Ciceronian Review

Schnabel

Julian Schnabel has directed four films, of which I have seen three: Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  All three are quite good, and not of a kind I would say.  They are all quite unlike his prior work -- his paintings, etc.  It is a curious case where the second line of work - the film making -- is much better and more interesting than what brought Schnabel fame in the first place.  The latter I found to be entertaining, but only.  Post-card art I would say.  The movies are visually interesting and inventive, well-paced, intellectually engaging.  Thoughtful.  The other art is commodity work.

Basquiat, for example, conveys the art effectively, and also the person.  It is a good biographical film, at least in the sense that it conveys a good deal about the nature of the artist, his context (what the old would call his milieu), and the drift into death.  It is one of the best about a visual artist that I have seen.  (There is a video about Cartier-Bresson that is quite good as well, although that is almost all art.)

The first time I read that Susan Sontag believed that she would never die, I thought it was a small joke or some insider shorthand about fame.  The statement keeps being repeated, and each time apparently the iteration is serious.  Apparently Sontag really did think, until shortly before her death, that she would not die.  Of all the people in the world over all the many hundreds of thousands of years there have been human beings here, she alone would live without end.  Not, mind you, the widespread (and nevertheless terribly odd) view that somehow or other something survives death or is resurrected after death.  No immortal soul for her.  Seems she thought instead that she would just go on and on, like some Star Trek episode or Greek myth.   Or maybe it was that God picked her out, among the many.  This is hard to make sense of, coming from an adult.  I understand that children get all sorts of odd ideas in their heads, including that somehow they are Hercules reborn or some such.  But Sontag held this thought as an adult.  And made no secret of it.  Of course, she was free to.  No rules (none enforceable anyway) against ridiculous ideas, and it was her time to use if she wanted.  But it does raise a question about the fact that people listened to her, read her work, talked about her as though a serious thinker.  (I admit, I have a bias here in that I never liked any of her works.)  How is this not believing in magic?  Say the right words and up comes the mummy.  And now her notebooks are being published.  The excerpts I have seen suggest that publication is a bad idea.  Of course the notebooks of youth make for some moments of cringing, which is okay if there is a proper reward.  Is there?  What did Sontag say that would make anyone want to read her every word?  I doubt that even the likes of Wittgenstein or Quine, etc., would warrant such publication.  Surely not every word ever from the pen of Eliot or Bishop should be put out in print.  In general I am not much for the publication of the entire corpus of anyone's writings.  Even less reason to give such treatment  who held such a plainly idiotic view -- she would never die -- .   

Titian

The art market is, I think, the best place to test out theories about economics and the relationship of value and price.  A couple of items floating about will serve.  There are the recurring stories about the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and then, this morning, the news about a couple of Titian paintings up for sale in the UK.  The owner (the Duke of Sutherland) is asking 100 million pounds for the paintings, and apparently will get it.  Many contributions being collected.  People are entitled to give their money as they will I suppose, or within some pretty broad limits.  Which is the point -- is there a connection of any strength between the price of the two paintings and their value?  I am not at all sure how one goes about thinking it through.  The first two options are plainly deficient.  One could just leave it at the value of the paintings is the price paid.  Monetize and we are done.  Or one might hand it all over to some experts.  (Like wine -- and obviously just as much a fraud.)  Somewhere else I think is where one wants to be.  To me, the prices are far too high.  Titian is great, but not 50 million pounds.  I am not sure there is a work of art I would put up that much for.  Is that the problem?  An inability or defect in conception on my side?  Well, Jeff Koons sculptures at 15 million are ridiculously over-priced.  It is a funny market with lots and lots of levels.  In any moderately large city, one can easily find quite good art work at relatively low prices.  One can get first rate photographs, for example, at under $2,000, and paintings are not all that much higher.  And then this market of the hugely expensive.  (A market which is filled with dreck.)   This is the kind of thing I think is genuinely hard to think about.

Top Hat

Salt Lake City has a pretty good ballet company Ballet West.  Not great or New York good, but pretty good, and well worth watching (or paying to see I should say).  I go once or twice a year.  They have a short program season, half to two-thirds of which I cannot bear.  Not because of the dancers but the choreography.  Nutcracker -- no never again without a small person who has never seen it, and probably never at all except at the best companies.  And then they do an old big thing, La Bayadere (which is not old, but still lumbers a bit).  I try to go to the programs with short pieces and multiple choreographers.  Which is a long way to a short review of the last show of the season.
As I said, good dancers.  They are always a bit better than I expect them to be.  And they do the traditional stuff very well indeed (relative to being here).  The corps is pretty good and good at being a corp.  (Plenty of times I say ABT corps perform anything but as a corp, so it is an accomplishment.)  So the ending program was a nice mix of traditional and modern ballet choreography Balanchine's Serenade (which was quite nice), Caniparoli's Hamlet and Ophelia which I likes a lot, followed by Bruce Marks' Continuo.  Most of the last was  last.  Not very interesting, beyond a piece for a lot of men to dance.  A few good bits, but overall nothing more than passing time.  Show ended with Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs, very funny dance.  Done well, the dance is very funny, even if you don't know much about dance.  Funny and interesting.  But, what I found interesting is that Ballet West did a bad job with it.  The dancers knew their parts (even if various bits of costuming fell off).  And they did some impressive things, particularly when one dancer lost her shoe, all fine.  It was clear, however, that they could not perform the dance properly -- they were not loose enough I think, or not quite something.  I fell into the notion that because the Tharp piece is more relaxed, that a lesser company would be better at it.  On the contrary, and to my surprise.  I've seen it done a number of times, with the likes of Baryshnikov and Farrell.  But this performance showed me just how really accomplished the performances were, how very difficult it is.  It was a surprise to me to realize that the piece is hard for anyone not at the very top of ballet, or perhaps trained as modern or jazz dancer. 
I know this seems to end negatively.  I enjoyed the show and will be back, and the dancers are good.

And the really odd thing, the thing that is astonishing, is that Ballet West is one of about half a dozen pretty good to decent professional companies in Utah, that Utah supports more and better professional dance than Los Angeles. 

Something Abou Nothing

On a recent trip I read Kirk Varnedoe’s Pictures of Nothing. Varnedoe was curator at MoMA for a long time, a key figure in art markets since the 70’s. I love MoMA, and visit whenever I have the chance. The collection has had a deep influence on my understanding of art. The book is a defense and explanation of the value of abstract art since Pollack. The book is an edited version of a series of lectures given at the National Gallery (where I bought the book). (The lectures must have been great fun to attend.) The book has a relaxed style, consistent with its origins. But it is not just lecture notes, or even lecture notes at all. Varnedoe and his editor did a lovely job. As I said, the essential aim (I think) of the book is a vindication of Varnedoe’s work as curator, defense of the promotion of particular artists. I was looking forward to reading it, and quite enjoyed it. But I was not convinced of many of the important claims. A couple of examples. Cy Twombly – Varnedoe speaks highly of his work, but the pieces reproduced in the book (and others I have seen over the years) really offer nothing of interest. It is still bland decoration, and not more. It is nice to learn that Twombly had to sit on someone’s shoulders to scribble some picture or other, but, so? I have read half a dozen biographies of Rimbaud, but it is ridiculous to think that the value of his poems depends on knowing his life, or anything about his life. Again and again, Varnedoe ends up explaining the import of some work or other by telling us about the artist, what he (a couple of shes) was thinking or doing, etc., i.e., the biographical detail. The fact that Stella spent time in a shipyard is interesting, but useless to justifying the works.  (If it did, we could hardly value work more than a couple of hundred years old, and certainly nothing of the ancient Mediterranean, for example.) Stella, still seems to me best described as an artist who hates people. The formal qualities – oh look, the rhombus has been rotated – do not overcome the fact that the pieces all bear down on observers oppressively. But that aside, there is nothing much beyond the immense egotism of creation. What Varnedoe confirmed for me is that very much of the post-Pollack work is trivial, concrete forms for very small ideas. A lovely scam if you can run it. None of which means I won’t read it again. 

Architecture Awry

This does seem a horrible idea.  Perhaps it is just the angle.  Still it is hard to see how the addition could be thought appropriate to the pre-existing building.  Not that I care much for the first building - it is not a style that  moves me at all.  But the addition is horrible not only with the old building, but on its own.  It seems more a piece of sculpture masquerading as a building, and not interesting as sculpture. 

Koons

A couple of weeks ago the New Yorker had a profile of Jeff Koons, and the current issue of Art in America has a pretty picture of one of his sculptures (the picture is an advert for a Sotheby's auction).  (The auction, by way of digression, looks like it will include some quite good pieces, paintings mostly.  Good pieces by Pollack, Joan Mitchell (I think), Rothko, etc.  The prices are a little off-putting.  I don't think I could afford the catalog.)  The Sotheby's picture is of a piece of sculpture -- a stainless steel casting of a bust, titled something like Bust of French Woman (or Italian Woman).  (Actually the Rothko is for a Christy's auction - competing 20th century auctions.)  The Koons piece is titled Italian Woman; it is a reproduction of a piece from the 19th century.  (One of the three in the set came up for auction in 2001 and failed to sell.  At the time, estimated at between $800,000 and $1.2 million.  This time, the bottom has risen to $900,000.)  This particular bit is a piece Koons commissioned some artists to make for him.  The steel looks flawless.  The sculpture is not so much, but the thing itself is not so much what he does.  If you go here and scroll down, you can see an image of the thing itself.  Koons, as we can tell by looking at any of his pieces is something of a conceptual artist, and thinks of himself as developing from Duchamp.  Well, maybe the latter is not obvious from his pieces, so the NY Profile helps us along by telling us that.  We also learn that Koons has a somewhat spotty education (assuming the stuff in the Profile is not just a pack of lies, and it does not seem to be).  Koons is the Duchamp of the middle years I would say, riffs on readymades.  The thing about the profile I found astonishing was that Koons is apparently sincere and genuine, and a sort silly and simple guy.  I found it astonishing because the work seems so insincere, self-aggrandizing.  But both seem silly.  I suppose silly art is fine, although something about $ 1 million for a small joke seems out of whack to me.  I am not sure what Koons himself has made.  The Profile suggests that he has sufficient skill to get through art school -- on reflection I am not at all sure that getting through art school is any assurance of basic skills.  None of the pieces for which he made (great gobs) of money were things he himself made.  They were things he arranged for others to make for him, under his supervision.  Return of the atelier in a sense.  Weak, attenuated, but still recognizable.  It is the ideas then that people pay for; or museums.  (Museums of contemporary art are a bane.)  And Koons ideas?  Well, what to say.  At least the sculptures with the (now ex) spouse had the thrill of pretty naked woman having sex.  And the pieces about Banality were all genuinely banal, or worse.  So symmetry of a sort.  Clever, I suppose, if you do not have to have the object in your house or office, and you have no more than sixteen seconds to spare for art.  Nothing much there really, not even real humor.  But at $1.2 million, I suppose he can sell laminated crap.  Markets at work.

Marcel's Da Died

As carried on the wires, February 10:

A French appeals court yesterday upheld the three-month suspended sentence given to a 78-year-old Frenchman who attacked ''Fountain,'' Marcel Duchamp's porcelain urinal, with a hammer last year, but ruled that he did not have to pay $260,000 in damages, The Associated Press reported. Pierre Pinoncelli chipped the urinal, valued at $3.6 million, in January 2006 at an exhibition of the Dada movement at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and scrawled ''Dada'' on the work. Mr. Pinoncelli said his actions were a ''wink'' at Dadaism, which celebrated illogic and absurdity. He also said his actions had the blessings of Duchamp, who died in 1968. Last year a lower court convicted Mr. Pinoncelli and, in addition to the suspended sentence, ordered him to pay the Pompidou $18,600 for repairs and $260,000 to cover the work's depreciation. The appeals court upheld the sentence and the smaller fine, but ruled that Mr. Pinoncelli did not have to pay the Pompidou for any loss of value to the ''Fountain'' because the museum does not own the work. Mr. Pinoncelli also urinated on ''Fountain'' at a 1993 exhibition in Nîmes, France, and once cut off a finger to express solidarity with a French-Colombian politician being held hostage in Colombia.

Mr. Pinoncelli is, law notwithstanding, in the right here.  Good DaDa would involve a bit of a bash at what has turned into an icon (and which was and is just an industrial object and likely not the original).  It is bizarre to treat Duchamp's work in the way  the court did.  But the whole project is now quite gone, and the world of art the worse for it in some ways.  Well, the world of art certainly worse, rather smallish in mind now.  The thought of the urinal being used is amusing, and partly because it is, as displayed by Duchamp, hung wrong way up.

I suppose I complain too much.  There is plenty of good work, just generally not found in expected places.  Museums of contemporary art are often a horror, a sort of journey is self-mockery and thin thoughts, little minds. 

Livia's Ilk at Home

I need to update the lists for this blog.  I finished Domus a few weeks ago.  Very enjoyable and interesting.  The illustrations are sumptuous; not only the coloring but the textures are captured in a fair number of the plates.  Of course, as a sort of guide, some it is just a narrative listing of what painting was on which wall.  But thankfully that was kept to a minimum.  There are good discussions of the color, and,what I found most interesting, commentary on the siting of the buildings.  That was helpful because in a number of cases the present circumstances of the site make it hard for ordinary visitors to understand things like the orientation of the building.  One example.  I have been to Oplanto and seen Popea's villa.  But this book gave a much better sense of the location when the building was occupied.  Visit now, and it is in an excavated little valley.  Sight lines to Vesuvius and to the Bay are almost impossible to sort out (or were for me -- I could tell the directions but got little sense of the why of the building orientation).  It was also a shock to realize that only about half the villa has been excavated.  It is a gorgeous place.  But genuinely great wealth does aid in construction of lovely buildings.  One thing that I am still puzzled about is that it seems, from the little information I have garnered about Roman domestic architecture, that the dining areas were more or less underground or fully enclosed.  I do not understand why that was.
I need to get something on mosaics next.  I think I will get a sign made for the dog:

Daily Art Critic

The current issue of Art in America (I think it is the current issue) has a piece lamenting the decline of art criticism in daily newspapers and disappearance from academic journals of reference to the work of such critics.  I was a surprised by the essay, for various reasons.  The newspapers I read do have regular critics - no daily really, but very regular and frequent.  Even the local rags has art reviews (although I am hard pressed  to say whether that is a good thing - the restaurant reviewers have improved tremendously in the last year, by the by).  I had not thought about whether the daily workers were referenced by the grandees.  Mostly because they talk much the same language, so I assumed they all read one another and feed and re-feed the same peculiar meals.  Which is a roundabout way of commenting on the writing.  It is, even for the daily papers, very hard to make out what is being said about contemporary or recent art.  The reviews of big historical shows make sense, can be sorted through and one learns from them.  The catalogs too, actually, with some frequency.  But a turn to contemporary art and all is lost, a great wave of drizzle and drool and impenetrable fog covers over everything.  It is both awful writing (awful in many senses: bad writing badly written saying markedly silly things in obscure ways, etc.  Just like that sentence, come to it.)  and witless, acritical.  Some of it is due to the horribly sad state of plastic or visual arts just now in the US and Europe.  Far too much is made, and far too much is uninteresting commentary on other uninteresting bits of stuff, fraudulent in the end because it is not intelligent or interesting and bland when not ugly.  And the writing reflect that aspect(s) of the work quite well by mimicking it.  It is depressing sometimes.  What seems most wrong with MoMA is not that the architecture is not stunning, but that so much space (and money) is spent on contemporary work.  Gigantic spaces devoted to crap.