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8434. wonkers2 - 5/15/2007 2:19:13 AM Ron Mueck Sculptures 8435. wabbit - 6/2/2007 12:29:54 AM 
I haven't written any art stuff for several years, so bear with me.
I saw the Edward Hopper show at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. This is not what I would call a retrospective so much as a review of some of his work done in a few American locales. If you have never seen Nighthawks in person, it's there, in a room with Office At Night and New York Movie and nothing else. Those three are considered "iconic" works by Hopper, and I suppose they are, although Office At Night is over-rated, imho. The boss is disinterested in his sexy 'J-Lo from a scene in Out of Sight' secretary. Snore. Of the three, New York Movie is the most interesting. The usherette is lost in her thoughts, having seen the movie playing on the screen in the left side of the painting. It's a wonderful juxtapositioning of two versions of the fantasies we all play out in our heads.
Hopper's career came late, when he was in his late thirties, and didn't really form until he was in his forties. He made a living as an illustrator, and hated the term. Most people in the art world will tell you, privately if not publicly, that illustrators are not considered real artists. I think WoW will agree with me here: many so-called illustrators are very fine artists indeed, and many of the well-known, well-heeled artistes owe their careers to a small group of critics and to snobbery. I'll leave that for another day.
There are no drawings in this show, none of the illustrations from his early career, which is a disappointment. Two notebooks in a display case are very interesting, but you really want to turn the pages and see the thumbnail drawings Hopper made of his various works that were displayed or sold. In most cases, the thumbnails are far more interesting than the oils.
The shame of Hopper's illustration career is that while he hated being an illustrator, he was a very good one. This show is weak on great oils, but heavy with excellent watercolors and etchings. The etchings are very fine, and it is regrettable to me that he gave up printmaking in the early 1920's. He was quite skilled. His watercolors are wonderful, far more textured than almost any of the oils. There is a room of work from his Gloucester years, mostly watercolors of houses (remember, he said all he ever wanted to paint was the light on the side of a house). Two works stand side-by-side, both of the same street scene in Glouscester (Prospect Street), and the oil looks like a lazy man's copy of the watercolor. I don't mean that it is flat, or lacking in detail, it is simply lacking. It has none of the atmosphere of the watercolor.
None of the early Paris paintings are in this show, but if the oils up to the early twenties that are here are any measure, we aren't missing much. It wasn't until the twenties that Hopper's paintings became his own, more than his spin on George Bellows or Robert Henri. Even so, I'm not a huge fan of his oils, especially of the female nudes. He never seemed to differentiate flesh from the walls in whatever room he was painting, and that matters, at least to me. I don't find his nudes sensual at all, or even interesting. If you've ever looked at female breasts in a work by Michaelangelo, you know what I mean. Hopper's clothed figures are far better, but they are not what interests Hopper. Even the rooms and buildings play second fiddle to the light, which is his real subject. The final piece in the show, Sun in an Empty Room, is one of the best. Simple, not grandstanding, no theatrics, not trying to be something it isn't. It is a painting of light on a wall in a room, and that's enough.
About halfway through the show, I was struck by a thought of Hopper living in today's world. I looked at Early Sunday Morning and couldn't help but think how much he would love Google's Street View. It would be, so to speak, right up Hopper's street.
8436. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/3/2007 8:26:38 PM Many thanks for your take, wabb. My wife was a grants-juror for the Mass Arts Council recently and asked me if I wanted to come to Boston with her and see that show. I couldn't get tickets and passed; so your appraisal helps mitigate my lost opportunity. I also think his watercolors and etchings top his oils, but I hate the crowds at popular shows and can't enjoy perusing the work with the many distractions. 8437. wabbit - 6/4/2007 4:34:20 PM WoW, I was there at about 1pm on Friday afternoon and the gallery wasn't at all crowded. I thought there would be more people, but it was a treat not to have to elbow my way through the masses. If you find yourself in Beantown, you might swing by in the late morning/early afternoon and check it out. 8438. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/4/2007 4:53:29 PM Thanks again wabb. How much to get in and did you buy your ticket there without a reservation?
Btw, you can peruse many pages of his sketchbook at their website.
Click on: Hopper's Sketchbook 8439. wabbit - 6/4/2007 6:25:33 PM I'm a member, so I didn't have an additional charge. It's $23 (inclusive of museum admission) for non-members. I'm sure you could buy a ticket at the museum without a reservation, there were people doing that when I was there (maybe 15 people in line, not bad at all).
I was happy to see the sketchbook online, at least you get to see the contents beyond just one page. Great stuff, interesting to see how he kept track of his work. The Smithsonian has a nice "scrapbook" site about Hopper.
There is a painting in the show of a house on Rte. 6 in Eastham (you can see it online here) that I know you would get a kick out of seeing. The Cape hasn't been that empty for as long as I've been in MA (since 1966). You'd appreciate all the Cape work, I think.
btw, the image of the Prospect Street work I linked to in my initial post is the watercolor, not the oil. 8440. prolph - 6/5/2007 12:28:51 AM
wabbit, thanks for your post, I will add to painting light on a wall. I have a book-art in new mexico 19001945- Which has a section of -tje faraway nearby-many eastern paiters are included and some were sort of not able to deal with faraway. hopper came to santa fe and his mearby is a white wall with a few bluish houses and the church behind and tiniy bit of mountain and sky.
deapite having been an intrepid solo traveler i am regularly pulled back to santa fe where i was born,
patsy
8441. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/5/2007 3:57:16 PM Thanks again, wabb--for the info and the links. I found it interesting that Hopper's dealers received 1/3rd commission on sales rather than today's going commission of 1/2 (and often more in NYC). Also, that besides his talent and genius for dramatic light, he was very compulsive in terms of his record keeping; whereas, in today's art world, artists are solely recognized for their compulsions while genius and talent are no longer prerequisites. 8442. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/5/2007 4:27:36 PM BTW, the Smithsonian link is a Bon-Bon--thanks again!
8443. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/9/2007 4:35:54 PM I thought this to be a wonderful read . . .
Why the art world is a disaster
By Roger Kimball
It is now that we begin to encounter the fevered quest for novelty at any price, it is now that we see insincere and superficial cynicism and deliberate conscious bluff; we meet, in a word, the calculated exploitation of this art as a means of destroying all order. The mercenary swindle multiples a hundredfold, as does the deceit of men themselves deceived and the brazen self-portraiture of vileness.
--Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis
Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.
--Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see 'Wrestle, the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of "CCS Bard Hessel Museum," a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She’d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts, yes, those body parts, floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things, yes, those "things" to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something . . . special.
Well, these folks are not naifs. They've both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible, then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid--unless, that is, your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist, in which case it is something that duty requires you to inspect, docket, and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.
This is my unhappy position. So, one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of the elite, super-trendy Bard College. Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. If your bank account is healthy (tuition and fees for first-year students: $47,730) and young Heather or Dylan is creative, i.e., not likely to get into a Harvard or Yale or Williams, then Bard is a place you can send them and still look your neighbor in the eye. The college is probably best known for its baton-wielding president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras in his spare time and whom the music critic Tim Page once described as the sort of chap who gives pseudo-intellectuality a bad name. Bard also has the distinction of being, as far as I know, the only college in the United States to honor the memory of Alger Hiss, the perjurer and Soviet spy, by establishing a chair in his memory.
It had been a long time since I had visited Bard. Back in the early 1990s, I ventured into its sylvan purlieus to write about the opening of the Richard and Marieluise Black Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture. Now here we had, attached to the old edifice, the Marieluise Hessel Museum of Art. Two Marieluises? It turned out to be like the evening star and morning star of philosophical lore, Hesperus and Phosphorus: two names but one and the same orb—in short, as William Demarest put it in The Lady Eve, "It's the same dame." The German-born businesswoman shed the unfortunate (or maybe not) Mr. Black somewhere along the line. Although married again, she is taking no chances and now endows her endowments with her maiden name. Marieluise has been busy. In the early 1990s, when the Black Center opened, her collection of contemporary art consisted of some 550 items. It has grown to 1,700, of which approximately 200 items are on view in "Wrestle."
8444. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/9/2007 4:36:10 PM You will not be able to see "Wrestle." By the time you read this, the exhibition will have closed. But do not pine. You haven't missed anything. Have I become jaded? Too many close encounters with Gilbert and George, Matthew Barney, and all the other exotic fauna that populate the galleries and art museums these days? Perhaps. In any event, I thought my friends overstated the awfulness of the exhibition. Don't get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts, "explicit" images, and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn't worse than dozens of other exhibitions Iíve seen, youíve seen, weíve all seen.
I thought about this as I picked my way through the galleries at the Hessel Museum. A "video installation" by Bruce Nauman in which a man and a woman endlessly repeat a litany of nonsense, tinctured here and there with scatological phrases. Been there. Photographs (in four or five different places) by Robert Mapplethorpe of his S&M pals. Very 1980s. Histrionic photographs by Cindy Sherman of herself looking victimized. Been there, too. Nam June Paik and his video installations. Done that. A big pile of red, white, and blue lollipops dumped in the corner by Ö well, it doesn't much matter, does it? Any more than it matters who was responsible for the room featuring images of floating genitalia or the room with the video of ritualistic homosexual bondage. Ditto the catalogue: its assault on the English language is something you can find in scores, no, hundreds of art publications today: "For Valie Export, the female Body is covered with the stigmata of codes that shape and hamper it." Well, bully for her. "As usual with Gober, the installation is a broken allegory that both elicits and resists our interpretation; that materially nothing is quite as it seems adds to our anxious curiosity." As usual, indeed, though whether such pathetic verbiage adds to or smothers our curiosity is another matter altogether.
No, the thing to appreciate about "Wrestle," about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluise Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and, sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It's outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The "arts" at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary. Leon Botstein described Marieluise Hessel as a "risk giver." An essay in the Bardian, the college magazine, elaborates on this theme:
She was drawn to work that challenged and subverted the status quo, work that flaunted [the author means "flouted," but, hey, this is Bard] and struggled with urgent, utopian notions of gender and identity, feminism, and the politics of AIDS, among other issues.
Mr. Botstein and the Bardian have it exactly wrong. When it comes to art, Ms. Hessel is neither a risk taker nor a risk giver. Like Bard itself, she simply mirrors the established taste of the moment. Far from "challenging" or "subverting" the status quo, the 1,700 objects she has accumulated are the status quo. And far from "struggling" with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant cliches of today's academic art world. "Academic," in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of "scholarly," but rather in the sense that we speak of "academic art," stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory. A wall full of photographs of two girls does nothing to "interrogate" (a favorite term of art- and lit-crit-speak) identity any more than a mutilated doll forces us to reconsider our usual notions of whatever-it-is those odious objects are supposed to make us reconsider. Really, the only thing exhibitions like "Wrestle," or institutions like the Hessel Museum, challenge is the viewer's patience.
Ms. Hessel once enthusiastically recalled her introduction to contemporary art as a young woman in Munich: ÒIt was like entering a cult group.Ó That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of perspective and modeling we have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better) and 2) the right politics.
Again, my point is not to deny the repellent nature of much that was on view in ÒWrestle.Ó It deserves its ÒXÓ rating, all right. But it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interestingÑor even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dal’, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. ÒThe artist,Ó Orwell wrote, is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ÒArt,Ó and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like LÕAge dÕOr [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.
8445. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/9/2007 4:36:18 PM Orwell was writing in the 1940s. Already that attitude was old hat: it had definitively entered the cultural bloodstream with the Dadaists shortly after the turn of the last century. What those folks didn’t know about "challenging" and "subverting" conventional taste and attitudes wasn't worth knowing. In essentials, they pioneered all the tricks on view in "Wrestle"--the sex, the violence, the tedium, the presentation of everyday objects as works of art. The difference is that Duchamp was in earnest: "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge," Duchamp noted contemptuously, "and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." No wonder he gave up on art for chess. Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality. I do not have much time for Marcel Duchamp; in my view his influence on art and culture has been almost entirely baneful; but it is amusing to ponder how much he would have loathed the contemporary art world where all his ideas had been ground-down into inescapable cliches, trite formulas served up by society grandees at their expensive art fetes in the mistaken belief that they are embarked on some existentially or aesthetically daring enterprise. Perhaps Duchamp, aesthete that he was, would have savored the comedy. I suspect his amour-propre would have caused him to feel nausea, not amusement.
Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like "Wrestle," of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody. When the outre attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.
That's part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic--well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art. As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying "Wrestle"--accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days--demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication. It's not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn't even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man's land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the "art" is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it, as witness the little red band that surrounded the catalogue for "Wrestle." This "work" was by Lawrence Weiner and read: "An Amount of Currency Exchanged from One Country to Another." The point to notice is the usurpation of art by these free-floating verbal clots, full of emotion but utterly lacking in what David Hume called "the calm sunshine of the mind."
A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money--not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with "the arts." The presence of money means the presence of "society," which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday's philistine is today's champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be. If tout le monde is going to an opening for Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, you can bet your bottom black tie that the nice lady next door who gave MOMA $10 million will be there, too. The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called "the revenge of the philistines."
A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in "Wrestle": almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today's art world is nothing less than a tragedy. But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman's "Good Boy, Bad Boy" was right: "this is boring."
8446. judithathome - 6/10/2007 2:31:17 AM It's not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn't even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man's land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration.
It may not "quite" be that but it is perilously close. 8447. prolph - 6/10/2007 7:49:16 AM yes, wizard you are right, Are you publishimg the above ?--i hope so.patsy 8448. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 6/10/2007 4:18:58 PM Indeed, Judith!
Patsy, the above was published in the current edition of The New Criterion.
8449. wabbit - 7/3/2007 1:25:50 PM It's been a busy month for me and I've fallen far behind in my Mote reading. I just finished reading the Kimball piece - thank you for posting that, WoW. I remember getting into a debate in grad school about who was the most influential artist of the 20th century. The bulk of the debate vacillated between Picasso and Matisse, but I thought Duchamp was, for better or worse, more influential. It's a shame the irony was lost so quickly. A former teacher told me that when she was getting her MFA at Yale, she wanted to paint landscapes, but was told point-blank she would not receive a degree unless she painted something more "avant-garde". She said she essentially threw paint onto canvas, figuratively speaking, ending up with work she hated, but it got her a degree. What a shame. Her landscapes were beautiful. 8450. wabbit - 7/3/2007 1:27:33 PM RIP Beverly Sills.
Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died last night at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.
The cause was inoperable lung cancer, said her personal manager, Edgar Vincent.
Ms. Sills was America’s idea of a prima donna. Her plain-spoken manner and telegenic vitality made her a genuine celebrity and an invaluable advocate for the fine arts. Her life embodied an archetypal American story of humble origins, years of struggle, family tragedy and artistic triumph...
8451. alistairConnor - 7/5/2007 9:59:07 PM Another obit :
George Melly, jazz singer, anarchist, Liverpudlian, Surrealist, tart.
I read his autobiography, "Owning up", and recognised him as a kindred spirit. Missed a chance to see him perform when I was living in London in 1987, good lord that's 20 years ago. A colleague's father managed a pub in Deptford where Melly was appearing, he invited me but I turned him down out of sheer misanthropy. 8452. judithathome - 7/5/2007 10:12:05 PM Boots Randolph died this week, too. 8453. betty - 7/7/2007 3:40:04 AM oh I would give my kingdom for a good landscape.
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