynamic, exciting, and productive eras in the history of American art, yet one that many arts fans don't know much about. Why? I suspect it's because we've learned to see this work as pompous, sentimental, and imperialistic. (And who taught us to see it that way? Conventional academic art history.) Yet much of the work is still treasured; imagine our cities without these buildings, monuments, churches, and sculptures. It's fascinating to learn that architects and artists -- muralists, painters, mosaicists, sculptors -- collaborated frequently during this era, often on huge projects, and did so in a spirit of enthusiasm and cooperation. I can't, in fact, think of another era when America's art and architecture worlds were so healthy. John La Farge (1835-1910) was one of the era's giants. Of French descent, he grew up in New York City, studied in Paris, trained in the law, then decided to become an artist; he married, moved to Newport, and had nine kids. During his career, he worked on many scales, and in a wide range of media. Many of his buddies were the era's other greats: he collaborated with Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White, traveled to Japan with Henry Adams, visited Tahiti, was buddies with Henry and William James, and was known as a terrific... posted by Michael at December 3, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments





Monday, December 2, 2002


Rewriting (Art) History
Michael As you know, I’m a bit critical of the standard-issue histories of Modern Art that we were force-fed back in the 1970s. Just to see if they were still peddling the same old stories, I picked up, essentially at random, “Modern Art 1851-1929” by Richard R. Brettell, which is part of the Oxford History of Art series. I must say, I was pleasantly impressed: the art historical community, if accurately represented by Dr. Brettell (a professor at the University of Texas), has managed to overthrow a few idols since I checked in last. The first, and most immediately shocking change I noted was the shift away from a rigidly Franco-centric view of Modern Art. While there are still plenty of the French (and German and Spanish) artists you would expect to find in the book, just thumbing through the illustrations lets you see work by artists from Britain, Poland, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Canada. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a brief history of modern art that even mentioned Canada? And he admits that his account is probably still too oriented toward Western Europe: The recent opening-up of Russia and central Europe has coincided with a massive attempt to redescribe modernism in western Europe, the Americas, and Australia. This has resulted in a data-glut of proportions for which all of us are unprepared. Few historians of modern art, trained in the West during the last generation, even know the names of the major figures in eastern European or Latin American modernism, in either the nineteenth or the twentieth century. And the national histories of art kept so faithfully by historians and museum curators in Russia and eastern Europe have not been linked to the truly international and cosmopolitan art history to which they belong. The second change was the shift away from the parade of “-isms” (ah, you know: “Realism begat Impressionism which begat Post-Impressionism which begat Synthetism which begat the Nabis…etc., etc.”) We must still be in a transitional period regarding the parade of “-isms” because Prof. Brettell was forced to traverse them at a quick march at the start of the book; you gotta congratulate him, though, he actually does a reasonable job on 18 separate “-isms” in a mere 31 pages. Unmediated Cezanne vs. Image/Modernist Picabia However, he then moves on to his preferred two-part classification: artists who dreamed up their own images—in many cases before the motif—which he calls “unmediated modernism,” and artists who primarily juggled existing images, which he calls “image/modernism.” (No, I have no idea why he uses the slash between image and modernism.) This may seem like a matter of “you say tomato, I say tomahto” but he uses these categories rather slyly to dethrone the myth that art was on a straight runway from Impressionism to Cubism, and then achieved liftoff into the Empyrean regions of Abstraction. According to the good professor, analytic Cubism is an “unmediated modernist” phenomenon… …in looking at analytic Cubist paintings and in... posted by Friedrich at December 2, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Free Reads -- Bachini on Modernist Architecture
Friedrich -- Alice Bachini, whose blog is A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside, here, has a gaily-mocking tone that often gives me the giggles, and a searching and open mind that often gets my sorry noggin thinking. The other day she had some fun with a BBC documentary about modernist architecture. Here, she's semi-pretending to speak in the voice of the show's narrator: This tower-block, in (a now-posh part of) London, for example. Whateverhisnamewas imagined housewives hanging their washing on the (rat-infested, graffiti-covered) stairwells, and chatting over cups of sugar about the weather! It was a future of friendliness, niceness, big views of the sky, and above all, Clean Lines. This entirely-artificially-constructed-town in the middle of nowhere, Scotland, was imagined in the shape of a kind of giant, futuristic spider, by its architect Mr Doodah. Cleverly, and with a view to entire forced reconstruction of society, right down to the tiniest details of people's lives, according to his own unique magical inspiration, he did things that were new, unheard of, and completely and utterly silly. Does anything more ever need to be said about modernist architecture? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at December 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Economics and Art Appreciation
Friedrich -- This is a culture blog (generally, anyway), so it might seem strange for me to write about economics, and God knows I’m barely competent to talk on the subject at all. But a few years ago something funny happened: I got econ. It suddenly made sense: hey, it’s a way of seeing the world! But the really funny thing is that getting econ has enhanced my enjoyment and appreciation of the arts. To back up for a second: finally learning how to see and interpret behavior in the light of such forces as “limited resources” and “incentives” has been a tremendous help. (Worth, it occurs to me, many years of therapy.) The world seemed to open up; it seems much less mystifying these days than it once did. So that’s what people are up to! So that’s why so much behavior takes on the forms it does! This is all very basic, I’m sure, and I’m happy to be laughed at for my former naivete. But back in college I tried econ and never got it, despite OK grades in Econ 101 and 102. I wonder why. Because of the JFK-era Keynesianism that was still in vogue in the mid-’70s at our Lousy Ivy College? It seemed to make no sense. Or was it simply because I don’t have a math brain, and the damn textbooks were full of equations and charts? Not a challenge for engineering-brain you, but anything resembling a math symbol puts English-major me straight to sleep. What enabled me to get econ in recent years was finding a handful of resources that present the subject in plain English. No math, no charts -- just crystal-clear explanations and examples. (Plain, clear English: one of my favorite things.) Even better, especially at the outset, was discovering works that explained not econ itself so much as the history of economic thought. Quick explanations and examples; personalities; a sense of the field growing and evolving over time .... How did getting economics help me enjoy the arts even more than I generally tend to? It’s had a variety of effects. It’s helped me put the arts in context. Living an arts life can be like getting lost in a dream -- this is what Schnabel’s movie “Basquiat” is so good at suggesting. That kind of dreamlife has its erotic upside, but it can also feel like going insane. What getting econ did for me was set the dreamlife in perspective. The arts are many things, of course, but one of them is “a worldly activity like any other” -- and getting econ has helped me see that side of them for what it is. Artsies, of course, have a notoriously strong aversion to thinking sensibly about economics. I find when I talk to arts people that the subject of econ is so misunderstood it’s almost comic. Isn't it all about predicting stock prices? And look how bad they are at that! And what’s this awful “self-interest” that’s always... posted by Michael at December 2, 2002 | perma-link | (9) comments





Saturday, November 30, 2002


Chaos of History: Art in 1930
Michael Here's another mini-installment of my "cross-section" approach to art history, this time focused on 1930. All the following images were painted over a period of, at most, 5 years (1928-1933). As always, we're dealing with pop-ups, so I hope you take the time to look at them full-size. Abstraction B. Brooker, Sounds Assembling, 1928; A. Dove, Foghorns, 1929 Landscape M. Hartley, Carnelian Country, 1932; A. Jackson, Winter, Charlevoix County, 1932 Female Portrait F. Varley, Vera, 1931; P. Picasso, Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932; Y. Biriukova, Portrait of Lillian Evers, 1933 Female Nude T. Lempicka, Andromede, 1929; E. Holgate, Nude, 1930 Perhaps I should mention that I have no animus to analytic art history, simply that I think it's always a good idea to look at things a bit differently from time to time. I remember having one of those "aha" moments the first time I realized that Velásquez and Van Dyck were exact contemporaries, and Rembrandt was a mere 7 years younger. It suddenly became obvious to me exactly why Baroque painting had stamped itself so indelibly on art history. Anyway, enjoy! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 30, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Thursday, November 28, 2002


Politics of the NEA, part II
Michael As I mentioned in my last posting, the NEA was created in large part under political pressure from established arts organizations; from the politically active, wealthy individuals who raised funds and sat on their boards; from the film industry; and from labor unions like the American Federation of Musicians and Actors’ Equity, many of which were associated with the then-languishing New York theater industry. The whole question of the agency’s goals had been left essentially unaddressed in the legislation creating the NEA, other than by such meaningless phrases as The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States. The infant agency was a tabula rosa—and thus, in political terms, its budget was up for grabs. There was not much to squabble over in the first few years, however. The Johnson administration, whose ardor for supporting the arts had dropped off sharply after it became clear that the arts community vociferously opposed the War in Vietnam, had asked never asked for anything more than token (i.e., under $10 million) appropriations from Congress. Paradoxically, that set the stage for a huge increase in funding under Johnson’s Republican successor. Nixon, on taking office, had appointed Nelson Rockefeller’s protégé (and ex-mistress) Nancy Hanks to head up the NEA. Hanks, like the good bureaucratic empire builder she was, recommended a significant funding increase for the NEA in Nixon’s first budget. This would have been a merely predictable but empty gesture except that Nixon’s political advisor Leonard Garment supported Hank’s plans. Garment felt that the increase …would have high impact among opinion formers…Support for the arts is, increasingly, good politics…you will gain support from groups which have hitherto not be favorable to this administration… [T]he key is in the headline. Doubling won’t do when the money is peanuts—a bag of peanuts becomes two bags of peanuts. The ever impish Nixon, conscious that he was viewed as a cultural bumpkin, agreed, and on December 10, 1969, asked Congress to approve $40 million for arts and humanities for fiscal year 1971. Hanks then went to work to gain congressional approval. She began by committing most of the requested new money to museums and symphony orchestras, the groups best organized to apply pressure in Washington. Hanks stirred up support by visiting orchestra and museum boards to chat about what they might do if she—and they—got the money. And she delivered in return for their support: throughout her tenure the NEA’s expanded budgets amply rewarded established non-profit art organizations. Museums received nothing in 1970 but more than $9 million in 1974. Orchestras received $2.5 million in 1970 and more than $16 million four years later. In lobbying for her agency Hanks seldom dwelled on what she called “the great philosophical importance of the arts,” and instead worked to ensure that every congressman whose vote was needed heard from important, supportive constituents. One of Hank’s key allies was Jack Golodner, a Democratic labor lawyer who had become a lobbyist for the American Council for the... posted by Friedrich at November 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, November 27, 2002


Digital Photography Musings
Friedrich -- "But what about the printer?" That was my main worry a while back, when I was lusting to get myself a digital still camera. The cameras finally seemed tolerably good and tolerably priced. But the printers ... I didn't like the expense -- refilling all those damn ink wells! -- and I worried that the prints wouldn't last long before fading. Also, since I already have a good b&w laser printer, I wasn't eager to clutter up the work space with yet another gizmo. I want one, I want one ... No, actually, I can wait When I finally sprang for the camera about six months ago, I decided that my way of resolving the printer question would be by sliding into "waiting until they get better" mode. What prompts this posting is that I just realized that not only have I not yet bought a color printer, I haven't yet wanted to make a color print. I'm still in "waiting till they get better" mode, and am perfectly happy there. The fact is, or has proved (to my surprise) to be, that I find storing photos on my hard drive and looking at them on the computer monitor not just an adequate substitute for storing and leafing through traditional prints, but much superior to it. This isn't just a matter of editing fun with Photoshop, it's also a matter of sheer looking-at-'em pleasure. The photos look really, really good on screen -- that beaming CRT glow gives them a kind of glamor. I can make them larger and smaller at will, and I love being able to email them. Plus I can riffle through them pretty easily. Despite hard-drive clutter, my digi-photos are much more accessible to me than my old on-paper photos are in the boxes and bins where they're heaped. So I enjoy them more. I seem to remember that you've entered the digi-still-photo world yourself. Have you found this to be the case too? Assuming my experience reflects that of other users, I wonder what this means for photography. I'm happier with virtual photography than I am with hard-copy-centric photography, not just as somebody who dislikes the smell of chemicals but simply as someone who enjoys looking at photographs. Will the primary life (not just the production but the viewers' experience) of photos soon start to be onscreen rather than on paper? Myself, I'll always have some framed photos out and on display. But I suspect the great majority of my photos will accumulate on my hard drive, thence never to take on existence in the physical realm. And that's fine by me. I still crave a good color printer but now consider buying one such a luxury that I may never get around to making the purchase; they're always getting better and cheaper. Plus, I'm rather enjoying the pleasures of holding off -- the Wife claims that I enjoy waiting on a purchase more than actually making it. What I really crave these... posted by Michael at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments




Aloha, "Aloha"
Michael In a comment a while ago, you asked for more information on “Aloha” Barney, who was the art dealer for Edgar (“The King of Black Velvet Painting”) Leeteg. At the cost of countless minutes spent reading the articles thrown up by a Google search, this is what I’ve discovered: Apparently Aloha (whose name was either Barney Smith or Barney Davis) had been a submarine pilot in World War Two. He seems to have met Leeteg in Hawaii. Alternatively, since Leeteg spent most of his time drunk or high in Tahiti, it’s possible that he merely thought he had met Aloha in Hawaii. In any event, Aloha opened a gallery in Hawaii, where he sold Leeteg’s work. This was no small task, since ex-billboard painter Leeteg churned out two velvet paintings a week—over 1,700 in a 15 year period. Aloha was shrewd enough to call Leeteg “The American Gauguin,” and would often compare Leeteg’s technique of painting on black velvet with the play of lights and darks in the works of the Dutch Masters. As Phil Patton remarks, this was a school of painting “he could be sure patrons would know from the cigar box.” Note the Play of Lights and Darks Aloha also seems to have helped promote Leeteg’s image, encouraging the painter to construct the palatial Villa Velour, which was even equipped with a 10-seat Italian marble outhouse. Aloha realized that a hard-drinking, wildly promiscuous image was good for Leeteg’s prices; statements attributed to Leeteg like: “I have boozed more, fought more, laid more girls and thrown more wild parties than anyone else on the island, but it's all good publicity and gets me talked about plenty, and that's what sells pictures" have Aloha’s fingerprints all over them (especially since Leeteg lived with his mother.) Anyway, Aloha gave as good as he got in his relationship with Leeteg, since he managed to move the black velvet to the tune of $10,000 a picture in the late 1940s—when a buck was a buck—which would have made anyone other than a tormented artist like Leeteg happy. Of course, Leeteg may have been tormented by being excessively happy, since he died by falling off a motorcycle while drunk. Anyway, it was hard to tell his mental state since he was more or less always drunk, high, or getting yelled at by his mother. Visionary Dealer Aloha Barney In short, I believe the NEA should endow a college scholarship fund in memory of Aloha Barney Smith/Davis; more dealers with his visionary temperament would be the best development imaginable for the American art scene. You can read more about Aloha Barney and Leeteg here, here, here and here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, November 26, 2002


Pollock's Drip Fractals
Michael In the December 2002 issue of Scientific American there is a very interesting article by Richard Taylor on the existence of fractal patterns in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Dr. Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, is perhaps unusual for a hard scientist in also possessing a master’s degree in art theory. J. Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950 (detail) Does Art Imitate Math? After a chance occurrence got him thinking about possible affinities between Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and fractals, Dr. Taylor scanned a Pollock drip painting into a computer, then covered the image with a computer-generated mesh of identical squares, and analyzed which squares were occupied by the painted pattern and which were empty. As a result, he could calculate the statistical qualities of the pattern (i.e., the number of full or empty squares.) According to Doc Taylor, …fractals consist of patterns that recur on finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense complexity. In short, a fractal pattern looks quite similar at any scale of magnification, with a constant ratio of filled to empty areas. When Doc Taylor examined the “statistics” of the Pollock drip painting patterns under different sized-grids—from ones small enough to isolate a single speck of paint to grids a meter square—he found that the Pollock's imagery was of a fractal nature, with the same patterns appearing over the entire scale range. The good doctor considered the possibility that all drip paintings automatically create fractals, and to check this hypothesis he analyzed a painting by an artist other than Pollock. The non-Pollock drip painting yielded no fractal patterns. On the possibility that what he had found was just a fluke, Dr. Taylor analyzed a lot of samples, including: ...five drip paintings sent to us by collectors who suspected their acquisitions might have been created by Pollock. Despite superficial similarities with Pollock’s work, none of the paintings contained fractal patterns. The fractals are the product of the specific technique that Pollock devised, and all the 20 drip paintings of his that we have analyzed have this fractal structure. Dr. Taylor has also gotten interested in the aesthetics of fractals. For example, the more complex the fractal pattern, the higher the “fractal dimension," or "D” is: For a smooth line (containing no fractal structure), D has a value of 1; for a completely filled area, [D’s] value is 2. For a fractal pattern, however, the repeating structure causes the line to occupy area. D then lies in the range between 1 and 2; as the complexity and richness of the repeating structure increase, its value moves closer to 2. Dr. Taylor and his colleagues have investigated aesthetic reactions to three categories of fractals: natural fractals, such as those found in trees, mountains and clouds, mathematical fractals developed by computer simulations and artistic fractals, in this case sections of Pollock paintings. Participants in Doc Taylor’s tests consistently prefered D values in the range of 1.3 to 1.5, regardless of whether the pattern was from nature,... posted by Friedrich at November 26, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments





Monday, November 25, 2002


Art is Long, Life is Weird
Michael The Wall Street Journal of November 25 has a column (“Boomtown” by Lee Gomes) on a wrinkle in the art-technology interface known as 3-D scanning or “lidar.” This is a laser scanning system that yields 3-dimensional data of an object. While I’ve been aware of this type of optical scanning for a number of years (didn’t they use something like this back when they were creating the clay-to-animatronic-to digital dinosaurs for Jurassic Park?) I wasn’t aware that it was being applied to our sculptural heritage. As the article points out, Some of the most interesting laser-scanning work, though, is in the field of cultural and historical preservation. A team from Stanford University runs the Digital Michelangelo project that used a special high-powered laser to scan the statue of David in Florence. The scanning is accurate down to less than 100th of an inch and fills up 20 gigabytes of data. The article points out that, for art historians, these scans have a variety of worthy uses: David Koller, a Stanford graduate student who worked on the project, said the David 3D model was used in Florence to help plan the current cleaning that David is getting. He also said that the Stanford model is accurate enough that one can discern the direction of Michaelangelo’s individual chisel marks. With the right sort of image processing software, said Mr. Koller, an art historian could develop new insights into Michelangelo’s sculpting techniques. Art history almost seems besides the point, however: what really strikes me is that the David has entered a new phase in its life as an artwork. I mean, the darn thing's been digitized (the David’s been reduced to a mere 20 gigs?—that doesn’t seem big enough somehow) and will now go off into thousands of new experiences as a work of art. It will no doubt get “quoted” and inserted into God knows what new artistic concantenations. While I don’t claim to see this future more than through a glass, darkly, I suppose one can analogize with the ways in which 2-D scanners and the Internet have “democratized” the museum—today, every man can be his own art publisher/image-appropriating digital collagist. And if images have cast off their link to their handcrafted originals today, why shouldn’t this be true for 3-dimensional representations tomorrow? The mind boggles, but I guess that’s sort of the point. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, November 22, 2002


The Politics of the NEA, Part I
Michael In my never-ending series on American culture I thought it was finally time to get around to the NEA. The story of this august institution begins at the end of the 1950s. The social prestige of the arts had reached a new high in American life. Around the country, cultural events formed a new platform on which the affluent and socially ambitious could court distinction. While John Kennedy (like most of his colleagues in the Senate) had never been known as a friend of the arts, he had noticed that the arts constituency was growing and it included many powerful figures: bankers, lawyers and doctors, university presidents and newspaper publishers. After his election, Kennedy carefully used high culture to brand his administration as aristocratic and forward-looking. Fear of Rocky: Motivation for the NEA The political question of government support for the arts, however, really became a hot-button issue when New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller (considered Kennedy’s most likely challenger in the 1964 election) upped the ante by establishing a state arts council in 1960—the first in the nation. In doing so Rockefeller rallied both liberal Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans, as well as such powerful labor unions as the American Federation of Musicians, Actors’ Equity, and organized stagehands, electricians and carpenters around the bounty of public arts funding. Sensing a threat, Kennedy moved to enhance his own cultural profile. He sent Arthur Goldberg, his labor secretary, to New York to get headlines by mediating a strike at the Metropolitan Opera. Kennedy also proposed a National Culture Center for Washington, D.C. and appointed a prominent group of artists to its advisory board. Although Kennedy supported establishing an agency for federal funding of the arts, he was assassinated before this was accomplished. In the months that followed, it became clear even to anxious observers that however little Lyndon Johnson knew or cared about the arts, he was just as determined as Kennedy to woo the arts constituency, and was better at getting legislation passed. Johnson propelled a languishing arts bill through Congress. Although Congressional hearings focused on the problems of individual artists, it was actually a coalition of major arts institutions, New York City’s congressional delegation, the American Federation of Musicians, Actors’ Equity, the Motion Picture Association, and John D. Rockefeller III (puppet-master of Lincoln Center), that helped Johnson put the heat on recalcitrant legislators. On September 16, 1965, the House and Senate agreed on legislation establishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There was a significant gap in the legislation, however: to wit, what was the National Endowment of the Arts supposed to do? To what purpose was it to spend the $2.5 million allocated to it the first year? The congressional committee reviewing the bill affirmed that the endowments’ principal objective was …the encouragement of free inquiry and expression…conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged…no preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression. Nor... posted by Friedrich at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Modern/Modernist
Friedrich -- Remember my small campaign to avoid using the word "liberal" to describe leftists (who, in my experience, are anything but liberal)? Let's call them "leftists" instead. Well, I've got another one to propose. "Modern art," "modern architecture," "modern poetry" ... Hmmmm. That word "modern" is a problem. Why? Because it does several things that demand to be untangled. I'm proposing (and hereby resolving, if only for myself) using the word "modernist" instead of "modern" in these cases. Why? Because so-called "modern art" is really nothing but one strain and tradition in recent and contemporary art. Many different kinds of art have been produced in recent years, and are being produced now -- marine watercolors, for instance, and paintings-on-black-velvet, and surfboard decoration, and cowboy art. Some of it's good, and many of the artists producing this kind of work have their talents and skills. Yet they aren't taken seriously, or (often) even thought of as doing real art. Why not? Well, partly because the "modern art" (and "postmodern art") mafia makes the claim that the only real art of our time is art done in their own particular "modern" or "postmodern" tradition. The terminology allows them to look down their noses at all the other art that's being produced, and even to dismiss it as not-art. Because painters of hunting scenes, for instance, aren't grappling with the "formal issues" supposedly demanded by the nature of our time (said nature as defined, of course, by members of the "modern" mafia), they aren't serious, they aren't deep -- they aren't really doing art with a capital A. Why let them get away with this? One way, I propose, of combating the tyrrany of the modern-postmodern mafia is to insist on referring to their art tradition as "modernist" and "post-modernist." If we do so, we'll succeed in implying that their tradition is simply one of many. We'll undermine their claims to be the ultimate authority on things artistic. An example: "modern architecture" -- what a brilliant p-r victory to have claimed that name. It has many people believing that the only legitimate new (or newish) architecture -- the only buildings that qualify as architecture -- are shiney, abstract things (or, these days, jagged and bewildering things). Yet most people don't like these buildings, and many many other kinds of buildings are being built -- and, of course, not considered to be legitimate architecture by the mafia. Call the mafia's work "modernist architecture" (or "postmodernist architecture") instead, and it's clear that there are alternatives. "No, dear, I'm not in the mood for postmodernist, I'd prefer something a little more Adirondack cabin-ish instead." Using modernist instead of modern will open up minds, if only in a small way. Besides, I'm offended from a purely language-buff point of view. Any art produced now is modern art by definition. Anything built now is modern architecture. Any poem written today is modern poetry. None of them, though, have to be modernist. Which style to use (let alone... posted by Michael at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (22) comments





Thursday, November 21, 2002


Aesthetics & Automobiles
Michael Knowing your interest in the aesthetics of everyday life, I thought of you when I read a story in the New York Times of November 21, “BMW Design Chief Sees Art on Wheels; Some Just See Ugly.” (You can read it here.) Apparently Christopher E. Bangle, BMW's chief designer, wants each BMW to be a conversation piece known as much for design as precision engineering. Where BMW's [once] looked very much alike, he is trying to make each model different — some with bulging back ends, some with unusually reflective surfaces and sharp curves, and some, like the Mini, just plain small. According to the story, automotive market researcher Chris Cedergren thinks BMW is smart to adopt this approach: "It moves away from everyone else and differentiates the brand," he said. "It makes a statement. The more you can get the consumer to be one with that vehicle and really link their emotion to that vehicle, that will translate into a situation where the consumer will say, `I want it.' " "What Chris Bangle is doing is reading that into the marketplace, and, rightly so, developing vehicles that go after individual emotions," he added. While there has been considerable criticism of the revised styling of the 7 Series—in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not crazy about it—the article notes that Mr. Bangle’s overall strategy is proving quite successful. Sales of the new 7 Series — BMW's most expensive line of cars, starting at about $70,000 — have increased 45 percent this year. Mr. Bangle is particularly fired up about BMW's new Z4, which he claims represents an aesthetic leap in car design, analogous to the shift in Greek sculpture that occurred when sculptors discovered the power of draping cloth on nude figures to infuse them with an illusion of motion. BMW's Z4: Aesthetic Leap? I've never seen this car in person, so it's a little hard to evaluate this claim, but it would be nice if Detroit’s automakers, who once seemed to have some insight into car design, took Mr. Bangle's philosophy a bit more seriously. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments




Free reads -- black velvet
Friedrich -- Have you stumbled across this? An article in The Age by Pat Sheil about Edgar Leeteg, apparently the father of that great art form, paintings-of-Tahitian-girls-on-black-velvet. You can read it here. Leeteg was known as "The American Gauguin" Sample passage: When he received a letter from a friend living in Tahiti ... he stole a fistful of brushes from work, filled a dozen jars with paint and hightailed it to the south seas ... He eked out a living doing odd jobs. He also started painting the local girls and selling the results to sailors for a few dollars apiece. A self-confessed "gin-soaked dopehead", Leeteg was having a hard time of it. Link via Out of Lascaux, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (12) comments





Wednesday, November 20, 2002


Celebrity Smack Down
Michael As you know, one of our readers, Felix Salmon (not gregdotorg as I mistakenly mentioned when I first posted this story--sorry, Greg), in hotly defending the value of conceptual art, made a comparison between Robert Irwin and Thomas Cole, which he seemed to feel would favor Mr. Irwin: Do you really think that Thomas Cole would win a Celebrity Smack-down against Robert Irwin? The latter, just for starters, could easily lay claim to having a genuinely American vision, as opposed to simply taking Netherlandish lanscape painting, blowing it up a bit in size, and painting medium-sized mountains instead of fields with cows. Well, this got me to looking at both men’s works, something I hadn’t done for a few years—and along the way, I ran across some examples of their writings (the Internet is a wonder, ain’t it?) After studying these, I think any suggestion of a battle royale between Irwin and Cole is kind of misplaced. The two men seem more like artistic brothers (making allowance for the century and a half of artistic and intellectual evolution that separates them.) T. Cole, Schroon Mountain, Adirondacks,1838; R. Irwin, Double Diamond, 1997-8 A quote from Robert Irwin: If light is the medium and space is the medium, then, in a sense, the universe is a medium. I know the impracticality of it right now but when I say that the medium is the universe, that maybe the world is an art form, then the gardening of our universe or our consciousness would be the level of our art participation. A quote from Thomas Cole: [American scenery] is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic--explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery--it is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity--all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart! R. Irwin, Double Diamond, 1997-8; T. Cole, The Oxbow, 1836 The verdict in our celebrity smack down would appear--to me anyway--a draw, with both artists articulating an "genuinely American vision." Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 20, 2002 | perma-link | (6) comments





Tuesday, November 19, 2002


Change, Death and Pop Culture
Michael I was a bit surprised by the comments on my recent posting on Theodor Adorno; people who I know to be right wing wrote sympathetically of this avowed Marxist’s criticisms of popular culture. This got me to pondering some aspects of Mr. Adorno that I hadn’t included in my posting. (Hey, there’s a real space limit in blogging, okay?). In Adorno’s essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception,”he sounds rather nostalgic when discussing the earlier, or, as he terms it, “liberal” phase of capitalism (i.e., prior to the rise of Big Business or “monopoly” capitalism.) Adorno presents Beethoven, despite his commercial success, as a genuine thinker because he didn’t ignore the conflict between moneymaking and art making: When mortally sick, Beethoven hurled away a novel by Sir Walter Scott with the cry: "Why, the fellow writes for money," and yet proved a most experienced and stubborn businessman in disposing of the last quartets, which were a most extreme renunciation of the market; he is the most outstanding example of the unity of those opposites, market and independence, in bourgeois art. Those who succumb to the ideology are precisely those who cover up the contradiction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their own production as Beethoven did: he went on to express in music his anger at losing a few pence, and derived the metaphysical Es Muss Sein (which attempts an aesthetic banishment of the pressure of the world by taking it into itself) from the housekeeper's demand for her monthly wages. Adorno also pines in a rather non-Marxist way for the “old fashioned” elements in German culture: The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of "cultural lag," of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist—however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theaters with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. Adorno’s comments here (which seem much more “genuine” expressions of his feelings than many of his rhetorically bombastic theoretical pronouncements) struck me as very similar to views expressed by a writer who might be thought of as his opposite number: Henry James.... posted by Friedrich at November 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Sunday, November 17, 2002


Chaos of History: Art in 1910
Michael, In a previous posting, I mentioned how inspired I was by the book, “1900: Art at the Cross Roads,” by Robert Rosenblum, Mayanne Stevens and Ann Dumas. This volume catalogued a broad range of paintings and sculptures produced within a few years of 1900. I thought that looking at such broad “cross-sections” of art production was a way of providing a more enjoyable look at art history than the typical linear narratives or the “succession of isms” approach so beloved of textbooks. Given the limitations of space in a ‘blog posting, the only way I could think to utilize this idea was to pair paintings that had (1) either strikingly different formal approaches to a similar subject or (2) showed similar formal concerns being pursued by artists who aren't normally paired. So I put together the following as a mini-cross section of activity clustering around the year 1910. (All pictures are thumbnails; check 'em out at full size for maximum enjoyment.) Male Portrait P. Picasso, Portrait of AmbroiseVollard, 1910; A Zorn, Self Portrait, c. 1910 Female Nude R. Bereny, Reclining Nude, 1907; P. Picasso, The Dryad, 1908 Seaport Landscape G. Braque, Harbor in Normandy, 1909; M. Braun, Bay and City of San Diego, 1910 Figures in Action G. Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909; L. Corinth, Samson Blinded, 1912 Hope you like it, and maybe this will chip a few splinters off art-history’s shibboleths. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 17, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Brain Research
Michael I seem to have suddenly been reading a lot about scientific research that has implications for the arts. I suspect that people much hipper to the state of brain research than I are way ahead of me on this, but—vowing bravely to ignore the likelihood that I am about to re-announce the invention of the electric light bulb—let me share my tiny thoughts on these matters. The story that got me going on this was Sharon Begley’s “Science Journal” column in the November 15 Wall Street Journal. She describes the infant science of neuroeconomics, which studies functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of volunteers’ brains during economic experiments to see what is going on inside the old noggin. One conclusion the neuroeconomists seem to have established is that the anticipation of monetary rewards stimulates the same portions of the brain that fire up in anticipation of pleasurable food, sex or drugs. I assume it is legitimate to assume that the same mechanism is at work with other sources of aesthetic pleasure. If this is so, it may explain patterns of behavior one can observe in the arts. For example, according to Ms. Begley: The brain seizes on even the slimmest evidence of pattern. After only a couple of repetitions of some event, the anterior cingulate begins to fire in anticipation of another: as a result, we’re convinced that a stock that beat profit forecasts two quarters in a row will do it a third time. And if it doesn’t? Then neurons in emotion processing regions fire like crazy, generating a sense of anxiety and dread, researchers at the Duke University in Durham, N.C., report. Result: When a nice, reliable stock misses its earnings target by even a little, investors abandon ship in a fury. Often, the longer a stock has persisted, the worse the beating, because the longer a pattern has persisted the more alarmed the brain gets when [the pattern is] broken. This mechanism might explain why, only a decade or so after his death, the paintings of John Singer Sargent—for years one of the most fashionable painters in the world—could be had for only a few hundred dollars. He had been a highly "reliable” artist for 30 years, and yet, with the seismic shift in art world fashions of the 1920s, he became suddenly déclassé. Full of possibly the same anxiety and dread described by Ms. Begley, his collectors bailed out en masse. John Singer Sargent's "Nonchaloir" Suffering from Anxiety and Dread? Ms. Begley also lays out a mechanism that might make collectors or art buffs treasure the adventuresome and novel in art: The [brain’s] reward circuit runs on the neurochemical dopamine. We get a dopamine surge when we anticipate a niche, healthy 4% return on a money-market fund. But dopamine neurons get extra juiced when a long shot comes in—and the addictive nature of dopamine makes us willing to take financial risks for those long shots. Even the popular preference—easily observable at your local cineplex—for happy endings... posted by Friedrich at November 17, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments





Saturday, November 16, 2002


Art in Santa Fe
Friedrich -- A busy few days of art-going here on vacation in Santa Fe, wrestling with the way popular and elite art have become ridiculously (and tragically) polarized. First, a visit to the International Folk Art Museum, full of delights and surprises. Much amazement at how evocative, humorous, melancholy and mysterious folk art can be. Also how traditional, yet how inventive and bizarre: it can make you wonder why sophisticated, cosmopolitan artists bother trying. Later, an afternoon spent in the local galleries, full of cowboy art, designer abstractions, etc. Art for the tourist trade, yet almost all of it talented and skillful. It’s enjoyably disorienting for a NYC-based arts fan with an overdeveloped critical-intellectual muscle to wander around taste-testing this kind of art. Santa Fe puts you in a pleasing-yourself, quality-of-life frame of mind. You think about food, imagery, houses, and spending money on pleasure. You find yourself thinking, “Hmmm, I could live with that.” Is much of this art made for the market? Sure. Is that any reason to dismiss it? At the moment, I can’t see why. I’m pretty certain, however, that my art-world friends back in NYC will remind me why I should. Then an evening at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, feeling chagrined, because whenever I’m not in front of her paintings, I can feel annoyed by her. When I see them live, I think, Gee, these pictures are really very catchy. Finally, a visit to Site Santa Fe, the local stark-and-severe “art space,” an abrupt return to contempo, high-serious, art-world art, and a look at an installation show by Janine Antoni, who’s, ahem, upending assumptions of gender and the body. An impression in plaster of one of her nipples: inner/outer, masculine and feminine ways of doing things, etc. Lots of cows, soap, lard and chocolate: the inside/the outside, consuming/creating, feminine and masculine ways of making art. Hey, it’s possible to get what her work is about and still not like it. I can see taking pleasure from the folk art. I can see enjoying the tourist art. The O’Keefe paintings are hard to resist (part of the fun being that so many of them are about what it’s like to have a pussy, yet she’d never admit there was any sexual content in them). Out here in Santa Fe, surrounded by people enjoying Indian art, Hispanic low-rider art, and Georgia O’Keefe, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting much of anything out of Antoni. My own tastes run towards avant-garde art, and Antoni of course can do what she wants – free country, etc. But it’s telling that she gives you next-to-nothing to look at – her work’s all about realizing would-be clever art-world ideas. You have to read and decode it; the only other people looking at her show was a small crowd being led around by a docent, who was busy explaining the ideas. In fact, her work hardly exists without explanation. Antoni seems a clever, capable illustrator of current art-professor-and-foundation ideas, more a maker... posted by Michael at November 16, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments




American High Culture IV: The Role of Universities
Michael In my previous posting on “high” culture, I discussed how real estate developers have often used the prestige associated with performing art centers to advance their own business interests, often to the detriment of the art institutions the centers ostensibly serve. Well, if I’m going to survey “friends” of the arts with ulterior motives, I guess I have to mention higher education as well. Prior to World War Two, visual and performing artists were trained either in specialized schools, apprenticed with masters or studied with private tutors. After the passage of the G.I. Bill, however, colleges and universities swiftly glommed on to the arts. Whole departments devoted to creative writing, visual arts, music, drama or dance sprung up, offering new degrees such as the M.F.A., with doctorates coming rapidly after. The extent of university programs in the arts grew at an extraordinary rate. In 1948, only 105 colleges and universities even gave courses in dance—and then mostly in the physical education department. Twenty years later, 110 colleges and universities offered a major in dance, 22 had dance departments, 42 offered an M.A. degree in dance, and 6 were prepared to hand out Ph.Ds in dance. In 1960, some five thousand American college students were majoring in theater; a mere seven years later, there were 18,000. And this growth rate continued past the Sixties. In 1971, American universities handed out roughly 30,000 bachelor degrees in the visual and performing arts; by 2000, the annual production had doubled. During the roughly 30 years between 1971 and 2000, over seven hundred thousand Americans graduated with degrees in the visual and performing arts. Obviously, only a fraction of these people ever found employment in the arts, but I doubt that ever counted a great deal with the mandarins of higher education. ("Hey, if the tuition checks clear, what's the problem?") Given that “academic art” is a term of contempt in modernist art history, how has the movement of art training into a university setting affected the quality of art production? According to Alice Goldfarb Marquis, one 1970 survey of artists who took creative sabbaticals at the MacDowell Colony in New England revealed: …the MacDowell composers complained of over-intellectualized music and of faculties “too cramped, too cozy, too ingrown.” No one wanted to criticize anyone else because that would hurt the department. Many university-based composers were writing only for each other, said some, while others resented “cliquishness and faddism.” Writers who were MacDowell alumni were similarly disenchanted with academe. The campus atmosphere, said on, “encouraged too many academics to imagine they were artists.” Painters were even more disillusioned. Moving art from professional schools to campuses, said one, “made the art student a dilettante and killed the apprentice system.” The eminent art critic Robert Hughes discussed the impact of university art training on the quality of art production in his 1980 book “The Shock of the New”: Every five years, the art schools of America alone produced as many graduates as there were people in... posted by Friedrich at November 16, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments





Friday, November 15, 2002


Adorno's Self Portrait
Michael As you may recall, I had a little fun a few months back with a review of Mr. Adorno’s “Essays on Music.” But given his reputation as a major critic of popular culture—higher today than when he was alive—I decided to take a look at Mr. Adorno’s writings. Scouring the Internet, I found a translation of his 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception,” written with his collaborator Max Horkheimer. Although it took several readings of this densely worded, convoluted, 16,000-word essay to distill the main concepts—the things I do for 2blowhards!—I think the following summary describes them fairly accurately: #1—Modern popular culture represents the triumph of fixed entertainment formulas: Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable…As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. #2—Modern popular culture gains authority from its mechanical reproduction: The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation. The…charisma of the Fuhrer…has finally turned out to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the radio, which are a demoniacal parody of the omnipresence of the divine spirit. #3—Modern popular culture imposes a rigid “house” style on all artworks: No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the [rules of commercial music]. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when [Mozart’s music] is too serious or too difficult but when [Mozart] harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. #4—Modern popular culture converges with advertising: The highest-paid stars resemble pictures advertising unspecified…articles. [Movie stars are] often selected from the host of commercial models. The prevailing taste takes its ideal from advertising, the beauty in consumption… With these four ideas Adorno sketched out the salient characteristics of commercial culture in a capitalist-industrial era, and there is at least an argument (if not always a strong one) to be made for his positions. However, he didn’t stop there. He overlaid these points with a unique conspiracy theory, which I would call “The Culture Industry as a Mind Control Mechanism for Monopoly Capitalism.” This theory, although Adorno is a bit sketchy on the details, goes something like this: #1—Modern popular culture converts citizens into consumer zombies: The principle [under which the culture industry operates] dictates that [the average citizen] should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfillment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to... posted by Friedrich at November 15, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments





Thursday, November 14, 2002


Our Mission, so to speak
Bleep, bloop, sounds of static… We interrupt our regular programming for this public service announcement. It occurs to the two of us here at 2blowhards that now might not be a bad time to come clean about what we’re up to with our blog. In addition to having a lot of fun sounding off about this and that, we do have a fairly serious, two-part agenda. (Cue “Fanfare for the Common Man.”) The first is that, in our scatterbrained way, we’re trying to do for the arts (and for coverage of the arts) something like what Bernard Goldberg did for the conventional news. Goldberg wrote about how the kinds of people and the kinds of institutions that deliver the mainstream news condition what’s considered the news. The same thing holds in the arts. Cultural institutions and outlets are (mostly) run by certain kinds and classes of people, who tend to promote (if only professionally) certain values. Understand this, and how this works, and your enjoyment of the arts (as well as your awareness of what art is, and can be) will only increase. Or such is our conviction anyway. It’s a mystery to us why people who follow the arts aren’t as skeptical of what they encounter as people who follow the evening news. Many people are sharp about the day’s hard news. They see the slant, they know where it comes from, they call attention to it, they inform each other about it, they seek out alternative sources. For some reason, people who follow art often aren’t as aware and on the ball. Why is this? Maybe art and culture don’t seem as pressing as hard news. Maybe part of the reason people turn to the art and culture pages is to seek refuge from the squabbles of the hard news pages. Maybe the arts have been successful in their campaign to present themselves as an alternative – and why seek out alternatives to what’s already alternative? We also find that, often, when such questions as “who gets to define what’s art” are raised, people flip between total credulousness and total cynicism. On the one hand there’s the trusting response: “Oh, these poor, worthy artists!” On the other, there’s the prematurely gruff and cynical response: “It’s all a scam.” Both strike us as offbase. Total credulousness is hardly wise because this stuff is being created and fed to you by a class of people with its own interests. Total cynicism is offbase because there is in fact a lot of talent and brains out there. If you’re overly cynical, you aren’t going to let yourself find and experience the current work and thinking that is in fact useful, provocative, interesting and pleasing. Why worry about any of this? It’s true that the arts are less immediately a matter of life and death than hard news is. They’re gooier, and more a matter of such semi-indefinables as glamour, sex, entertainment, and personal opinion. But they aren’t just a matter of... posted by Michael at November 14, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments





Wednesday, November 13, 2002


The TiVo Revolution continues
Michael Although I’m a mere amateur TV-watcher compared to you, I thought I should share how TV watching at my house has changed since my technophile wife installed a TiVo. I’m no “early adopter” of electronic gizmos, and I stopped watching much TV at all a number of decades back, but I must say getting a digital video recorder, or “DVR” as the acronym-crazy electronics industry likes to call them, has been a revolutionary advance over standard TV. My family now watches what we choose to watch when we choose to watch it. We skip commercials with carefree abandon. (On the rare occasions when I end up watching “live” TV—without running it through the DVR—I find myself futilely reaching for the control to make commercials go away, and then painfully realizing that I’m back in the Stone Age. It’s always hard to go back.) My wife uses the DVR to analyze the serves of tennis pros in slow motion. My daughters’ viewing habits now consist exclusively of watching digitally recorded reruns of “Friends” (after their homework is done, of course.) Since the major limitation of the original TiVo device was how much stuff could get recorded—a lot of material had to be erased each week to make room for new programs—Hughes Electronics now offers an option that combines its DirecTV satellite service with the basic features of TiVo and which has the capacity to record 35 hours of video. Not to be outdone, EchoStar Communications sells one device with 60 hours of recording time and a more expensive variant that gives you 90 hours. Since we recently shifted to satellite TV from Adelphia cable (their accounting wasn’t the only dodgy element in their operation) we now have one of these in our house too, I forget which. These changes have made so radical a shift in my family’s interaction with TV that I found myself reading a newspaper story on the next chapter in the DVR saga. According to the Wall Street Journal of November 13, manufacturers of digital video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV hope to reach a broader audience by piggybacking on the growing popularity of DVD players. Toshiba Corp’s U.S. unit will incorporate TiVo’s DVR technology in a DVD player that will be released next year. Thomson Multimedia SA has introduced the RCA Scenium Digital Media Recorder that plays DVD movies and has recording space for more than 30 hours of video. It also copies digital pictures and songs from a CD, turning a DVD player into a jukebox, a TV into a photo album. Why do I care? Well, as the WSJ story mentions: …DVD-DVR products are most likely to appeal to people who place a premium on uncluttering the shelves of their home theaters. I must confess the biggest drawback to all this progress is the ever-increasing number of interwired boxes sitting above, below, right and left of the TV screen. I mean, I’ll watch digitally recorded satellite TV, but if anything goes wrong (say,... posted by Friedrich at November 13, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Saturday, November 9, 2002


American High Culture III: The Role of Real Estate
Michael “High” culture in America, city governments and the real estate industry have had a long relationship in the U.S. This relationship was already visible in 1892 when the original Metropolitan Opera building in New York City burnt down. The stockholders were divided as to whether it made sense to rebuild, as they had only $60,000 in insurance, and it would take several times that to restore the building. One of the stockholders, Henry Clews, spelled out the case for rebuilding: The opera house property is a good investment. The ground alone is worth that much and the enhancement of values has been so great that I am sure that it has increased more than three times the original cost. In this way the stockholders are protected from loss in spite of the lack of insurance. In the end, the partners who wanted to rebuild created a new company, tellingly named the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, and bought out the property for $1,425,00—a price that was, in fact, roughly three times the cost of the original building. By the late 1920s, the rebuilt opera house was obviously far too small and there was widespread desire for a new facility. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., (known rather touchingly as “Junior”) whose business interests had always been in real estate, not in oil, went so far as to buy up several blocks around 50th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. He intended to build a new opera house along with office and commercial space. By October 1929, Junior was committed to paying $3.3 million a year in ground rent when the stock market plunged and the Met hastily withdrew from its commitment. Junior went forward anyway, and built Rockefeller Center. Rockefellers Senior and Junior Art Lovers? However, although the Met got away that time, the Rockefellers weren’t done with culture, or with real estate, of which they had amassed a great deal in Manhattan by the 1950s. The next go-round with the Met was, in fact, motivated by the fact that after the Second World War and the revival of general prosperity, people had started leaving New York and heading for the suburbs. This trend was distinctly unfavorable for the Rockefellers’ extensive real estate holdings in the city, and it led them to counterattack on multiple fronts, assaults that lead not only to the development of Lincoln Center but also to the World Trade Center. As Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her book “Art Lessons” points out, the motivation behind the development of Lincoln Center had little to do with art (not a subject the Rockefellers were known to embrace): Many lofty words have been offered as motivation for the determination by John D. Rockefeller III and a phalanx of New York’s business moguls, in 1955, that the city must have a grand cultural complex…Beneath the flow of fine words, unarticulated, ran a current of fears: that the city was slipping from the summit of the financial world; that Manhattan real estate values... posted by Friedrich at November 9, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Friday, November 8, 2002


Cultureblog Fever
Friedrich -- Prowling the work of our fellow culturebloggers, I notice that Alexandra, over at Out of Lascaux (here), has worked up an entertaining head of steam over the proper role of art critics, and that AC Douglas (here) is deep in the midst not just of a Movable Type upgrade but an enlightening discussion of the best way to understand Wagner's "Ring." Sample Alexandra passage: And why do they feel they have to take on this role? Because so much contemporary art is completely incomprehensible, not just to the "common man," but to anyone who stumbles across it. Art is about ideas, but it is also about communicating ideas. If art doesn't say something to the audience besides "I bet you're too stupid to figure this one out," then it has failed. Sample AC Douglas passage: Italian-form opera, for all its often convoluted melodrama and grand staging, has but one purpose and one purpose only: To act as showcase for the human voice in song.... Not so Wagnerian music-drama. Music-drama is about the drama, and singers are merely one part of the musico-dramatic apparatus, and not the most important part, either. That role falls to the orchestra in which is contained and played out the very core of the drama itself. Classy stuff! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 8, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, November 7, 2002


American High Culture re-redux; and Continuing Ed: Lawrence Levine
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your ongoing series about the stresses between popular and high cult in America. You're touching on a bunch of topics I'm primed to rant about myself, among them the greatness of 19th century (ie., pre-modernist, pre-NEA) American art, and the scandal that is a modernist art education. Much else too, but I'm feeling scatterbrained at the moment, and can't pull together anything of much interest or use. Except a mention of a book I suspect you'd enjoy, Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (buyable here). Levine: Give the man a Blowhardy It's a terrific book of cultural history (and a book of facts and inductions, not theory). Levine discusses 19th century America and American culture in eye-opening ways. His topics include Shakespeare (whose works were central to American popular and elite cultures both); sheet music; folk songs; opera; Mozart; marching bands, and much more. The shitty art-history brainwashing, er, education we were given back in the '70s left us with the impression that pre-modernist American art was an embarrassment -- a crass mess, by and for rubes who could never quite get it until Euro-modernism showed the way. In fact, pre-modernist American culture turns out to have been rather like what's currently developing on the Web -- a wonderful, patchworky jumble. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the stress line between popular and elite cultures, always present, became hard and almost absolute. It's interesting (to me, in any case) to note that one of the reasons for this was the way the rate of immigration went soaring. How does this work? Well, the immigrants brought with them Old World beliefs, preferences and tastes, as well as a pushy verve, and knocked aside the old debates and conversations. For better or worse, American modernism was, like Hollywood, largely the creation of immigrants. The other reason was that the native-born, at least those with enough money, found these crowds of rowdy newcomers a bit much; they retreated from the newcomers and the public cultural sphere into enclaves, private life, and a "high culture" that became rather like a country club. John Philip Sousa: Great American artist? Part of the strength of Levine's book is his honesty about his reactions to the story he tells. How refreshing and democratic the rowdiness of the 19th-century American crowd! Yet, gosh, do you really want every aria disrupted by a tomato-throwing, cheering, spitting public? It can be too easy to mock the elites, as it can be too easy to be sentimental about the popular crowd. I'm curious to hear about your responses to the elite-popular split, one of the distinctive characteristics of American culture. (I gather, if with rather little evidence, that the popular and the elite worlds are more prone to coexist than to be at war in Europe and Asia.) Myself, I'm rather like Levine. I approve of the profit motive, and acknowledge that it's into popular culture and commercial... posted by Michael at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments




American High Culture Redux
Michael In my last posting on “high” culture in America, I promised to explain where today’s high-cult institutions—museums, symphony orchestras, opera houses, all unified by the practice of scrounging to make up for the inadequate take at the box office—come from. As we saw, the arts in 19th century America were a boisterous, democratic, and very much private sector affair. However, those that hewed closest to their European artistic model, like symphony orchestras and opera houses, were unquestionably fighting an uphill financial battle. The audience for complex, expensive ensemble arts such as these only outnumbered the performers by a ratio of some ten-to-one (in a full house), which made it tough to make money if ticket sales flagged. Rationally, that may well have been an argument for developing a simpler—i.e., cheaper—style of presentation, but the cultural prestige of the European symphony orchestra and opera company held a potent allure for Americans. It was so potent, in fact, that wealthy European-culture-worshippers, like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Joseph Pulitzer were willing to subsidize the New York Philharmonic, and Henry Lee Higginson not only founded the Boston Symphony but acted as a guarantor of its debts. I’m offering no criticism of these gentlemen—it was their money and they were certainly free to do as they pleased. (Higginson also had the good taste to sit for John Singer Sargent and got a terrific portrait in return--click on the popup below to check it out.) John Singer Sargent Portrait of Henry Lee Higginson However, this was only a stopgap solution to the problem. It was not clear that there would be an endless succession of extremely wealthy art-fanatics who would be willing to spend their money behind the scenes to prop up these institutions. The solution, oddly, was the 1894 income tax law, which included a provision that charitable donations to nonprofit corporations organized for “educational” purposes would be tax-deductible. This presented the wealthy with a choice of paying the government taxes or donating to nonprofit enterprises, which was a choice many less-than-religious supporters of the arts were willing to make--especially if they got to be a certifiable member of the social-cultural elite in return. In short, the income tax provided the incentive, and the nonprofit corporation the vehicle, to broaden the group “supporting” the uneconomic arts. The biggest givers, while no longer required to assume a heroic burden like that of Mssrs. Morgan or Higginson, got another perk as well: they got control of the enterprise because they sat on the board. These wealthy, prestige-seeking board members, often determined to use their art institution to civilize the masses, had an intensely conservative effect on the material that was actually presented and how it was presented—no more of the wild and wooly hybrids of “low” and “high” art which we saw were financially successful for decades in New Orleans-style opera and on the vaudeville stage. No, by jingo, we were all going to take our “high” culture straight. So much for giving the... posted by Friedrich at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, November 5, 2002


The Living Dead
Michael Given your interest in graphic novels, I thought you might want to know that Eddie Campbell, the artist of “From Hell,” is also a writer on art. While researching another posting I absolutely stumbled across a column, "Eddie's Corner," written by Mr. Campbell for his own website. Mr. Campbell was apparently irritated into writing by an academic’s formalist and reductionist definition of comic books, but his comments are certainly applicable to many other areas of art: I’m sure a psychologist could oblige us by explaining what is missing from modern life that gives rise to the need to declare our enthusiasms to be ‘art-forms’, for it is indeed a strange neurosis. Then we argue about the definition of our our new found art form and attempt to find in it the formal purity that we have persuaded ourselves an art form must possess. Where did this expression ‘art form’ come from anyway? The earliest stated use of the term I can find dates to 1868. That would put it right at the beginning of what is called modern art...In 1871 Whistler painted the portrait of his mother and titled it ‘Arrangement in grey and black’. From here on the avant-garde would continue to push art toward greater austerity of purpose. Subject is pushed to the background. Form is the connecting tissue between one movement in art and the next: Cezanne points the way to cubism, which opens the door to abstraction etc…. We need refer to nothing else but form, if we desire it. I was reading a book written in the 1970s (I’m trying to relocate it) on the subject of Gothic architecture. Having discussed one great building from an aesthetic point of view, the author states we should not forget that it was also designed to be a place of worship. Eh? At what point in the discussion of a Gothic cathedral do we lose sight of what it was built for? Art had become that part of an object that is separate from function…The bottom line to all of this is that the world desperately needs a new concept of art and the place of art in the world. Firstly we have to stop thinking in terms of ‘art form’…[W]hen I ceremoniously toast the ‘founding fathers’ of the art that I practice, they are as likely to be writers as cartoonists, comic dramatists as doodlers, sculptors or even just barroom talkers, because I see my art as the art of humour. There are only two arts. Being serious and being funny. All the technical stuff is but the means, the craft or the tools. There is a tendency among those who write on art to make the means the whole of it. Time to end the tyranny of the tools. The Versatile Mr. Campbell I don’t know about you, but the line of critical discourse Mr. Campbell is rebutting is painfully familiar to me from my student days at our Lousy Ivy University. It’s appalling that,... posted by Friedrich at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




American High Culture
Michael After reading a history of the NEA last week, I got to pondering the whole question of “high" culture in America. As you might imagine, the term gets tossed around quite a bit in any such book. But once I started thinking about it, I got a bit confused: I mean, can anybody tell me exactly what is "high" culture? From sociological observations over the years, I would say it would include painting (but not Norman Rockwell), classical music (but not R&B), opera (but not Broadway musicals), ballet (but not square dancing), poetry (but not the kind that rhymes if written between 1910 and 1990), literature (but not best sellers), etc., etc. It seems to help a work’s high-culture quotient a lot if it embodies a well-defined artistic tradition that was nurtured someplace other than America (if possible, Europe) and if that art, previous to the French Revolution, was created for kings, aristocrats, and/or the prelates of the Catholic Church. I guess a working definition of "high" culture in today’s world is anything that (1) wasn’t dreamed up by Americans, or, at the very least, will never be understood by the average American (2) conveys social cachet and (3) can’t charge its consumers enough to keep it afloat. Now, it may seem harsh to condemn all cultural activities originating in America as “low.” But I think the following quote from historian Clinton Rossiter accurately summed up many generations of American and European intellectual thought on that subject: …no great nation can be said to be worth respecting or imitating if it has not achieved a high level of culture, and it is at least an arguable question whether this nation will ever achieve it. Obviously, in the 20th century America has plenty of institutions that have guarded the gate against the barbarians of the “low” and nurtured the flame of the "high"—universities, museums, symphony orchestras, etc. But it got me thinking where these institutions come from, because when I look at America in the 19th century, I can't see any such thing as "high" culture, in the sense of artistic activities fulfilling all three conditions I outline above. For the skeptics in the audience, I’m prepared to lay out some illustrations, limiting myself to music in order to keep this posting at a manageable length. Music began its history in America in church, where, by the beginning of the 18th century, it was conceded by even the Puritans to be necessary in order to keep everyone together when reciting the Psalms aloud. Let's face it, though: there has never been any social cachet attached to the Puritans. The Revolutionary War saw a flowering of musical creativity, but it was aggressively anti-European in nature, with American musicians deliberately changing the words of British songs, such as "Yankee Doodle," to taunt their adversaries. William Billings, a Boston tanner, composed an anthem called "Chester" that expressed his confidence in the ability of the new nation to shake off the "iron rods" and... posted by Friedrich at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Moratoria Dreams
Friedrich -- It occurs to me that many fields could use the occasional imposed-from-without break from habit. It might freshen them up, or make them dig a little deeper. Baseball, for instance: wouldn't you be curious to see the consequences of a moratorium on spitting and crotch-scratching? So why not at least dream of imposing moratoria on cultural fields? Here are some of my proposals: Magazine journalism: a month every year with no puns allowed in either headlines or picture captions. Standup comedy: a week every month with no use of the word "motherfucker." Literary fiction: one season a year without any mention of incest. Television: a day a week with no twirling or spinning graphics. Movies: a summer a decade entirely without special effects. Indie comic books: a onetime year-long ban on stories about slackers with bad sex lives. Advertising: a month every year with all type to be set in traditional serif typefaces of uniform size, and with typeface-movement forbidden. Gallery art: every other season to feature no installation or conceptual art, or anything of any kind involving video. Highbrow criticism: the words "formal rigor" and "transgressive" to be banned forever. What kinds of cultural-field moratoria would you impose, if only you were king? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Monday, November 4, 2002


Turner Prize: Tate v. Howell
Michael Intrigued by the furor over UK culture minister Kim Howell’s negative comments regarding the work of the four short-listed finalists for this year’s Turner Prize, I did a little research on the plain-talking minister. According to the Guardian, this isn’t the first time Minister Howell has made blunt remarks: [Howells] described the royal family last year as "all a bit bonkers" and had to apologise after saying in a Commons debate that "the idea of listening to three Somerset folk singers sounds like hell." Since he seems like a remarkably perceptive fellow, I thought we could use his remarks to stage a debate over the work of at least two of the four finalists. For the “pro” side of the debate, I took some remarks from the website of the Tate, which held the exhibition and hands out the prize. Entry of Liam Gillick, Turner Prize Finalist What the Tate says: [Gillick’s] art is underpinned by rigorous theorising: he is as much a writer as a maker of objects. However, Gillick's work is shaped by a very visual awareness of the way different properties of materials, structures and colour can affect our surroundings and therefore influence the way we behave. Coats of Asbestos Spangled With Mica (2002), made of coloured Perspex and anodised aluminium, has been created specifically for this exhibition. In this work, Gillick encourages us to explore our bodily and intellectual perception of an altered environment. What the Minister says: I've sat under perspex roofs like that in canteens since the mid-1960s. It's not at all interesting. It's very, very boring. Entry of Fiona Banner, Turner Prize Finalist What the Tate says: Banner explores the seemingly limitless possibilities of language, yet at the same time demonstrates how words can often fail us, exposing our inability to convey internal thoughts, emotions and experiences. Since 1994, she has created handwritten and printed texts, which describe feature films or particular scenarios in meticulous detail. Since 2000, Banner has used pornographic film to explore sexuality and the extreme limits of written communication. In the works shown in the exhibition, she transcribes the activities taking place in Arsewoman in Wonderland, an X-rated version of Alice's fictional adventures. What the Minister says: I thought it was a piece of pointillism [dot painting] when I walked into the gallery but it turns out to be her description of a porno movie. As for me--a onetime art student who has personally created installations with his own hands--I must admit that my suspicions as to the seriousness of the Turner Prize committee are aroused by the general vagueness and the lack of impact of the installation art they've been handing these prizes out to. One suspects if the work "read" well enough to convey any genuine heat, it would be rejected as insufficiently shocking to the bourgeoisie, or whoever it seems they think they're shocking. Turner Prize Presenter and Media Attention Grabber I sense the whole ethos of the Turner Prize was best summed up by... posted by Friedrich at November 4, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Sunday, November 3, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- More tips for those who want to use their TV as a cultural resource, and not a narcotic. I’m fond of three or four of the current true-crime series: Good stories! With beginnings and endings! And juicy characters! The quirkiest of the bunch is A&E’s atmospheric City Confidential, which views a crime story as a chance to explore an environment. A murder in Memphis? Why not pick up a lot of Memphis lore along the way? Why not meet some oddball local characters? Why not peak inside a social circle? Often an episode gets so engrossed by its setting and characters that it won’t get around to the specific case that is its ostensible subject for 15 or 20 minutes. Yet the shows are usually quite satisfying -- they're like short versions of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." The voice of Paul Winfield, who supplies the narration, is a big plus -- seldom have you heard anyone relish his instrument's effects quite so shamelessly. City Confidential (A&E, showing this week Sunday at 9 pm; Monday at 1 am; Wednesday at 10 pm; Thursday at 2 am; Saturday at 6 pm). Just because I'm a women's-tennis buff... The WTA Sanex L.A. Championship (ESPN coverage begins Wednesday at 3:30). Women’s tennis has been more fun to follow than men’s for some years now; the men are bazookas blasting away at each other, while the women still have to rely on strategy. And, hey: Women! Ie., drama, family intrigue, conflicted feelings, wild mood swings, diva tears and diva delight. Given how monotonous the finals have become -- all Serena and Venus, all the time -- you’re likely to find more unpredictability to enjoy in the early rounds. Movie tips for people who love watching beautiful, talented actresses and who don’t mind sitting through lousy movies to get a glimpse of their goddesses: Sweet November (Cinemax, Saturday at 6 pm). Godawful sentimental chickflick about a tragic kook (Charlize Theron) who decides to loosen up a hard-driving prig (Keanu Reeves) -- but Theron is terrific, as well as beyond-belief pretty. Thief of Hearts (IFC, Wednesday at 10 pm; Thursday at 6 pm). Remember the glossy, overdynamic Simpson/Bruckheimer hits of the ‘80s -- “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Top Gun,” etc? Well, they made some duds too, and this was one of them. But Barbara Williams, playing a conventional woman lured into a romance with a thief, brings to her character a slow-motion sensuality, and dark undercurrents of fear, distress and need, that are very erotic. Killing Zoe (IFC, Friday at 8 pm and 11:15 pm; Friday at 4:15 am). Crappy heist-gone-bad edginess from a Tarantino sidekick, but an all-too-rare opportunity to feast your eyes on one of the most elegant, jewel-like actresses around these days, Julie Delpy. This month’s theme on TCM is Westerns. Morality plays in mythic settings -- that’s what Westerns deliver, and it’s what the form is all about. The hunger for this kind of entertainment never seems to... posted by Michael at November 3, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, November 2, 2002


The Emperor Has No Clothes
Michael Thanks for putting me on to the most recent flap in British art, in which Culture Minister Kim Howells seems to have spoken his mind without pausing to edit it for popular consumption (something you've got to admire in any politician.) I really can't do better with this than just quoting the Reuters' story: Minister blasts Turner art as "bullshit" LONDON (Reuters) - Culture Minister Kim Howells has blasted the contenders for one of the art world's leading prizes as "conceptual bullshit." He accused the art establishment of being out of touch with public taste and urged a new generation of artists to step forward. Howells was reacting to the entries for the Turner Prize, on show at London's Tate Britain gallery. The prize, derided by its critics as a farce, has been won in the past by pickled sheep and elephant dung. Howells visited the exhibition and left a comment pinned to a gallery noticeboard. "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost," the note read. "It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit." Plain Talking Culture Minister Our readers can read the entire story here. I'm going to be trying to follow how all this turns out. If any of our readers is more hip to the British art/political scene than I am, I would welcome their views and news. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, November 1, 2002


Free Reads -- Perl on Modigliani
Friedrich -- Le Grand Nu, 1919 The Modigliani exhibition that's up in Buffalo right now is apparently the first such major retrospective of his work in this country in 40 years. The New Republic publishes a beautiful Jed Perl review of it, here. Sample passage: Everything in Modigliani's work is short cuts and telegraphed messages. When he paints people he gives us summaries. He is a mythologizer for a hurry-up generation, the perfect court painter for the fast-moving bohemia of Montparnasse ... To operate so much by instinct is to be a sort of gambler, and Modigliani's virtuosity sometimes suggests a wise guy's manipulative personality. His swelling, swerving contours are authoritative, singular, and also frequently superficial. And yet even when his work, in many of the portraits of blank-eyed beautiful women, is half-baked, it is not necessarily slapdash. He brings his own quickening authority to the gathering excitement of the modern movement. I'm very fond of Modigliani myself, even if vaguely aware how uncool that is. The iconic quality of his nudes and portraits seems gimmicky and too easily arrived at, yet I can't help enjoying and admiring his sensuality, his Classicizing instincts, and his ease. And the dream of Bohemia that his paintings conjure up ... Well, shameful and hick though it is to admit, that image is part of what lured me into the media-and-arts field. Would someone please tell me what became of that dream Bohemia? I'm here, but now it's gone. Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery, here, has put together a Flash presentation on Modigliani. The Artchive (here) has a good page of text, with links to many images. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 1, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, October 31, 2002


Artchat Survival Guide -- Aesthetics
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- A shot at defining "aesthetics," a term some of our readers have expressed an interest in. "Aesthetics" is one of those words Americans get funny about. We balk at it; it seems to reek of refinement, English class, school ... The hell with all that, let's get on with the party! We're suspicious of aesthetics, and we all too often prefer to avoid the topic. When we do get interested, we look to Europe for guidance (Henry James was great on this theme), or to academics or gurus, and we find ourselves wanting. The problem with our suspiciousness about aesthetics is that it shuts off conversation. Aesthetic experience is hugely important; to avoid consideration of it is to deny ourselves the full experience of life's pleasures. (Our naivete also leaves us open to exploitation by "experts.") And what's the point of that? Technically, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the subject of beauty; the dictionary's opinion is that aesthetics has to do with a concern for, or appreciation of, beauty. Both of these definitions are fine, god knows. But there's another way to take the word that's more practical and more useful -- hey, values Americans like. In our confusion about the topic, we tend to picture aesthetics as something you do after you take care of everything else that's more important. We take aesthetics to be optional -- as the slice of cake we may or may not treat ourselves to after a hard day. In fact, it's part and parcel of, and inseparable from, how we experience life. We're always considering things and making decisions about them on grounds that are least semi-aesthetic. (The one exception: when the only value at stake is life or death.) Aesthetics is life considered from the point of view of beauty and pleasure. And nearly everything can be -- which isn't to say that, morally speaking, it should be -- discussed from the point of view of aesthetics. A long way of saying that whenever choice is available, aesthetics (taste and preference, pleasure and displeasure) plays a role. Say you're thirsty: do you pour yourself a glass of milk, or one of o.j.? What can drive people a little nuts about the arts is the way the aesthetic point of view is forever forming and re-forming itself, and operating on multiple levels. It's like my (admittedly pathetic) understanding of Zen -- you don't find enlightenment, you let yourself be the enlightened being you already are. How to do that? Quit trying to figure it out! It's all so indefinite -- but that doesn't make it less real. Here's how it works. I'll use the example of my walk to work this morning. I threw on some corduroy pants and a windbreaker (chilly outside!), got my tea at the deli rather than the usual fancy place, and angled up through Times Square rather than take the 5th Avenue route. Along the way, I... posted by Michael at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Learning from Las Vegas
Michael, Wandering around Las Vegas last weekend I ended up spending quite a while walking through various casinos on my way somewhere else. As you may have guessed, I’m not a gambler and I generally don’t “get” the whole gambling scene. My wife asked me at one point if I wanted to bet on the World Series, and laughed at me when I explained that I had neither inside information on the two teams nor any control over their behavior, so, no, I didn’t want to bet. But during my visit, the dimly lit, entirely enclosed, weatherless spaces of the casinos--filled with the glow of slot machines--kept reminding me of something. Finally, it dawned on me what it was: I was remembering a photograph I had seen of the deep interior of the Egyptian temple Abu Simbel. Innermost Shrine Lit by Glowing Gods (Egypt) and Glowing Slot Machines (Vegas) The picture had been on the web site “Sacred Places” by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe of Sweet Briar College, which I had looked at while writing a previous posting. When I got home, I went back online and reread his description of Abu Simbel. The actual interior of the temple is inside the cliff in the form of a man-made cave cut out of the living rock (cf. The Sacred Cave). It consists of a series of halls and rooms extending back a total of 185 feet from the entrance..[where one finds] the innermost shrine with seated statues of the gods Ptah, Amun-Ra, the deified Ramses II, and Re-Horakhte. The most remarkable feature of the site is that the temple is precisely oriented so that twice every year, on 22 February and 22 October, the first rays of the morning sun shine down the entire length of the temple-cave to illuminate the back wall of the innermost shrine and the statues of the four gods seated there… Following his link to the “sacred cave” I came across this: Caves are ambiguous spaces, offering both protection and shelter but can also trap and imprison. Because of its location within the earth, which many cultures have identified as female, the cave has been identified as the womb of Mother Earth, and associated with birth and regeneration… That sounded a lot like a Vegas casino, all right—womb and tomb all in one dimly lit location. Besides naturally occurring caves, artificial caves were dug into mountains…Often the mountain itself was also artificial. The pyramids in Egypt were man-made sacred mountains inside of which were created artificial caves… "Man-made sacred mountains" reminded me of Las Vegas’ Luxor casino, which is shaped like a pyramid, and which I had been walking past every day. Abu Simbel (Egypt) and Luxor Casino (Vegas) So let’s see if I can read the riddle of a Vegas casino: we’re talking about a sacred cave [the casino] in the middle of the desert, buried beneath an artificial sacred mountain [hotel], in which un-foreseeable units of good and bad fortune, of death and regeneration,... posted by Friedrich at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Tacit Knowledge -- Sound Levels
Friedrich -- About ten years ago I spent time talking with some movie sound editors and technicians. The issue of the day was the new audio systems that were being installed in movie theaters. One of the interesting bits of not-in-the-textbooks knowledge the sound guys (all guys, no women) passed along was that people have strong volume-level preferences, and that these preferences change predictably with age. For most young people, loud noises are enjoyable, even exciting -- young males are even more prone than young females to be excited by loud noise. It's sometime around the age of 30 that people start losing the taste for loudness. By the time they're in their 40s and 50s, most will actively dislike loud noise, finding it annoying or even painful. The sound guys were thrilled by their new toys, which offered possibilities for wonderful sonic detail and atmosphere. Yet what they were mostly being ordered to do was pump up the volume: to deliver shake-the-floor thunderclaps, rib-rattling explosions, thumpa-thumpa scores. The sound guys weren't surprised by the result -- which was that movie attendance was skewing ever-more-pronouncedly towards the young. Older people simply don't want to be knocked around by sound in that way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Continuing Ed: The Chaos of History
Michael, While in Las Vegas, my wife and I were at the Venetian casino to buy some new shoes (don’t ask), when we stumbled across a local branch of the Guggenheim located in the building. The exhibit was 40 or 50 astonishingly high quality Old Master paintings from The Hermitage. (It included a Poussin unlike any I’ve ever seen, an early battle scene that rushes towards you in a nightmare of diagonally crossing action, combined with a wall-to-wall Mannerist phalanx of bodies—the impact is like standing in a theater exit watching a wall of people running towards you after someone has yelled “fire.”) My wife couldn't believe the average Vegas gambler cares for what I call HFOP (“high falutin’ oil paintings”) but I pointed out to her that the Guggenheim doesn’t need everyone to come, just enough people to come. My estimate is that fifty people went through the mini-museum during there in the half-hour I was wandering around, which translates into maybe a thousand customers a day @ $15 a head--$105 thousand a week! Over $5 million a year! You know, they may actually have a business for themselves there. Especially since the Guggenheimers probably “borrowed” the Hermitage’s art for peanuts! Ah, the "art spirit"! In the Guggenheim’s bookstore, which is about as big as the exhibit space, I came across a heck of a book—Robert Rosenblum’s, Maryanne Stevens’ and Ann Dumas’ “1900: Art at the Crossroads.” Starting from the art exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the authors selected samples and expanded their search through the years just prior to and following the turn of the last century. While an exhaustive review would be impossible, even a single volume shows the enormous variety of painting and sculpture gurgling away back in the “dark ages” before anyone even thought of the NEA. Views of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris The more I’ve learned about art, the less the tidy summaries commonly presented in college courses or in hagiographic histories of “modern art” seem to accurately describe reality. In part, this problem is methodological—professors and authors attempt to make sense of the chaos by clinging to their linear “story line” while in reality, all sorts of artistic cross-breeding is going on, producing litters of lovely “dead-ends” which must be ignored for their lack of progeny! The other problem is the fact that artists’ rarely have a “starring role” in art history for more than a few years or so—but they have the awkward tendency to go on producing for decades on either side of that brilliant window. The result is, of course, that you find out that painters who were dealt with two chapters back (the original French Impressionists, say) are still hanging around doing significant work after the invention of Cubism! Will they never learn to gracefully leave the stage? While it may make hash out of neat scenarios, as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to love the junky messiness of it all, and to find... posted by Friedrich at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Wednesday, October 30, 2002


Comments
Michael We got an interesting and thoughtful comment the other day, which I thought deserved a bit more prominence than our format generally offers. It was from Mike Kelly in response to my posting "Getty vs. Acropolis." I've not been to the Getty, so I can speak only of the photographs I've seen, including those on your web page. Based on those, however, I'd score the comparison between it and the Acropolis slightly differently. On the second point, for instance, where you see lumpishness and illogic, I see interesting variation, which is not nearly so obviously inferior as you suggest to the Parthenon's "Masses [that are] cleanly and clearly articulated". But the main point I wish to make is that the comparison, though not irrelevant, is absurdly unfair. The Acropolis is nearly universally recognised as one of the great works, if not the greatest work, of collective architecture in the history of Europe, if not the world. You seem to be trying to pass off the comparison as a condemnation of the Getty. That's like trying to show that Long Day's Journey into Night is lousy because it fails in a comparison, on some arbitrarily chosen points, with, say, King Lear. Also, you point out that the Parthenon took less time to build than the Getty, but the relevant comparison would be between the entire Acropolis complex--which had been the object of comparison up until this point--and the Getty, would it not? First, I want to make it absolutely clear that I appreciate Mike (and the rest of our readership) taking the time to read my stuff and comment on it at all, whether or not you agree with my point of view. As for the actual design issues Mike raises, I look very, very often at the exact view shown below of the Getty as I wind my way from Los Angeles' West Side to the Valley. Not my favorite view Looking at this view (at length, usually in slow traffic) I find that the Getty's design suffers from a fundamental problem of scale. The large masses are very large, and yet really don't "articulate" well to each other: they don't create either a rhythmic or a structural pattern. The modernist "detailing" glued on the outside of the major masses does link the large masses and (modestly) articulate them, but is too small and insufficiently muscular to work visually from a distance. Ergo, the design can only hope to work fairly close up, and this building can be seen from at least 10 miles down the 405 freeway! I'm not the only person who thinks there's something wrong here, either; a friend mentioned that an architect of his acquaintance (who likes the complex as a whole) considers the "freeway" views of the Getty to be closely akin to what you see when a fat repairman with baggy pants bends over to pick up a tool (his words, not mine)--in short, the building was designed to be seen from the... posted by Friedrich at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Free Looks -- high-end digicams
Friedrich -- While digital movie images strain to approximate the quality of traditional film imagery, these days digital still photos have a gleam -- and they're getting denser and tighter by the month. Already, many of the photos you see in magazines, especially those with short schedules, come from digital cameras. The latest high-end digi-still cameras have 6 million pixels, and take photos so sharp they almost hurt. You can sample what they look like here. Be prepared for how scarily detailed the facial closeups are. Pretty models, attractively made-up -- and their skin, if you stare at it long enough, looks like Verdun, the morning after. Any more pixels, and the resulting photos will be drilling down past the bumps and follices to the sub-pore level. We'll be looking and staring, and finding ourselves being stared back at by sebaceous glands. As we move into a world where most imagery is generated digitally, one job-market prediction seems safe: the better makeup artists and lighting designers are going to find their services in urgent demand. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments




Public Art--for the Public?
Michael I just got back from a few days with my wife in Las Vegas. While there, I read the very interesting “Art Lessons,” by Alice Goldfarb Marquis, a book on arts funding centered largely on the National Endowment for the Arts. In one chapter she discusses public sculpture funded by the NEA. According to Ms. Marquis: While the NEA strenuously insisted that it was interested only in “excellence” and had no aesthetic or cultural agenda, the internal communications described by [Mary Eleanor] McCombie reveal a bias for certain artists and styles and a…belief in the redemptive powers of modern sculpture. When Northern Kentucky State University selected Red Grooms and Donald Judd to create 100,000 dollars’ worth of monuments for its campus, Ira Licht, the endowment’s public art coordinator, rejoiced at the selection of “excellent artists whom we’ve had difficulty placing.” I was intrigued to see for myself how credible the NEA’s claim of possessing no aesthetic or cultural agenda was, so I looked up pictures of artworks cited by Ms. Marquis. Regrettably, I couldn’t always find pictures of the actual piece funded by the NEA, so I have included several pictures of similar art by the same artist. Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, MI --$45,000 (1969 dollars) in NEA money Jose Rivera’s Construction #105 —resembles Construction #150in Lansing, MI --$45,000 in NEA money Donald Judd’s Untitled 1969 --resembles Dropped Plane at Northern Kentucky State University Carl Andre’s Stone Field Sculpture in Hartford CT --$50,000 in NEA money Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan Just to provide some context for my reading, I was spending most of my time wandering up and down the Las Vegas Strip (only occasionally in a drunken stupor), looking at the profilic public art on display: Fountain at Caesars' Palace Hall at the Venetian Viewed from Las Vegas, the idea that the NEA was without a cultural agenda is risible. The NEA had obviously equated "excellence" with a variety of academically-sanctioned art movements of the era such as Minimalism, Earth Art, etc. Although probably not giving what they were doing a second's thought, the NEA's agenda had the effect of validating academically-sanctioned art, and thus validating the role of the academy itself in the cultureverse. Don't get me wrong, I love public art, and would like to see more of it. I just think that public art should actually connect with the public, not talk down to it. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. As a thought experiment, try imagining that placing boulders in lines on empty lots (essentially, the formula of Carl Andre's Stone Field Sculpture) was a thriving rural tradition, usually performed inebriated, and imagine how eager the NEA would have been to fork over $50 grand to some drunken rube then. No, it helped Mr. Andre a lot to be a college graduate doing something that could be construed as lecturing the suburban public about its relationship with the environment.... posted by Friedrich at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Media Surplus redux
Friedrich -- Dave Trowbridge (here) takes my earlier posting comparing food and media surpluses and has himself a whole lot of fun with it. Don't miss the Scientific American article about TV addiction that Dave provides a link to. Oh, heck, I'll pass it along myself: here it is. Sample Trowbridge passage: Michael's metaphor of media obesity can be spun even further if one equates the body's insulin response to carbohydrates, which many believe to be the key to modern obesity, and the orienting response to visual and aural stimuli, which is the key to media overconsumption. Life under conditions of surplus... Many of us, I suspect, have little eating regimens that keep us from packing on too much weight. I certainly do. One element of it is, for instance, that I simply will not eat desserts. Period. (Exceptions made only out of respect for such events as birthdays.) I've found that it's far easier to follow that simple rule religiously than it is to decide whether or not to indulge on a one-dessert-at-a-time basis. I suspect many of us have similar pop-culture regimens. I do. Do you? One element of mine: I watch TV, but only on videotape. In other words, I never simply sit down and turn on the set on to see what's there. I force myself to choose what I want to watch (by deciding in advance what to tape), and then, by watching only what I've gone to the trouble of taping, render my TV time finite -- a tape will come to an end, where "TV" per se never does. Thanks to this agreement with myself, it's been years since I grogged out in front of the tube. I'm eager to know how you regulate your exposure to junk culture. Do you limit the number of magazines you subscribe to? Do you refuse to admit the Sunday Times into the house? And what regulating-junk-culture secrets can our readers share with us? (How embarrassing this question will prove to be if no one leaves a comment...) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Tuesday, October 29, 2002


Continuing Ed 1 -- evo bio and aesthetics
Friedrich -- Another new rubric! I'm always impressed by how many people maintain intellectual and artistic interests despite the hecticness of daily life. Yet, after high school or college, these people often become frustrated; they're busy and distracted, and don't have the chance to turn up the kinds of gems of thought and information that you and I, geeks both, are passionate about finding. But why, in the age of the web, should anyone settle for the crap they were given at school, and the crap that journalists and the popular culture pass along? And why shouldn't geeks like us pass along a little of what we know? So, herewith the inaugural posting of a new 2blowhards department: tips for those interested in keeping their brains alive. Topic for today: evolutionary biology and its impact on thinking about pleasure, art and aesthetics. The politicized, Frenchy-and-Marx derived ways of thinking about art that have done such damage over the last 20 years have pretty much played themselves out -- about time, and cause for celebration. As Harold Bloom once observed, the decon people who moved into the college and foundation lit-and-art departments don't like art; if they did they wouldn't be so devoted to dismantling them. What they really like is politics. I'm guessing, from the standpoint of having followed writing and publishing for a few decades, that what we'll start seeing a lot of soon is evo-bio-derived ways of thinking about art. And hallelujah for that. Unlike the decon/structuralist rape of the arts, which leaves idiocy and devastation in its wake, evo-bio approaches respect the existence and nature of the arts. Does evo-bio answer every question one might raise about art? No, but what does? Is it timely, provocative and helpful? You bet. The best quick-and-easy place to start is the chapter on art in Steven Pinker's new The Blank Slate (buyable here) -- 15 or 20 pages that do a heroic job of laying the approach out and giving tips for further reading and thinking. The book is well worth reading in its entirety for many other reasons. Denis Dutton's great Arts & Letters Daily website (after a brief hiccup, it's back again here) does a fabulous job of keeping readers up to date on the latest evo-bio observations, theories and ideas. It'll also give you a sense of how lively the field is. Of all the books devoted entirely to the topic (I'm a buff), the one that seems to me the most helpful for someone dipping a toe in the water is Ellen Dissanayake's Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (buyable here). Dissanayake: Art has its roots in human nature I can't do a better job of summarizing the book's thesis than Publishers Weekly did: "Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies... posted by Michael at October 29, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Monday, October 28, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- I’m limiting my list of tips to the week on TV to two resources, the E! Channel’s showbiz documentary series "The True Hollywood Story,” and Turner Classic Movies. “The E! True Hollywood Story” is a glitzy, tabloid-style series that the Wife is addicted to and that I’ve also come to be a fan of -- imagine People magazine cover stories done as TV shows. But the shows seem responsibly researched, the producers are tenacious and successful in getting key sources to talk, and, as for the brassy style... Well, do you really want to watch something sober on a topic like Divine? It runs and repeats itself numerous times during the week. Here are a few of this week’s highlights: On the E! True Hollywood Story Friday 10 a.m.: Marlon Brando Friday 8 p.m.: Divine Monday at 8 pm, Tuesday at 9 am: Liza Minelli Thursday 9 am: Alfred Hitchcock Thursday 1:30 pm: Jaws Back in college, I had the film-history bug bad; I attended screenings of old movies nearly every afternoon and evening and ran a film series of my own for a few years. I’m told that old movies are now in short supply on most campuses. When I moved to New York in the late ‘70s, the city had a half-dozen repertory theaters where buffs could find old movies to watch. Nearly all are now closed. Where’s a film-history buff -- or an eager film-history neophyte -- to turn? The video store, of course. But Turner Classic Movies too. Better prints than you’ll see on video rental tapes (better prints, in fact, than the ones that used to be shown in specialized movie theaters), imaginative programming, the occasional good documentary about film history. It’s an amazing resource, a movie rep house available at home 24/7. Here’s just some of what’s on this week. On Turner Classic Movies Monday at 10 pm, Rebecca. Hitchcock does Daphne du Maurier -- Hollywood Gothic romance at its most luscious. Wednesday at 1:30 am, Notorious. Primo romantic suspense: one of Hitchcock’s best, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman showing what star power really is. Shhhh -- I’ll never be caught saying this in public (too pretentious!), but I think it’s a masterpiece, and one of the greatest studio entertainments ever made. Now let's pretend I didn’t say that. Wednesday at 3:30 am, The Stranger. Early Orson Welles suspense, far more trim and fast than his more famous films, but every bit as stylized. Wednesday at 2 pm, Lord Love a Duck. George Axelrod’s frenetic Southern-California-in-the-’60s satire is hilarious, almost exhaustingly inventive, and a legend among comedy professionals. It also means a lot to people who grew up in Southern California -- it does a likably wonderful job of capturing the cheerful, heaven-on-earth inanity of the place. Wednesday at 4 pm, Holiday. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in a George Cukor adaptation of Philip Barry’s classy romantic comedy. Wednesday at 11 pm, Duel in the Sun. Overheated King Vidor-directed camp classic.... posted by Michael at October 28, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Sunday, October 27, 2002


Free Reads -- no, that's free looks
Friedrich -- Sometimes I wonder why artists/writers/whatever don't make more creative use of the web, and sometimes I marvel at the inspired ways artists/writers/whatever are making use of the web. Today belongs in the latter category, now that I've stumbled across a page of links (here) devoted to sites where photographers are keeping one-photo-a-day photodiaries. Some amazingly snazzy photos and some very chic sites. I especially liked an Italian site that features nothing but the day's one photograph and the words (my shakey translation) "no archives, no gallery, no links." What a terrific form the online photodiary is. I'd try one myself if only I weren't such a bad photographer. People scatter whenever I pull out my Nikon. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Getty vs. Acropolis redux
Michael, In a previous posting I recounted how disappointed I was in the Getty Museum complex, given the virtually limitless financial resources of its sponsors, comparing it to its disadvantage with the Acropolis in Athens. Mentally I put the disparity down, in large part, to the inferior performance of Richard Meier, the Getty’s International Style-mannerist architect, in contrast to what the Athenian trio of Iktinos, Kallikrates and Mnesikles had delivered working within the much tighter stylistic and technological constraints of classical architecture. Acropolis Temple Complex by Iktinos, Kallikrates and Mnesikles When I discussed the subject with a friend, his grimace when I made the comparison clearly indicated that he thought I was being unfair to Meier, or possibly any modern architect—would his name even be remembered 2500 years from now? Getty Museum Complex by Richard Meier I pondered my friend’s reaction later, thinking about the various alternate explanations that might have unfairly advantaged the Athenians over the Los Angelians. The first such advantage was undoubtedly political. After the Battle of Marathon, where the Athenians and their allies had defeated the Persians, the Athenians planned a series of new temples on the Acropolis in celebration. The first of these was in construction when the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC. The next year, the Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea, but the building plans for the Acropolis were shelved for nearly 30 years. Meanwhile, the Delian League, led by the Athenian fleet, pried the Greek city-states of the Aegean loose from the grip of the Persian Empire. Athenian power and wealth grew with the success of the League, until, under the “democratic” leadership of Pericles, it was effectively converted into the Athenian empire. To symbolize this new era, Pericles returned to the abandoned project of rebuilding the Acropolis, although making it grander to emphasize Athens’ greatly expanded financial resources. This program carried a huge weight of political and patriotic symbolism that elevated its emotional significance for the Athenians. The Getty represented nothing comparably meaningful to the people of Los Angeles. The performance of architects—like most artists—tends to rise to the level expected from them by their patrons, and Meier’s performance could not have been elevated by Los Angeles’s tepid interest in his efforts. But the larger advantage of the Athenians was religious. Looking for pictures of the Acropolis and its buildings, I visited quite a few websites, and in the process stumbled across one called “Sacred Places” by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe of Sweet Briar College (you can visit it here.) This site, although still under construction, intends to be—in its own words—an “exploration of how and why places become invested with sacredness and how the sacred is embodied or made manifest through art and architecture.” Professor Witcombe’s thesis is that such loci (including Lascaux, Newgrange, Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, Giza, Teotihuacán, Chartres, etc.) achieved a quality of ‘sacredness’ first and that famous buildings or artwork present at each site followed on afterwards, intended to showcase or highlight that sacred quality. Moreover, many... posted by Friedrich at October 27, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Saturday, October 26, 2002


Media Surplus
Friedrich -- Why are so many modern people obese? One helpful theory comes from evo-bio: because we evolved to survive in a world of food scarcity, we developed an inborn tendency to pig out whenever we run across some plausible eats. We pack it on when we can to help us get through the inevitable periods of scarcity. These days, though, those of us in rich countries are living in a situation of superabundance. Everywhere we look, there's food we might eat. And given such an inborn tendency to load up, it ain't surprising so many of us wind up fat. The challenge is no longer to feed youself and survive scarcity, and the inborn instincts are no help. They just get us in deeper and deeper trouble. Instead, you have to wrestle with the problem consciously and deliberately -- not an easy thing for most people to do. To go for it, or not to go for it -- that is the question It occurs to me that we're in the same predicament where the media and arts are concerned. Go back a few centuries and it was rare for a family to own more than a couple of books -- even a rich family might own only a few hundred. Imagery was in short supply too. The paintings in the church you attended, the signs over the stores and stalls and restaurants you patronized, might be all the imagery you ever encountered. Music? Live performances only. The mass press, photography and movies brought lots of changes, one of them the accessibility of imagery. In a book about how movies have treated historically-based subject matter (title to come as soon as my porous middle-aged memory revives), the novelist George Macdonald Fraser made a good point. It's common to grouse about how movie narratives mangle fact. But there's another side to it, Macdonald argues. Prior to the movies, most people didn't know what foreign cultures or distant historical periods looked like. The image bank was empty. With the movies, people's personal image banks started to fill up. Macdonald points out that the studios were able to do research into look-and-feel on a scale no university could match, and with onscreen results that were often accurate and stunning. Well, that was a heck of a digression. Back to my line of thought, such as it is. Even for us spoiled baby boomers: three channels of TV and no internet. Quark and Photoshop weren't around to make it easy for publishers to pump up the visuals in books and magazines. If you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the movie theater. Radio, records....But we were getting there. These days it seems like we're surrounded by beckoning arts-and-entertainment-and-media things all the time. It's become hard to get away from them. The magazine racks dazzle, the web's always there to play with, there's cable, radio, CDs, DVDs... Screens showing imagery in motion are everywhere. Things that twinkle, scratch, pop, and... posted by Michael at October 26, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments





Friday, October 25, 2002


Free Reads—Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Age
Michael A humorous note from the front in the Digital Wars: A musician, George Ziemann, was attempting to sell some CDs of an album his band had recorded via eBay, hoping to get some exposure. Unfortunately, in his auctions he used recordable CDs that he manufactured himself. Someone (it’s not entirely clear from my reading of the story)—either an eBay employee or an outsider who approached eBay via its Verified Rights Owner program—accused Ziemann of piracy and eBay shut down his auction repeatedly, despite the fact that the music in question was entirely his legal property. Less humorously, the wired.com story reveals that: ... eBay would not comment on its policing policy, but several companies scour the Internet looking for copyrighted materials. The movie industry uses Ranger Online...The recording industry has employed several search companies, including Media Enforcer and BayTSP.com You can read the entire account here. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. George Ziemann himself is a pretty entertaining guy, and you can read about him here.... posted by Friedrich at October 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, October 24, 2002


Free Reads -- Righties and Pleasure again
Friedrich -- Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata.net, here, has been following our gabfest about righties and pleasure, and has now entered the fray. If I understand him correctly (these Brits! So educated and articulate!), he's presenting the notion that while lefties tend to move from personal preferences to entire worldviews -- ie., they want to dominate with their tastes -- righties see taste and pleasure taking place under the auspices of more substantial activities, such as politics, economics and business. Sample passage: If you are a lefty, you believe in actively shaping the details of the big wide world out there. You and your friends are going to plan it, shape it, sculpt it, collectively and democratically if you are being nice about it. Therefore your opinions about everything, including art, are a public issue. If you prefer abstract impressionism to neo-realism, then you have a positive duty to say so, because when you have finally become the Benevolent Despot of Everything of Behalf of Everyone, your opinion is going to make a big difference to all those favoured or thwarted artists and art fans out there. Ditto your opinions about history, geography, biology, nuclear physics, literary criticism, sport, car design or car abolition. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Philosoblog and Envy reredux
Michael To make my own pathetic little addition to your brilliant discussion of the current alliance between notions of pleasure and Left-wing politics, I offer the following scattered observations: 1. Modern Lefties (in contradistinction to more Traditional Lefties) can be intensely materialistic and focused on conspicuous consumption--both in their personal and professional lives--without this interfering with their self-image as egalitarians and citizens of the republic of virtue. I'm convinced after much thought that the guys who run the New York Times Magazine were not being hypocritical (no matter how much it may look like this to a Rightie) by running a lengthy article by Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman on the evils of increasing income inequality--advertised on the cover as “The Class Wars Part I: The End of Middle Class America and the Triumph of the Plutocrats”--while simultaneously running a 48-page advertising section on "The Best of Luxury Homes and Estates" in the same issue. The ability to do something like this without hypocrisy is the very essence of the Modern Left-wing Attitude--and just because Right-wingers and Traditional Lefties don't "get" how it's possible doesn't mean it isn't real. 2. There is an affinity I can't spell out but I sense exists between people who are trying to mirror the masses back to themselves (TV personalities, advertisers, movie execs, magazine editors, politicians like Bill Clinton) and a left-wing point of view. 3. Ralph Nader's consumerism has become the dominant strain in modern Leftist thought, the key principle of which is making sure that the powerful corporations that deliver the essentials of life to the average consumer are policed in this activity by the Nanny State and the plaintiffs' bar. This movement is NOT at root hostile to corporate America, but is rather symbiotic with it (by which I mean that corporate America gets something out of this, too). 4. The current vogue of celebrity-worship and the hushed attention paid to their fabulous personal trappings is definitely tied in to all this somewhere. I think I'm on to something here. Do you agree? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Free Reads -- Theodore Dalrymple on Paris Crime
Friedrich -- The British doctor who writes under the names Theodore Dalrymple and Anthony Daniels is one of the best essayists since George Orwell. City Journal runs a new piece by him on the way crime is on the upsurge in Paris, here. Dalrymple doesn't avoid discussing the aesthetics of the Le Corbusier-inspired housing projects where most of the criminals live. Sample passage: The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Righties and Pleasure Forever
Friedrich -- It occurs to me that if I'm going to gas on about righties and pleasure, and if I'm going to make vague noises about how the web is allowing arty people of a non-leftie bent to make contact with each other, I should at least pass along some links. So here are a few places to begin. The curious can also explore the links we've supplied in the left-hand column of this blog. *Myron Magnet edits City Journal, a terrific, if New York-centric, city-life and politics magazine. It has a very complete online incarnation here. The very impressive and entertaining Roger Scruton and David Watkin often appear in these pages. *American Enterprise Magazine, here, does a good job of following developments in the New Urbanism, a movement of architects, builders, developers and planners who love and respect smalltown America, and who are determined to bring its pleasures back to life. *Frederick Turner is a British-born Texas professor, critic and poet who has developed a persuasive theory of what he calls "Natural Classicism." (His book by that title is buyable here.) It'll interest anyone who suspects there may be a connection between traditional artistic forms and recent discoveries in biochemistry, computing, chaos, and genetics. He has his own website here. *I have no idea what Christopher Alexander's politics are, but he's a fascinating and influential anti-modernist thinker on building and architecture. His "Pattern Language" website, here, is a beguiling thing to explore. The book of his to begin with (beware: they're addictive) is "The Timeless Way of Building," buyable here. *NewKlassical, here, is an online meeting place for artists and art fans interested in poetry that rhymes, music with tunes, and buildings that have comprehensible and enjoyable forms. *Lucien Steil's Katarxis, here, is a gem of an online catalog-magazine devoted to traditional and classical architecture. And that's just for starters. Persist, and you'll discover that the brilliant political columnist Mark Steyn is also a first-rate drama critic (an example here), that Notre Dame's School of Architecture (here) has been giving its students a traditional drawing-and-history based education for some years now... Rightwing political journalism and commentary have flourished because of talk radio and the web. Now, thanks to the web, the traditional and classical arts, and discussions about them, are finally starting to flourish in the same way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Pleasure and Politics reredux
Friedrich -- A political staffer from the West Coast writes: The reason why conservatives seem more puritanical than liberals about pleasure (e.g., sex, drugs, outre art) is because they are. For every libertarian blogger cracking jokes about pot and porn, there are hundreds of people like my aunt, who hates movies with "bad language" and is horrified by the thought of legalizing marijuana. Remember Nixon's Silent Majority and GW Bush's pledge to restore dignity and honor to the presidency, i.e. no Oval Office blowjobs. Liberal pleasures: sex, drugs, rock & roll, art, porn. Conservative pleasures: tobacco, football, country music, Tom Clancy novels, SUVs. Alcohol is bipartisan. Feminists don't believe in any of these pleasures. Gay men believe in them all. (I've been to gay C & W bars). Great stuff. I've got a little caffeine in me, so I'm going to tease apart one aspect of our correspondent's note. It's all-too-common for righties as well as lefties to say that righties are more puritanical about pleasure than lefties are. I can't agree. They may indeed be more puritanical about leftie pleasures than lefties are, but they just as clearly have their own pleasures. Our correspondent, when referring to the pleasures lefties are open to that righties generally aren't, makes mention of sex, drugs, and outre art. Those are indeed, or at least can be, pleasures, whether or not you personally want to experience or recommend them. (And lefties often do.) But they aren't all there is to pleasure. Our correspondent lists, all on his own, tobacco, Tom Clancy, and country-and-western music. Potential pleasures, each and every one! To indulge in cliches of Republicans for a moment, here are some other, and not-uncommon, potential rightie pleasures: duck paintings, good Scotch, rumpled corduroy pants, reading the morning paper while sipping coffee, listening to swing jazz on LPs rather than CDs, old stone houses, quilts and window seats, Labrador retrievers, making fun of lefties.... These are all potential pleasures as deserving of recognition, appreciation and discussion as any art-porn novel or deconstructed building. Which is to say that, despite the thought-policing of lefties and the reluctance of righties, righties already have an aesthetic, if not many aesthetics. Righties: It's simply not the case that you have no aesthetic tastes or preferences. Everyone does, at least everyone who has a few spare dollars and a few spare minutes -- who isn't entirely consumed by the struggle for existence. Your aesthetic is there already; you don't have to come up with one. The challenge is to recognize it as such, and to assert it as such. Lefties will look at the old Victorian house (or the crisp new condo) you adore and say, "That's not architecture." Don't let them get away with that. Say instead, "It certainly is architecture. And it's a kind of architecture I much prefer to the kind that you advocate." Why do you think it is that righties have such trouble recognizing that they have their own pleasures and their own... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, October 23, 2002


Philosoblog and Envy redux
Friedrich -- Heavens! I go away on business for a couple of days and return to find all the neighbors having a party in my backyard. What fun. Did you read the comments left behind on my recent “lefties and attractiveness” posting? Good stuff! Little flurries of conversation on the topic even appeared on other blogs. What a sharp, civil and humorous bunch. Just try opening up such a subject in arty New York circles. “Civil and humorous” is not what you’ll encounter. It was fascinating that no one saw any need to dispute my central assertion that the left has succeeded in associating itself with attractiveness, and that the right has failed to keep up. Why this should be so, whether it has any real importance, and what (if anything) might be done about it -- all that’s up for grabs. But there’s a general acknowledgement that the left not only markets itself more attractively than the right does, but has made the topic of art-and-pleasure its own. I was impressed (as well as surprised and touched) that everyone who commented on the posting actually seemed to have read it and registered its argument. A few (perfectly civil) emails did come in from people who seemed under the impression that I was arguing something else entirely -- that lefties eat better, know what real art is, and probably fuck better too. For the record, no, I don’t think any of that. What I was hoping to say was that lefties own the discussion on these topics. There is almost no debate about such topics as food, sex, pleasure and art whose terms aren’t dictated by the left, which means that there is no real debate on these topics. How can there be, when one of the debating teams also sits in the judge’s chair? I was also, of course, hoping to say a few more things. One was that the left’s takeover of the topic of attractiveness is an accomplishment of some importance. Left policies and ideas have failed over and over again. How to explain the fact that, despite this, leftie-ism continues to do so well for itself? My humble suggestion? That “attractiveness” must be a large-ish part of the explanation. It was striking that even our brainy readers seem to accept the left’s definitions of art and pleasure. To them, “art” is Chris Ofili and his elephant dung, “cuisine” is the high-strung faddish restaurants the gals of “Sex in the City” hope to get tables at. As you and I know, contemporary visual art is and can be many things -- from Southern rural “yard art” to the neoclassical “toga painting” done by graduates of the New York Academy, from marine watercolors to the latest Flash’d corporate website. It’s striking too that our visitors don’t seem to realize that “cuisine” can be home cooking, barbecue, and corn on the cob as well as Latino-Asian fusion avant-gardism. The fact that what occurs to such a well-informed and open-minded... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Tuesday, October 22, 2002


Getty vs. Acropolis
Michael I took my daughter to the J. Paul Getty museum complex in Los Angeles last weekend (she had a class assignment) and, once again, I realized how disappointed I am with this billion-dollar complex. So I got on the Internet and checked out another hilltop 'cultural' complex to see how it stacked up (all pictures are thumbnails--check 'em out for yourself): Acropolis complex reads well from a distance; Getty is visually incomprehensible from a distance. Running Score: Acropolis 1, Getty 0 Masses cleanly and clearly articulated; masses lumpish and illogically articulated. Running score: Acropolis 2, Getty 0 Entrance clearly marked, Propylaia creates dramatic yet dignified approach to Temple complex; entrance visually undistinguished, looks like approach to sports arena. Running score; Acropolis 3, Getty 0 Original--adaptation of temple design for a site with three different ground levels; copy--a staircase designed to display institutional bloat. Running score: Acropolis 4, Getty 0 Acropolis is a series of masonry buildings (real stones displayed); Getty is a series of steel frame buildings covered with stone veneer: Running score: Acropolis 5, Getty 0 And one other thing; the Parthenon was built faster (9 years) than the Getty (12 years from awarding commission to completion). Granted, it took the Athenians an additional six years to finish the sculptural decoration--but of course people are still fighting over that decorative sculpture 2500 years later. Thank goodness that won't be a problem at the Getty. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 22, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments





Saturday, October 19, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- We postmoderns tend to take for granted how well-off we are in terms of access to entertainment. You've got the Web and cable TV? Then you're in better shape to enjoy the fruits of the cultural world than any pre-1950s king or queen. Here's a Clip and Save guide to the upcoming week on cable. *Rising Sun (HBO Saturday at 3 a.m.). Philip Kaufman directs Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes in an adaptation of Michael Crichton's Japanophobe novel. Semi-effective as a thriller; sharp and sophisticated as a comedy about multiculuralism. *Training Day (Cinemax, Tues at 8 pm; Wednesday at 3 am; Fri at 10 pm). Denzel's Oscar-winning performance, and a snappy, gritty urban thriller in its own right. Ethan Hawke does a beautiful job setting off Denzel's performance, by the way. Second bananas deserve credit too. *Vanya on 42nd Street (IFC; Monday at 10 am and 4 pm; Tuesday at 8 a.m.). The sublime Louis Malle/Andre Gregory/Wallace Shawn adaptation of Chekhov's play. See what ensemble acting is really about. *Sweet Smell of Success (TCM; Sunday at 6 pm). This urban tale about tabloid Manhattan stars Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, and was directed by Alexander Mackendrick. A flop when it first came out, it's now a legend, and helped establish a tough, flamboyant New York style. You'll see where a lot of Scorsese's style comes from. *Antonio Banderas is interviewed on Inside the Actor's Studio (Bravo; Sunday at 8 pm). *Joy Ride (Cinemax, Sunday at 10 pm, Thursday 11 am and 8 pm), a low-key but genuinely scary (and very handsome) thriller. Directed by John ("Red Rock West") Dahl. *The Making of 'Gone With the Wind' (TCM, Wednesday at 8 pm). I'm not a fan of the movie that is this documentary's subject, but the story of the film's production should be fascinating. *A Men Who Made the Movies hour on the director Raoul Walsh (TCM, Friday at 7 pm) *On A&E's American Justice, host Bill Kurtis can take a little getting used to, but he and his show do a terrific job of presenting stories of crimes and criminals. This week's episodes include *An hour on the disappearance of the famous atheist Madalynn Murray O'Hair (9-10 pm Wednesday) *An hour on Karla Faye Tucker, a Texas double-murderer (Wed., 10-11 pm) *An hour entitled Girl in the Box (Saturday, 5 pm), about a strange kidnapper/kindappee case. He kidnapped a hitchiker and made her his sex slave for seven years. Horrifying. But she never seems to have made any effort to escape. Perplexing. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, October 18, 2002


The Economics of Elvis reredux
Michael You ask what direction would I like to see copyright law take as we move further into the age of perfect and easy replication? Based on what I learned writing my posting, “The Economics of Elvis,” I’m not so sure copyright law should take much of a direction at all. When a new copyright law is passed, it’s always justified as an attempt to protect the property rights of innovative people from some current threat (whether mechanical reproduction in 1909 or digital piracy in 2002). Once this “hole” in intellectual property rights is patched, things will work “like everyone knows they should.” But intellectual property is subject to the law of unintended consequences big time. What has commonly happened is that once the lawmakers have applied their backward looking "patch," we discover that they've gone and created entirely new property rights, often in industries undreamt-of when the law was passed. For example, was it really a matter of course that songwriters (or, in reality, their corporate successors) should own the radio rights to their songs? How about television rights? Did anyone know how much money would be involved in either the radio or the television rights when the bill that granted these rights was debated—in 1897? Of course not; the congressmen of 1897 felt bad for songwriters because they couldn't charge royalties for performance of their music, a power that dramatists had enjoyed for performances of their plays for 50 years. But this decision had a whole series of unforeseen impacts that extend to this day. Another troubling consequence of the creation of such expanded intellectual property rights is impact this has on the creative "temperature" of an industry. Corporations are money-making entities, not creative entities. They are not in business for the joy of innovation or the joy of making “art.” A portfolio of intellectual property of demonstrated popularity that can be risklessly exploited offers the illusion of security in a notoriously unpredictable environment. (For one example, think of the profits the current generation of Disney managers has extracted from their control of Walt Disney's portfolio of intellectual property.) This path, however, leads directly away from the risk taking and experimentation of trying to develop products for new, poorly defined markets. Unproven markets will always be inherently dicey for large companies, because it is genuinely unlikely that such markets can generate enough sales to provide a good return on the organization’s large amounts of invested capital. The net result is a conservative, play-it-safe tendency to pursue strategies that have yielded mass sales and large profits in the past, and that, if possible, don’t make existing inventory “obsolete.” While apparently rational, such a strategy will also generally fail to flush out the new, urgent wants/needs in society that can serve as the basis for a radically enlarged market. In my piece I used the example of music industry’s failure to identify and exploit the demand for “race” music for twenty years, and for “hillbilly” music for fifteen years—because the... posted by Friedrich at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Economics of Elvis Redux
Friedrich -- Many thanks for explaining the business history behind the pop-music business. I'd always wondered what the hell ASCAP and BMI were, and had supposed they were sinister cartels. Nice to know that I was right. In old-fart moments (more and more frequent these days), I tell young people to go into copyright law. It'll be a happening field for decades; adjusting the laws pertaining to creation and ownership isn't going to be easy in the digital age, and the only people certain to do well are the lawyers. In the midst of these disputes, my sympathies tend to be with the artists, although I try not to be too, too sentimental about this. But I'm a know-nothing -- or, given the couple of stories about copyright I helped out with, a know-little. You're a student of the issues. What direction would you like to see copyright law take as we move further into the age of perfect and easy replication? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
The Economics of Elvis
Michael Perhaps you noticed the following in the October 12 issue of the Economist: The war over control of the digital copying of music and movies has many fronts, in Congress and the marketplace as well as the courts. It has pitted Hollywood against the technology firms of Silicon Valley and consumer advocates such as Mr. Lessig. The record industry succeeded in killing Napster this year, but file-sharing by consumers is growing; on-line swapping of films and TV shows, as well as music, is catching on. America’s frightened media behemoths are lobbying hard for new laws and new technology to stop copying and to control what customers do with their products. While the fight over the control of digital music rages, a look at history suggests that many of struggles of today echo the battles fought in the music industry over the past century. (My account is largely based on the work of Russell and David Sanjek in "American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century" and Peter Hall's "Cities in Civilization.") In the late 19th century, practitioners of the music “content” industry clustered in New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Songwriters primarily made money by selling their product to music publishers, who in turn sold sheet music to consumers who wanted to play the music at home. However, when in 1891 the first major revision of copyright law in one hundred years was passed, the music publishers “saw the light.” In 1895 the Music Publishers Association (MPA) of the United States was formed, and within two years had successfully lobbied Congress for additional copyright legislation, giving them the power to license (i.e., demand royalties for) public performance of their work—a right which they had never previously possessed. The music publishers were fed up with the money (i.e., payola) that vaudeville was sucking out of them. (Musical vaudeville performances were the chief advertising medium for new songs.) Armed with their new intellectual property right, the music publishers decided to turn vaudeville from a cost center into a revenue source. In 1913 they formed ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and Publishers, and announced that ASCAP would prevent the playing of all copyrighted music at any public function unless a royalty was paid. ASCAP chose from the beginning to pool the funds it received (that is, they weren’t divided according to the exactly calculated earnings of each song). ASCAP’s distributions deliberately favored the larger music publishers and the most popular songwriters. ASCAP’s bargaining power came from the perception that it controlled the most popular, most “mainstream” music, and it had to keep the major players on board to maintain its clout. A big source of royalties that started to roll in (an unintended benefit of the 1897 copyright law) came from the recorded music industry. These grew healthily until 1921. However, when this total began shrinking the next year, ASCAP easily identified the culprit: free music from the nation’s infant radio industry. And ASCAP knew what to do about it. In 1922,... posted by Friedrich at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, October 16, 2002


Artistic Quote of the Day
Michael A quote from John Walker’s “Constable”: [Constable] found beauty in everything that grows: weeds as well as flowers. He once corrected a lady, who, when looking at an engraving of a house, called it an “ugly thing.” In what was virtually a reprimand, he stated one of his fundamental beliefs. “No madam,” he said, “there is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,--light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. I think Constable has put a finger on something rather larger than art here; that is, a tendency (which I am far too ready to indulge) to dismiss whole chunks of life as not “measuring up” to our assumptions about what is beautiful, desirable, pleasurable or profitable. As a result, I, at any rate, am constantly in danger of not enjoying life as much as I should as a consequence of pre-conceived ideas—the most idiotic explanation imaginable! (And something approaching what I, for want of a better term, would describe as a mortal sin.) I hereby resolve to do better. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Poussin redux
Michael Your posting on Poussin reminded me of an observation by Delacroix (who was an extremely intelligent art critic.) Delacroix proposes a dichotomy between the way Classical Greeks and the Rennaissance Italians perceived and communicated form. He points out that the Greeks perceived complex forms (e.g., nude people) as a series of overlapping geometric volumes, like those of an amphora. One Amphora: a Vase Because of the underlying geometry of each of these volumes, we can perceive not only the shape of each amphora “unit” but also its orientation, the “tilt” of its central axis. Many Amphorae: A Greek Torso, 5th Century B.C. In contradistinction, the Italians of the early Renaissance grasped a form by its surface planes or its contour lines. Note the harsh planes and angular, chopped outlines of Antonio Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus of 1470: No Amphora Here On the basis of this dichotomy, Delacroix claimed that from an examination of Poussin’s drawings that the French Baroque artist’s sense of form was Greek rather than Italian—that Poussin felt objects by their centers and not by their edges. Poussin's Acis and Galatea: Obviously Greek I just knew you couldn’t sleep at night without this information. Cheers and sweet dreams, Friedrich P.S. I couldn't resist tossing in Poussin’s self-portrait; it’s one of my favorite all-time paintings. Enjoy. Poussin's 1650 Self Portrait... posted by Friedrich at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, October 15, 2002


Decades of Design?
Michael Granted, I’m the former Detroiter, but we’re both old enough to at least dimly remember the days when American cars had genuine style. I was struck the other day by the progression in the following Buick ad… Buick's Decades of Design Campaign …that is, I was struck by the progression from powerful design to inoffensive mediocrity. How dare Buick be so insensitive as to run the top and bottom pictures in this stack together--it's offensive. I think General Motors continues to miss a huge bet by not resuscitating elements of its much more stylish past. And I'm not referring to running ads stressing how hot their styling used to be, I'm talking about incorporating some of their traditional elements into today's cars. Let's bend a little metal here. As I’ve watched Cadillac, in particular, try to find its way stylistically out of the wilderness over the past twenty years, I keep wondering why nobody ever has the balls to create a car that at least echoes the 'Great White shark' aura of the 1950s and 1960s Caddies. Will Anyone Make Lithographs of the 2002 Cadillacs? How many consumer products can access such a fully developed brand identity, an aesthetic that screams “Live Large! Be Optimistic! Kick Ass!” How many companies have this much stylistic DNA just waiting to spring forth, like the first shoots of spring hiding under the winter snows? Has GM learned nothing from the success of Harley Davidson over the past decade? A Still Unresolved Question Does GM really think they can out-Mercedes Mercedes? Or out-BMW BMW? I keep wanting to tell them: Come on, guys, give it a shot. You can do it! You can return to your roots!. Or am I just kidding myself? Somewhat nostalgic cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 15, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Sunday, October 13, 2002


Comics--That Old Time Religion
Michael, Thanks for tipping me off on the latest in the debate over the religious affiliation of super-heroes. According to a story on jewsweek.com, "Up, Up and Oy Vey," which you can read here, the discussion has been fueled by the recent "outing" of The Thing (a member of the Fantastic Four super-hero crime fighting team) as a Jew—and, apparently, a traditional one at that. The Thing Affirms His Jewish Identity--Are You Gonna Argue With Him? I first heard the argument that all super-heroes are Jews in Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” In that novel, Clay, a Jewish teenager who goes on to become a comic-book writer, wises up his Jewish cousin Kavalier, a future comic book artist: They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself. As quoted in the jewsweek.com story, Steven Bergson, who works at Toronto's Albert and Temmy Latner Jewish Public Library, and who moderates an Internet site dedicated to Jewish comic books (which you can see here) admits Superman's "origin story" invites a Jewish interpretation: Superman is an 'alien' immigrant, leads a double life (as Jews who passed as Gentiles did), was saved by being sent away as an infant, (with obvious parallels to both the 'Moses in the basket' story and the escape of the Jews from Germany) and his Kryptonian birth name sure sounds Jewish (Kal-El in Hebrew means 'All that is God.') The Moses of Krypton? As a religious triple threat (baptized a Roman Catholic, raised a Protestant and converted in adulthood to Judaism) and a longtime comics fan, I’d like to weigh in on this incredibly significant issue. The arguments for Superman’s Jewishness are strong, but not, I think, totally conclusive. The two Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, who invented the ‘Man of Steel’ (and who are the obvious prototypes for Kavalier and Clay) appear to have been channeling other religious traditions as well. Superman is raised by a man (Pa Kent) who is not his biological father, and is brought up in a rural backwater (Smallville); moreover, this foster Son from the heavens grows up to possess miraculous, godlike powers. This is all rather reminiscent of the Christian narrative of Jesus (of course, another Jewish boy). The Iron Giant--Can a Robot Look to Superman For Spiritual Guidance? The regrettably underseen animated movie, “The Iron Giant,” is a good example of how popular culture has used Superman as a Christ-symbol. In it an alien robot of superhuman power is inspired by reading Superman comic books to sacrifice itself in order to save its adopted community. Rather touchingly, the robot mutters the single word: “Superman” under its breath just before ramming a haywire nuclear ICBM head-on in the upper atmosphere, detonating the warhead and scattering itself to the four winds. Echoes of the Buddha? And the Superman story doesn't just echo... posted by Friedrich at October 13, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Art, Beauty & Fashion
Michael Thanks for sending me a copy of Dave Hickey’s 1992 book, “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.” I wasn’t aware of Hickey before this, but his discussions on the problematic nature of beauty in contemporary art, as well as beauty's slippery relations with politics are quite brilliant. Dave Hickey There’s hardly a single paragraph in the entire 64-page book that doesn’t convey a rather pithy insight, but given the attention I’ve been paying to the economic infrastructure of art production, I thought I'd share the following with you: I think we must acknowledge Picasson’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—a painting that we must regard either as a magnificent “formal breakthrough” (whatever that is) or, more realistically, as a manifestation of Picasso’s dazzling insight into the shifting values of his target market. I mean this seriously. Consider this scenario: Pablo comes to Paris, for all intents and purposes, a bumpkin, complete with a provincial and profoundly nineteenth-century concept of the cultural elite and its proclivities—still imagining that the rich and silly prefer to celebrate their privilege and indolence by “asetheticizing” their immediate environment into this fine-tuned, fibrillating, pastel atmosphere. He proceeds to paint his Blue and Rose period pictures under this misapprehension (pastel clowns, indeed!)—then Leo and Gertrude introduce him to a faster crowd. He meets some rich and careless Americans and, gradually, being no dummy, perceives, among the cultural elite with whom he is hanging out and perilously hanging on, a phase-shift in their parameters of self-definition. These folks are no longer building gazebos and situating symboliste Madonnas in fern-choked grottos. They are running with the bulls—something Pablo can understand—and measuring their power and security by their ability to tolerate high-velocity temporal change, high levels of symbolic distortion, and maximum psychic discontinuity. They are Americans, in other words, post-Jamesian Americans, in search of no symbolic repose, unbeguiled by haystacks, glowing peasants, or Ladies of Shallot. So Pablo Picasso—neither the first nor the last artist whom rapacious careerism will endow with acute cultural sensitivity—goes for the gold…[and] encapsulates an age… Picasso's Demoiselles: Fast Girls for a Fast Crowd? I will admit, I always wondered about Picasso's abruptness in "pulling down the curtain" on his Blue and Rose periods and making such an abrupt jump-shift into Cubism. (The rest of his career shows no such complete abandonment of former artistic concerns as he moves from one era to another.) The 'received' story of modern art has a whole series of intellectual gaps like this, and, in my opinion, needs to be complete demystified. What we all grew up reading about post-1850s art is largely a fairytale, and hooray for guys like Hickey for trying to chop his way through the underbrush of this Enchanted Forest. You can buy a copy of “The Invisible Dragon” here. For a review of another of Hickey’s books, “Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy" go here. For a March 2000 conversation with Dave Hickey and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on the state of contemporary painting, you can go... posted by Friedrich at October 13, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, October 12, 2002


Times Square
Friedrich Times Square: The revolution is now I can’t be the only person who’s noticed that what the early Soviet revolutionary artists envisioned has come to pass. It's visible in the architecture of the new Times Square, and it's all around us in the form of the media-and-technology networks so many of us work and play in. This became evident to me some time ago when The Wife and I attended a show in L.A. of Soviet revolutionary architectural drawings. "It's Times Square!" we whispered to each other over and over. Bewildering that more people don't recognize that what radicals have dreamed about for centuries has arrived. We have critic acquaintances, for instance, who denounce the new Times Square yet carry on as though there's something subversive about pop culture. Er, guys.... How can they miss the fact that avant-garde-ism is all-pervasive these days? In the electronic and digital universe, everything connects, everything interpenetrates, there's no gravity, linearity is a beat-up old relic, the hierarchies that haven't yet been leveled are about to be, etc etc. Listen to a CD while surfing the web, take a stroll through a shopping mall while your VCR records a show at home... Zdanevich and Tatlin would keel over in amazement and delight. Early Soviet art: The dream was then Why don't lefties recognize their dream now that it has become a reality? (My suspicion: they prefer the dream because it is a dream.) Two answers occur to me. One is that the underlying realities (birth, death, scarcity, illness, frustration, etc etc) haven't changed and never will, and that what lefties have really been protesting are the basic facts of life. They always assumed these problems would evaporate once avant-garde-ism was installed in power. Basic facts of life haven't changed? Well, then, the revolution hasn't really arrived. The second is that lefties are so accustomed to thinking of their dream as a pure thing that they don't recognize it in a (necessarily messy) incarnated form. Oooooh -- money, profits, business -- nasty. That's not a revolution. But maybe there are better explanations. Do you have one? Funny how it never seems to occur to lefties that even the revolution has to be paid for. Utopia does too. I had lunch with a friend in the Frank Gehry-designed Conde Nast lunchroom the other day, and was struck, not for the first time, by the way that Times Square represents a bringing-together of international finance, media power, avant-garde star architects, and theme park whoopee aesthetics. These elements and values are no longer in conflict. They're playing on the same team. Not enough is made of the way the most mundane pop culture these days embodies avant-garde ideals. TV commercials and rock videos are as nonlinear and unbounded as anything Godard collaged together. What producers do with techno and rap is as far-out as anything Varese or Boulez devised. OK, the new-media artifacts are pumped-up, are determined to sell sell sell, and are set to throbbing dance... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Eisenman/Oakeshott redux
Friedrich -- Sweet of you to take a look at Oakeshott's great essay, "Rationalism in Politics" (readable here) -- and you're right on the money to choose Peter Eisenman as a primo example of the "rationalist" type. (The New Urbanist Andres Duany has a go at Eisenman here.) I'm sorry I haven't been able to get more people to give Oakeshott a whirl. Reading him jolted my mind out of any number of binds I didn't know it was in, and lured me into an appreciation of many things I hadn't given enough recognition to -- evolved ways of being and doing, largely. My brain felt sharper, as it often does when wrestling with philosophy, but it also felt like it gave a series of great big yawns, and with each one settled into a deeper and more nuanced enjoyment of life. It would be hard to read the best essays in "Rationalism in Politics" (buyable here) and not get a lot out of the experience. The essays in that volume that this Oakeshott fiend recommends most fervently: "Rationalism in Politics," "The Masses in Representative Democracy," "The Political Economy of Freedom," "On Being Conservative," and "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind." Gems all, guaranteed to set the mind a-buzzing on many, many topics. Why not enjoy pornography in private while entertaining the idea that perhaps it ought to be outlawed? Why not combine a taste for liberal economics, smaller government, a humanely conservative social gestalt, and bohemian pleasures? Why not prefer to avoid interacting too much with popular culture even while recognizing its vitality and (occasional) genius, and that it serves its functions for most people pretty efficiently? Oakeshott fuses enlightening philosophy with a sophisticated and subtle "such is life" attitude. How to beat that? Though I do remember some critics dismissing him as a crank and a dandy -- they seem to think there's no place for the aesthetic point of view in political philosophy. Me, I find any political philosophy (or economic system) that doesn't take the aesthetic point of view into account beyond unappealing. A telling Oakeshott personal detail I'm fond of: though he wasn't a believer, he enjoyed attending church services, finding them poetic and deeply moving. Incidentally, I notice that many blog-surfers are puzzled (if not incensed) by some of Andrew Sullivan's stances; they seem bewildered by the way Sullivan's positions don't cohere in a familiar way. They might find his take on the world less puzzling if they were more familiar with Oakeshott, the subject of Sullivan's college thesis. Much of what Sullivan does in his thinking is exploring territory opened up by Oakeshott. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, October 11, 2002


New Cultureblog
Friedrich -- A delightful discovery, "Out of Lascaux," an art-history cultureblog run by Alexandra, whose last name I don't know, here. Sample passage: As a kid, I used to think medieval art was ugly because it wasn't "realistic". I think most of us think that way when we're young. Then, we grow up and learn why things are the way they are and we look at life differently. Well, most of us. But now I love medieval art, especially Gothic art. Alexandra's list of permalinks includes some promising-looking blogs -- more to explore! One of these days the 2blowhards, computer mediocrities both, will figure out how to add new blogsites to our own list of permalinks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Poussin
Friedrich -- A couple of terrific, oh-so-true pieces about Poussin: Karen Wilkin in The New Criterion, here, and Robert Hughes in Time, here. Sample passage from Wilkin: There’s a wonderful loosening of contour— without any weakening of form—in Poussin’s drawings, an invigorating openness quite unlike the sculptural, closed delineation of his paintings, that is especially appealing to twentieth-century eyes. Even more accessible to modern taste are the brushy drawings where tone all but drowns line and only a few, telling islands of untouched paper remain to suggest form and mass. Sample passage from Hughes: "Questo giovane ha una furia del diavolo," remarked Marino, introducing him to one Roman patron - This young man has the fury of a devil. Furia didn't simply mean rage; it suggested a state of inspiration, of contact with primeval forces that lie below the surface of culture...Poussin wanted to reconstitute antiquity in his paintings by grasping its root: energy. Always in his best work there are the signs of overflowing vitality, constrained by form's superego, the mode - tragic, idyllic, epic, sacred. I'm not crazy in seeing technical similarities between Poussin and Frank Miller, am I? The limited number of values, the relative absence of line and the almost-total dependence on tone and shadow to delineate mass and form, the way the areas of light and dark are so often, as Wilkin points out, open .... Of course, their work couldn't be more different in terms of feel. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Frank Miller
Friedrich -- I know I'm 15 years late arriving at this particular party, but: have you ever looked at the graphic novels of the artist/writer Frank Miller? He's probably best-known for "The Dark Knight Returns," an operatic Batman epic that was the visual basis for Tim Burton's "Batman" and is often said to be one of the best of all superhero graphic novels. I tried "Dark Knight" years ago and wasn't much taken with it. But the other day I read an installment of his "Sin City" series, and flipped for it. (By the way, does one "read" or "look at" a graphic novel? I wonder if it's best to say one "goes through" such a mixed-media thing?) The story was passable romantic-downbeat urban noir, but the visuals were beyond fabulous: lurid, and trippy-intense. And the pyrotechnics! The entire book is done in black and white (no in-between values at all), but the variety of effects he gets -- from the individual frames, as well as the page-compositions and sequencing -- is amazing. A breath-taking high-wire act; I was giggling and gasping all the way through. Sweet Dreams: Frank Miller, Poussin, "The Matrix" Despite the fact that I'd recently seen a wonderful museum show of French drawings from the 1500s and 1600s (mucho Poussin, who I adore), and despite the fact that the same day I read "Sin City," The Wife and I re-watched "The Matrix" (which we adore) -- despite competing with these two powerful visual experiences, Frank Miller's visuals dominated my dreams. That night, I dreamt in Frank Miller. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, October 10, 2002


Free Reads -- Philip Roth Reredux
Friedrich -- Funny rant about the incoherence of visual people, thanks. A professor I know who has to teach aesthetics to visual-arts majors tells me there's no way to get his students thinking intellectually in an even semi-organized fashion. "They're hopeless," he says, rolling his eyes. And a painter I know (that rarity -- a bright one) tells me the French have an expression, "Bete comme un peintre" ("stupid like a painter"). I find visual people to be in many ways like performers -- talented, rarely gifted with much in the way of intellect, and full of meaningless chatter, which is, however, interrupted now and then by brilliantly helpful, offhand observations and statements. Like performers, they seem to have no idea when they're being idiotic and when they're being insightful. Listening to them is a peculiar experience, something like this: babble babble bab AmazinglyInsightfulObservation babble babble bab. But I'm sometimes charmed by their silliness, their sense of style, and the way they feel so very strongly about how things should look. Even the babble, properly edited, has its pleasures. Degas, for instance: what an amusingly stylish gruff bastard. A couple of excerpts from Degas' letters: No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing. Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. Cranky Bastard Is there anything to what he says? Maybe. What I mostly like is the way the words, the thoughts, the attitude, the pickiness, and the sheer Frenchiness all snap into place. Ker-thwam. I find his little sayings as pleasing as good jokes. On the other hand, phew, can visual people radiate "attitude" or what. Why are so many of them so prone to do this? The artier types in the media world, and the arty types in the art-gallery world, can out-disagreeable and out-snoot the worst country-club snobs. My best shot at an explanation runs along these lines: they aren't smart, they are stylish, there's a natural tendency to cluster with people who are kinda like you and once there to look down on outsiders...This line of reasoning suggests that visual people are very insecure -- perhaps about having such lousy verbal skills? Perhaps they deal with their vulnerability about not being very smart by over-doing the visual-style snobbery. What are your former-art-student thoughts about this? Complicating matters a bit, I notice that people who go into commercial illustration and graphics are often funny, bright, irreverent and pleasant -- they're like the kids in the back row who throw spitballs. I once asked a few of them about this, and was told that many of them grew up loving (and drawing) comic books, and either never went to art school or tried it and dropped out. So: An art school education equals "attitude"? Growing up on comic books equals "likable irreverence"? It's a theory, anyway. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments





Wednesday, October 9, 2002


Free Reads--Philip Roth redux
Michael In your posting “Free Reads—Philip Roth” you comment that “a gift for writing fiction has nothing whatever to do with the ability to reason and make sense of things.” I would guess that Roy Lichtenstein would agree with you, if you would extend your comment to the visual arts and to the ability to make sense of things—verbally. In Michael Kimmelman’s book, “Portraits,” he talks with Roy Lichtenstein as they walk around the Metropolitan Museum of art: Lichtenstein settles finally on a group of Ellsworth Kellys: a tall standing steel sculpture, nearly rectangular, and two shaped canvases, one of them all blue. Ellsworth Kelly (from nature?) [Lichtenstein:] ‘[The Kelly painting] is the ultimate in color intensity. It’s entirely about the relationship between color and shape. There’s no modulation of color. Modulation is usually read as atmosphere, it gives you a sense of recession. But here you don’t have that, there’s no illusion, which turns the picture into a thing, the opposite of a window. It’s like a sculpture that just happens to be on the wall. I know Ellsworth says it comes from nature. But I don’t know why you’d want to say this, because art relates to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true. I don’t think artists like myself, or Ellsworth, have the faintest idea what we’re doing, but we try to put it words that sound logical. Actually’—Lichtenstein grins—‘I think I do what I’m doing. But no other artist does.’ Roy Lichtenstein (pure abstraction?) An excellent example, I think, of why art needs to reference a tradition of meaning outside itself. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Been there, Done That Redux
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your rant about Paul Goldberger’s review of the Times Square Westin. Goldberger’s an odd critic (as I noted in a posting, here, about his review of the new L.A. cathedral), often on the verge of taking a shot at orthodoxy, then retreating straight back into it. He may believe what he writes; he may also suspect that if he were to blow the alarm on the hoax that is most new architecture he’d soon be out of a job. Like you, I enjoy sounding off about bad new buildings. (The Wife doesn't share my passion, but puts up with it graciously.) I wonder what it is that’s so satisfying about lambasting awful architecture. Its generally public nature? A bad building is an offense not just against individual taste, but against users, passersby, even entire neighborhoods. Is it the ponderous self-importance of the architecture establishment? Various malcontent architects have told me that there was a brief moment in the early 1990s when it looked as if the Kremlins of architecture taste were finally going to throw open their doors. Then the doors slammed shut once more, and they have been locked ever since. These days, I know of only three schools (Syracuse, Miami, and Notre Dame) that teach anything but mainstream modernist-postmodernist dogma. You write that you first saw through the propaganda of modernism when you wrestled with architecture in college. Sorry to say that I woke up somewhat later, but it was also while wrestling with architecture that it happened. I remember (to my shame) reacting indignantly the first time I read Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (buyable here). Well, I huffed, he has some points, but he just doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, blah blah. I knew a bit about architecture history, see, and clearly Wolfe didn’t get it. Then I learned much more about architecture history, re-read the book, and realized that Wolfe had indeed gotten it. He’s deliberately provocative, and he cartoon-ifies everything he touches. But his main point isn't just perfectly valid, it's key to understanding what's happened to cities and buildings in this country over the last 50 years. The two cents that I’d try to add to the discussion is that it doesn’t hurt to be wary of the rhetoric of postmodernism, which poses as a playful rebellion against modernism but which in practice turns out to be an extension of it. Postmodernism can be just as academic and imposed-from-above as the worst modernism. I'm pleased, for instance, that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (godparents of postmodernism) think architects should pay attention to the American strip. Big of them! But I find the buildings that they've built at Our Lousy Ivy College as stuffy and shallow as a building with lots of goofy brickwork can be. I mean, decoration's nice, but a shoebox is still a shoebox. Venturi and Scott Brown's Lewis Thomas Building The most entertaining and useful critiques of the modernist-postmodern mafia... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Orchestras in Crisis
Friedrich -- Robert H. Hughes in The Wall Street Journal (online, but you have to subscribe) reports that big-city symphony orchestras are undergoing a terrible financial crisis. They're really feeling the current business crunch. "Nearly a dozen cities' symphonies are operating six figures or more in the red," Hughes writes. Programming and salaries have been cut, seasons have been shortened, and a few orchestras have closed up shop. All this, despite the fact that attendance grew 16% during the 1990s. Further interesting facts: income from ticket sales accounts for only 38% of the revenues of the big orchestras. (Other main sources of income: endowments, gifts, government funding.) Classical-CD sales are shrinking. And the number of commercial radio stations devoted to classical has shrunk from 50 to 32 in the last decade. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Monday, October 7, 2002


Been there, done that
Michael I was glancing through the New Yorker of October 7 when I happened to notice the headline: “Miami Vice: Is this the ugliest building in New York?” I was intrigued, as I keep a special place in my heart for architectural theory. It was in an architecture class that I first rebelled against the authority of Modernism, which in the early 1970s lay like a frigid, crushing ice sheet across the aesthetic landscape. The ugliest building in New York? So I checked out Paul Goldberger’s review, eager to see where ‘educated’ opinion had gotten to in the intervening thirty years. Did that headline promise a postmodern rave, or some new-urbanist critique? At the beginning, I couldn’t exactly tell: The forty-five-story Westin is the most garish tall building that has gone up in New York in as long as I can remember. It is fascinating, if only because it makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky…This is less a building than a concept, and you can imagine it being pitched to the developer, Tishman Realty & Construction, the way producers pitch a television show to network executives… Yes, yes, Mr. Goldberger, but does that mean you like it or not? (I assume a postmodernist would think those were all good things.) I manfully stuck with the review, hoping to get my question answered. Goldberger was spending a lot of ink on the way the Westin’s tower was divided vertically into two parts by a curving white stripe, the taller half clad in vertical blue glass and a shorter half clad in horizontal pink glass. Finally he got down to brass tacks: [I]t makes no sense to design a single building to look as if it were two different, clashing buildings. The two parts aren’t different structurally and they aren’t doing different things inside…It’s all pretense—not the kind of pretense that brings us fake Georgian or fake Renaissance but the pretense that the hoopla is somehow connected to a meaningful architectural idea. Everything [the architectural design firm] Arquitectonica has done here is as superficially decorative as if the building had been sheathed in classical columns and pilasters. I sat up straight when I read that one. He was actually accusing the design of failing to obey the High Modernist commandment: Form Shall Follow Function. And it was not sinning venially (“the kind of pretense that brings us fake Georgian or fake Renaissance,”) it was sinning mortally by calling into doubt the True Faith (“that the hoopla is somehow connected to a meaningful architectural idea” [emphasis added]). He must be really outraged: he even compared the design to the perennial 'bad example' of modernism, Beaux Art classicism. Superficially decorative or just plain ugly? Just as I had pegged Mr. Goldberger as an unreconstructed Modernist (hey, there's no accounting for taste), he pulled a fast one on me. Moving on from the tower, he turns to the building’s “bustle”, the 13-story entertainment complex fronting on Times... posted by Friedrich at October 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Sunday, October 6, 2002


Arts in the Moonlight Re-redux
Michael In your posting, Arts in the Moonlight redux, you ask: I wonder how the NEA decides which artists who make little or no money at their art qualify to be called “professional artists.” Is it a matter of holding a degree of a certain sort? Of making a certain amount of money from art? If so, where is the line drawn? And why there? According to the NEA, their information came from the monthly Current Population Survey (“CPS”) data files. This survey is a joint product of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census; it is described on the CPS website, (which you can visit here): The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a monthly survey of about 50,000 households conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics...The CPS is the primary source of information on the labor force characteristics of the U.S. population…Estimates obtained from the CPS include employment, unemployment, earnings, hours of work, and other indicators. They are available by a variety of demographic characteristics including age, sex, race, marital status, and educational attainment. They are also available by occupation, industry, and class of worker. In short, for the purposes of the CPS (and thus the NEA study), a worker is a professional artist if he says he is. It appears that the CPS offers survey respondents a very long list of occupations to select among, including the following “artistic” categories: architects, designers, musicians and composers, actors and directors, dancers, announcers, painters, sculptors, craft artists, artist printmakers, photographers, authors, college and university teachers of art/drama/music, and artists not elsewhere classified (no doubt we bloggers could squeeze into this last category.) A “moonlighting” artist is a person who lists their “main” occupation as one of the above and also holds down a second job. This second job may or may not also be artistic although apparently the second job is more likely to be non-artistic today than in the past. Sorry if I was unclear on this significant point. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 6, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, October 5, 2002


Art in the Moonlight Redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for returning to the theme of art and economics, a much-underdone topic. The NEA study you discuss, about the job situations of “professional artists,” sounds fascinating. You’re no doubt better equipped than I am to pull it apart and make further sense of it. But one thing I’d like to know is how the study’s researchers define “professional artist.” I mean, if an artist isn’t making real money at his art, then he’s not a “professional artist” -- that’s basic, no? We’d laugh at a guy who claimed to be a “professional baseball player” if he had to hold down a fulltime job to support his baseball habit. So why do we allow a guy who enjoys playing the trombone but who makes his living as a carpenter to call himself a “professional musician”? (Most likely answer: sentimentality about that poor, persecuted field, the arts.) Another example: What’s the difference between a teacher who paints watercolors as a hobby, and a “professional watercolorist” who makes no money as a watercolorist and so supports himself as a teacher? No difference at all, as far as I can see. In both cases, it comes down to the same equation: Painting-for-pleasure plus teaching job. Does it really matter if the first person is relaxed about his commercial painting prospects, while the second person is still clinging to a dream of making it? They're both still doing the same thing. I wonder how the NEA decides which artists who make little or no money at their art qualify to be called “professional artists.” Is it a matter of holding a degree of a certain sort? Of making a certain amount of money from art? If so, where is the line drawn? And why there? I wonder this in full sympathy with all artists who wish they had fewer money challenges, and more time to do art. I know where you’re coming from, dudes and dudettes. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Art in the Moonlight
Michael The NEA, after performing considerable analysis on the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) and longitudinal databases such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has come to the rather unsurprising conclusion that most “professional” artist are unable to make a financial go of it without holding down a second job. (You can read the entirety of their study, “More Than Once In A Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings By American Artists,” here.) Getting beyond the obvious, the NEA offers some interesting (if not terribly astonishing) observations. One is on the precariousness of artistic jobs: while noting that artist’s educational qualifications are more similar to professionals rather than to the general workforce, the NEA notes that artists appear to have unemployment rates that are twice as high as other professionals. Another is that art doesn’t pay particularly well: artists earn only 77 to 88 percent as much as the average of other professionals. Ancient Economic Symbol of the Arts As for the extent of moonlighting by artists, the NEA’s analysis indicate that at any given moment of time, around 14% of artists are holding down a second job, which is about 40% higher than other professionals. The study also reports the results of several work-related surveys of artists. A 1983 survey of artists in New England suggests that only 24 per cent could make a living working solely at their artistic job. A 1981 survey found that 61 per cent of performing artists held second, non-artistic jobs. Authors surveyed in 1986 suggested that 70 per cent required a second job to make ends meet. The figure in a 1993 survey of choreographers was 80 per cent. Interestingly, given many complaints about the lack of government support for the arts in the United States, other countries with more developed publicly funded arts programs report very similar results. Finland, for example, a country with strong government support for artists, shows high rates of multiple-jobholding, with only 21 per cent of fine artists able to make ends meet without an outside job (although performing artists in Finland needed less outside employment than Americans.) A 1998 survey of Dutch visual artists reported that more than one-third of their earnings came from teaching and more than one-quarter of their earnings came from non-arts work despite extensive support for artists by the Netherlands’ government. In a 1982 survey of Canadian authors, 63 per cent needed income from moonlighting. A 1988 survey of almost three-quarters of Australian artists held some other job in addition to their artistic work. A 1994-95 survey of British visual artists found that only 11 percent earned all their income from working as artists. What would an economist make of this? I can’t speak professionally, but it would appear that the demand for artistic careers among the workforce seems to easily outstrip the supply of paying work in these fields. Apparently, this is true not only in America but around the developed world. It would appear that the psychic rewards of a career in... posted by Friedrich at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, October 2, 2002


Free Reads -- WTC Architecture
Friedrich -- Catesby Leigh in the New York Post argues that the planners and agencies responsible for rebuilding the site of the World Trade Centers are on entirely the wrong track, here. Sample passage: The announcement of the competition back in August made no bones about it: Hostility to tradition was a plus. It placed "risk-taking" - defined as "not accepting received wisdom but starting with fundamentals to go beyond easy and safe solutions" - at the top of the list of qualifications. Yet that "received wisdom" has shaped Gotham's noblest vistas. One traditionalist proposal for the site can be seen here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, October 1, 2002


If I Were an Editor 10 redux
Michael Where do you get off asserting modern artists come from money? Eager to refute this outrageous claim, I visited an Internet site with a large number of biographies of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, renoirauction.com. There it took me only a few moments to assemble the following data on their social origins: Frederic Bazille was born in 1841 to a wealthy family of wine producers near Montpellier. [Bonnard] began law studies c. 1885, but abandoned them in 1888 to work for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and at the Académie Julian…In 1889, after he had sold a champagne poster design, his father allowed him to begin serious training. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania to a prominent Pittsburgh family, [Mary Cassat] traveled extensively through Europe with her parents and siblings while a child. Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. …In 1886…he inherited his father's wealth and finally, at the age of 47, became financially independent… Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi into one of the oldest aristocratic families [in France]. Manet was born in Paris on January 23, 1832, the son of a high government official. To avoid studying law, as his father wished, he went to sea. He then studied in Paris under the academic French painter Thomas Couture and visited Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands to study the paintings of the old masters. Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, France into a family of wealth and culture. Her father was a high ranking civil servant. She was Fragonard's great-grand daughter. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) …was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859, the son of comfortably-off parents…Seurat's relative financial ease meant that he was unused to dealing with potential clients… Signac …decided to become an artist, his prosperous shopkeeping family giving him financial independence. Well, I hope this small study disabuses you of any idea that independent means and advanced art are in any way linked! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
If I Were an Editor 10
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your enlightening treatises about Shakespeare’s London and Mozart’s Vienna. The topic of money, business and art is usually taken on in such unhelpful ways: a big deal here, a betrayal there. Who cares? What I want to know is: how does this weirdo arts economy work? If I were an editor, I’d kick off coverage by commissioning a piece on the theme of “Trust Funds and Modern Art.” In my art-history explorations, I’ve been amazed by how many of the “radical” artists of the past were independently wealthy (or managed to marry someone rich). “Independently wealthy”: what an adorably genteel way of saying “rich enough to not have to work.” And in my explorations of today’s art-and-lit worlds, I’ve been just as amazed by how many current avant-garde types have enough money not to have to work for a living. The rest of us need to figure out some way to get by financially, which usually means either choosing to apply our talents in some business context (visually talented gal finds work as graphic designer) or by working at some job (word processor, teacher) we hope will be tolerable in order to support the art activities (painting, poetry) we care about more. If you take the first option, you wind up doing "commercial art," which isn't considered to be "real art"; if you take the second option, your art is in constant danger of becoming “just a hobby.” It sometimes seems like (a few exceptions allowed for) only the rich get to be "real artists," doesn't it? So why do we pay attention? It's not as though they need more luck and attention than they already have. The way family money has supported and fostered the avant-garde; avant-garde-ism as a function of the posture-striking of bohemian rich kids – yet more things they didn’t tell us about at our Lousy Ivy College. What was the student population like, money-and-statuswise, during your time at art school? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Monday, September 30, 2002


Every Picture Tells a Story redux
Michael, I know, I know, I swore I would never look at another of Gil Elvgren’s paintings—they are simply too deeply felt, too eloquent on the human condition for a sensitive soul such as myself. But I couldn’t help it. Apparently, in art, all roads lead to Elvgren! I was minding my own business, leafing through a book I own, called “Art at the Turn of the Millenium.” (It’s one of those books you can tell is ultra-hip because it’s in both French and English—although, oddly, the editors are both German.) Suddenly, I came across some documentation of Vanessa Beecroft’s installation pieces. I got really excited because Ms. Beecroft’s work is totally cutting edge, in the sense that like most performance pieces you have to be there to really get it—the perfect mechanism for separating the hipsters who go to art openings from the unwashed masses who, er, don’t. Vanessa does Tokyo! I decided to research the insider line on Ms. Beecroft in case some sophisticate started throwing her name around at a party. On the designboom.com website, which is apparently too hip even for capitalization, I found this penetrating commentary on one of her performance pieces: the one evening event (09.05.2000) is the first solo project by beecroft in the uk. it's art; it's fashion. it's good; it's bad. it's sexist; it's not. it's vanessa beecroft's performance art. the primary material in her work is the live figure, which remains ephemeral, separate and unmediated by any device we normally accept as artform, such as painting or photography. I don’t know about you, but I am just knocked out by any writer who can work ephemeral, separate and unmediated in one sentence—without even beginning it with a capital letter! I could tell I was out of my depth. I retreated back to my book “Art at the Turn of the Millenium,” pausing to marvel at the way it had a whole second title: “L’ART AU TOURNANT DE L’AN 2000.” There I picked up some more prosaic background info (in both English and French): Since the mid-1990s, Vanessa Beecroft has been parading before us a succession of scantily clad girls. Recently, they’ve been appearing with nothing on at all. In Beecroft’s performances and exhibition openings they silently take up their positions, moving very little, standing before the public like living pictures. Standing Like Living Pictures--Early Version, Late Version Before I could control myself, I remembered that Elvgren too had painted pictures of scantily-clad girls (and some apparently wearing nothing at all!) Was it possible that the Elvgren, uber-artist that he was, had successfully anticipated performance art 50 years or more in the future? I manfully suppressed the thought and went on: Wholly in keeping with the late 20th century happening culture, Beecroft is offering something that obviously cannot be conveyed through the media. And yet she is playing in her mind with the very images communicated by the media. Elvgren & Beecroft: Master & Disciple? This was simply too much. I... posted by Friedrich at September 30, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, September 28, 2002


Bye, Bye France
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Some sociological phenomena seem to pass by completely unnoticed, and (for no good reason) I'd like take note of one of these: the way that France has grown to be of so little interest to Americans. I'm happy to mock France as a nation of underbathed, self-important cowards and showoffs; lord knows they ask for it. Still, I once spent a (miserable) year there, I was drawn to the arts via French movies, novels and painting... Anouk Grinberg in "Mon Homme" However pathetic those personal fact are, France for a very long time meant a lot to Americans. Many of the best American artists and architects of the 19th century went to Paris to polish off their educations. Throughout the 20th century, serious American artists, modernist division, took inspiration from early 20th-century French art. France meant love, food, beauty, fatalism, pleasure, wine, absinthe, unfiltered cigarettes. Oh, and sophisticated actresses who didn't mind disrobing, and who did so with a queen's gravitas. Everyday people took France seriously too. Wifeys and hubbies plotted out their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages to Paris. Anyone interested in taste and food bowed down before French cuisine. Kids studied more French than they did any other language, and college students flocked to spend a semester or two in Paris -- this seemed especially important to a certain class of girls, who appreciated learning "how to be a woman": ie., learning how to wear a scarf and boots, how to use makeup, how to conduct an affair, and how to use a bidet. Going to France was a way of symbolizing that you put such ooh-la-la values above (patooie) business, economic efficiency and convenience. It was an American's one stab at what Americans feel so divided about: Sophistication. Then the French lost their magic. When? How? And why? As far as I can tell, it happened around 1980. There was a micro-mini-genre of movies about American kids in France ("French Postcards" in 1979, and the immortal "Summer Lovers" in 1982). And, really, have we heard much about France as a cultural magnet since? Perhaps readers can fill in a few blanks here. Marie-France Pisier in "French Postcards" Why have Americans lost interest? Perhaps it's because we've made so much progress where quality-of-life questions go. Who needs France when American food has gotten better and American clothes have grown less dorky, and at a time when sex is, to put it mildly, not in short cultural supply? But perhaps the French themselves have blown it: A friend who lives in Paris tells me that even the food in Paris isn't good any more. What, in fact, does France have left to sell? I still find their fashions alluring, or at least the way they present them. I'd rather leaf through an issue of Marie-Claire than an issue of Playboy any day, and one fashion-crazy friend of mine still takes off for some serious Parisian shopping a couple of times a year. Camgirl, French-style Even on... posted by Michael at September 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, September 27, 2002


Fun With Flash
Friedrich -- In my amateurish way, I enjoy following commercial art: ads, book jackets, posters, etc. My current fave amateurish observation to make is that Flash animations are having more influence on the general visual culture than any other form these days. I may be right, I may be completely wrong, as the Wife never tires of pointing out. But there's no question that the Flash animation field is a hopping one. Weebl's Stuff is a British website run by a guy who makes Flash animations in his spare time. Sample his work here. I think Weebl's a hoot. Be sure not to miss "Kitty Bash," featuring kittens and a bloody hammer. Hey, if Weebl is making these things in his spare time, that means his animations aren't strictly speaking commercial art. But they certainly represent something more than just a hobby. So should they be considered a kind of art-for-art's-sake fine art? But some of them are interactive games, which aren't usually considered art... Hmm: Maybe the time has come for me to revise some fundamental assumptions. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Art and Markets
Friedrich -- Many thanks for the fascinating rundown on the economics of the Elizabethan theater. Why don't art-history professors tell kids these things? I'm still reeling, all these years later, from the shock of discovering that most art hasn't been done out of the sheer love of doing it. I have nothing like your background in history, but I did stumble across one book on the topic of the economics of art that I found very useful, In Praise of Commercial Culture by an econ prof named Tyler Cowen. (Buyable here.) A history of art and markets, it's a little once-over-lightly (which may suit me better than it suits you), and he isn't good on the actual art. But he's a zillion times more down-to-earth, shrewd and better-informed about such topics as "making a living at this" than the art history profs are. Cowen teaches at George Mason, which seems to have a lively department -- Walter Williams, the libertarian econ columnist I enjoy so much, teaches there too. Cowen's own website is here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, September 25, 2002


Hollywoodize Yourself
Friedrich -- If you have a snapshot and 25 bucks, you can be the star of your own George Hurrell production, here. Digital: be your own fantasy. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Free Reads -- Barnes Foundation
Friedrich -- What in the world is really going on at the Barnes Foundation (website here)? The great art collection, left in 1951 by Dr. Albert C. Barnes to be housed (and very quirkily displayed) in his mansion outside Philadelphia, is in bad financial trouble, and there's now talk of breaking Barnes' will in order to merge the Foundation with several others. Things have been bizarre in Barnes-land before. Dr. Barnes specified that the collection was never to tour, for instance, or to be displayed in color reproductions -- yet a large part of it was put on tour in 1993, accompanied by a color catalogue. No matter how bad the place's financial situation, these repeated violations of Barnes' will have got to be giving pause to anyone who wants to leave behind an art collection. Ralph Blumenthal writes about the mess for the NYTimes here. Roger Kimball gives a more opinionated view for the WSJ here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, September 24, 2002


Every Picture Tells A Story
Michael When I went to lunch today I lost my head and took not only one but two books with me: E.H. Gombrich’s “The Image & The Eye” and a book of reproductions of Gil Elvgren’s paintings. This sort of thing is always a mistake. I can never decide which book to read, and often try to look at both of them and get horribly dizzy. Anyway, I decided to start with theory and began with Gombrich’s essay on “Action and Expression in Western Art.” There my eye lit on the following passage: [T]here must be a great difference between a painting which illustrates a known story and another that wishes to tell a story. No history exists of this second category, the so-called anecdotal painting…It is likely, however, that the student of non-verbal communication would find a good deal of interest in these systematic attempts to condense a typical dramatic scene into a picture without any…contextual aids... Wow, I thought, I have an example of that right here. I opened the book of Elvgren’s paintings and my attention was immediately drawn by this narrative masterwork: Obviously Elvgren had decided to depict the intense drama of the witness facing the opposing attorney. Of course, space considerations apparently dictated the elimination of the opposing attorney, but Elvgren’s artistic mastery overcomes this by showing the young woman’s twisting posture as she writhes under his savage cross-examination. Of course, her expression is a bit ambiguous; why do you suppose she is smiling and batting her eyelashes? Perhaps she sees her brother in the courtroom crowd, and wants to let him know how well she is bearing up under the strain. Well, even if the context is a little unclear, I think Elvgren’s penetrating analysis of the human condition is quite powerfully rendered. I went back to Gombrich: One could think of other topics and social functions which have driven the artist towards the exploration of non-verbal communication. Advertising, for instance, frequently demands the signalling of rapturous satisfaction on the part of the child who eats his breakfast cereals, the housewife who uses a washing powder or the young man smoking a cigarette. To find an example, knowing that Elvgren had done advertising work, I again leafed through the book of his paintings, until I saw this example of what appeared to be art for a home workshop ad. I thought, this must explain why the woman in the advertisement is making such a kissy little mouth while feeling the edge of the axe blade—she’s surprised at how sharp her new grindstone has made her dull old axe! It was a little unusual, granted, to use a woman in the ad at all, of course. I mean, you’d think grindstones would be more of a guy’s thing—and sharpening axes, too. And her choice of legwear is a bit unorthodox for a workshop, even if it is at home—I don’t think my old shop teacher would have thought that sitting so close to a grindstone... posted by Friedrich at September 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, September 21, 2002


Crunchy Cons, Reredux
Michael I got around to checking out the on-line version of "Granola Conservatives" by the National Review’s Rod Dreher which you recommended. I agree that it is quite interesting and I'd like to respond to it. For those of you who haven't read it, Dreher’s main thesis is that despite being a conservative, in some respects his life and values have "more in common with left-wing counterculturalists than with many garden-variety conservatives.” Garden Variety Conservatives? I have little to argue with Dreher's somewhat obvious (but true) point that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in anybody’s philosophy, and his more subtle suggestion that one should always look closely at what you can learn from your intellectual opponents. After all, these people spend a lot of time engaged with exactly the same issues that engage you--they're bound to dig up something you should think about. But Dreher takes his argument further, using two examples where he thinks lefties have a point that conservatives are not taking. The first is that capitalism, with its emphasis on economic growth, can be bad for the environment, and that conservatives often fail to support environmentally-friendly policies or will even actively oppose them. The second is that modern capitalist society creates a sort of relentless, debased, lowest-common denominator culture, leaving Dreher little choice but to--eeek!--seek relief from National Public Radio and PBS. (The horror!) Regarding the environment, I can only analyze my own feelings about this in detail. I would be lying if I denied that I constantly feel suspicious of environmentalism. Why? To be honest, it bothers me that the environmental "movement" is so clearly just a new vessel that has been filled with the same old anti-capitalist wine that used to slosh around in the socialist/communist winesack. I don't think it is unnatural to be suspicious of a movement that seems so frankly opportunistic and disingenuous about its arguments, if constant in its goals. But this is a sort of ad hominen argument; forgetting environmentalism, what of the environment itself? As a father and a link in a genetic chain that I hope will still be going strong many generations in the future, I think one would have to be insane to be indifferent to the fate of the environment. However, I still have reservations about the ways and means of current-day left-wing 'command and control' environmentalism. Let me give a real-world example of why I have these reservations. There is a land use dispute taking place in my home town. A large (3,000 home) residential development, backed by a major savings & loan, is stalled because of the presence of an endangered animal. Now, I live in a neighborhood which is in the next valley over and just as environmentally un-friendly as the proposed development but which got built before the Endangered Species Act was passed. Nobody in my neighborhood gives a damn about the threat to this endangered animal or pretends to; they oppose this development because... posted by Friedrich at September 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, September 20, 2002


Time-stopping Redux
Michael Did you know there is a whole niche of er, erotic literature called "time stopping?" I'd tell you more but it's not my bag and I didn't poke into it. I'm always surprised to see how sexual fetishes and fantasies, which people usually consider deeply private, are almost always common to many. And, of course, since the Internet came along, shared among many. (Hey, you name the fantasy--furry people, shrinking or growing people, gender-switching, smoking, hypnotizing your hot schoolteacher into being a bit more friendly--there's a community for you online, with an associated literature.) I'm also surprised by the ways in which culture, whether "high" or "pop," seems to often be informed by "underground" sexual literature. Wasn't it Delacroix who commented that the arts of his time were covertly saturated with the influence of the Marquis de Sade? What was Delacroix reading? You could do a whole Ph.D. thesis on the meaning for modern pop culture of Betty Page, who modelled for Irving Klaw's (classic name!)rather furtive plain brown wrapper publications in the 1950s--I've given up counting the number of references I've seen to her in the past 10 years. A few days ago I was rather surprised to see Michelle Pfieffer on a woman's magazine cover wearing a black dress that overtly refers to rubber/PVC- fetish ware. (Although, thinking of her "cat suit" in Batman, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.) Betty and Michelle--sisters under the skin? Ubiquitous pop culture and still-ghettoized erotic culture are only separated by a razor's edge--and it's gotten to be a very sharp razor indeed since the launch of MTV. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Currin Redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for tipping me off to John Currin. I enjoyed the interview with him that you linked to. I notice that at one point he says: I like things to be still, I'm interested in a still image...There's a pleasure in freezing movement, a voyeuristic pleasure in being able to see one moment and look at it forever. So true. Have you ever read Nicolson Baker's "The Fermata"? On the same theme: the hero can stop time. Baker: Time-stopper The only thing, it turns out, that Baker's hero can think of to do with the stopped time is to walk around undressing and feeling up women. A wonderful creepy/sexy/funny novel, the only Nicholson Baker book where I felt the obsessiveness and virtuosity got in synch and paid off. Plus some amazingly specific (and bizarrely convincing) descriptions of what time, when stopped, feels like. I wonder how John Currin and Nicholson Baker would get on. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Gombrich Redux
Friedrich -- I think you're really onto something when you bring Gombrich and evo-bio together. They're both useful; they both help explain the arts. They may not explain everything, but they get you in the ballpark, and that counts for a lot. Gombrich I don't think I ever encountered any explanation Marx-derived or Freud-derived that did me any good. Structuralism, decon -- fooey to all that. Back when we were in college, discussions of the arts were often discussions of greatness and transcendence. I found and find that kind of discussion almost useless. I may be interested in your opinion, or the Wife's, or for that matter a given professor's. But only because I know and enjoy and respect you. (Even so, I do have hopes that your opinion will then open out onto something further -- observations, jokes, musings.) Besides, discussions about what's great lead to stupid arguments ("X is better!" "No, Y is better!") and tend to get stupidly political ("X should be in the canon!" "No, Y should!"). Who cares? Well, someone probably does and should, but not me. And what's really to be said about "greatness" or "transcendence" anyway? Although I can enjoy critical and fannish rhapsodizing up to a point. For whatever dubious reasons, I'm more interested in what's helpful. And what I tend to find helpful is the study of artistic forms -- their history, their components. Narrative genres, visual genres, musical types and structures, etc -- these are the building blocks of art, as well as the grammar of it. Where did the various artistic forms and genres come from? That's where I think evolutionary psychology comes in useful. They evolved. From what? From innate structures, probably, as well as from what showed itself from experience to work over time. For instance, when I first read my favorite novel, Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma," I read it in isolation from most of the lit and entertainment of its time, so I (dimly) had the impression that Stendhal made it all up. Wow, what a god of creativity he seemed. Stendhal Since then, I've learned that for content he was lifting from a particular kind of Italian romantic narrative, and for structure he was leaning heavily on the then-very-popular swashbuckler-romance form. My respect for Stendhal hasn't diminished -- hey, he was a human: good job! -- and my enjoyment of the novel hasn't either. This is simply the way art works. Nobody makes it all up. Structures and forms evolve; and, as they do, artists do their best to add their two cents to the mix. But, also, so much seems to be innate. I'm no scientist, but I can't see how anyone can argue that it isn't part of being human to try to read figurative imagery into anything we see; to try to read narrative and/or argument into anything long-ish that we read; to hear and/or look for melody into anything we're asked to listen to as music; and to try to... posted by Michael at September 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Artist's Quote of the Day
Michael I found a great interview with John Currin, one of my favorite contemporary painters: You can find it in full here. An excerpt: You can't make a painting without embracing your own desire as something good…That's why I've always thought of myself as an expressionist artist. I think in terms of expressionism because it's involved with dumb ideas, really stupid ideas; and even if my strategy would seem to be mapped-out, some people would even say "smart," that's not what I mean when I say "stupid." I'm talking about stupid urges and stupid desires, things that don't involve any irony or anything intellectual… I think about things that are not ironic, like sexual desire, fear of death, basic things that are by no means new concepts. A semiotician would say that the entire world is ironic, that it's about understanding where the misapplied labels are, that the very idea of a label describing something is a lie anyway. It seems to me that great art always makes you feel like there isn't a misapplied label. Currin's "The Veil," "The Bra Shop" and "Jaunty & Mame" And they say breast men aren't smart cookies! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Cultural Evolution
Michael I was reading “The Image & The Eye” by E. H. Gombrich last night and stumbled across what may be the common link between our interest in socio-biology and the arts. Discussing the development of what he terms 'the convincing image' in Western Art (a process by which any element of realism subjects the rest of the image to a critical process that will, in time, make it more realistic too), Gombrich offers a little tangential insight: There is a real Darwinian parallel here which should not be overlooked. For the evolution of convincing images was indeed anticipated by nature long before human minds could conceive this trick. I am referring to the wonders of protective colouring and mimicry, of deterrent and camouflaging forms in plants and animals. As we have learnt at school, and as we can see with amazement in zoological displays, there are insects that look exactly like the leaves of the tree which is their habitat…. Moth on Tree The eye and the brain of the bird from which protective colouring must hide the butterfly surely differ in a thousand ways from ours. And yet we can only assume that both for the bird and for us the butterfly and the leaf have become indistinguishable…[M]ight it not be argued that the shapes of art are also arrived at through adaptation to various functions…we may assume that evolution in art as in nature could also approximate other specifications than that of effortless recognizability. Maybe the immensely disquieting and expressive forms of those tribal styles we call ‘primitive’ also evolved step by step towards awe-inspiring or terrifying configurations… One might imagine that it was merely felt that certain masks, images or ornaments were charged with more potency, more mana, than others, and that those features that made for their magic power survived and increased in the course of time. Maybe the reason I like art history, in addition liking individual pieces of art (a combination of tastes that, when you think about it, is by no means necessarily automatic) is that I’m seeking a sense of functional development in art. I’m like a paleontologist, looking for fossils that document the evolution of artistic ideas. Or maybe my interest in art stems from the fact that it offers a handy, concrete manifestation of the processes of cultural and biological evolution which one can more dimly sense occurring around us every day. What do you think? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, September 19, 2002


The Oldenburg Story, Part II
Michael Have you heard of bad boy Belgian artist Wim Delvoye? He’s a sort of a latter-day Claes Oldenburg, but then I always liked Claes Oldenburg. Obviously a joker, he has gone in for such exercises as a full-sized wooden copy, elaborately guilded, of a cement mixer: Rococo Cement Mixer He revisited this theme more recently by creating a full-size, wooden replica of a cement truck, fussily ornamented like spooky Old World furniture in your Grandmother’s house. Grandma's Cement Truck What can I say, he seems to like cement. Changing media to photography, he took pictures of massive cliffs towering above villages and added (presumably by computer) what appear to be enormous, neatly incised messages to the rock face, like inscriptions carved into Roman buildings. Of course, these imperial, more-than-billboard sized messages are utterly banal in Delvoye's work: “SUSAN, OUT FOR A PIZZA, BACK IN FIVE MINUTES." Mr. Delvoye seems to have made quite a stir with his latest installation piece, entitled “Cloaca” in which food is pulverized, subjected to various enzymes, and comes out as something rather close to shit. While I wouldn’t hurry out to see this, I grant you that it is the kind of thing that will get you written about—and I suppose that’s the point. (Hey, I’ll forgive a lot in artists who have a sense of humor…so few do.) Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Free Reads -- L.A. Cathedral Redux
Friedrich -- Paul Goldberger of the New Yorker reacts to the new, Rafael Moneo-designed, Our Lady of the Angels cathedral in L.A., here. Though, to be honest, it's hard to tell quite how he's reacting. Praise-quickly-retracted follows on criticism-quickly-hedged, over and over. Give Me that Big-Box Religion Goldberger's a strange one. He's much more broadminded than most establishment architecture critics, willing not only to acknowledge that such phenonomena as the New Urbanism and the New Classicism exist but also to treat them semi-respectfully. But he seems terrified that if he goes too far -- either in lacing into the absurdities of late Modernism or in praising non-avant-garde work -- he'll lose his establishment membership card. (He's probably right.) I can only guess, of course, but my impression from his amazingly waffly piece is that Goldberger really doesn't like the new cathedral one bit. How do you read him? Sample passage: The new cathedral has more in common with the familiar Los Angeles megabox. It's a big, horizontal mass, like the Beverly Center, the vast shopping mall built atop a parking structure; and the Pacific Design Center, a beached whale in blue glass; and the factorylike Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I don't say this to be disrespectful. I think Moneo has tried to take a particular kind of Los Angeles building and make it into something spiritual, although it's not a natural leap. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Free Reads -- Freund
Friedrich -- Eakins' "Four-in-Hand": Photoshopped? Charles Paul Freund of Reason magazine has been doing some venturesome thinking and writing about art. He's much more freewheeling and openminded (and also direct and to-the-point) than the art world's own writers are. Freund writes about Eakins, Vermeer, Hockney and technological helping hands here. Sample passage: What Eakins did with the photos was a laborious version of what many digital artists are doing today. Eakins didn’t merely create painted versions of photographs. Using a "magic lantern" to project a series of disparate images on a single canvas, he made composites. The final painterly conception is entirely his own, and is apparently what drove his creation of the photos in the first place. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, September 18, 2002


Free Reads -- Andres Duany
Friedrich -- American Enterprise magazine runs a good interview with Andres Duany, one of the ringleaders of the New Urbanism, here. Sample passage: The real problem is the impulse to be avant-garde, which severs our ties with the past. Avant-garde buildings can occasionally be quite beautiful. But the win-loss ratio is horrible; unacceptable. To get those very, very few successful, glorious, modernist buildings, you sacrifice an enormous percentage of failed buildings at every level, because each designer tries to reinvent the wheel instead of improving on established forms. Curious what a New Urbanist town looks like? Click here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, September 14, 2002


Free Reads -- Adorno Redux
Friedrich -- Knowing what an Adorno fan you are, I'm passing along this Edward Rothstein piece in the NYTimes about him, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Uglow Model
Friedrich -- From an online talk with Lisa Coleman, an English actress, about working as a nude model for the artist Euan Uglow: At first I was very prudish about it, but then I felt really liberated. During coffee breaks I used to walk about the studio still naked, with a fag in my mouth. I posed for him for two years - and he never finished the picture. That did irritate me. Picture below is by Euan Uglow, though not of Lisa Coleman. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, September 13, 2002


Free Reads -- L.A. Cathedral
Friedrich -- Michael S. Rose has come out swinging against contemporary church architecture. (About time someone finally took that fight on.) Why do they look like drive-ins, food courts, and shoeboxes? In "Ugly As Sin," his new book, Rose explains the reasons. Few new churches have received the kind of ecstatic press that Our Lady of the Angels, the new L.A. cathedral designed by the Spanish modernist Jose Raphael Moneo, is currently getting. Rose has a contrarian's view in the Wall Street Journal, here. Geometry and Faith? I haven't seen the finished church myself. Have you? When the Wife and I drove by it during construction, it looked well on its way to resembling a chic parking garage. [Readers can take a few looks for themselves at the church's website, here.] Sample passage from Rose: The building consciously breaks with the historical continuity of two millennia of Catholic church architecture. Instead it pays homage to the past 50 years of banal and uninspiring utilitarian office structures that have littered the landscape of downtown Los Angeles (and many other American cities). Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 13, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Pontormo and Ingres
Michael I just got a new book on Pontormo (Jacopo Carrucci), the Florentine Mannerist. As I went through it, I was struck less by the similarity between Pontormo's art and that of his contemporaries (e.g., Andre Del Sarto and Agnolo Bronzino) than by the way it seemed to find an echo in the work of J.A.D. Ingres, some 300 years his junior. I'm not suggesting anything very mystical here; Ingres spent 20 years of his career in Rome and 4 years in Florence, so his opportunities for exposure to Pontormo were significant. But since Ingres' "worship" of Raphael is an art-historical cliche, I think it's useful to examine if his affinities were not closer to the less academically acceptable Pontormo. Both Ingres and Pontormo were masters of an extremely refined style, and with both painters they caressed the "strings" of style with as much attention, if not more so, than the "music" of their subject matter. Their palates were so fastidious that neither could really choke down Michelangelo's example, although they both spent time attempting to do so. Raphael, on the other hand, could and would shove everything he could find into his artistic maw (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Gorgione, you name it), burped and went on to the next course. Both Ingres and Pontormo preferred a rather distant and subdued rhetoric in their treatment of subject matter, while again Raphael is far more of a showman, now refined for the royalty in the gallery, now coarse and playing to the crowd. Neither could remotely be envisioned as the painter of Raphael's "The Transfiguration" which is one of the showiest, "Hey Ma look at me!" paintings ever made. And both Ingres and Pontormo were aesthetes who turned to private visions of sensuality while adrift on the seas of war and turmoil; Ingres (1780 - 1867) experienced the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars as a young man, while during Pontormo's lifetime Italy went from chaotic independence to being dominated by outside powers, with episodes like the Sack of Rome tossed into the mix. Anyway, just to give you a little visual thrill, I include some examples. The first is "The Grand Odalisque" by Ingres (painted 1814). Note the similarity of the pose to that of the Pontormo's figure study for the loggia frescos in either Careggi or Castello (drawn sometime after 1530.) [I'll get back to you shortly on this] The second is Ingres' "Woman Bathing" of 1807. Again, although the pose is quite different, notice the Madonna of Pontormo's "Madonna and Child with a Young St. John" (sorry, I don't know the date.) With a little hair coloring, it could be the same woman. Cheers Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 13, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, September 12, 2002


Artistic Problems
Michael In my posting, "Godard redux," I referred, rather mysteriously, to the concept that art needs sustained engagement with artistically nurturing emotional/technical "problems." Reading that over, I'm highly confident (as Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert used to say) that nobody could guess what the hell I'm talking about. So here's an example. In 1481 Leonardo Da Vinci got a commission for an altarpiece on the topic of "The Adoration of the Magi." Leonardo, not having an ounce of Christian piety in him, saw this as an opportunity to explore some formal ideas he was playing with. (Of course, this being the Renaissance and not the 20th Century, Leonardo had no intention of shocking or alienating the religious order who were paying his bills--he was perfectly happy to "illustrate" the Gospel story in such a way that it could be used as a backdrop for their church services.) Leonardo apparently began his thinking with Boticelli's version of the same story which was about six years old at the time. Botticelli Leonardo obviously didn't think Botticelli had said the last word on the subject. If you notice, Botticelli's brightly daylit painting describes space largely by having his figures (conveniently clothed in different colored outfits) overlap, and having them stand under a structure that is obviously constructed in one-point perspective. Only in the upper corners does Botticelli use atmospheric perspective to show that the landscape background is far, far behind the foreground. Leonardo seems to have had a brainwave: what if he could use atmospheric perspective (or something closely related to it) to describe the foreground figures and bring them into a clear spatial relationship with each other. He would have discovered a new "unity" for painting, that could make the figure groups attain the monumentality of sculpture (albeit by a completely unsculptural device). Leonardo seems to have found the technical effect he was looking for in dim, highly diffuse yet still directional light. Leonardo, after two years of playing around, brought the picture to this state: Leonardo He then abruptly left town, abandoning the project and leaving the poor monks with this unfinished picture. I'm sure he had a cover story (artists always do) but I believe the real reason Leonardo gave up on the picture was that he couldn't figure out how to take it any further. To be more specific, when he started superimposing local color over his monochrome underpainting, how could he keep the "picture puzzle" effect of differing local colors from disrupting the unifying effect of light, shadow and atmosphere that he had already created? The altarpiece sat unfinished for years, serving as a challenge to ambitious painters. Leonardo, on his travels around Italy, kept playing with this problem, although not, in my opinion, really solving it. The best he could do in his later paintings was to introduce very quiet, subdued, grayed-out colors (e.g., The Mona Lisa). However, in the fall of 1504, a youth from Urbino showed up in Florence, eager to prove his mettle.... posted by Friedrich at September 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, September 11, 2002


New Classicists
Friedrich -- Robert Adam's Sackler Library at Oxford If you're interested in the New Classicism, here are some treats. First, the thoughts of a few New Classicist intellectuals: *Leon Krier on how absurd modernist architecture is, here. *Carroll William Westfall compares classical and modernist architecture, here. *David Watkin, a brilliant British architectural historian, arguing that classical architecture is the language of Western civ, here. *Lucien Steil, himself a New Classicist, runs Katarxis, a terrific webzine about traditional and classical architecture, here. You can taste-test some of the work of the New Classicists at these sites: *The Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture, in NYC, here. *The studio of Robert Adam, one of the more bold New Classicists, here. *The native-born and still-young Eric Watson of Tampa, Florida, who has worked with many of the New Urbanists, here. *Julian Bicknell, one of the stricter but also most romantic of the group, here. [Note to the zillions of journalists (small joke) who frequent this site looking for ideas to steal: go wild! And lotsa luck with this one, which I tried to sell for years, and for which I never found any takers.] Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Free Reads -- Catesby Leigh
Friedrich -- One of the most interesting developments in architecture in recent years has been the resurgence of classical (not just traditional, but actual columns-and-porticoes) architecture. It's also been one of the most unremarked developments, at least so far as the mainstream and official architectural press go. Catesby Leigh writes about the rebirth of classical architecture for the Weekly Standard, here. It would also be worth buying a copy of the magazine, which includes photos of the buildings discussed. Sample passage: The romantic stereotype of the architect as a Promethean genius--a man who invents the terms of his art more or less ex nihilo--has done the profession considerable harm. Most clients haven't much use for visionaries who aspire to erect gigantic upside-down woks. A small number of high-profile jobs allows a well-placed coterie to inflict their "creativity" on the hapless public. But meanwhile, more and more work slips away from architects, as clients get the job done with construction engineers and tradesmen. Add on top of this the preservationists' listing of everything they can get their hands on, and the average architecture-school graduate finds it very hard to be "creative" and make a living. Some good news: one of the best of the New Classicists has been engaged to build a new $100 million quad at our Lousy Ivy College. I didn't like much about the place but I did think it was pretty, and it's been awful to see the mess the administrators (and their fave postmodern architect) have made of new construction in the years since we left. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Colored Prints
Friedrich -- I had no idea that Renaissance prints were often hand-colored, or colored at all. Did you? The Baltimore Museum of Art (website here) opens a show of 80 such colored prints on October 6th, which they describe as "the first extensive exploration of hand-colored prints of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. During the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the application by brush of washes, body color, and precious gold, and silver paints to engravings, etchings, and woodcuts was a common aspect of print production." Here's an example, a hand-colored Durer woodcut from 1511. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, September 6, 2002


Prissy Art Classes Redux
Michael I was looking at a book I picked up on vacation, "Realism in 20th Century Painting" by Brendan Prendeville. I discovered that what I termed "structured" drawing (i.e., mapping out your image by measuring everything visually using pencil or paintbrush) was a central theme of the art of various postwar British painters. William Coldstream (1908-1987) insisted on painting from observation: "By systematically gauging vertical and horizontal distances on the person or object, seen against a brush held at arm's length, and marking his canvas accordingly, Coldstream sought to let his subject emerge as if by itself, without having been merely willed. Equally, he was intent on respecting the integrity of the painting's surface, its beauty." Coldstream set up something called the Euston Road School with a couple of other artists, Claude Rogers and Victor Passmore. The book, which is regrettably short on illustrations, does reproduce two intriguing canvases: one of Victor Passmore's paintings, "The Studio of Ingres," and another by one of Coldstream's students, Euan Uglow, "Curled Nude on a Stool." Passmore Uglow In both cases the reduction of three-dimensional data to a set of completely two-dimensional marks is very evident (the work almost becomes conceptual art), and yet its conceptualness (conceptualosity? conceptitude?) is in rather interesting tension to the fleshiness of the nudes. (Oddly, both renderings seem to focus on buttocks. Accident--or Hidden Meaning?) Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 6, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, September 5, 2002


Prissy Art Classes
Friedrich -- Snappy work! John Singer Sargent, watch out. More artists should start making use of JPEGs, blogs and email as distribution systems. Smash the gallery cartel! How do you like prissy art classes? I took one that qualified: a couple of weekends, very intense. Everything we drew we had to measure and then measure again. We used plumb lines, straight sticks and other devices. It was the Art 101 equivalent of taking a really severe-and-precise cooking class. I wouldn't want to work like that all the time, but the process became rather absorbing; it was fascinating to learn about the techniques, and to let whatever was going to happen to your head and eyes just happen. I got more out of it than I did out of most of the "express yourself" art classes I've taken. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Mein Own Art
Michael I tried out your idea of shooting some art with an electronic camera over the weekend. Following are three of my drawings from the art class I took in the fall of 2001. They were done as "structured" drawings--that is, everything in them was measured (the face measured in "eye-width" units, the body in head-length units.) This turns out to be trickier than it looks; the body doesn't always give you landmarks where'd you'd like to have them. They were drawn with conte pencil on newsprint, a medium I don't pretend to have mastered, especially for modelling purposes--which is why these are rather low contrast, linear images. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at September 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Tuesday, September 3, 2002


And That's Putting It Mildly
Friedrich -- From the British magazine Philosophy Today: The death of man, the death of the subject and the death of the author were celebrated rather than mourned in the 1960s, and brought in their wake the end of ethics, the end of agency, and the end of committed literature. The anti-humanistic hubris of the heyday of structuralism seems retrospectively not so much radical as suicidal. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at September 3, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, August 30, 2002


Symmetry, Classicism and Eros Reredux
Michael There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Thursday, August 29, 2002


Free Reads -- Dorment on Puvis
Friedrich -- Puvis de Chavannes made two paintings of John the Baptist being beheaded. Richard Dorment in the Telegraph compares them, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Symmetry, Classicism and Eros
Friedrich -- I've read, as who hasn't, news reports over the last few years about how evolutionary theorists have been thinking about beauty, about how beauty seems related to symmetry, and how both function (at the very least, I should think) as signs of reproductive health. Throw all that and a little del Sarto and Han into my muddled brain, and you've got me thinking, Hmm, classical art at its sexiest seems to be a matter of symmetry crossed with something just a little bit off. Why? Maybe symmetry represents design and conscious intention: Culture? Skill? Fantasy, desire, and the ideal? And maybe "something a little bit off" signifies "interest," "vitality," and "life." Put them together and you've got something that seems to fuse, in however unstable a mix, a hint of Ideal beauty together with its flawed incarnation in temporal life. And I'm musing a bit about today's gal performers. Have performers ever looked so gorgeous or been in such great shape? They seem physically perfect, walking fantasies -- yet they do almost nothing for my religio-erotic centers, at least once past the first attention-dazzling minute. Kapow! Then my interest is all burned up, and I'm on to the next blast. Cristina, Poppin' Out At You Recently I was looking at web sites devoted to actresses from the '60s and '70s (Anna Karina, Stephanie Beacham, Susan George, etc). Gorgeous gals, though not tweaked, implanted, buffed and Photoshopped to anything like the high polish of today's performers. Susan George, Inviting You In And I was enchanted, partly because that was the era that imprinted itself on my then-still-malleable brain. But the enchantment also had to do with the actresses's imperfections -- the overbite, the too-small butt, the little scar on the temple. They didn't exist as pure fantasy and thereby usurp my erotic imagination; and images of them don't jump out at you either. I find that these actresses (and images of them) stir the imagination while inviting me into the stuff of life: sorrow, beauty, transience, physicality. The result: I feel aroused, moved, touched, and exalted all at once. The sensation isn't of having my buttons pounded (and my soul hence flattened), but of being lured out of myself, there to contemplate the Larger Questions. Cute as the Britneys, Cristinas, Shakiras and Taras are -- and I'm a fan of kiddieporn pop -- they never move me. Too much symmetry? Do they move you? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Andrea del Sarto Reredux
Friedrich -- I've been leafing through my del Sarto book thanks to your urging. Classy! And classic. Fascinating how his pallette tends to be either muted or outright electric-stormy. He doesn't bother much with the range in between. I love del Sarto's shallow, sometimes indefinite shelf of space -- it makes the figures function like objects in a trompe l'oeil painting, defining their own space and world, as isolated in consciousness as on the canvas. Placement and organization, baby, not movement and dynamism! Also the care he takes with his compositions: chaste yet voluptuous. And stranger and eerier than you first think it's going to be, as classical art often is. Speaking of classic, have you ever seen the contempo painter Raymond Han's work? Very impressive, enjoyable, and sexual. His paintings have some similarities to del Sarto's -- the shallow shelf, the sense of organization, the khaki/mother-of-pearl color schemes, and the under-the-surface, somewhat freaky eroticism. Here are a couple of Han's still-lifes. I couldn't turn up examples of his paintings-with-people; in them, he arranges people and furniture as though they were still-lifes. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, August 28, 2002


Adorno
Michael I was leafing through the book review section of the L.A. Times last Sunday when I stumbled across “Thinking Hard, Listening Deeply,” a review of Theodor W. Adorno’s "Essays On Music." (Link here.) Being a musical ignoramus (I’m pretty much of the “I don’t know from music, but I know what I like” school), I am a sucker for books that will explain music to me, so I settled down to read the review. I was pretty quickly put in my place by the very first paragraph: Given that whole careers are devoted to elucidating the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, an interested neophyte reader might well approach his work with trepidation. The ideal reader of his essays on music would have a thorough knowledge of the classical repertoire since Bach and philosophy since Kant as well as Adorno's other work, which runs to 20 volumes in the German collected edition. This clued me in—I am, after all, an Ivy League graduate, and, I like to think, pretty quick on the uptake—that I’d better accept as Gospel everything that follows, because evidently no one other than (possibly) Adorno himself could be sufficiently intellectually prepared to criticize Adorno. Feeling out of my depth, I was just about to bail when the reviewer, Adam Kirsch (identified somewhat obscurely as the author of the book of poems "The Thousand Wells") threw me a lifeline: For even at his most abstract and theoretical, Adorno's writing is always oriented toward real life. Like Marx, he seeks to understand the world in order to change it. I was intrigued that someone in 2002 was still complimenting a writer by comparing him to Marx, given the last century’s experience with “Practical Marxism.” Perhaps foolishly, I decided to stick it out. I learned that Adorno, born in 1903, was “from one of those Jewish households that revered German culture” (are there any other kinds of Jewish families in the serious books the L.A. Times reviews?) He went on to study musical composition in Vienna, was a huge fan of the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. However, after eventually deciding to focus on philosophy, he joined up with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a group that undertook the “sophisticated application of Marxist thought to cultural and social practices.” (I hope you picked up on that “sophisticated” and didn’t think they were just sitting around making “Workers of the World Unite” posters with magic markers.) Unfortunately, timing is everything in life, and Adorno had the poor judgment to do all this right around the time Hitler came to power. Adorno and the Institute quickly skedaddled from Germany, Adorno heading for London and the Institute for Columbia University in New York. Adorno eventually also went to New York in 1938, and moved on to Los Angeles in 1941. Adorno’s arrival in Los Angeles, while probably not making the front page of the L.A. Times in those benighted days before it became a world class newspaper, certainly... posted by Friedrich at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments





Tuesday, August 27, 2002


Scruton for a Day
Friedrich -- From an interview with my favorite prissy-and-stuffy, contemporary-Right philosopher, Roger Scruton: Our appreciation and understanding of works of art is in the first instance isolated from life -- that's the whole point of aesthetic experience, that it enables us to contemplate life from a position of solemn detachment. Works of art are not there to influence or guide our actions. They are there to be contemplated; but from the act of contemplation we gain a sense of what is meaningful. And this feeds our moral sense. The fact that there are bad people moved by works of art doesn't taint those works of art; you have to think of all the good people moved by them too. And maybe the only good thing about these bad people is that they were moved by those great works of art. The interview, which ran in The Philosopher's Magazine, isn't online. (The TPM site is a lot of fun to explore, here.) Voice of Reaction -- and I Mean That Admiringly I often don't agree with Scruton, but I always find it enjoyable to wrestle with his arguments and to watch his prose march by. He's a wonderful writer -- dismal, but sonorously dismal, like Elgar. There's plenty of other Scruton on the web. He gets off some good ones in an article for City Journal about art and kitsch, here. Salon ran a long q&a with him, here. Scruton's own website is here. Are there thinkers you're fond of similarly? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Still Life
Michael While I am crazy about Chardin and other French still life painters, I have also come to adore wild-and-crazy Flemish still lives with dramatic backgrounds and live animal (peacocks, dogs, etc.) studies. Some of them have amazing passages of drawing and very intriguing cool/warm color schemes. Not that it is of any significance, but I sometimes think the painters of the first half of the 17th century (Rubens, Van Dyke, Jordaens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Halls, Caravaggio, et al) were so accomplished that it explains the relatively less vigorous state of painting in the 18th century--until Romanticism reinvented painting, it was suffering from a "been there, done that" mentality. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Free Reads -- Dutton, Kalb
Friedrich -- An ear-and-mind-opening discussion of the pianist Glenn Gould by the editor of Arts and Letters Daily, Denis Dutton, here. Jim Kalb casts a skeptical eye on utopian enthusiasm for self-organization, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, August 24, 2002


Carbuncle Awards
Friedrich -- The Carbuncle Awards are given in Scotland to the country's ugliest buildings and towns, with the winner receiving the wonderfully-named "Plook on the Plinth." You can read about the contest here. Is there a similar contest in the States? There should be -- shame is a much-underemployed behavior-modification strategy these days. Let's use it to make architects and builders do better. Although, gosh, the competition for "lousiest" will be fierce. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Why Do I Care?
Michael I ask myself, why do I care about the state of high-falutin' oil painting ("HFOP") anyway? I think because good HFOP always implies the existence of a community--the kind of community which I could legitimately aspire to joining. Rubens or Michelangelo, as talented as they are, didn't go it alone during their lifetimes. Even posthumously their art needs people to understand it, appreciate it and even display it. I guess that's why I've spent so much time trying to figure out where I could find a local chapter of this (imaginary?) organization and join up. So far, needless to say, I've mostly had disappointments in this quest; this type of society is not only secret but virtually hidden. Nonetheless, I seem incapable of giving up the search altogether. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, August 23, 2002


Andrea del Sarto Redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for the thoughts about del Sarto. I've got a book about him on my shelf that I've never given a close enough look. Now I will. Cool speculations earlier as well about why 19th century academic art has been so despised. I wonder too if the fact of its being "hypocritical" has been a strike against it. For we moderns, direct confrontation is (supposedly) good, circumlocution is bad. I'm a big partisan of hypocrisy myself. Like stereotyping, it's a sometimes-useful tactic. I'd go so far as to argue that without it (or some other way of applying sugarcoating) social life isn't possible. (I'd go so far as to argue that hypocrisy and stereotyping are inevitable -- so why argue about whether they should or shouldn't be?) Given that art is, if not primarily at least partially, a social activity: what's wrong with some hypocrisy in our art? This thought first came to me 5ish years ago as I stood in the Art Institute of Chicago, looking in rapture at 19th century white marble American nudes with mythological and allegorical names ("Justice", "Fidelity"). It also occured to me: what's great about the hypocrisy is that it enables you to look at and enjoy these nudes in public. Enjoying it in public Somehow because of this, the flesh of the nudes came into focus and seemed more, not less, tender. The eroticism became more, not less, powerful, and I realized I was experiencing it privately, even though the art itself was very public. Suddenly the magic of that kind of art started to work for me. Why had my modern/post-modern art education and experience deprived me of this pleasure previously? Do these (to me) dumb modernist attitudes about authenticity and confrontation and their supposedly essential connection to art all go back to Romanticism? Which more and more I think of as a kind of cancer that I don't want entering the system. (Or, maybe better: that needs constant beating-back.) But that's probably terribly classical of me. [Note to anyone who objects to my use of cancer as a metaphor in the previous paragraph and who's about to reach for a copy of Sontag in support: Fuck Sontag. I've had cancer too, and I can't imagine being offended by someone using "cancer" as a metaphor. ] Incidentally, do you enjoy your Tivo? I've been reading articles recently about how much users love 'em (once they've caught on to how to use them), and about how Tivo-like boxes will be everywhere in a few years. Does it change the way you use tv? Best Michael... posted by Michael at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Andrea del Sarto
Michael I was first attracted many years ago to Andrea by his red-chalk drawings, which are very rich and sensuous, with lots of crosshatching and vigorously reworked contours. He makes a virtue, at least in his better drawings, of searching for the form. (Okay, so his lesser drawings can be a bit clunky). Compared to the dominant drawing style of 16th century Florence--i.e., extremely precious ink-and-wash presentation drawings--Andrea's studies look refreshingly like some sort of "action painting." Then, on a whim about six months ago I got a good color artbook on Andrea's paintings and have been looking at it off and on since. I like his work more the longer I look at them. In looking at his few paintings reproduced in standard art-history texts, Andrea had come off like a kind of timid wallflower in comparison to the wild-and-crazy types around him--Michelangelo, Raphael, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmagianino, Pontormo--as though he started out somewhere quite near Fra Bartolomio's rather conservative classicism and never quite made the leap into the gloriously quivering whirlpool of neurotic Mannerism. And while I have quite a soft spot for Mannerists in my heart, my respect for Andrea's deliberately low-key, classical masterworks continues to grow. Which is not to say he wasn't a man of his time--more leisurely study of his paintings has made it clear how significant a figure he was in Florentine art. For example, he seems to have been the first Florentine, and possibly the first Italian, to really appreciate Durer's work, and to begin the long tradition of stealing Durer compositions (something Van Dyke and Velasquez were still busy at over a hundred years later.) He also appears (at least as far as I can tell) to have been the first Florentine to substitute straight lines for more naturalistic curves in rendering (check out his draperies, in which every apparently curving contour is a actually series of straight lines.) Pontormo and many subsequent artists are clearly indebted to Andrea for this element of their drawing styles. More significantly, Andrea was not only a gorgeous colorist, but he managed a to utilize what look like overlapping glazes of color--often alternating warm and cool--to recreate the effect of the multiply-reworked contours of his chalk drawings. One of the issues in art that seems to always attract my attention is how painters reconcile their drawing and painting. Of course, Andrea must have looked quite closely at Leonardo's sfumato techniques, but the final effect is quite different from Leonardo's (whose own tensions between drawing and painting were, in some respects, only resolved by after his death in Raphael's "Transfiguration" ). But most of all, I appreciate Andrea for what seems to be the simultaneous warmth and humility of his nature. He seemed to genuinely love beauty, and to trust that his love of beauty, however gentle, would make his art live. Perhaps this is a lesson all artists might benefit from. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Thursday, August 22, 2002


Academic Art Redux
Michael An interesting rant. While over the top (I simply cannot get as excited about Bougereau and Gerome as he does, except for some of their landscape painting, which is actually pretty good), he does get at how difficult it is to really look at 19th century Academic art with an unprejuidiced eye, and how deeply the period is still propagandized against in art history texts. Academic "Springtime" It almost makes me think that the social/economic/sexual/religious tensions of the 19th century were so extreme that art manufactured at the time raises such unpleasant feelings that it must be sent off to sit in the corner. I can still remember one of the first books I read about art history, "Impressionism," in which the author begins the book with a critique of the "official" art of the 1870's. Nonacademic Renoir He considered it to be deeply hypocritical, respectable on the surface but prurient underneath, with exhibit A being all those "pinup" Salon nudes, carefully dressed up with mythological trappings. (He also slammed it for using a "smooth" painting technique -- which must be bad because decades later it was appropriated by advertisers of consumer products.) Of course, this author wouldn't dare utilize such language against Titian's, Corregio's or Ruben's "pinup" nudes, or even Corot's, Delacroix's or Courbet's nudes. And I suppose the openly pornographic style of Indian sculpture (which I really dig) is beyond criticism because it is the work of oppressed people. Indian Religioeroticism This all raises the question of whether Impressionism is considered "good" by 20th century art historians because it was relatively unerotic during an era when the dominant style of eroticism makes us feel threatened (i.e., "icky."). In other words, is Victorian eroticism--based on rules designed to navigate Victorian sexual tensions--so disturbing to us that art constructed in accordance to its schemas must continue to be stomped on by writers 120 years later? This may be an interesting example of the "liberated" sexual mores of today's cultural elite being not nearly as tolerant as we like to imagine them. It makes me think the cultural elite are a group of very sophisticated people who don't want to know anything about their parent's sex lives. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Free Reads -- Academic Art
Friedrich -- You might get a kick out of this piece, here. Blasts modern art, praises 19th-century academic art. And why not? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Fantasy vacation
Friedrich -- Take an architectural drawing tour of Italy, info about it here. Ah, for a little money and time. OK, for a lot of money and time. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Wednesday, August 21, 2002


Gris Design
Michael I may go out and buy a book on Juan Gris that I've been eyeing--not that we have to talk about his paintings, but just because I've always thought he would have made the best magazine art director of all time. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Howard Hodgkin
Friedrich -- Are you a Hodgkin fan? I am, although I know that in edgier eyes that makes me a fuddyduddy. I take him, though, not as what he's often made out to be (Brit version of Matisse-esque AbExer), but as a more sizzling version of a Bloomsbury painter -- ie., all color, pattern, and suggestion. Not that, come to think of it, there's much difference between the two descriptions. The colors are all hot and bothered -- flushed -- but the paintings are at the same time poised and contained, and I enjoy the combo. Let's hear it for sensuality-in-reserve. Which, as I type these words, reminds me what a fan I am of Grace Kelly too, another exemplar of the well-behaved-yet-hot-to-trot. (I read in a bio of Grace Kelly that, when she was a young actress studying in NYC, one of her ideas of a good time was to put on a grass skirt and dance the hula for her boyfriend...) Naughty Princess A cute quote from Hodgkin (taken from Saturday's Financial Times): I think the reason that so few British artists have used colour since the pre-Raphaelites is that the British regard it as slightly pornographic. Look at Turner's sunsets -- they're the colour of tumescence, really. Best, Michael... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Elvis meets Rubens
Michael I've been listening to a good deal of Elvis recently, and have become obsessed with a strange issue that derives from it. Sam Phillips, the Sun Records man, described "Don't Be Cruel" as a "sad song with a happy beat." I've been listening a lot to another Elvis song, "Mess of Blues" which is also, ostensibly, a sad song: I got your letter, baby Too bad you can't come home I swear I'm going crazy Sitting here by the phone Since you've gone I've got a mess of blues I got your letter Sunday Didn't eat a thing all day The days are all Blue Mondays Since you went away Since you've gone I've got a mess of blues (etc.) Elvis is doing his operatic, booming, echo-chamber version of human suffering. However, the music is very swinging, strongly rythmic (if mid-tempo), with the beat emphasized by hand claps and background singers going "wooo-woo." In short, another "sad song with a happy beat." The closest artistic analogy that comes to my untidy mind is Rubens' "Raising of the Cross" in which a suffering (but very athletic) Christ looks plaintively to Heaven as he is being hoisted by the combined efforts of huge, ultra-muscular ( and rather evil looking) manual laborers, with a few vigorous Roman soldiers and a beautiful leaping spaniel (one of the great dogs in painting) tossed in. Again, we have a "sad story" told with, well, a "happy beat." In both the song and the painting, the protagonist's suffering is obvious, but the whole treatment (strongly rythmic in both cases combined with an extravagant, virtuosic execution) suggests an underlying energy or power that will, we know, shortly "resurrect" the protagonist from the dead. This suggests that the attraction of Elvis is that he is a modern version of Osiris, suffering the dismembering wounds of adolescence, but with the superhuman vitality that makes his sufferings ultimately life affirming. (I don't think it was an accident that in the Osiris myth he is resurrected with an 'improved' penis in place of his sacrificed natural one.) When I say that art is at root religious, I may be saying that human nature seems to demand certain stories/rituals/ideas from both art and religion. Osiris Rocks I've been trying to think of a movie-analog to all this, and so far flopping. What is the cinematic analogy to the swinging rythmn of both the song and the painting, anyway? I actually first noticed the tension between style and substance in 50's rock--where I think it is quite widespread--in "The Great Pretender." There the tension is between the operatic "doo-wop" form and the earnestness of the singer--he may be singing opera, but by God he's sincere. Does all of this derive from the fact that 50's rock was extremely self-conscious about being the art form of "teenagers"--who of course couldn't be taken seriously? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Saturday, August 17, 2002


Voice of sanity
Michael From a review of "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum: In the end, this show isn't so much about the Holocaust itself as about the art world recycling ancient cliches and obsessions and grafting them onto the Holocaust...Mr. Schechner's Diet Coke self-portrait [a photo of himself holding a can of Coke inserted into a photo of camp inmates] is yet another rant about the corrupting tyrannies of consumerism familiar since the days of Pop Art--50 years ago...For three decades or more, contemporary artists have turned their backs on art for art's sake in favor of a more activist agenda...artists saw their mission as addressing the world's social inequities: racism, sexism and almost every other "ism" you could think of. Yet a show like "Mirroring Evil" with its insider references to art and philosophy, is so ingrown, so inside baseball, that it demonstrates just the opposite: how out of touch contemporary art has become and thus how incapable it is of engaging the real world in any significant way. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Friday, August 16, 2002


Art and Religion
Michael It does seem that the rise of "intellectually respectable" American Art eerily parallels the dominance of psychoanalysis (and, of course, the decline of organized religion) in American public life. As I have pompously opined in the past, I think Art only finds a meaningful social context in religion (or a reasonable facsimile, like J.L. David's worship of the Jacobin Revolution.) It's a bummer that psycholanalysis was the best religion Depression- and Postwar-Artists and Arts Intellectuals could latch onto. I mean, would you rather have illustrated stories of nymphs and satyrs (or even Madonnas and babies), or be forced to inflate your early family history into "mythic" terms via slashing brushstrokes? No wonder you would gradually wander off into color field painting--twice the fun, and with your pretensions of mythic "selfhood" more or less intact. If you noticed, however, Macho Mythic Self Art kind of conked out during the Vietnam War, and its religious function feebly yielded to Feminism. Honestly, walking around Soho and looking at galleries, or leafing through Art in America, does contemporary art look bursting with health to you? It feels more to me like an exhausted masturbatory fantasy. I grant you, I'm just an old fart (and was one even when I was in art school) and there are all these ambitious careerist young artists and art intellectuals on the make. But doesn't it seem like they're too late to the party? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Leon Krier Redux
Michael Great stuff. Why do you think we never heard about guys like this while we were at our Lousy Ivy College? Have you ever noticed that universities (with the possible exception of the sciences) seem to be about the last place one would go for truly original thinking on any subject? One suspects that's because academic "teaching" amounts to a sustained test of a student's abilities to absorb and parrot back the concepts that their teachers present to them; the people that are happy with this paradigm as students seem to be the ones that go in for careers in academia. The Ivies: Avoid 'em I remember being astonished once at hearing that Einstein got to pondering General Relativity because he was thinking about all objects, light and heavy, falling towards the earth at the same acceleration (a measurable fact). He couldn't believe that it was because (as Newton's gravitational theory explained it) that objects of larger mass had their increased gravitational pull exactly offset by an increase in massy inertia. Einstein apparently thought, "It's perfectly offset, 100% of the time, always and everywhere? Bullshit!" So Einstein decided to look for another mechanism which would explain the observable phenomenon. The reason I was astonished by this is that it totally flies in the face of traditional academic expectations in which the godlike teacher knows all the answers and you get higher grades the faster you get with the program. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments




Leon Krier
Friedrich -- Have you run across Leon Krier? An architect and town planner, and (roughly speaking) the intellectual godfather behind the New Urbanism movement. (The photo above is of Poundbury, an English town extension he's masterminded.) Fascinating, witty, provocative and, yes, I suppose you'd have to say reactionary, although I'd argue that he's a progressive, cheerful, forward-looking reactionary, not that he needs me making such a ludicrous case. To tell the truth, I think he's a genius. His thinking and observations get my head spinning on numerous subjects. You can sample his mind here. Here's an appreciation of his great book, Architecture: Choice or Fate? Your reaction? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments





Wednesday, August 14, 2002


Fleshy Old Lucian re-re-redux
Michael -- Haven't seen much Auerbach, but the little I have seen makes me curious to see more. I didn't think you'd be too intrigued by L. Freud. I'm sort of pleased I could make that prediction accurately. I guess I've been paying attention to what you were saying for the past 30 years. For a non-Expressionist comparison, though, what do you think of Rubens' more exaggerated skin painting, in which he juxtaposes cool grays (transition tones, veins) with warm lights, cooler highlights, and super-warm reflected light to create a flesh-physicality as intense as Freud? For an English painting comparison, have you ever seen Stanley Spencer's "Leg of Mutton Nude"? Best, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Fleshy Old Lucian re-redux
Friedrich Very impressed by Lucian, though more so now that you've pointed out what fascinates you about him. But never fond of his work. I don't think I'm deep or substantial enough for it. You may be fonder of tortured/pondered/heavily-worked things than I am: make sure every square inch matters! My essential laziness is overawed by such concerns. And as a would-be painter, I'm looking for tricks. "How to fill up all that extra space easily and entertainingly," basically. I once took a class in how to paint faux finishes -- it was as useful as, and much less pretentious than, any other art class I've taken, even if I retain little. (Sponges? Rags? Something like that.) There's a place here in town (the Studio School) that runs a program called the Drawing and Painting Marathon. A week or two of working eight hours a day on the same drawing or painting. I've been tempted to give it a try, but lordy, I just don't know. Maybe more up your alley? Are you an Auerbach fan too? Freud I feel I get, even if only in some dim way. Auerbach I can't make sense of. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Fleshy old Lucian redux
Michael Interesting article. What do you think of old Lucian? I had an art teacher who didn't like him, claiming that Lucian always painted the same painting. I like him because he evolved a style of modeling that, by exaggerating color and tonal shifts, manages to intensify the fleshiness of flesh (as well as creating a densely linear network throughout the picture, which unifies his painting and his drawing.) Yes, yes, it's a bit morbid. But Freud strikes me as a (less facile) Egon Schiele-type, but one who lived long enough to get interested in other people. While I don't see myself copying him, I wouldn't mind pursuing a nude or a portrait over many, many sessions, trying to wring everything I could out of every square inch. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)
Fleshy old Lucian
Friedrich -- Hey, a not-bad Observer article about Lucian Freud, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Monday, August 12, 2002


The Uses of Reality
Friedrich -- Journalism vs. fantasy? I suppose that I view "the journalistic" as one element a given work of art or entertainment might be selling, nothing more or less. I don't live for it, per se, but I'm sometimes glad when it's present. I thought the fiction (is that what you mean by "fantasy"?) side of "Bonfire of the Vanities," for instance, was weak, though I enjoyed the book's journalistic side. I recently watched a movie on DVD called "Perfume," and one of the things it too was selling was "journalism" -- in this case, the look and feel of the fashion-and-media industry. The movie (worth seeing for a variety of reasons) was dead-on, and very enjoyable, in that department. Starved as this spectator usually is for something, anything, I'm not about to turn down some decent journalism if and when it comes along. The "Yeah! That's what it's like!" response is perfectly enjoyable for me. From "Perfume" But that's just a mature and impersonal response. Yawnsville. Personally, the fulcrum I'm more drawn to contemplating is realism vs. symbolism. (The strictly fantastic -- sci-fi, fantasy, etc -- doesn't attract me as much as it does you. I tend to be happiest when I can feel the imagination stirring beneath a cloak of something recognizable.) I seem to have a bigger-than-usual appetite for the symbolic -- Colette, for instance, or turn- of-the-century erotic painting. People can talk all they want about Klimt's superficiality, about how he's more a poster designer than a real artist, but they'll never persuade me to stop enjoying his paintings. I suspect that my taste for the symbolic helps explain my attraction to crime fiction, too. Its basic structure (a crime is committed, an investigation follows) resonates for me. I walk around thinking thoughts about how wrong literature goes when it tries to model the (supposed) quantum uncertainty and existential formlessness of existence. What's the point of doing that, or even attempting to do it? (People can do as they please, especially in the arts. I'm just chugging along my own tracks right now...) People are storytelling creatures. We impose explanations and stories (ie., cause and effect) wherever possible, and whether or not our cause-and-effect stories can hold up in some ultimate sense. (His acceptance of the human inevitability of cause-and-effect thinking, even as he debunks its validity, is the main reason I love Hume so much.) Why not run with, rather than fight, that tendency? Particularly given that art isn't science. Which is a rant I'm rarin' to go on any time now -- about how wrong I think artists go when they picture what they're doing as something akin to science or philosophy. (Oakeshott is terrific on the way people get themselves in trouble when they impose on one field the thinking that's appropriate to another.) Ie., why not assert form in the face of it all? The effort can, at the least, give the artist a chance to bring a few aspects of experience... posted by Michael at August 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0)