Modern Kicks

cold wind blowing

While I've been out of it, the tough news has continued to mount.  Yesterday I checked in to The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research only to learn that last week my alma mater had, along with other cuts, eliminated its gallery program and laid off its director, Judith Tolnick Champa (Greg Cook has continued to be on top of the story, adding details here and here.)  While I don't mean to minimize the importance of the other affected programs, I have to say that this particular development strikes me as a shortsighted and really damaging development.  Everyone knows about the difficult financial environment, but there's no equivalent for the program in the entire southern part of the state, or indeed within Rhode Island's system of higher education, in terms of range, ambition, and quality.  The Fine Arts Galleries have been a major asset for the University and their loss, along with a superb curator and educator, will have a negative impact on the school and the cultural life of the state.  I admit to being biased, as it was now close to 15 years ago that I first had the opportunity learn art history from Tolnick Champa and have my eyes opened by the exhibitions she curated (I still remember first seeing a Louisa Matthíasdóttir landscape in a show she curated; I also know I've written about at least one exhibition at URI, but can't find it now to link.)  My own experiences aside, however, this is a major blow.

Slightly further afield, Boston's Museum of Science also is cutting back, in a move that no doubt sent shudders throughout the Hub's non-profit world.  The Museum emphasizes in the article that these are not entirely budget-driven but strategic cuts (small comfort, I'm sure, to the newly jobless), and I do wonder how much they reflect a certain retrenchment after what seems like a period of rather heady growth.  Still, the Museum of Science has long been a powerhouse in its field, so when it catches a cold . . . you can fill in the rest.

further reading

As an update to the post below, I've made some comments over at Fugitive Ink regarding the Batoni review, and the author there has responded.  I'll be commenting further over there later in the day, so it's safe to say that it's where the conversation is.  Head on over and take a look, especially if you haven't yet read the review.  Even if it's not your sort of thing, I'm sure the description of the emotional trials of a young student at Cambridge will take you back to you own, best left forgotten, college days.

congrats

Congratulations to the Boston Children's Museum and their landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. on winning a 2008 General Design Award of Honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects.  A featured juror comment reads calls the design "playful and daring without being silly and avoids the clichés of working with children’s landscapes. A fantastic example of placemaking."  More from the award:

In a world where almost everything within a city is designed for adults, the Boston Children’s Museum Plaza is designed for children. Perceptions of difference, distance, size, and scale are playfully manipulated in different ways within the new plaza. Inspired by the forty-foot-tall Hood Milk Bottle, all elements of the design, from the seating and paving to the unique environments like the marble boulders or the native plant garden, are slightly oversized, undersized, overstated and boldly patterned.

With respect to its urban setting, the plaza establishes a clear outdoor area for the museum that is distinct from but fundamentally connected to the pre-existing Harborwalk and attracts attention within the seemingly boundless waterfront setting. In recognition of its significance, the Hood Milk Bottle was rebuilt in a new location in order to announce the presence of the museum from a distance and enhance its visibility from all directions. In conjunction with architectural improvements, the design of the plaza also serves to clarify the museum’s entry sequence.

The award text is dated in one respect: it says that the museum is on track for LEED certification.  It's my understanding that BCM already earned that certification, becoming the first museum in Boston to have it, so good on them.

weddings, parties, anything, and bongo jams a speciality

What I'm reading: Hogarth: A Life and a World.  'Sgood.  Also big, and I'm only in the early chapters, so not much to say.  I will note that it gives a better picture of eighteenth century London than Peter Ackroyd's book, which I found rather tiresome and didn't finish.  Better maps, too.

What you should be reading: this marvellous review of Pompeo Batoni at the National Gallery.  Follow the links in it, too, they're eye-opening.  I'd always had a liking for Batoni and his milieu, so I had no idea that others would be so dismissive.  I'll grant that British art critics might be forgiven a little impatience when faced with familiar fare, much as I might feel when hearing that the MFA has another Impressionist show planned.  Still, that's no excuse for an exhibition review that apparently bores of its subject after a few paragraphs and simply wanders off.  In any event, the review at Fugitive Ink does the work of recapturing Batoni from unsympathetic critics, in part by embracing (if I may say so--the terminology is not the author's) a sort of hermeneutic consciousness.  If that doesn't make you want to read, perhaps the good humor in the early paragraphs and the lovely grace note at the end will.

I've been wondering ever since, and hope to comment over at the site, about Batoni.  One of the criticisms made of him is of a certain self-effacing quality in his work, a combination of deference to his sitters and apparent natural inclination, that can lead to a sort of blandness.  I don't think this is imagined, and in his lesser paintings can be a fault.  But we don't judge painters by their least efforts, even if we do acknowledge them, and so I'm continuing to wonder in what ways Batoni's achievement distinguishes him from his contemporaries--how would one compare him to other eighteenth century painters and how would he rate?  What, with some degree of specificity, is his place?  The more I think this over, the more I reflect that it's a shame that eighteenth century art often doesn't get the same respect as that of periods before and after it.

Anyway, now that there's nobody here but us chickens, I have a proposal.  It should be no secret to regular readers of this site, if any remain, that content has . . . lagged a bit.  In part that's because I've been busy, in part because I haven't been up to much, and in part because of a lack of ideas.  But if you're still reading, I must assume you want me to keep writing, if only to amuse yourself by laughing at my ignorance and poor command of the language.  So then: give me something to write about.  Give me an assignment, tell me to write about something (reasonably accessible, please), and I'll do my best to do it.  And now that I'm making this suggestion, don't let the comments continue to sit there with a big fat goose egg, it'll be embarrassing for the blog.  And you don't want to let the blog down, do you?  Me neither.  So for the love of god, tell me what to do.  Will blog for food free.

housekeeping

Observant readers may have already noticed some changes in the sidebar at right.  I've started on the long-deferred business of cleaning up my links, getting rid of those to sites no longer updated and adding some new ones in their stead.  This isn't very enjoyable for me, as a number of the sites to which I find myself removing links were important to me and run by people I consider friends.  I can only say that if they find themselves reactivating their sites, or starting new ones, I will be more than happy to restore links.  On a more positive note, I've added a few links that I'd long meant to get to.  For instance, it only took me nearly seven months from the time I first posted about it to add The Art Tribune, now listed with the other art media sites, as it should be.  Among the blogs, Sharon L. Butler's Two Coats of Paint has been a site I've long meant to add, and now finally have.  Art Observed, meanwhile, "covers contemporary art globally from a New York City perspective," if I may borrow from the site description.  Lots of good stuff at all three, so check them out if you're not already reading.  I know there are other good sites out there, too; perhaps this beginning will result in continued updating of links.  We shall see.

looking good, billy ray

From a review in the Times Literary Supplement of The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England by the appropriately named John Styles:

Some modern historians tend to regard pictorial evidence of a well-dressed working class as a sentimental distortion. In exhibition catalogues you will often see the genre scenes of George Morland and Francis Wheatley dismissed as “idealized”, with their sturdy peasants in spotted kerchiefs and brass-buttoned waistcoats and the women with sprigged petticoats and overskirts and silk scarves. Or take Stubbs’s Haymakers, with their blue and canary breeches and their white cotton stockings, not to mention the women with their spotless aprons and black silk-covered hats, all described by John Barrell in his book The Dark Side of the Landscape (1983) as “dressed well above their station” and “quite impossible to believe in as labourers”; are these not creations as artificial as the Wedgwood biscuit ware on which they were reproduced? . . .

. . .  John Styles, formerly a costume scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has squirrelled together a remarkable, and often poignant, heap of evidence of what the poor actually wore. There is, for example, the inventory of the clothes lost in the terrible fire at the Suffolk market town of Brandon in 1789. The fire consumed the homes of rich and poor alike, so that we can contrast the total wardrobes (apart from the clothes they had on their backs at the time) of the surgeon and the postmaster with those of the blacksmith and the cordwainer and their families. By value, the losses range from £88 to less than £3, which reflects huge differences in the quality and number of the garments lost, but not in the type. Even the poorest usually had a change of shirt, shift, stockings and gown (the outerwear by then usually made of cotton, the underwear still mostly linen). Nor did the styles vary greatly between classes. Even great ladies had taken to wearing aprons, even servant girls wore silk kerchiefs.

Labouring men would spend several weeks’ wages to buy a watch, often silver-cased rather than brass. [E. P.] Thompson famously claimed that these purchases were enforced by the grim disciplines of industrial mass production. The natural rhythm of work in the field had been supplanted by the tyranny of the clock. Styles argues that the prestige and decorative value of the watch and its potential with the pawnbroker were at least as important as its timekeeping value. Court reports of theft cases (another fertile source, since the reports often identify the thief or victim by what he or she was wearing) suggest that watches were seldom stolen at workplaces, except from coachmen and Post Office guards who did need to keep accurate time, and were often left at home hanging on the bedpost, only to be taken out and shown off at the pub – and then nicked. Watches in eighteenth-century England were items of conspicuous consumption as much as the Rolexes and Patek Philippes that now sparkle on President Sarkozy’s wrist. Two of the handsome illustrations that crowd Styles’s sumptuous volume show Lord Nelson and a very common sailor each sporting watch chain and seals dangling from his fob pocket.

I remember reading Barrell's book on landscape about 12 years ago and recognizing it as a serious work with a lot of truth in it that nonetheless made me rebel against all of its conclusions (his book on the political theory of painting I found much more congenial, as it unknowingly connected with issues in other fields that I was interested in, though I doubt Barrell would have approved.)  Thompson isn't really any concern of mine, though I've read The Making of the English Working Class and admired it.  Nonetheless, I am delighted to read of Styles' book, as nothing could please me more than a good, empirical, rebuttal of what's become to some degree a one-sided argument.  That it takes the form of argument built from patiently assembled and colorful details accompanied by plenty of images, as it evidently is, makes it sound even better.

Not having read it, I don't have much more to say (other than it's on the wishlist), but the watch example does stir my mind a bit.  As the review goes on to say, some of the arguments find parallels in our time, and this seems to me to be one of them.  I can't help but think that there's an element of truth in both sides as presented.  After all, consider how we treat certain updated new versions of similar technology: the complaint that, with laptop computers and cell phones, no one (or rather, no one of certain professions) even is truly free from the office, must be among the most commonplace of observations, whether offered bitterly or with a smile.  Yet when it comes to these instruments of our supposed enslavement, how many are looking at advertisements and visiting stores to find the most up-to-date models with the coolest features and latest designs?  E.P. Thompson may be lucky he didn't live to see the iPhone.

the difference between a rembrandt and a warhol

Larry Salander explains it all to you.  James Panero's right--a story worthy of Balzac.  I hope to have more to say later, but I'm off to more workaday concerns.

. . . Adding, now that I have a chance, that while the article is fair-minded and friendly to Salander, it doesn't soft-pedal the fact that the blow-up of his gallery forces observers to wonder if the dealer is a knave or a fool.  Either way, I'm very doubtful his attempt at growing the market for Old Master art works could have worked on the scale he seems to have attempted (assume "I'm no economist" demurrals somewhere in here.)  While tastes can change, too much of the value of a, say, Donatello is already priced in to the current cost of such an object.  While this removes a lot of the uncertainty of the value of the object, it limits the potential for growth--and older art has uncertainties of its own regarding provenance and authenticity affecting its prices that are less of an issue in the contemporary market.  Lastly, it feels like Salander's convictions regarding the value of older art didn't take into account the realities of the market for contemporary work to which he compared it.  The purposes and effects one can put a large Jeff Koons Hanging Heart to are quite different from those that a Parmigianino suits, regardless of the superior aesthetic merit of the latter.  I don't think it's possible to educate taste  in a certain direction when it lies opposite to that which buyers are looking to pursue, or at least not to effectively do so.  The same is still true, albeit on a lesser scale, when comparing contemporary painting and older works.  Furthermore, the number of buyers able to operate on the scale Salander was imagining is necessarily very small in any segment of the market.  He evidently looked at the $100 million price tag for Hirst's skull as a benchmark to meet, without (apparently) taking into account the extent to which that figure may have been a stunt.  Not a great model on which to build a business.

surfacing

Despite this site giving the appearance, the past few weeks, of my having fallen into a jar of Massic wine myself, I've merely been too busy and preoccupied by the disaster unfolding around us to think up thoughts about the art I've not been viewing.  I have some hope that the situation will change, so keep an eye out.  In the meantime, I've been reading.  January and early February found me happily gliding through all of A Dance to the Music of Time, about which I really should have had more to say at the time but found it too difficult to write of such a large work in the way it deserved.

So a few odd notes now, on the novels and some other things:

sunday night links

A few more links to provide some reading for Sunday evening or to ease your Monday morning:

- The Atlantic looks at Birth of the Cool, currently on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art.  No, of course I haven't been to see it yet.  On a related note, Regina Hackett has an informative post about a documentary on midcentury modern art in LA, what it gets right and what it leaves out.

- A press release worth heeding: Big RED & Shiny Declares It Unethical To Quote Yourself In Press Release That You Wrote.  Well done.

- Richard Lacayo has a post and an article on the current state of play regarding the myriad cultural property disputes museums face today.  The article quotes Philippe de Montebello deploying heavy irony to question the extent to which source nations will take the principle of repatriating artworks: "And at what point is Turkey going to return the Alexander Sarcophagus to Lebanon?"  The question is not as far fetched as it may seem.  The fact of successful claims on what has become largely uncontested ground will not--and has not--resulted in the issue going away, it only means further claims, from other parties and at times with less legitimate cause, will emerge (and have done so.)  Combine this with the growth in online collection databases, where an increasing number of museums place an ever-growing amount of collection information online, making easily accessible little-known holdings and the scope for potential claims grows even wider.  It's harder now not to think that a major instance of repatriation--say the return of the Elgin marbles, discussed in the article--that went significantly beyond existing norms wouldn't blow the lid off the fundamental question of international collections of antiquities as such.  How many objects could museums claim to rightfully own if the British Museum did not stand by its right to works held in Britain for centuries, whatever their importance of the circumstances of their arrival?

- An excellent new blog, soon for the sidebar links: Fugitive Ink.  Just the sort of thing I like to read, and highly recommended.  The anonymous author, it seems, anticipated my desire to see a discussion of why it was important to keep the painting of General Wolfe in the UK, but I think I like this post, on crime and walking at night, even better, not least for its beautifully evocative depictions of London after dark.  They're almost, if I may use a much-abused word, phenomenological.

- Simpleposie has a whole bunch of film-related art questions up right now, including from a week or so ago, "Which character in what movie is surrounded by the best art?"  I don't really have an answer, as I watch very few films, but am reminded of two examples.  First, at the conclusion of the tempestuous party scene in All About Eve that supplies about 75% of the film's best lines and moments, as Bette Davis's Margo Channing is led off to bed, drunk and still feebly raging, the camera closes in on a reproduction of the portrait of Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Reynolds.  Then there's Laura, which doesn't feature any real art in particular that I'm aware of, but has loads of faux-Impressionist and other 19th century art in various scenes, as well as a painting of the title character as a focus point in the first part of the film.  Good movie, too.

- It's from the previous issue, but I just saw that Bookforum has an discussion regarding Edmund Wilson, two volumes of whose criticism has been published by the Library of America, between Morris Dickstein and Lewis Dabney, Wilson's biographer.  They discuss problems with Axel's Castle, and may be entirely right in their assessment.  Still, it's always seemed to me--especially the chapter on Joyce, which displays a remarkably complete grasp of immensely challenging writing virtually contemporary with the work's publication--as impressive a feat of reading as I've ever seen.  And now's as good a time as any to mention that Wilson's daughter, Helen Miranda Wilson, is a painter, and a good one, to my eyes.

Hm.  You know, a few of these could have been developed into actual stand-alone posts of their own instead of grouped into another lame links post.  Maybe some other time.

endings and updates

I was thinking to myself this morning, "You know, I've been so busy, I've fallen out of touch.  I need some art news.  Let's go over to Figure Painting and see what's going on."  So I did, only to find that the blog's last post went up a week ago: Callen Bair, the author, is leaving for law school.  While I'm sad to see the site go--I liked it and found it a useful place to find out what was going on in art world doings--I do wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors.  I especially like the focus she took in her last entry--art's not all about New York and the like.

In other blog news, I should probably mention that I intend to soon do some work on the sidebar links.  I really hate to remove links, but I have several to sites that are no longer active.  I keep them there because I enjoyed them, and in many cases think of the writers as friends; but too many dead links make the list less useful.  Now that I've said this, I'll probably never get around to doing it, but I just wanted to go on record first.

Also: some time ago I took umbrage at a suggestion someone made that this site would be closing soon.  I'm happy to report that my status has been upgraded.  And how pleased am I that this site is linked to on the web page of the Courtauld Institute of Art's library?  Very, very pleased.