Art world

Andrew Wyeth died the other day at age 91 at his home in Pennsylvania. Both Anya and I were surprised; I could have sworn he had died years ago. I remember seeing his work at NOMA a few years back, and even then the impression I had was that he had already died. I can only surmise that these last few years, he was not working, although I understand that he painted well into his 80's.

I'll talk about the two pics in a second.

What I find amazing is the kind of criticism that was leveled at Wyeth's work during his lifetime. Common criticisms are that Wyeth's art verges on illustration, and that his rural subject matter is sentimental. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The Village Voice, derided his paintings as "Formulaic stuff not very effective even as illustrational 'realism'".

Here's Time magazine's take:

Even when Wyeth is admitted into the canon, he's held a bit at arm's length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City owns his most famous canvas, Christina's World, which it acquired in 1948, soon after it was painted, for just $1,800. But while the picture is always on display at MoMA, it's consigned to what you might call an anteroom on the margins of the more respectably modern galleries . . .

The London Times art critic even cut poor Christina's feet off. You think they would have left off the bottom of a Pollock or a Rothko?

So I ran across this story. Seems Aelita Andre will be holding her first gallery showing at the Brunswick Street Gallery in Victoria, Australia later this month. The gallery's art director was shown her work by another client of his, liked what he saw and set up the show, with lots of press and promotion.
WhenThe Age's art critic, Robert Nelson, was shown the works, his first impression was of "credible abstractions, maybe playing on Asian screens with their reds. They're heavily reliant on figure/ground relations."

One problem. Aelita Andre is 22 months old. That's right--my kid COULD paint that.

Maybe Wyeth could have been more credibly abstract; he could have paid more attention to color-shape and that old bugaboo, figure/ground relations.

Well--of the two paintings above, one was done by an artist, the other was done by someone who woke up fussy from their nap.

Go ahead--guess which one!

Michael who?

So we're riding in the car a few days ago, listening to some Christmas music that I had playlisted on the iPod. The usual stuff, of course, but I like to find some more obscure stuff if I can (how 'bout "Dominic the Christmas Donkey" or James Brown's "Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto"?). So a mashup comes on, mixing Lennon's "Imagine" with a very young Michael Jackson singing "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." It's actually pretty well done; try Googling Santastic II; it'll take you to a bunch of interesting holiday downloads.

THe kids asked who that girl was that was singing in the song. Anya and I laughed, and thus began a rather long discussion about who Michael Jackson was, how he was a superstar both as a child and an adult, how he had been fabulously wealthy (we didn't go into detail about his rather spectacular fall from grace). The girls were particularly fascinated by his pictures that we showed them on the internet. Emma still has trouble understanding what happened to his nose and how can he still sing without a nose and why did he not want his nose anymore.

The saddest thing for me, though, was the fact that just a little over 10 years ago, Michael Jackson was wall to wall world famous. There wasn't a kid on this planet (and probably a few others) that didn't know who he was. And yet here were two little girls (4 and 8 1/2) who had no clue of his identity--none at all. What happened?

Obviously, Michael was a talented individual. Songwriter, dancer, performer--he did it all, and sold millions, if not billions of records. But was his talent that deep? Will he be regarded as a classic? Some hugely popular artists withstand the test of time. I predict that we will still be listening to the music of Lennon-McCartney "many years from now;" the same goes for the song stylings of Bing Crosby or Sinatra.
I am not so sure that Britney or L'il Wayne will be part of anyone's classic canon down the road. American cultural history is apparently littered with "sensations" that find themselves beached and forgotten when the popular tide recedes. Who really remembers Paul Whiteman, or George W. Peck?

I actually feel sad for Michael Jackson, as strange and creepy as he was (is). It is amazing what fame can do to people. Sometimes the changes aren't just internal.

Free Speech

Yet another example of the chilling effect that the Bush administration has had on free speech.

Wafaa Bilal is exhibiting his videogame, "The Night of Bush Capturing," at the Freedom of Speech exhibition at FLATFILE Galleries in Chicago. In the game, players are sent on a mission to kill President Bush. "This is to raise awareness about the civilian toll in Iraq, and how a lot of them have been forced by the consequences of the invasion to become suicide bombers," Bilal said.

As Instapundit would say, they told me if Bush was elected, artists would feel intimidated in expressing their creative viewpoints.

Right.

Of course, this kind of thing is totally different.

Loaves and Fishes, a Minnesota-based community action group, is protesting the display of a combat simulation videogame at the Duluth Air Show. The Virtual Army Experience, used by Army recruiters, demonstrates what life could be like as a soldier. In one scenario, participants transport aid to threatened humanitarian aid workers while using machine guns and a missile launcher to wipe out terrorists who stand in the way.

Michele Naar-Obed, spokesperson for Loaves and Fishes, is outraged that a military-sponsored video game would be featured as an exhibit at an air show. She is quoted as saying, "I’m very upset over this. I think this is just insane that they would use this kind of venue to train our youth to kill people. . . we find it to be unacceptable and inappropriate."

Apparently, she is unaware that it is a military air show; the headline act is the US Navy Blue Angels. Most of the planes there are military planes. The Duluth Air Show is not a bunch of old guys in shorts standing around in a field, comparing Cessna stories.

Lileks has a good summation:

Inappropriate? At an air show? One can understand their anger if the simulation was mandatory, and children were herded into vast rooms, drugged up, forced to ride the Humvee sim then marched into a recruitment office and told they were signing up for a free trip to Disneyland, but that’s not the case. Somehow a sim about saving relief workers by blowing up terrorists is BAD, but a game in which one plays a criminal who drives around town running over pedestrians is okay.

The Army removed the same game at the request of Summerfest officials in Milwaukee.

“We’re determining it’s probably not something that we want to have shown at Summerfest,” John Boler, vice president of sales and marketing, said before the decision was made to request removal of the game.

The game drew criticism from Peace Action Wisconsin, which called it “totally inappropriate and offensive.”

“War games should NOT be presented as entertainment,” the group wrote in a press release. “War is NOT a game. Summerfest is meant to bring people together for a good time in peace, not to present opportunities to practice shooting people.”

No mention is made of whether any other activities (like a Grand Theft Auto demo) or performers at the festival drew the wrath and ire of Peace Action Wisconsin.

But I'm pretty sure they would have welcomed Wafaa Bilal.

Art musings

So we trotted down to New Orleans this weekend, and pretty much had the day to ourselves Saturday. It was a beautiful spring day, so we headed over towards City Park, and had lunch at Cafe Degas. I really enjoyed it; I think it is one of Anya's favorite restaurants in the city. The food is very good, basic French cuisine (probably not very cholesterol friendly!) in a great setting. We actually ended up there twice--after we spent a few hours at the museum we went back for the dessert menu--mmmmmmm.

At NOMA, there was the George Rodrigue exhibit, and Mr. Blue Dog himself was there, signing books. Now this is where I will being to rant a little, so my apologies. Rodrigue has an extensive body of work going back 30-40 years. His early works are actually pretty interesting; I really liked the dark, foreboding landscapes, dominated by towering, somber oaks, their branches terminating in what seem to be claws. There is a technical skill displayed. These paintings are "painterly," as Anya likes to describe them.

And then there are the Blue Dogs. I was looking at the large metal sculpture that he had done (he does sculpture, too--I didn't know that), and my attention was drawn to the dog's eyes. A circle, two marks at the 4 o'clock and 8 o'clock positions, and the eyebrow thingy coming off and over at about 11 o'clock. There it was again. Again. And again. And again. Every dog, every eye--again and again. I mean, maybe he has an assistant draw the eyes for him.

One of the 1st Blue Dogs (I think) was there, and it was actually kind of interestingly done (the eye was different, too, somehow, like some conscious thought had gone into its construction). But it's like suddenly, the Blue Dogs began selling like hotcakes (very expensive hotcakes) and Rodrigue was off to the races. Blue Dog this, Blue Dog that, Blue Dog with a celebrity, Blue Dog with whatever happened to be fashionable that day. Formulaic I believe is the word I am looking for. I thought the Blue Dog with Drew Brees was embarassing.

His scenes of Cajun life, once artistic and somewhat masterful (like The Aioli Dinner from 1971) in more recent works seem to be quickly thrown together, almost appearing as if he is trying to imitate some kind of outsider art. Ummm, childish I believe is the word I am looking for.

So what? Is it art? I don't know--I'm not an artist, but I am married to one, and I can hope that some of her brilliance and "painterly" knowledge rubs off on me. And Anya and I have had this discussion before. There is a gallery in the Quarter that featured the works of one artist, whose "badge" was a skinny, line-like saxophone player, standing underneath a wrought-iron balcony, blowing his skinny soulful heart out at the moon hanging above. Nice image, yeah, kinda touristy--but again and again and again, in commutations and permutations and repetitions that eventually make one realize that that "special" painting (for $14,000) maybe isn't so "special" after all. When does art become formula? Can a formula be art? Mr. Rodrigue makes (according to the website) $22,000 per painting. His work is admired and sought after by many, as perhaps is the same for the saxophone painter. But is . . . it . . . art? Are you really reaching and stretching yourself as an artist painting the same dog's eyes day after day? How do you sleep at night? Easy, I'm sure, if you are counting sacajawea's all the way to Dreamland, but as an artist, what do you feel? Accomplished? cheap?

When I asked my artist wife, she replied, "we just don't know." Kind of like that wave-particle duality thing, or what's at the center of a black hole, or where they buried Hoffa's body. I'd like to believe that a true artist develops, and expands and explores their art form, and doesn't sacrifice their instinct for money.

But--we just don't know, although as far as Hoffa goes, I like the theory that he's encased in the north end of Giants stadium in New Jersey.

Bouguereau, Meissonier, Gerome--Art and Shifting Paradigms

Yeah--great title for this post, huh?

My lovely wife is a talented artist, as you may well know. Her work is beautiful, and impressionistic, and I love it. Of course, I'm not an artist, but I like to think that I know art when I see it, to paraphrase Potter Stewart. Maybe it's just me, but I like to see something when I look at a painting, something represented--flowers, a pond of lilies, the London skyline or the front of Chartres cathedral. Sometimes great washes of abstract color can be attractive, but I get lost with a canvas consisting of a big red square, or something that looks like it was constructed with a spirograph. I'm not even getting into the idea of painting, for example, the same skinny sax player beneath a wrought iron balcony and a crescent moon OVER AND OVER AGAIN, and selling it (for big $$$$) as art; that's another post for another day.

So I ran across this article about Tom Wolfe and an apparent revolution in the art world:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/30331.html


The three names in the title of this post were the "It" artists of late 19th/early 20th century France, and a French newspaper conducted a survey

in which they asked leading French art dealers, critics, curators: Who would be the French artists of the 19th century who would still be the giants of art in the year 1997? By the standards of that day, it was a huge survey. And the results were, number one, Adolphe William Bouguereau; second, Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier; and, third, Léon Gérôme. They were looked upon as the giants."

Who? Wait, there's more. "Even after the era of Andy Warhol, who left an estate of $510 million, we cannot begin to comprehend the scale on which these artists--Bouguereau, Meissonier, Gérôme--lived." Wolfe sketches in some detail. "Two- and three-story-high studios. Belgian hangings on all the walls. There were always Persian rugs strewn wherever you could strew one: on top of the piano, on top of the balcony railing, on the bed, everywhere, even on the floor.

Yeah, I said the same thing--who? As Wolfe notes, by 1920 these guys were gone, replaced by the Cubists and Picasso and the then avant-garde. The article is good reading, covering the intersection of politics and the modern art world, among other things--even poetry and verse are getting swept in the change. ". . . Picasso is a fraud?" You just gotta read this.