Modern Kicks

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.

i have waited years for this moment

I'm not kidding.  And, as of October, my wait will be over.  Of course, it will be absolutely mobbed at first, making a trip there an ordeal one would rather avoid, and they're almost certainly not going to get a license to sell beer and wine (although I've always wondered why they didn't simply open an adjacent liquor store when combining groceries and alcohol wasn't allowed.)  And I'm surprised that it turned out to be Warwick rather than Providence, or at least closer to Providence.  I guess Warwick hustled a little more to make the deal, though I know some of the people over in Summit had been trying to entice TJ's to North Main Street, which would have been a great location.  I guess it'll be left to Miriam, the bars, and auto places, unfortunately.  Still: totally stoked.

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.

my thoughts exactly

Busy and blocked.  But not displeased at the arrival of spring or without hope that my opportunities to post will improve.

Blue, Red and Grey - The Who

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.