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 | (4) 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) comments

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) comments

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) comments

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, giv