Amazing. Just as Chuck Todd is telestrating his way through a complicated explanation of how Barack Obama can yet pull out a narrow win in Indiana, MSNBC interrupts him to call it for Hillary Clinton. I've watched this sad scene unfold every single time the vote's been close during this primary. The only thing more improbable is that Rachel Maddow continues to have a job on a cable news network, despite being a woman, a lesbian, an unapologetic liberal, and quite frequently correct.
You have to see the sweetheart note tucked in the acknowledgments of Kieran Healy's Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. How nice. I doubt the book's going to get him out of giving her his kidneys or what have you if it comes to that tho.
Promise I'm not some sap-craved acknowledgments reader—it came up in comments over at Edge of the American West.
The new-to-me Chicago Art Blog takes up the case against the Washington Post's writeup of Amy Sillman's Hirshhorn show by Michael O'Sullivan. Fair enough—as I said before, O'Sullivan's review struck me as inaccurate and nothing more than that.
In fact the Post's major odd turn with this article was not assigning it to Blake Gopnik in the first place. Gopnik has not to my knowledge told readers that painting is dead. But in 2004 he wrote an essay that plainly suggested that death's just a heartbeat away. Given his argument on the situation of painting, I imagine that those readers who have been following along would like to know whether a show like Sillman's confirms or disproves his prejudices.
In its rogues gallery of right-wing bloggers, the Village Voice numbers the split on Megan McArdle as 60-percent stupid, 40-percent evil. This is an error. McMegan is 0-percent stupid and refuses to do good, a distinction and a difference.
Elsewhere among famous female friends of mine: For the New Yorker, Ariel Levy quotes "one blogger"—one said uncredited blogger being Ann Friedman. This is an omission. Ann Friedman's name is her name!
The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers asks Artnet editor Walter Robinson why he allowed Artnet critic Charlie "Charlie's Angels" Finch to review a show of his paintings for, yes, Artnet. Robinson called Edgers a "dweeb". Edgers goes up the ladder to Artnet president Bill Fine, who says, effectively, "meh". This, in response to a review that Finch concludes by imploring readers to "journey over to Metro Pictures and pick up a painting."
Zero credibility.
Editor Sarah Hromack of Curbed SF notes a clever feature the site used to cover the Olympic torch passing through her town (and the associated Chinese and Tibetan protests): Twitter. Seems like a no-brainer. I didn't realize that cities outside the District even knew about these things.
Absolutly cooler than all those other counterfactuals. Here I have to slip in a plug for the award-winning, handcrafted, Austin-original Tito's vodka.
Jeffry Cudlin and Sharon L. Butler take exception to Michael O'Sullivan's review of Amy Sillman's solo at the Hirshhorn. O'Sullivan suggests that he doesn't buy Sillman's claims that her work is conceptual—but then he wraps up by dismissing conceptual art. ("And that's the problem with conceptual art, you see.") O'Sullivan's take on Sillman's work seems, frankly, inaccurate.
Cudlin calls it a head-scratcher. Butler, who is a very keen critic, has a take that strikes me as strong ("Perhaps he would be more comfortable writing for the sports section"); Carol Diehl in comments sounds a self-congratulatory note ("Hi Sharon, we're a great pair: you outing the 'under-thinkers' and me outing the 'over-thinkers'").
That sort of "outing" isn't what's called for in re O'Sullivan's work. Occasionally the blogosphere's talent for correction seems like a calvary that's eager to mobilize. O'Sullivan is no Charlie Finch, that's all I'm saying.
Only with some effort could you produce a list of the top ten horses of all time and do worse than North by Northwestern has done. Pokey is a contender, maybe. But Mr. Ed for the top slot? Put peanut butter in my mouth and I'll talk, too. Three Kentucky thoroughbreds to represent the greatest horses of all time? It won't do. Here I give you the record corrected:
10. A horse with no name
9. Equus
8. Artax
7. The Horses of Helios (Pyrois, Eos, Aethon, and Phleyon)
6. The Fire Mares of Krull (watch at 5:17)
5. Sarah Jessica Parker.
. . . I'm kidding! Number five is Maurizio Cattelan's La Ballata di Trotsky.
4. The horse you rode in on
3. Shadowfax
2. Incitatus
1. Pegasus
We are still several weeks out from a decision on the exploratory oil drill applications in the Great Salt Lake near Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, according to Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinator John Harja.
What's that, you say? You're not familiar with the issue? Pick up a copy of The American Prospect and you can read my lead culture piece about the situation—why it matters and how the state will weight the factors that will influence its eventual decision. You can read a few grafs online, but the rest's behind a firewall. (Plus in print you can read my witty photo hed contribution: "Downward Spiral".)
What's that, you say again? You would like to read about Spiral Jetty and oil but you need to familiarize yourself with the tenets of Barack Obama's foreign policy platform? In the very same issue you can read a comprehensive survey of the Obama Doctrine by Washington Independent bomb-thrower, Surge drummer, and roommate/Jezebeau/Top Chef/Re-Upper Spencer Ackerman.
Are you kidding? A Flophouse two-for-one? The news called it crack/ I called it Diet Coke.
No one watches them to the end, of course, so you would hardly know the answer, but revealed deep in the credits to the Atlantic's "Table" segments is the name of the band responsible for the theme: My Morning Jacket. Sure enough, there on the band's MySpace page is a live version of "Gideon" that brings to mind images of Yglesias, McArdle, Douthat, and Ambinder and their brain trust on the windswept plains.
I tease; it is in fact a great feature, and my world will be much improved when the Atlantic finds a way for the show to be loaded to my iPod, so I can watch when I'm on the train, at the gym, and so on.
I'd hazard that all the comments left on Chipotle Mexican Grill's Facebook page (what a ridiculous world) are the product of astroturfing, were it not for a note left by friend and fellow SXSW attendee Reihan Salam. He is quite real and, apparently, quite fond of Chipotle. That's okay, but for Facebook's sake it's probably bad that companies are joining Facebook to advertise direct-virally to consumers rather than advertising on Facebook, a viral network program.
Now to Dallas, then to the District. I have eaten well more than a dozen enchiladas at this point.
You may have seen that my housemates, friends, and I graced page 1 of the Sunday Styles in today's NYT. Woo! Naturally no editor could resist running Wreck in the paper of record.
Now, go buy a copy of Yglesias's forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand, a physical copy of which is now floating around our house.
The Re-Up Gang on The Wire season 5, through the penultimate episode. We'll have one more dialog after the final ep, though I'll be in Texas at that time and I'm not sure what my Wire-watching status will be.
UPDATE: One aspect of the show that should be dealt with in greater detail than an email forum encourages is the question it has raised about realism and verisimilitude in literature and where The Wire falls on both accounts. It seems to me (based in part on comments to previous episodes of our WireTAP dialog) is that complaints that this season has not been realistic have been taken to mean that the show is not Realist in a formalist sense. It isn't and clearly never was.
Snoop's death is a good example of the fantasy that informs the show. "Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it" is borrowed from the final showdown scene in Unforgiven between Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood. Hackman protests that he doesn't deserve to die, that he was building a house—an appeal to humanity and the potential within even monsters. The final confrontation between Michael and Snoop is an inversion of those values: Michael was never one of them, humanity has nothing to do with the work that they do.
Certainly, it was one of the finest interactions in the season if not the whole show. It wasn't Realist by any stretch but it was realistic based on what we know about the characters. Too much of this season, though, has traded faithfulness to the characters for the fantastical and (as Kay protests in the latest WireTAP) the transactional. It's when basic verisimilitude breaks down that the fantasy stuff, like Omar's suspenseful, death-defying cliffhanger, takes on a special and unfortunate significance. Whereas in the context of a show whose characters' motives are grounded and readable, the departures and genre play that characters like Omar represents are satisfying, they seem gratuitous and overblown when the rest of the show isn't working.
Ombudsman Deborah Howell tells me that she agrees with a disapproving note I sounded about Charlotte Allen's Washington Post article and that her own item on the subject will appear on Sunday. It sounds like she will also ask John Pomfret et al. to take responsibility for the piece.
In re: Allen's article, Kieran Healy offers that playing against type is a market niche:
When associations with some classification are strongly polarized, there'll be more anger and fighting, but also more incentive to play against type. And of course these processes take place within nested contexts, which complicates the dynamic. But the bottom line is that cross-cutting social categories will be filled with people happy to bear the intersection as an identity, and probably also to spend most of their time talking about it: hence black conservatives, marxist economists, Log-Cabin Republicans, ex-gay fundamentalists, pacifist Marines, libertarian environmentalists, pro-life Democrats, or what have you.Playing-against-type articles are great for newspapers: they draw eyeballs. PATs allow editors to telegraph to one set of readers that they run a truly liberal paper, one that encompasses many viewpoints and isn't afraid to interrogate uncomfortable truths. At the same time PATs allow editors to telegraph to another set of readers that they are on their side.
This does no one any service. Liberal readers don't like to read extremely wrong, offensive articles, whereas people who hold extremely wrong, offensive beliefs (such as the notion that women are stupid—not, by the by, poorly equipped relatively to perform spatial reasoning tasks but just plain pluck-dumb stupid) do not represent a sizable segment of the reading population. In order to preserve their liberal readership, the paper's editors must walk back on the article in clever ways, which, I guess, the troglodyte readership isn't supposed to notice. Which the troglodyte readership is happy to do, since the troglodyte readership is totally imaginary in the first place.
If the Washington Post would like to find more writers who, like Charlotte Allen, believe that women are stupid but better off for it because they are pretty, there are some weather-beaten branches of my family tree that are abloom with opinion journalists. What a spring the Washington Post will know!
However, if the Washington Post intends to appeal to these flowers by publishing Allen's piece as a "balance" to stories in which women are competent and successful, the plan won't bear fruit. The buds to whom I refer don't read.
Spencer Ackerman, Kay Steiger, Ezra Klein, Ann Friedman, Matthew Yglesias, and I—along with new addition Sam Rosenfeld—bring you the re-up. WireTAP, round two. Look for two more drops as the season and series winds down.
Gogol would appreciate the sentiment: "The AP Has Written Britney Spears' Obituary."
JMW Turner, Snow Storm - Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich. 1842.
Now up at Guardian America: my review of the Turner show at the National Gallery of Art. Here's a teaser:
When JMW Turner arrived at the Royal Academy in 1799 just short of his 25th birthday, Britain needed to know him. Auld acquaintance at the turn of the century would not be forgotten, but the best in British arts and letters nevertheless were gone. Collins, Pope and Swift all were dead. Gibbon and Hume recently had passed. Keats and Shelley, on the other hand, were mere babes.And so on. As a result of writing the piece I have developed a fascination with Royal Academy politics. As a result of writing the piece I have also developed some outstanding library fines. So if you have a copy of James Fenton's School of Genius that you'd like to let me borrow, I'd be much obliged. . . .Among painters, Benjamin West - the painter of epic representation and then-president of the Royal Academy - was perhaps the only artist who measured up to Turner's talent, even in those years of his youth. John Constable, who would become the other looming figure in landscape painting, was an outsider. As Turner achieved prominence, Constable has some success in France but couldn't sell his work at home.
So when Turner joined the Royal Academy as an associate - the youngest inductee in the fraternity's history - he posed something of a problem to the group's longstanding but humble achievers. Well before his membership, even, Turner posed a challenge to academicians such as Thomas Girtin and Philip de Loutherbourg. Yet the young buck faced no resistance. If Britain's historical dip contributed to Turner's painterly rise, so much the better: a retrospective of Turner's work - the largest ever to appear in the United States, currently showing at the National Gallery of Art - surveys a comfortable career that nevertheless embraced experimentation.
I don't remember whether I mentioned it here, but I'm contributing at the brand-new Guardian America imprint. It's edited by Michael Tomasky, former editor of The American Prospect. It's not to be confused with http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa, which is just a category page.
Check in later this week for a review of the Turner retrospective at the National Gallery.
Edward Winkleman noted last week that his answers for the Art in America roundtable were abbreviated. Question: What's the editorial standard on Q&As?
A reader wrote in last month pointing to Matt Elzweig's New York Press piece on Deborah Solomon, the author of the New York Times Magazine "Questions For" column. Solomon's column comprises a transcript of a conversation between Solomon and a media figure or celebrity. Elzweig interviews Solomon's interview subjects and finds that her interviewing practices bend standards for ethical journalism.
One element of the NYP story caught my attention:
In a follow-up email to me, [Ira] Glass wrote: "As you and I talked about on the phone, though magazines radically rewrite and fabricate interviewers' questions all the time . . . . I don't think a newspaper should do it. I know in some picky way, the New York Times Magazine thinks of itself as a 'magazine,' but for me and for most readers, we assume the editorial standards are the same as in the newspaper of record, and when the paper says a reporter asked a question, the reporter did in fact ask the question."Emphasis mine. I wasn't aware that the standard for a Q&A should vary between media.
(Again, to be clear, Peter Plagens's questions in Art in America read as straightforward to me—it sounds like he properly transcribed his own words along with his interviewers'. I only meant to touch off on Winkleman's observation, not suggest any wrongdoing.)
Last month, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt responded to Elzweig's critical piece, acknowledging the complaints outlined by interviewees—"Ann Landers" columnist Amy Dickinson, This American Life host Ira Glass, and Meet the Press host Tim Russert—were all merited. Dickinson and Glass weren't especially upset, but Russert was irate.
In each instance, Solomon had apparently sacrificed fidelity to the interview for the sake of her hook. That's the temptation. None of the interviewees accused Solomon of putting words in his mouth, but her editorial nips and tucks—to her questions and to interviewee quotations—altered context and meaning.
Hoyt suggested that the newspaper note in some way that Solomon's column is not a verbatim transcript. Editor & Publisher notes that in Sunday's NYT Magazine, the column appeared with a proviso: "Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Deborah Solomon."
Does that do the trick? I'm not sure it will put interviewee's minds at ease—but that tells me, the reader, what I need to know. It seems like there's a more transparent option, though: Full transcripts of the interview could be made available online as a text file. Some readers might even consider it a feature to read an hour-long interview with a particular subject. The full interviews would not be published, per se; I think that might signal a lack of confidence in Solomon's project. But there they'd be there, for all to see.
Then again, Solomon herself e-mailed Glass to say: "700 words. 700 shackles. Wish we had more room. One more question." Why not just publish a longer Q&A? The Internet allows us to break these chains of wordcounts.
Of course the great advantage to the blogosphere over print media is its boundlessness; and after reading the Art in America roundtable on art blogs by Peter Plagens with Regina Hackett, Tyler Green, Jeff Jahn, Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof, and Edward Underscore, my one complaint—beyond the fact that the article isn't available online—is that Plagens's questionnaire really calls for a survey. Art bloggers can demonstrate the topics at hand by exploding some traditional boundaries of a print article.
So I'm going to answer Plagens's questions here, and then I'll kick this to a few bloggers I know will contribute smart answers. Any writers out there with blogs and opinions about art should give it a go. Forgive the navel-gazing, and apologies for the meme—very 2003 of me—but maybe this will help Plagens to understand. "In a sideways version of the time-honored Dewey-esque tradition of learning by doing, I decided to do a story on art blogs," he writes. We can help with that story.
Click below for questions and answers. In proper meme fashion I want to trouble a few select bloggers for their answers—Jen Bekman, fellow District writer Jeffry Cudlin, Global Warming Your Cold Heart, Hungry Hyaena, Paddy Johnson, JL, Arthur Whitman—but the list could go on and on and anyone who wants to take the time for a little self indulgence should give it a go.
What's the purpose of your blog?
It's a medium for writing about art, politics, and rhetoric. In the past I have done some original reporting here, although I tend to reserve that work for traditional media outlets these days. Once or twice I've published Q&As, panel writeups, that sort of thing. It's a decent journal for keeping track of things I've read, and blogs are one way for writers to keep up with friends and colleagues. There on the sidebar are links to recent articles I've published so I suppose my blog, like all writer's blogs, helps to promote my work.
It's an appropriate place for the odd news tidbit—for instance, the suggested attire on the invitation to the Corcoran Gallery of Art's annual ball is "natural glamour in black and white". Is "black tie" always couched in a euphemism? Note the British spelling. (I did not get an invitation.)
What are the boundaries of your blog?
The length and height of your monitor? I don't advertise artists or shows; I'm no cheerleader. I don't particularly think of myself as a blogger who is democratizing art though I know others who claim that mantle, and I'm sympathetic to that view. Peter Schjeldahl said something like, "If people don't like art, bully for them," saying he wouldn't do a dog-and-pony show to try to bring viewers (or readers) under the big tent.
On the other hand, promoting visual literacy—that's something that Roberta Smith talks about—sounds like a worthy goal, but I would hardly suggest that everything I write here serves that function. Some bloggers are very disciplined and write only about a single topic; I'm easily distracted and can't resist writing about politics, literature, and Texas football. I seek out journalism that is never concerned about going over my head. There's no reference to obscure for my blog, if it's a helpful one.
Tyler has cited Joy Garnett's NewsGrist blog [hyperlink added —ed.] as doing a great job of "placing art within a sociocultural and political context." What I see on NewsGrist is a magazinelike interspersing of short profiles, exhibition reviews, op-ed pieces on how other people are covering things, and Village Voice–like political takes. But what does Tyler's comment mean to you, and why are blogs in general better positioned than print to do what he describes?
Le race, milieu, et moment, n'est pas? Medium notwithstanding, it's the critic's goal to do this work.
Funny to me that here Plagens relates Garnett's blog back to print in all these ways, but it's important to consider that there are aspects of blogging that are unique to the medium. Newspapers have the same Web technology as bloggers now, and they've adopted some Web-based practices but few newspaper blogs resemble blogs by the grassroots.
Why can't blogs go further, to the point where there's hardly any discernible difference between artist and critic/commentator, blog and work of art?
I don't know if I understand what Plagens has in mind, but I don't I suppose there's anything preventing a blogger from doing what he envisions. Suggesting that all blogs might do something, though—sounds like herding cats.
What scope and degree of editorial control do you exercise over your blog?
Complete. Absolute unlimited power!
What about posting comments from readers, and what about anonymity?
I'll allow it. I might give someone hell who jumps into a thread to attack me or someone else from the veil of anonymity, but only if I'm cranky.
What's "trolling," and why don't some of you allow it?
Here I defer to Ben Wolfson, who has written widely on the art of trolling. Would that a troller were to come along with a proper troll, such a figure would be permitted, even welcomed. Alas, today's pale imitations are urged to peddle their pathetic wares some other place.
Is trolling really so easily identified and universally bad? Is having posters register a solution?
Again, see above. But comment registration isn't a solution for much anything, especially in a low-rent (i.e., low-traffic) niche of the blogosphere like art blogs.
What about liability coverage?
Like if I fall and break my rib? I don't have any. With all due respect asking a blogger whether he has liability coverage for his content betrays a Web-ignorant mentality.
What's the economic model of your blog?
There isn't one although I do get enough clickthroughs from the Amazon widgets there to occasionally buy a new paperback. It's still an open question of how online publications with far larger audiences can make money, so I'm not surprised that a model hasn't emerged specifically among art blogs. There might be money and readership enough to sustain a nationally focused macro-blog—something that would in some ways mime and other ways sidestep the art glossies—but so far no model has yet to emerge. It's something all of us are thinking about, though.
How do you see your blog's relation to the established print art media?
Blogs are or can be part of the art media. They stand to note errors and injustices, expand coverage, and praise good work; bloggers can perform meta analyses that print media rarely will. Of course, the media-hound-dog role is an especially cherished, privileged position: It's the reason blogs came up in the first place.
Tyler and Regina, what's the relationship between your blogging and your work in the print media?
I'll hazard an answer on this one, too. The blog is one more pocket—some things I think to write, I'll tuck into an article, whereas other things wind up on the blog. It's hard for me to establish a narrative the way that, say, Tyler Green has, because I end up moving the little ball under all these shells and that's hard to follow. Over time I think this blog will find a bit more structure and narrative.
How do you attract readers/posters other than by word of mouth?
It helps to have friends and colleagues whose blogs are more prominent than mine—that accounts for a lot of eyeballs. Readers who stick around, though, stay for shared interests, I'd guess, and I wouldn't know how to reach those people except by word of mouth.
In general, is blog art criticism more open and liberal, and print criticism more closed and conservative?
Not strictly speaking, no. I think it rarely lines up so neatly as "liberal" and "conservative" or "open" and "closed"—more like "discriminating" and, well, "not."
Here in the District, bloggers and others in the arts community clamor for more coverage, no matter the coverage. I'd rather see (and write) more expansive consideration of shows and artists and issues that merit the coverage.
Some people say that there's a dearth of art criticism at length on blogs. Is this true? If so, does it have more to do with reading on a computer in general, or with art criticism in particular?
It has nothing to do with reader on a computer. I subscribe to only a few romantic notions about print media—I like my Sunday Times in print—but my brother, who's seven years younger, thinks that's totally ridiculous.
I agree that there's a dearth of longer-form art criticism on blogs. I can't actually afford to write things on my blog that I could get paid to write, but if I were in a position to I'd love to use the blog to publish some off-beat arts critical ideas. JL at Modern Kicks writes long-form on his blog and we're all the better for it. Frankly, those with the knowledge to write art criticism just aren't inclined to write blogs. We're talking about a small number of people total.
Art magazines come out once a month. Newspaper art reviews usually appear once a week. Blogs appear more or less daily, and sometimes have updates by the hour. Do you think that the faster pace of blogs will start to affect the pace of art-making.
No. I just don't see why bloggers updating more frequently would affect practice any more than Artforum changing its print stock or the Times switching from Times to Georgia might. To say that this sphere of commentary has that sort of reach risks hubris.
Tyler just said that there's more good art being made by more artists in more places than at any time in history. Is this true? And if so, what's the reason?
In the West, possibly. Artists, designers, and media figures make up only a small percentage of the creative class but that group is expanding or has expanded over this generation. I'm not sure Tyler's making the sort of claim that can be proven out entirely, but for restricted fields of comparison I'd guess that he's right.
Do blogs help correct the geographical bias in print art criticism, i.e., the tendency to think that most of the important stuff happens in New York or Los Angeles, and the difficulty of art outside those places to get national attention?
Yes—for people living outside New York and Los Angeles.
One index of a city's gravity as an art center is young artists—perhaps recent MFAs—from elsewhere coming to set up shop. Is that happening in Philadelphia and Portland?
Erin Killian wrote a piece in the spring for the Washington Business Journal about city planners who were brainstorming ways to make the District a larger destination for artists than it is today. Here's a crucial item from the report: "Closer to home, Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery counties each fly the 'creative economy' banner, promoting their areas' abilities to attract and retain all types of creative professionals." Jessica Dawson glanced on these issues in the Washington Post in her report on arts in Bethesda, Maryland.
It can't be overstated the degree to which municipal divides in the region frustrate the city's art scene. There are two states suburban to the metropolitan center of Washington, D.C., both of which hope to skim the profits generated by the urban creative class. There's only so much pie in the greater metropolitan region, and suburban areas like Arlingon, even exurban places like Reston, establish art centers that each take slices from the whole. There hasn't been a viable creative downtown in D.C. and to the extent one exists, it is retarded by the drag, the creative "sprawl," of outlying arts nonprofits. This city can't support the number of arts nonprofits that exist here. Do es the city need a Wpa, a Grace, and an Mpa? To some extent these organizations' programming is redundant—the defining difference is geographical base, and between these there's a difference of dozens of miles at most. It would certainly be better for the District if there were fewer of these nonprofits and those that existed put on better, bigger-profile, and more differentiated shows.
Is there any constructively negative edge to your blogging and, if so, what is it?
This is probably a question to ask the people and institutions I've taken on. I don't think I ever write anything snarky or angry that doesn't implicitly or explicitly suggest how to shape up.
Let's throw something back into the mix: naked human ambition. Unknown bloggers want to be little bloggers; little bloggers want to be bigger bloggers; and bigger bloggers want to be called, as is Tyler's Modern Art Notes, "the most influential of all the visual-arts blogs" by the Wall Street Journal.
I like Green's answer here: "Readers are excellent at distinguishing the Anchor Steam beer from the generic Natural Light." If the question is what do I want to be when I grow up, it's a hybrid journalist, the sort that new media is inoculating: writing investigative journalism, criticism, and meta-media ombudsman–type blogging.
Where will your blog be in three to five years?
One plank in my formidable media arsenal? The last embers of my burned-out career? If I'm still doing it I don't suspect it will be so different. I hope that in three to five years the visual template has changed once or twice.
The District gets a proper fat weekend arts section starting August 26, when the Washington Post debuts its combined Style and Arts sections. This is a great convenience—now you know exactly what sections of the paper you want to throw out. [rimshot]
I'm just kidding. The Sunday arts section will still have Book World. [rimshot]
If anyone would be so kind as to pick up a copy of The Onion, today's edition (i.e., not the one that will be on newsstands tomorrow), I'd appreciate it. I have an A.V. Club feature on Mingering Mike that I didn't realize had already run, and I need a physical copy of that clip, unless and until it runs in the national edition (I'll let you know). Look for it while supplies last.
Hmm, let's not leave the post at that. Here, I've got a question. Why does Whole Foods sell packaged quinoa cheaper than bulk quinoa? Packaged quinoa, which comes with a handy, stay-fresh, ziplockable seal, is $1.69 per pound. Bulk, the stuff's $2.19 per pound. Bulk quinoa might taste better, but so much better that twisty-tying the bag wins out over that satisfying feeling you get when you thumb close a ziplock seal and it resists just a little bit before it snaps into position? No, not likely. Quinoa is tiny bitter alien spawn.
Awfully crunchy, I know, buying quinoa. I like to think I made up for it at the pumpkin-spice-and-raisin granola bulk dispenser, which wasn't pouring, damn thing, and which I shook so hard that the adjacent dispenser spilled almonds everywhere and brought the attention of the authorities.
I've heard this happens in other journalists' lives, and now it's happened in mine. Yesterday, making a routine phone call to try to track down contact info for a story, I inadvertently alerted someone to the fact that her friend had died. I couldn't help but feel callous, like my role in telling her had been a callous role, even though it wasn't and things like this happen from time to time, journalism notwithstanding.
Newsweek's Cathleen McGuigan phones in a report on Crystal Bridges, asking why art critics and patrons are so unnerved by Alice Walton's art-world maneuvering. Why does Walton's money scare people? Why not ask Laura Katzman—the director of museum studies at the Randolph-Macon Woman's College's Maier Museum, who resigned in protest from her tenured position after Walton's shopping-trip visit to the museum?
McGuigan writes that "locals can get jumpy", citing local news reports issued "supposedly because [Walton] was checking out the fine collection at Randolph-Macon College's Maier Museum of Art". (The story's significance expands beyond the purview of the art world. Here's the short version: Recognizing that single-sex schools don't compete in higher education today, Randolph-Macon Woman's College decides—rather quietly—to admit men. The school promises angry students and alumni that the university won't be forced to sell assets or its character with the transition. However, in the wake of an alumni backlash over the sex change and the school's secretiveness—a backlash that cost the school big time—the university starts to look to its assets for sources of income. It badly needs to replenish endowment spending, which has gotten so out of hand the school's accreditation is at risk, without alarming alumni even more. Hence, an audit recommending that the university sell its art collection; hence, a visit from Walton.)
It's not wrong that the lion prowls the savannah after the wounded antelope (as a friend likens Walton), but it's not better for these institutions—the Maier, the whole city of Philadelphia—that Walton arrives to buy art but not to support art institutions. Notes the Richmond Times Dispatch:
"One of the things that's frustrating is the continual talk of it as an asset," said junior Emily Knoble, a studio art major from Tucson, Ariz. "They're talking dollars and cents instead of creativity and inspiration and culture."Right: Critics like me and educators like Katzman get nervous because institutions start talking very institutionally when a baroness like Walton on hand, as if their decisions affected Excel spreadsheets more than their communities and constituencies.
Finally—and this gets ignored in favor of deliberations about aesthetics and acquisitions—but it should be said every time Walton makes any purchase that she benefits from a ludicrous tax giveaway written for Crystal Bridges by the Arkansas state legislature.
"When it comes to mating rituals, young women have rewritten them, leaving some men pining for the clarity of the old days." If by "some men", the writer means "Laura Sessions Stepp". She writes that androgyny among young men today is a direct response to, and another casualty of, Captain Jack Sparrow. See, Sparrow's "swish and swagger" model of masculinity owes to new freedoms expressed by young women. Stepp laments that women are no longer passive agents to be picked up, treated, petted, and returned home before midnight. Today, women might pay for dates, and might skip the movie altogether to get to the sex.
The offer of pay and play has deeply confused young men—so much so that they are dressing out their apprehensions. This is why you see so many fey pirates walking around. But just what exactly are these buccaneers wearing?
They bend the gender role freely, especially if their buds are doing the same.Hey, I'm wearing at this very minute a pair of Rainbows. Like the rest of these clothes Stepp lists, these sandals turn out to be designed and marketed for men and yet have a brightly colored element. Transgressive, somewhat disturbing, and perhaps too high a price to pay for women's entree into professional and academic spheres.A preppy guy in high school might pair a lime-green Polo Ralph Lauren shirt with light yellow J. Crew pants, a Lily Pulitzer belt and Rainbow flip-flops.
"Formalism and Its Discontents." "Aestheticism Lite." "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics." New Republic art critic Jed Perl has always tapped the marketplace for the clever coinage in his art criticism. But the market doesn't lend itself to the conclusions Perl draws, and yesterday's contemporary art-market record high at Sotheby's is reason enough to revisit a few of Perl's balder claims.
Perl is a prickly critic; dislike is his default state. He isn't pleased with whatever's clever. That much he's made clear in frequent and often blistering tirades published by The New Republic, from whose ramparts Perl has blasted a broad range of artists who share one feature in common: They enjoy popularity or notoriety. A handful of postwar artists—so-called Silver Age AbEx painters, such as Joan Mitchell—qualify for his grace in New Art City, his (quite decent) reconsidered art history of "the Byzantine city within the Byzantine city" (i.e., present-day Chelsea). But Perl himself can tell you best how he feels about the progress of art: "[C]ertain artists were perhaps not so much acting in history as they were responding to popular demand, to what [Dwight] MacDonald, quoting Kierkegaard, called 'a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public.'"
In his latest piece, the critic is pitted against the titted: "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics", an essay he penned earlier this year, is a double-fisted denunciation of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and that phantom menace, the public, who tolerates them. But Perl gets in another bête noir in this piece, too: the art market. He writes:
Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now pervasive in the upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics.How to square that downcast view of the market with the record-smashing Rothko sale? Originally valued at $40 M, White Center (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose) cleared $72 M. If financial valuation has forked off of aesthetic valuation, what to say about Rothko, an artist whose work, if not unassailable, probably isn't the standard flown by this new financial-existential threat?The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now--think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other.
And why say anything about Currin and Yuskavage at all? They aren't the high-tide markers of the market; if anything, these artists benefit from the buoyancy that established master lend. Artnet published an end-of-the-year report in 2006 discussing fall auction results. Of 2,800 auction records, these are the top 10:
Moving down the list of the top 400 record sales, you'll find no mention of Currin or Yuskavage. Which doesn't say much—they might not have come up at auction in the fall; if they did but didn't set records they nevertheless sold high, to be certain. In any case, 2006 was not the year for either of them. Why did Perl feel the need to highlight these artists as the exemplars of excess?
Or [collectors] may enjoy their Currin as a financial trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power. Or they may regard it as an object of delectation, in much the way that they have been instructed by some art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy a Bonnard.In fact, collectors are enjoying Bonnard just fine:
Here's the article I think Perl could write: "Fickle-Down Economics". A treatise about how the boisterous art market promotes speculation on the work of untested artists at the margin. This would be, of course, nothing new about art or about markets, but it would give Perl license to hunt his bugaboos. Playing amanuensis to the marketplace doesn't play to his strengths if at the end of the day that's what he's interested in doing.
A letter to the editor with regard to an item I wrote; my response follows the letter. See also.
As the risk of relentless self-promotion, here is a link to the online version of my City Paper ColorField.remix feature. And there's more! Click away, God help you, to hear me talk about the works highlighted in the article in this slideshow podcast.
It is bad practice to use one's blog to expound ex ante defenses of one's potentially pain-inducing forays into new new media, so I won't. Much as I love to hear myself talk, I find it painful to listen to the sound of my own voice, so I haven't heard past the part where I say "drop E" when I mean "drop D." Apologies to any doom-metal guitarists out there.
UPDATE: Link fixed.
Kevin Drum wtfs the National Review for publishing this line by Thomas Sowell:
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.I kid you not, in just a few hundred words he's skipped on to the sorry state of pitching in baseball. (Johnny Wholestaff, my ass! When I am king, Ron Guidry will be first against the wall.)
If you ask me, this line, a gem Sowell passes on from a nephew of a reader—oh, the red-American "reader", that font of five-and-dime wisdom, who probably considered this phrase, rolled it over his tongue and perceived its truth from every angle, while he sat, squinting against the setting summer sun, watching the rivalry game at the local Little League field, where boys play ball and somehow, along the way, through the spit and the grit and the long extra innings, and not without a little tough love, grow into the men that built this nation and make it strong, and that "This Is Our Country" song from the Chevy commercial is always playing, everywhere, no one even thinks to ask how that's just playing all the time, and readers are good but nephews of readers, every writer wishes for a nephew of a reader, for they are one in a generation, although sometimes more: young and brash, hawks, revolutionaries you see, bright-eyed and laser-focused, with true vision and singular commitment to identifying and then analogizing the enemy—redeems it all:
Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented worker' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist.'That works for me.
Another Wemple item: He reports that the Washington Post beat on-the-ground news teams on the Virginia Tech slayings story by making phone calls. Wemple writes:
So bag all the advice you got from your editor or journalism prof. Those are the folks who've established the wisdom that good reporting involves burning calories. Get out of the office. Hit the streets. Just think of the acronym that has long inspired reporters at the Los Angeles Times: GOYA/KOD—Get Off Your Ass/Knock On Doors."But the acronym already exists: "Pick Up the Damn Phone"!In light of the Post's reportorial romp of last week, a new acronym is in order: SD/HSC—"Sit Down, Have Some Coffee."
The real lesson I took away—and probably everyone who went to J-school knows this—is that the only way to search out college students for a pressing story is over MySpace and Facebook and IM. Obvious, in hindsight.
Erik Wemple writes about a WaPo style convention I like to call the Rule of Appositives. I use a lot of nesting in my own writing—I have to, since I'm writing about a topic for people who aren't necessarily familiar with that topic, one that has a very particular argot. So bracketed explanations don't bother me: they're efficient. But at the newspaper, the Rule is, where there's a way for an appositive, there's a will for an appositive. Wemple find two examples of things that the WaPo explains that it probably doesn't need to explain—the iPod ("an expensive music-playing device that has become a pop-culture icon") and blogs ("an online update with much of the same news but viewable by anyone with a Web connection"). You gotta assume that some portion of the newspaper's readership overlaps with the percent of the population who made the iPod popular and use the Internet.
Blake Gopnik writes a great review of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, a soccer film—"portraiture in its purest form"—that I tried my best but failed to catch at the Hirshhorn a week and a half ago. By "my best" I mean that I got there on time, expecting the usual handful of art wahoos that shows up for experimental film screenings. Instead there was a line stretching around the perimeter of the building. Moreover, this was a line for just the first viewing; the museum had already added a second, later show and distributed raincheck tickets for that. Oh, and the line? Full of soccer hooligans. Where are these people during the day, and what do they do when the World Cup isn't on? It was like a LeftBank happy hour had been relocated to the National Mall.
Gopnik's review is clear and informative, and he avoids a lot of traps he could have fallen into: lame soccer jokes or, worse, informed soccer references. But I must protest his self-effacing jab at "sport-ignorant art critics". Some of us are reeling today not just from the weekend's schedule of art-fair parties and gallery openings but from some devastating losses to the Golden State Warriors. I'm with Sir Charles—Golden State sounds like a place where they play a lot of soccer, damnit.
UPDATE: Yglesias saw the film and says it's sux0rz. One thing he mentions that Gopnik neglected to emphasize: Zidane muses metaphysically about soccer over the soundtrack of the film. I like Gordon's films, but that sounds intolerable.
Of course Dolce & Gabbana knows that the depiction of a rape scene will sell clothes—nothing new there. Presumably D&G wagers the benefit of sexual violence & humiliation narratives against the risk of winding up as grist in Jean Kilbourne's mill.
Yet there is a line even ruthless ad men won't cross, and that's televising ads that depict graphically violence against women. (At least, I've never seen a snuff commercial.) That's what distinguishes ANTM's gristly editorial spread from the rest. Substantively, it's just this ad run through the Grindhouse. But ANTM being a television show in which the editorial process is (or purports to be) transparent, you get a live forum in which tastemakers say things like "[Y]ou don't look dead to me. You look like you're dying," and "Death becomes you, young lady."
Young women of the District! Find out for yourself, um, how the sausage gets made at the ANTM auditions on Saturday night.
This is funny. Lee Rosenbaum writes that the Pritzker Prize Web site revealed this year's winner yesterday with a note saying, "Embargoed For Release 29 March 2007". The world wide web is a dumb place to stash your secret news. Not something bloggers, even Time bloggers, are likely to hold to—hell, even the Washington Post ran Philip Kennicott's take yesterday.
It's a good thing, though, that traditional media outlets are taking their cues from bloggers about whether they should adhere to news embargoes. They don't make much sense within a virally driven media.
UPDATE: Richard Lacayo says it was a Spanish newspaper that broke the embargo, which prompted the Pritzker people to permit people to post publicly.
In an e-mail and in comments to this post, Marc Spiegler and Edward_ assure me that Art Salon isn't what I'm saying it is. They're merely moderating comments to keep the place on topic and spam free, that's all. That's fine—I'm not sure why I was so cranky about it in the first place. So I'm putting on new eyes and giving it a second glance.
So keep up with that site while I'm gone. G.p will go black for a week while I travel around Texas. ¡Hasta luego!
Edward_ points to a new blog to which he and others are contributing, Artworld Salon. At first glance, it's less about art than about movers & shakers—a breathless post about a public spat between dealers serves as an introduction. That's fine, but I find distasteful the disdain for readers that the authors have built into the site: Comments are enabled—but only for invited commenters. Commenters, in fact, aren't described as commenters at all, but "panelists." Pinkies up, everyone? Come, now.
Now, there's nothing wrong with engineering your site so that, say, only those people whose last names being with C may comment. But it misses the point, and so does this site's policy. Again, it's a valid gesture, dispensing with the comments option—just don't confuse your comment-restrictive blog with an "open-source think tank."
Reminder that tomorrow, I'll be speaking on a panel about visual art and the media. It's from 6:30 to 8 at Provisions Library at Connecticut and Q Ave. More info and discussion, voici.
Michael Thompson, Kill All Artists (Cynic), 2000.On March 7 I'll be joining a panel to discuss art criticism, old media, new media, and dead media. "The Role of the Arts Writer: Critiquing Art Criticism" is the fifth in the Framework panel series held by Transformer Gallery; the panel will assemble at Provisions Library.
The other panelists include Rachel Beckman, who does the arts beat for the Washington Post; Glenn Dixon, former arts editor at the Washington City Paper and current WaPo Express contributor; Corcoran instructor and author Andy Grundberg; and Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture. Hirshhorn curatorial research associate and manager of interpretive programs Ryan Hill will moderate; he, by the way, will be giving a lunchtime talk on Arshile Gorky and another one on March 2 about the current Horn of Hirsh show, "Refract, Reflect, Project".
Okay, names and hyperlinks dropped! With that out of the way, let's kick off the panel now.
One thing that I—as the lone, lowly new media writer—have to emphasize is that new media isn't the end of editorial standards for art criticism. There is an editing process that takes place, though it's a distributed process; and anyway, old media institutions are absorbing new media, for better and for worse; and anyway, it's not as if traditional media outlets don't have their own pitfalls. Washington Post art reviews are written with an eigth-grade audience in mind not because Blake Gopnik is stupid—not because Blake Gopnik thinks you're stupid—but because the Washington Post thinks you're stupid. Jessica Dawson's gallery reviews are only ever about 100 words long not because she has only 100 words' worth of ideas—not because local shows are only worth 100 words—but because the Washington Post doesn't give a fig more than that. [SEE UPDATE BELOW.]
New media has unique problems that go well beyond not-being-old-media. The first time I saw a G.p review listed on an artist's CV, I got nervous as all hell. I don't even always proofread, y'all. But that review was something like 800 words, not 80, and 800 words I'll stand by, not 80 words that don't exceed a single syllable. Since then I've been more careful about distinguishing between entries and reviews; I'm careful not to start a review with notes about which cereal I ate for breakfast or the bus ride on the way to the show, and yes, bloggers can be incredibly lazy about style, because many bloggers are bad writers, and even good writers who write blogs sometimes sacrifice style to get the posts up, to feed the beast. But this assumes that there's some sanctity to art criticism in the first place. I think there is: There are standards, duties, obligations, and so on that an art critic has to live up to; we are the few, the proud; etc. I just think that new media neither alleviates nor drastically reimagines these concerns.
But these are all ideas that the panel will address in detail in March. I figured it would be especially bloggy to invite all the internets to join the panel—just like when Buffy and Willow turn every potential Slayer into the real thing.* The discussion is "The Role of the Arts Writer: Critiquing Art Criticism"—consider it an open thread.
* A sci-fi/fantasy reference, per the terms of new media union rules
UPDATE: My comments about the Washington Post were both too brash by half and not representative of my opinion of the paper's writers, editors, and content. Occasional misgivings with specific articles are bound to come up in a field where subjective opinion is crucial; a fit of pique such as the one I've written is neither a substantive nor worthy way to express any sort of disagreement. Specifically, I do not believe that Post writers or editors belittle their readers and I regret saying so.
By not seeking comment from the Post about their direction of the section, I abused the unique platform that blogs offer to complement and supplement mainstream media coverage. A better journalist would seek comment and information before blasting any publication with this sort of diatribe. And since then, I've written on this blog and in other outlets critical and supportive things about the Post's art coverage with fairness and measured voice—I think I have become a better journalist.
—ed., May 2008.
So this metaphor from Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked, excerpted in the WaPo review mentioned below, comes unhinged:
Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?The house cracketh up:
Yglesias: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You want to have a big party and invite all your friends over.When false entailments are drawn from a metaphor's source domain, hilarity ensues!Spencer: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You don't want people breaking in through the front or the back.
Me: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. If you're ever in a bind you can always take out a mortgage.
UPDATE: Genevieve had a bit on Stepp metaphors a while back.
Far more excessive than the $1.28 million or more MoMA pays director Glenn Lowry annually is the apartment that the MoMA trust provides gratis. The New York Times refers to this as a "fringe benefit." No. Free haircuts are a fringe benefit. Midtown lofts are not part of any kind of scheme that could be considered a benefits program. That's more like a reeducation camp for personal expenses.
What's simply awful is this new NYT online feature that prevents idly clicking on and highlighting and unhighlighting text while I read. I'm sure that every person in my household does this, and you probably do, too. All of a sudden, double-clicking on any word opens a window providing the definition of that word. Words that one might idly, accidentally click in the course of nervous highlighting—words that need no introduction, such as "to" and "November".
This is irritating, but it is an elegant solution to a persistent problem in the Washington Post that I was discussing with an art critic the other night. WaPo articles suffer from the rule of the appositive. Hence "competition from the soccer World Cup" creeps into an article discussing a modernism exhibit in London—as if readers would naturally assume a different World Cup, as if readers didn't know what the World Cup was, and so on.
(To the dozens of cricket and alpine ski fans who I have offended in presuming that soccer's is the world's favorite World Cup, my apologies.)
That's a minor example, but the rule of the appositive can have a pernicious effect on style. The critic told me that the WaPo once insisted on defining Tintin in the text, which is just the kind of wet blanket that a newsdaily editor loves to throw on a good joke. I feel that I'm being condescended to when the paper insists on humorlessly toiling over pop allusions or, worse, giving up valuable review space to explain simple concepts in insultingly simplistic terms.
Now, everyone has his own issues with the WaPo arts coverage—Lenny Campello, area cheerleader, complains that the paper doesn't give any inches to metropolitan-area artists. (And he's right.) As for me, I wish it were written and edited with just a fraction of the insight reserved for the Book World section. Here—from a review of a book on hooking up:
Through sex, we discover irrefutable otherness (he dreams of being madly in love; she hates going to sleep alone), and we are scared and enraptured, frustrated and inspired.You'd never read anything like that in a visual arts piece—not because the same ideas aren't there, but because the section editors are afraid of using large words to address them. Maybe some hyperlinkage will make the editors less syllable shy?
There will be more discussion of criticism, local and more broadly considered, soon enough. Isn't it so predictable, though? The MSM fumbling with technology; the blogger writing the random, raving, rambling rant about it.
To clarify some confusion prompted by tonight's episode of Veronica Mars: If taken before before implantation of the fertilized egg (within 48 hours or so of sex), RU486 is emergency contraception—it's not an abortifacient. This season of Veronica Mars, however, is.
All the more disappointing that the show references Either/Or.
Rightwing bloggers are mounting a full-bore campaign to embarrass John Edwards for hiring rad-fem blogger Amanda Marcotte to lead his presidential campaign blog. Most of these bloggers are calling her ugly (as in, not good lookin'). But nutsofascist Michelle Malkin has prepared a dramatic screeching of a few of Marcotte's angrier posts.
It may sound like these people want to tar Edwards for associating his campaign with a pottymouth progressive. Dragging a candidate through the mud's a bonus, but not the objective. With Marcotte, the rightwing bloggers are taking advantage of a function of the liberal media that the conservative media lacks: self criticism. Remember what Grover Norquist said about the press?
The conservative press is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team. The liberal press is much larger, but at the same time it sees itself as the establishment press. So it's conflicted. Sometimes it thinks it needs to be critical of both sides.Right—a parade of the worst from Pandagon's archives might very well make lefty readers and voters consider Edwards's decision in a negative light. If the meme gains steam, traditional media outlets will pick up on it. Once Edwards distances himself from Marcotte, liberal candidates will have effectively distanced themselves from bloggers altogether (no blogger's daily archives stand up to that kind of scrutiny). On the same coin, only the left dishes out that kind of criticism in the first place—dig up any eliminationist rhetoric you want out of Michelle Malkin's archives, and right-leaning readers will collectively shrug. Ann Coulter breathes gaseous sulphur and still appears on cable television.
The netroots is one of the few structural advantages liberal candidates enjoy, and conservative bloggers hope to establish now the media mechanism for neutralizing this advantage.
MoMA kick-started a month-long love-in for women with the Feminist Future symposium, which featured speakers such as Marina Abramovic and the Guerrilla Girls. Habseligkeiten's Lauren O'Neill-Butler and Artforum's Rhonda Lieberman took notes.
The NYT gives Judy Chicago a glance in advance of the March opening of the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which is now the permanent home for Chicago's The Dinner Party. The NYT piece mentions Hilton Kramer panned Chicago the last time the work was hosted at the Brooklyn Museum. "Pan" doesn't come close—Hilton brusquely dismisses Chicago, uh, from the dinner table. Here's his lede:
JUDY CHICAGO'S "The Dinner Party" will open tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum, where it is scheduled to remain through Jan. 18. For the many faithful followers of the Feminist art movement, nothing more need be said. This is news—and indeed, review—enough. Never mind the Picasso retrospective. Forget the Hopper show. Male chauvinist pigs, anyway, wheren't they? For aficionados of Feminist art, "The Dinner Party" is the event of the year—and of many a year.Indeed—nothing more need be said. The rest of his piece, however, is below the fold.For the rest of us. . . .
The New York Times
October 17, 1980, Friday, Late City Final Edition
ART: JUDY CHICAGO'S 'DINNER PARTY' COMES TO BROOKLYN MUSEUM
BYLINE: By HILTON KRAMER
JUDY CHICAGO'S ''The Dinner Party'' will open tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum, where it is scheduled to remain through Jan. 18. For the many faithful followers of the Feminist art movement, nothing more need be said. This is news - and indeed, review - enough. Never mind the Picasso retrospective. Forget the Hopper show. Male chauvinist pigs, anyway, wheren't they? For aficionados of Feminist art, ''The Dinner Party'' is the event of the year - and of many a year.
For the rest of us - or for anyone more interested in art than in ideology, especially when visiting an art museum -the esthetic pleasures to be derived from ''The Dinner Party'' may prove to be more elusive. It is not that the work is in any way hermetic or mysterious or oblique in either its form or its meaning. Nothing more obvious or accessible or didactic has been seen in an exhibition of contemporary art in a very long time.
The fact is, ''The Dinner Party'' reiterates its theme -the celebration of women, both real and mythological, throughout the ages - with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art. Yet what ad campaign, even in these ''liberated'' times, would dare to vulgarize and exploit the imagery of female sexuality on this scale and with such abysmal taste? For its principal image, ''The Dinner Party'' remains fixated on the external genital organs of the female body. Its many variations of the image are not without a certain ingenuity, to be sure, but it is the kind of ingenuity we associate with kitsch.
To represent women's achievements through the ages by constructing a monument to their sex organs may not, in any case, be everyone's idea of an appropriate act of homage. No doubt it is intended to be an ironic comment on history, but that is not the way it comes through. The result looks merely crass and solemn and singleminded.
What is ''The Dinner Party,'' anyway? It is a vast installation, occupying a single large gallery, consisting of a triangular banquet table, 48 feet long on each side, adorned with 39 place settings. (There is no need, I suppose, to spell out the meaning of that triangle.) Each of these settings represents a celebrated female personage. The range is from the Primordial Goddess of prehistorical mythology to Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe in the 20th century, with acknowledgements to Kali, Sappho, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella d'Este, Emily Dickinson and other female eminences along the way.
Each of these 39 place settings consists of a large painted plate, sometimes carved in high relief, a large goblet and oversize utensils set down on an elaborately sewn and embroidered cloth bearing symbols deemed to be appropriate to their subjects. The whole structure sits on a platform of porcelain floor tiles bearing the names of 999 other women who are believed by Miss Chicago and her Feminist colleagues to have ''made significant contributions to society; attempted to improve conditions for women; provided a model for the future, or illuminated an aspect of women's experience.''
Such a project required the collaboration of a vast work force, of course, and Miss Chicago is said to have enjoyed the help of some 400 men and women, who worked for five years on ''The Dinner Party.'' That aspect of the project is documented at considerable length in a didactic display that serves as a prologue to the installation at the Brooklyn Museum.
The work on the plates is Miss Chicago's, I believe, and it is the plates that dwell so unremittingly on variations of the vulviform image. It is in the separate cloth runners, however, that we occasionally encounter some details of real artistic interest. There is a nice bit of tapestry, for example - all roses, violets and purple iris against green foliage - in the place setting for Eleanor of Aquitaine, and some beautifully sewn folk figures in the runner for Mary Wollstonecraft (though the plate representing the author of ''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' is one of the ugliest in the show). But artistic felicities are few and far between at ''The Dinner Party,'' and the use of visual stereotypes is rampant.
Thus, for the Emily Dickinson plate we are treated to a sex organ framed in pink lace, whereas for the plate representing the abolitionist called Sojourner Truth we are given a gross caricature of African mask imagery. Then, as if the images themselves were not gross enough, there is the tacky and ubiquitous use of gold and glitter to brighten up the atmosphere. Taste is not Judy Chicago's forte.
Is ''The Dinner Party'' art? Well, I suppose so. After all, what isn't nowadays? But it is very bad art, it is failed art, it is art so mired in the pieties of a political cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own. To this male observer, it looks like an outrageous libel on the female imagination.
Here's an ad that's popped up all over town (you can see the sign for the Farragut West Metro stop in the reflection on the glass). The pink part that's hard to make out reads, "Not just horror movie dead, but really, truly dead"—funny, since slasher flicks are the bellwether for imagery depicting violence against women.
There's no question that an ad like this isn't checked over by a full committee of marketing execs before it's launched in a metropolitan area. Someone found this campaign aggressive, and that person(s) was overruled—or, more likely, the ad was applauded because it is aggressive (the thought being that breast cancer requires action now and these ads should draw people's attention and force them to do something).
Oh, I did something all right—I called and complained. A staffer at the Susan Komen Foundation headquarters will return from lunch to find a stern message on her voicemail: I complained that the ad couples violent words with a woman's headless torso, with informative text appearing in marginal and tiny font, and that the ad is misguided at best and irresponsible at worst.
Now, it's hard to get too worked up about an ugly ad by a fundamentally decent organization, and it would be in especially poor taste to complain about ads about breast cancer and leave it at that—breast cancer is a terrible disease that affects almost everyone at some point or another, and organizations like the Susan Komen Foundation is basically doing the Lord's work. Two close girl friends of mine recently had reason to mention it. That's reason enough for me to donate the dozens of dollars at my disposal toward research—though I could use advice (in particular that of you breasted readers who have experience with or opinions about these organizations) regarding whose cause is worthiest.
Feministing has complained that the Komen Foundation favors a "save the titties!" message, which is tacky. On the other hand, the group supports Planned Parenthood, which is a decent thing to do and also irritates the religious groups that continue to insist on a link between abortion and breast cancer incidence. Other things that don't cause breast cancer: antiperspirants, underwire bras, the pill, fondling, silicone implants. Treat yourselves, ladies!
Michael Crichton isn't merely a pulp-fiction factory, anti-environmentalist hack, and middle school–minded libeler—he's also the author of a catalog on Jasper Johns! Crichton's introduction doesn't inspire confidence.
From a writeup of a recent Second Life Left Unity protest of Front National, the radical-right political party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen:
It's unclear when the shooting started, or who fired the first shot (several witnesses claim FN security forces assaulted them with "push guns", weapons capable of flinging a Resident across the island like a ragdoll), but in the final days of last week, at least, the assault raged from both sides.[. . .]
And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, "rez cages" (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more. By California time, the battles often culminated at 2am, 3am, and even later into the small hours of the American clock, when Residents in Europe are most active. So amid the exchange of salvos, the chat log was choked over with pro and anti-Le Pen curses, most in French. And when the lag was not too overwhelming to stream audio, the whole fracas was accompanied by bursts of European techno.
One enterprising insurrectionist created a pig grenade, fixed it to a flying saucer, and sent several whirling into Front National headquarters, where they'd explode in a starburst of porcine shrapnel. A few native English speakers joined the fray, though at least one missed the point in either direction, unhelpfully shouting "The French stink! Get out of Second Life!" and the like amid the conflict.
A screenshot from the protest
The Second Life Herald reports that Front National staff were forced to evacuate the facility; a casino now stands at the site of the former headquarters. But that's not the end to political tensions for the Porcupine arrondisement: the Modern German Army has identified the casino as a prime ground for recruiting. The Herald explains:
In a series of interviews with German Army führer Tristan Mineff and his troops, the Herald was told an unhappy tale of "French lag" and vigorous defense virtual German virtual real estate from the noisy partisan politics of another country from another universe—real life. [sic]In an unrelated news item, the Herald reports on an outbreak of a highly contagious strain of Haiku. The first reported case was recorded today at 3:45 p.m., and follows:We discussed the how selling some land to get a buffer between the German Army's base and the FN proved to be a mistake when Irish leftists purchased the plot and set up an anti-FN outpost. Führer Mineff also provideded the Herald with a copy of the "SECOND LIFE STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATY", and discussed the joys of damage enabled land, using black soldiers to make the point that the German Army are not fascist nazis, and the Alliance Navy.
Teleports, Linden$,In brighter news, pics are up from the winter opening at the University of Texas's Metaverse Gallery, which exhibited works by portrait photographer Shoshana Epsilon. The Flickr set is here. (My avatar was unavailable to attend.)
My virtual nards shriveled.
Concurrency sucks!
[Via Jackmormon.]
On his own terms. I heard him tell a story that I just love, about visiting France and being thoroughly reamed by a taxi driver and responding, "Oh je suis, suis je?" There there's his hilarious auction introduction, more rant than pitch, to a famous Bill Newman painting—and those are just things that people overheard him say, not even published writing.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, from time to time I would check in on the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, since I had been fond of the place and always tried to visit when I was in the city. Shortly after the devastation, some people who worked there set up a blogspot site in hopes of finding out where everyone was. It led to some tearful reunions (and reading).
No surprise that Cacno is up and running, but there's still a great deal of cultural rebuilding going on—or so I learn from Cynthia Joyce's Culture Gulf. She writes here about 1 dead in attic, a collection of distressing New Orleans Times-Picayune columns by Chris Rose (who, avant le deluge, wrote the celebrity gossip beat). I recommend it for your bookshelf, to fit that empty slot beside Robert Polidori's inescapable and haunting book of photography, After the Flood.
It's bad practice to use one's blog to offer up ex ante defenses of one's print stuff, so we may say that newly minted blogger and fellow CP writer Jeffry Cudlin wandered into a trap of his own devising with this post—his, like, third or forth ever. It's tempting to write those caveats: what the reader doesn't know is that I originally wrote this, or, I would've liked to mention so-and-so's work but had no room. (Those almost always apply.) But those would've, could've, should've, and did, in fact furthermores amount to asterisks—footnotes to which the readers of the original print edition may not be privy.
To that end, I'm wagging the finger at Regina Hackett—or rather, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Hackett first apologizes for an awkward lede. That's a feeling that strikes like a nicotine fit—second-guessing is habit forming. It's a position of privilege to write about art—and it's deflating to feel that your craft hasn't risen to the occasion. It's the correction that Hackett publishes in her post that rankles. At the end of the day, this probably belongs under the editor's column, but that's neither here nor there—if the mistake was published in the paper, the correction belongs there, right? (And apologies to RH for making her work a case in point. Here's a post that shows her off).
Skipping over the moronic anonymous comments, the conversation at Cudlin's place turns toward that favorite fulmination: whether writers must be artists to be critics. As a writer with some college-level fine arts training, I say that critics need standards like a fish needs a bicycle. The readership will out. If you don't know what you're talking about, readers who do will let you and everyone else know—that's the call and response of journalism. Blogs, I think, make the marketplace of ideas even more transparent. The charge that so-and-so shouldn't be writing about art is levied more often than not in hopes of declaring an opinion ineligible.
Now that I've covered shots across the bow, middling grousing, and navel gazing—let me tell you, I'm a real prince today—I'll direct your attention to this incredible Guardian report about a merger ventured Britain and France during the 1950s. To make one kingdom. I know. It's so rad.
If not the worst opinion, surely the worst opinion column the Washington Post has ever published. Above and beyond Courland Milloy's idiotic objections to the HPV vaccine, since when is cervical cancer a subject that deserves so much snark?
Jackie Trescott writes that confusion reigns over Smithsonian on Demand, the joint project by which Showtime pays the Smithsonian for rights of refusal to archival materials. Curiously, the her editors gave her story the headline, "Smithsonian Deal With Showtime Passes Muster." But as far as I can tell, "The Smithsonian Institution's controversial partnership with Showtime Networks has not hampered researchers' access to Smithsonian materials" so far.
Here's the kicker:
[T]he GAO found the Smithsonian received 117 requests for filming after the contract was in place and rejected only two.That doesn't sound like a clear bill of health to me, but it's all hard to say, since details of the contract haven't been made public. We're able to gloss some details from Trescott's report:GAO said its evaluation of the contract's impact was hampered by the "incomplete data and oversimplified criteria" provided by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian says its paperwork was created for a different purpose.
Some details of the contract were made public by Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small at a congressional oversight hearing in May. Small said the Smithsonian signed a rare 30-year contract with Showtime and that it would receive $500,000 a year if the deal is successful. The contract allowed the Smithsonian to create six shows a year with non-Showtime filmmakers.What are the metrics of success for subscription-cable documentaries? What are the implications of success on documentaries? The fact that the infant agreement has not yet hampered a non-Showtime documentarian does not seem like much of a recommendation for the program. Especially since greater visibility to Smithsonian documentaries will mean more requests, and if I understand correctly, more rejections.
I'm considering several degrees of outrage. I don't yet understand the commitment that the Smithsonian has to Showtime, so I don't know what's appropriate. The documentary on the cloudy leopard sounds cool, so I'm slightly outraged about not having Showtime.
Stocking stuffers!
The Washington Post reports on a guerilla-ish Beirut ad blitz that skewer sectarianism. It's a series of billboards with newsprint text advertisements or offers blatantly tailored to certain groups ("Parking for Maronites Only") alongside more earnest appeals ("Citizenship Is Not Sectarianism") designed pro bono by H&C Leo Burnett, Beirut. It's been distributed pro bono, too, via rapid-fire txt msg and word-of-mouth buzz.
The WaPo calls it "part provocation, part appeal, with a dose of farse that doesn't feel all that farcical." Hm. A nascent Dada?
DCist picks up the story here. As Sommer notes, the library has 99 problems. And now there's this gaping hole in the OCC footprint to think about. But it's easy to bury the lede in this story: Mayor Williams hoped to slip under the radar an ambitious restructuring of the DCPL. From the beginning his plan has resisted scrutiny, and the press has mostly not bothered. The Mayor released his Blue Ribbon Task Force report on the future of District libraries, a 370-page monster, the day before the Council's scheduled markup session on the legislation. And all this happens the week of Thanksgiving. I mean, come on.
Today Kojo Nnamdi—oh, go ahead, treat yourself, trill his name! You know you can't resist lolling those mellifluous tones over your tongue—will talk with new library chief Ginnie Cooper. Given that NPR just mentioned the tabled library bill in its hourly news roundup, I'm betting the question will come up. (NPR's angle, for what it's worth, was that the caucus found that the OCC site was too profitable to be given over to a public library. That's definitely Carol Schwartz's reasoning for opposing the Mayor's plan, but not Gray's position, that is, not his position before the vote. Now, it's harder to say. Barry's position is, as ever, mysterious. You know, I think I might have even said something like this to NPR's cub reporter.) Just a few more minutes of listening to poor Art Buchwald slowly dying on air on the Diane Rehm show, and then I'll be updating.
Here's the Mayor's response:
It's disappointing that the Education Committee did not approve our library plan but it's a good sign that the members tabled it rather than voting no. That suggests to me that they see the value of a new, clean, high-tech, child-friendly modern central library that is worthy of our great city and want to revisit this issue again soon. I will be redoubling my efforts over the next few weeks to work with Councilmembers to respond to any unanswered questions they have about the project.I understand that yesterday Mayor Williams called Marion Barry three times before the committee vote, so phones will be ringing off the hook—now, he has to convince nine members to introduce the library bill as emergency legislation, if he has any hope of establishing the library transformation as part of his legacy.
Tomorrow, the City Paper's Jessica Gould will run an item on the Hirshhorn's loading dock renovation woes. Woes? Woes.
And cheers & bon voyage to folks departing and joining the paper.
Broadcasting & Cable offers an analysis of changes at the news desk six weeks into Katie Couric's tenure at CBS Evening News. It's fascinating:
[S]ince Couric's arrival, women have received 40% fewer assignments than they did under her predecessor, Bob Schieffer. Men, meanwhile, have seen no cutback in their workload. The paucity of female correspondents is one result of an array of changes to the content, form and presentation of the newscast instituted under Couric. Those changes amount to two main differences in the new Evening News.I'd read that Couric was shortchanging hard news, but this seemed natural enough to me, who has a dim view of broadcast TV news: People go to the Internet for the hard news, and Katie Couric for the smile and the latest on [cleverly abbreviated couple]. But that's not a totally founded view, I think. There's a sizeable proportion of people who still depend on the nightly news for information, and those people are increasingly turning to the Internet for . . . pr0n. I poked around on the Congressional Internet Caucus site and, well, didn't find the report I looked at a while ago, which suggested that the increase in news-net use is a mere fraction of the increase in YouTube and other entertainment-net uses. The anchors are still gatekeepers.First, some hard, breaking news has been supplanted by features/interviews/commentary. The "Story of the Day" averages 18% less time than it did under Schieffer, who used to run one soft (human-interest, celebrity) feature for every three on a hard topic. Under Couric, the ratio is one to two. Moreover, the new nightly feature, freeSpeech, devotes 90 seconds to guest commentary.
Whatever else her tenure means, Couric seems to be keeping her sisters at CBS down:
Second, the role of the anchor has been emphasized; the role of the correspondent downplayed. That change is evident right at the top of the newscast when the day's major stories are teased.Maybe the changes explain why Couric's show has taken a drubbing in the ratings. Already the show is cutting its nightly opinion segment, but the report doesn't say anything about what the new mix will look like, or whether it will include more roles for women broadcasters.Whereas Schieffer had his correspondents introduce their own stories, Couric does all the teasing herself. She also has 20% more voiceover time than he did. Couric cedes time for the freeSpeech segment to a CBS News colleague only once a week, when Schieffer himself offers a regular commentary on Wednesday; on the other four days, we hear a guest.
The upshot of all these changes is that stories filed by correspondents account for just 69% of Couric's news hole, compared with 85% under Schieffer. And the brunt of that cutback has been borne almost entirely by CBS' female correspondents.
Steven Vincent, a political correspondent and sometimes art writer who was killed in Basra, has been posthumously awarded a Kurt Schork Memorial Award in International Journalism. Courtesy of The Corner.
Tommy is not going to like this news:
Officials with the local Boy Scouts and the Motion Picture Assn. of America on Friday unveiled the Respect Copyrights Activity Patch — emblazoned with a large circle "C" copyright sign along with a film reel and musical notes.I've got a lot of respect for my handful of friends who made it through Eagle Scout and beyond, having myself never learned a knot more complicated than the shoelace (despite being in the scouts for some years). Shame to see the Scouts bowing to their less noble instincts and climbing in bed with an organization like the MPAA.The 52,000 Scouts who are eligible may earn the patch by participating in a curriculum produced by the MPAA. To earn the badge, Scouts must participate in several activities including creating a video public-service announcement and visiting a video-sharing website to identify which materials are copyrighted. They may also watch a movie and discuss how people behind the scenes would be harmed if the film were pirated.
Fortunately for supporters of free information, the allure of free movies, music, and pr0n is enough to counteract whatever content-side sympathies the Scouts establishment are able to instill among young troops with this very ugly badge. (Unfortunately for supporters of the Scouts, all that freely available digital content probably does a number on recruiting. Tying knots wasn't even all that fun back in the stone age days of my youth.) There's no irony lost in the notion of the MPAA tapping the Boy Scouts in order to develop a clone army.
Tommy can't comment on this post without first defending this badge.
Did you know that the current City Paper features the fall arts guide—the complete autumnal calendar for cultural events in the District, presented in a handy pull-out format perfect for stashing in your glove box, man-purse, or messenger tote? In it I wrote a preview for Leo Villareal's show at Conner Contemporary. Note that I don't know what I'm talking about in that piece, exactly, since that show opens November 3, and I can't see into the frickin future.
Also, you have just two shopping days left to read my profile on Baltimore-based artist Ledelle Moe before some other, sorrier feature takes its place in the print edition.
City Paper items this week: Teo Gonzales and Inigo Navarro Davila at Irvine Contemporary and Alex Gutierrez at Project 4. I'll add links when they're available on the CP site and Spanish diacriticals when I'm feeling less lazy.
Also this week I have a feature profile on artist Ledelle Moe. Excerpt:
Given that the giant heads in "Memorial (Collapse)" appear to have been haphazardly lopped off a trio of disfavored colossuses, you'd expect the faces to be drawn from those of Saddam, Lenin, Kim Jong-Il, maybe even the National Party pols of Moe's homeland. "Coming from South Africa, people who have died are [seen as] a microcosm of a bigger political ripple," says Moe, explaining how some people tend to read her work. However, the faces reference not despots but people in Moe's life who have died. She doesn't say who, but she's still apparently trying to get over the loss.Sounds sinister. You can read it today."[P]eople who I knew personally, or not personally—their deaths stayed with me," she says. The heads, she says, "are about my own overturning."
In this week's City Paper, I sound off on recent sculptures by Evan Reed at Flashpoint.
The old sketch comedy show called The State used to run a skit about muppet trapping. Muppets are delicious, you see, and to trap a muppet you merely need to show that you are curious about the world. ("I sure could use some help counting to four," the hunter says, and some goofy blue muppet appears in the window. Then, bam!)
Muppet trapping came to mind while reading Blake Gopnik's discussion in the WaPo with George Washington University art history professor Alexander Dumbadze about the Corcoran and why our children isn't learning (or some such). The pair strut through the Corc, examining select pieces from the current "redefined" show. From the exchange about a piece by Kehinde Wiley:
BLAKE GOPNIK: Here's a work of very contemporary art that sees having an elaborate gold frame as something worth making a splash about.Frame-iness! Golly-garsh, Mr. Snuffleupagus! [WHACK]ALEXANDER DUMBADZE: And in a sense it's almost making fun of tradition, and playing upon the significance of the frame. What's really quite fun about this is the way the patterns and the gilding of the frame have been drawn into the rest of the work in the background. If you took off the frame, it would be a very different work.
BG: So maybe one of the lessons that art students could take away from this is that every single thing matters in a picture, and should be thought through. If you're going to put on a frame, that frame has to be about "frame-iness"!
Sure, allowance should be given for an off-the-cuff discussion about a piece, but Kehinde Wiley deserves better—even from a soundbyte. In the accompanying video, Kenneth Noland gets the same treatment. Says Gopnik: "But let's talk about the frame, instead of talking about the picture."
Borderline inanity is one thing, but they make some claims that are just wrong. Gopnik and Dumbadze mischaracterize the context surrounding Madonna and Child II, a piss photograph by Andres Serrano. Though Gopnik chides the Corcoran for sanitizing the piece in the accompanying wall text, he then leads into this exchange:
AD: Unfortunately, it goes back to broader cultural issues. During the culture wars of the late '80s, everyone got mad at Serrano's "Piss Christ" . . .That's striking. Of course the museum isn't inviting violence by hanging this piece—much less by explaining in words why it's considered offensive. Did Gopnik and Dumbadze consider why there hasn't been any violence? Or protesters, or even a public murmor, despite the fact that Madonna and Child II has all the same provocative content as Piss Christ? It's not for lack of inflammatory wall text. The proximate reason is that the deteriorating former Senator Jesse Helms hasn't made a public appearance since 2005, and no elected leader in the federal government has taken up his crusade. Today, there are more useful cultural blugeons available out there—gays, immigrants, Christmas-battling liberals—so art, for the moment, is off the radar. There's a pattern to culture wars, one that Wendy Steiner explains: There hasn't been a culture war that a powerful conservative agent didn't invent whole cloth. Republicans incite the "violence," not the museum. (Methinks that here, Gopnik's confusing Serrano with the Danish cartoons.)BG: -- where he put a crucifix in urine --
AD: . . . so this sometimes puts institutions in a real fix.
BG: They're inviting someone to get violent, if they're honest about the work.
You know finally exactly how unseriously Gopnik is taking his audience when, walking into a room of works by Donald Judd and Anne Truitt, he says Minimalist and actually throws little finger scare-quotes around the word ("Minimalist"). That's sloppy—even for a Style section piece written for Sesame Street's audience.
UPDATE: Quite clearly, my response was abundant in snark and light on substantive reproval. I hope readers recognize that I'm being unserious, too, when I'm talking about Gopnik vis-a-vis his audience—I do realize that this entire video effort is not to generate printworthy or academic criticism, but to give viewers with less visual literacy some handholds on contemporary art. That's worthwhile, and new media is a fitting avenue for that project.
Aww: A story that will make you want to nab one of hapless editors of the plucky n + 1, toussle his unkempt hair, and pour him a glass of his favorite Provençal rosé. The magazine tries to throw a fancy fundraiser—at an intern's parents' house!—only for some lout to abscond with the $3,000 in monies collected over the evening. (An episode of Veronica Mars, isn't this? If Keith Gessen is a rough-on-his-luck PHCer, then Stefan Beck definitely plays the cackling '09er.) From the Sun:
Asked in an e-mail to confirm the editors' alma maters, Mr. Gessen said: "You're not going to make this another one of those 'Harvard guys get really drunk and lose all their money' articles, are you? I think the real story is: 'n+1 sells out and throws nice party and this is what happens.'"You can do your part by ordering a subscription: Not only is it absolutely worth the money—light but relevant, as well evidenced by Gary Sernovitz's review of Gary Shteyngart's latest, Absurdistan—the magazine prints so infrequently that every issue feels like Christmas.
TNR, embarrassed by Siegel's efforts to marshall the Allies against the Axis of Bloggers, revoked his blogging privileges and hung some placeholder text saying that the blog was "currently unavailable." Or so I thought. Rather, the magazine was in fact worried about finding themselves on the business end of a libel suit.
Lindsay Beyerstein explains succinctly in comments on her blog how Siegel libeled James Kincaid—which is why the magazine suspended his blog:
Siegel didn't just say that James Kincaid is probably a pedophile because he's a scholar who studies the sexualization of children.TNR apparently agreed. The sockpuppetry meltdown was a spectacularly coincidental fiasco. (Or perhaps all too predictable, given the writer in question.)NAMBLA quoted a passage from Kincaid's 1992 book "Child Loving" and substituted its own euphemisms for Kincaid's terms. Where Kincaid wrote "pedophile" NAMBLA substituted "[boy-lover]", etc.
Lee Siegel copied NAMBLA's version, admitting that the passage had been bowdlerized.
Siegel was maliciously implying that James Kincaid was associated with NAMBLA and using NAMBLA's self-serving paraphrase of Kincaid's published work to do it.
Siegel goes on to say that editors shouldn't publish Kincaid's work because he confesses to being a pedophile.
So I guess Kincaid has frankly admitted his predilections after all--if you know where to look for them. What a shame that editors still publish his disingenuous screeds against the media's sexualization of children.Siegel's "I guess" doesn't get him off the hook. That's a factual allegation, not just an opinion.Siegel loses all plausible deniability in the next sentence in which he asserts that it is a shame that editors publish Kincaid's disingenuous screeds. It's an opinion that it's shame, but it's predicated on an alleged fact--namely that Kincaid is a self-professed pedophile.
Siegel is claiming that Kincaid's writings are disingenuous because he's a closet pedophile.
That sounds like libel to me--especially because of the subject matter. Implying that someone is a pedophile is probably libel per se. [Emphasis and links, Beyerstein's.]
The URL says it all: Lee Siegel's TNR blog, "Lee Siegel on Culture," has been suspended. [NOTE: See update below.] The most recent post, if you want to call it that—it's a single line of text—suggests that the blog is "currently unavailable." Make no mistake: In response to the generalist critic's inane blogging—and in particular, one notorious episode that prompted Matthew Yglesias to dub him "a modern-day Hannah Arendt," to cite just one of the critical-to-dismissive response Siegel earned—his editors at the magazine have permanently revoked his blogging privileges. Seemingly, his higher-ups along the masthead decided that his stint was sufficiently regrettable that the best thing to do was whitewash it: Previous posts and archives have, to the best of my browser's knowledge, been deleted.
Siegel no longer writes material for the back of the book under Leon Wieseltier (that's not news). But does he retain his position as senior editor with the magazine? While he's still listed as such on the masthead, I am led to understand that this recent development serves as his de facto termination/resignation. Which specifically—dooced or deferred?—G.p can't yet say; Liegel might continue to serve in the same senior-editorial capacity that, say, Andrew Sullivan does (which is to say, not really at all). There's more news forthcoming, so tune in.
(Why the Schaudenfreude? What beef do art writers have with Siegel? Click here and here for a sampler. And then there's this recent groaner. Short answer: Siegel's an inept critic, and a baby to boot, and the cultcha's better off without him.)
UPDATE: Franklin Foer, editor of TNR, replaces the placeholder text at Siegel's blog with an apology:
After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel's articles and blog under the username "sprezzatura" were produced with Siegel's participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel's blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine.Siegel was much more familiar with the ways of the blogosphere than he ever let on! Apparently "sprezzatura" posted glowing praise for Siegel as rejoinder to his legion critics; when the magazine's readership—whom Siegel ought not to have mistaken for complete asses—cottoned on, someone at TNR did the homework and compared the IP addresses. Before this person could act on the information, the gig was up.
Apparently, when Siegel wrote,
Politics is about persuading your adversary's supporters to come to your side. It's not about reassuring everyone on your side--under the guise of "thinking strategically"--that you and they are absolutely right.he was operating with a fuzzy definition for the number of agents that "you" constitutes. One wonders whether he's employed the same tactics against his enemies in the blogosphere. Ezra Klein, checked your logs lately? (Let's all give thanks that Uma Thurman doesn't keep on online diary.)
Perhaps most delicious of all—and sure, this story is a whole heaping spoonful of tasty—is Siegel's handle. One definition of sprezzatura—a paradoxical Renaissance term that summons forth a lot of intro-humanities course memories—might be a certain sort of graceful carelessness. The best locution is given by the character Count Ludovico in Baldassar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier:
It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it . . . obvious effort is the antithesis of grace."I'd say Siegel absolutely nailed it.
NB: The decision to oust Siegel was made, apparently, before it was revealed that he played sock puppet for his own blog.
In this week's City Paper I've got a short bit on Santana Miyazaki at Touchstone Gallery and more on Remix: East-West Currents in Contemporary Art at the Arlington Arts Center.
"Academy 2006," in this week's City Paper.
While Mike Grass is away for a couple of weeks, I'm picking up some of his Express-ive duties. Need to catch up on the haps in the District as of 6 a.m. this morning? I'm your man. In case you don't click over, I'll take the opportunity to especially plug Lynn Berenbaum's tennis blogging. She's covering the Legg Mason Tennis Classic here in the District, and while I couldn't tell you Legg Mason from Foghorn Leghorn, I can absolutely recommend Berenbaum's easy, locally focused, just-gossipy-enough writing style. If you, in fact, actually enjoy tennis, you'll love her stuff.
Howdy, WaPo readers. If you're looking for the Rioult post, click here. For more art stuff, scroll down or click here. For published art stuff, click here and search for "capps". To disconnect, press 0, or simply hang up.
MORE: Hilariously, the online Style section offers a link to the Reliable Source column about Rioult—that's almost like actual Style reporting on local art news! Or maybe the RS is featured online wherever it's relevant, in which case . . . the Style section still sucks.
New in the City Paper this week: A short item on E3, the painting symposium currently showing at Transformer, and a longer piece on the DC Free Recording Project. Excerpt:
"I'm not doing it to say, 'Hey, look at what a bunch of great fucking guys we are,'" [Ian] MacKaye says. "It's more like the Diggers," the late-'60s San Francisco guerrilla-theater group that operated a bread line. "It's just free because it's free."I managed to piss off MacKaye and the conversation quickly descended into Deadwood-ian levels of profanity. Guy could use a drink or something.
I should have some stuff on Cap Fringe this week, too, but I haven't seen the issue yet.
But you see, Ryan, I do want to read about the "consumption decisions of 19th century textile workers." If their consumption decisions are anything like my breakfast decisions, then 19th-century textile workers just ate two Whole Foods turkey sausage links. Sausage link–eating workers of the world, unite and take over!
As former DCist editor, Ryan needs no introduction to local readers, but I hope to one day play a bit role in his ocean-spanning anglo empire, so I'll welcome him. His blog stays with us in the District while he moves to London—wish him the best with both.
Check out the Times's text:
As the congregation of the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church looked on and its pastor, Apostle Alton R. Williams, presided, a brown shroud much like a burqa was pulled away to reveal a giant statue of the Lady, but with the Ten Commandments under one arm and "Jehovah" inscribed on her crown. [emphasis added]Irritating though these may be as political artworks, you have to admit, the Memphis piece belongs in a folk art collection, posthaste. Forget What's the Matter With Kansas?—here's a crisp snapshot of that American fringe whose silent-majority status is systematically overstated as, well, you read What's the Matter With Kansas?, didn't you? You can fill in the blanks. Runs a cold chill through my secular heart.
Here people are going to find the AES+F piece more inflammatory than irritating, but it's worth noting that the series predated 9/11 (and anyway was made in a country in which 9/11 refers to Turgenev's birthday). New Liberty is billed as a response to Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," which probably sells out its print run after every terrorist attack. But I say this one can still be irritating! It's that gotcha! quality from which most political art suffers. Fuck, I'm shocked I didn't see it at the Whitney Biennial.
Now that I think of it, none of the series was originally presented as photographs, because it had some sort fuzzy commercial contextualization of experience angle. This piece in particular was a t-shirt, and I considered buying one for the novelty, but no one was working at the Sakharov Museum the entire time I was there; and furthermore it seemed to me that buying one would be an endorsement of sorts of a view that (most likely) originally stemmed from the war in Chechnya, about which I couldn't write a very long post. It's not quite the same thing, but ultimately, I'd be irritated to see a Ukrainian strutting around in an ironic shirt that said "I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THE WRONGNESS OF THE CONFEDERACY." Not exactly analogous since Chechnya isn't the text but the likely subtext of the t-shirt, but anyway, I didn't buy it. Where exactly could you wear it in the States, anyway?
Certainly not to the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church (Apostle Alton R. Williams, presiding) in Memphis, Tennessee. Their Li'l Lady Liberty'll put a boot up yer ass.
Next week I'll have some news about an artist with whom you're all familiar and that artist's plans for a new permanent installation in the District. I mean, I have the news now, but I can't tell you yet. For now, note that CP's Show & Tell column is back. Nell Boeschenstein has the goods on the Source Theater, which has stood empty for as long as I've lived here.
From today's live chat with M. Grass, the Washington Oculus:
Grand Rapids, Mich.: What does "blog" mean?Crucial.
Michael Grass: Good to hear from good 'ole Grand Rapids, Gerald Ford's hometown. [blah blah blogs] . . . reminds me of an old broken-down carnival ride at the Ionia County Free Fair, which Grand Rapids, you must know is about 30 miles to your east.
In Inside Putin's Russia, Andrew Jack describes a meeting with a Russian official:
As I prepared to leave Moscow at the end of 2004, I went to the ministry of foreign affairs to receive my annual press accreditation card.So kurators mind the media—that certainly fits the story behind the Whitney Museum's NYT ads."Andrew, why do you keep writing about Yukos? Why not something more positive?" said my kurator, a young shaven-headed man who had recently replaced his end-of-career predecessor as ‘handler’ of the English-speaking media. "That way when I show my boss your articles next year, he will be able to say you are a serious correspondent and offer no objection to renewing your card."
More on the Whitney Biennial very soon—stay tuned.
A thanks and horns-up to fellow Longhorn J.H. for e-mailing the text of the article I mentioned below. It's a 2003 WaPo spotlight by architecture critic Benjamin Forgey on the Mies Van der Rohe Farnsworth House ("one of the most important—and beautiful—creations in the history of 20th-century architecture") on the eve of the building's sale at Sotheby's, an auction that might have imperiled its existence. (Had the Farnsworth House been sold to a private buyer, that buyer could have altered the original design to make it more "livable" or even attempted to take down and move the House to a different spot.)
Forgey wrote that "the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages." One might say nearly the opposite about the MLK Memorial Library, the limits of whose public service was never tested, given the library system's gross mismanagement.
Regardless, Forgey suggested that potential buyers consider donating their auction bids to the joint campaign between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the Farnsworth. And those are the organizations who own the building now, exactly as it should be.
Here's hoping that we'll yet see Forgey prognosticate about the fate of the District Mies very soon. Full text of the 2003 article (and a pony!) below the cut.
The Washington Post Saturday, October 25, 2003And for dessert (because I know you read every nutritious word) (via):SECTION: Style; C01
HEADLINE: Sheer Treasure: Fate of Mies House Is on the Block
BYLINE: Benjamin Forgey, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: CHICAGO
They were going to show the Farnsworth House this morning, busing folks 60 miles from the Loop into the Illinois countryside for brunch and "a private viewing" of the famously beautiful -- and exquisitely impractical -- weekend retreat.
But the party was canceled this week, say the real estate marketers, because it wasn't private enough. "Once the invitations were received, the response we got was very, very overwhelming," explains Stuart Siegel, president of Sotheby's International Realty. "People told us they didn't want to see it with a group. 'We know the house,' they were saying, 'and we want to see it at our own pace, in privacy.' "
Oops. You will have to give Siegel a call in New York if you'd like your own private tour of the world's best and best-known glass house at its wooded, 60-acre site in the fast-suburbanizing farmland near Plano, Ill. Be sure of your finances before you call, however. The Farnsworth House is being offered for sale at a Sotheby's auction in New York on Dec. 12 with a pre-sale estimate of $4.5 million to $6 million.
Here's a better idea. If you want to save this great treasure, you can do it for less. A donation of $1 million or so, or indeed of any amount, would boost a last-minute campaign by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the house.
In announcing the campaign on Oct. 16, the two organizations pledged $1 million each to seed the fund. "We've had some interest, but we're not there yet," reports National Trust President Richard Moe. "We're trying to identify individuals and institutions in the limited universe of those who are passionate about modern architecture."
The cause is just. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1946 and completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is one of the most important -- and beautiful -- creations in the history of 20th-century architecture. Its cultural worth far outweighs its monetary value or its status as a private residence.
But money is what auctions are all about, so it remains crucial that the two public organizations succeed in their last-minute campaign. They propose not only to preserve the building on its original site, but also to guarantee public access by operating the house as a museum.
Yes, there may be a buyer out there who would treat the house with due respect, but such a result is far from certain. Because there are no restrictions on the Sotheby's sale, a purchaser would be free to alter Mies's masterpiece -- to add a bedroom for the kids, say, or to screen in its airy porch -- and thereby disturb or destroy its subtle harmonies.
Or, a new owner might even decide to take the house apart piece by piece (no simple task given the precision of Mies's detailing) and move it to another location. Moe and David Bahlman, president of the Illinois preservation group, rightly point out in a joint statement that this would be "an architectural disaster of the first order." It also would
be quite loony, but there's no telling what kind of loons might be attracted to Sotheby's in December.This uneasy situation came about because the State of Illinois, under budgetary and political pressure, reneged on an agreement to buy the house from Lord Peter Palumbo, its owner for the past 31 years. Palumbo, a real estate developer and collector of modern houses -- he also possesses a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and one by Le Corbusier in Paris -- purchased the property in 1972 from Edith Farnsworth, a medical doctor and the original owner.
By all accounts Palumbo has been an ideal custodian, using the house as it was intended to be used -- as an intermittent retreat -- and maintaining it in pristine condition. After a damaging flood of the Fox River in 1996, he hired Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, Mies's grandson, to carry out a $500,000 restoration. On my recent visit the house looked as good as new. The hundreds of lady bugs attracted to its white steel piers did not in the slightest mar the splendid lines.
The Farnsworth House is more about ideas than practicalities. Its everyday deficiencies have been almost legendary from the time they were first enumerated by Farnsworth in an Illinois courthouse in the early 1950s, during a bitter legal dispute with the architect.
For instance, there's the mosquito problem. Mies did not want screens to mar the transparency of his porch or the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, but Farnsworth put them in anyway. One can easily imagine how the screens did indeed taint the beauty, and also how they must have made summer evenings more bearable. (Palumbo, in contrast, has made do without screens and attacked mosquitoes at the source, replacing the prairie grasses they adored with a conventional lawn.)
Then there is the decoration issue -- in Mies's carefully calculated interior, one cannot even move a chair a few inches without altering, and possibly spoiling, the carefully calibrated whole. More fundamentally, there's the contradiction between residential privacy and all-glass walls, made all the worse when the house in question is famous and lacks any interior walls. Farnsworth once was startled coming from her shower by a group of Japanese tourists, busily snapping photographs.
These and other impracticalities, however, pale in comparison to the building's sheer presence in the landscape. And its other transformative qualities. The house is simplicity itself -- a long box measuring 28 feet by 77 feet and constructed of glass and white-painted steel -- yet simple means have been deployed with such definitive precision that the effect is magical and complex.
Supported by eight wide-flange steel columns and raised five feet off the ground, the horizontal box at first view appears to hover amid trees. The slightly asymmetrical placement of a long entry platform contributes to this dynamic effect. Yet, paradoxically, the transparent building stands solidly and authoritatively in the land -- there are
echoes of stone Greek temples in this harmonious box with steel legs.You see right through it, but it refuses to disappear.
The house has a handmade feel, too, despite its industrial materials. During construction Mies insisted that the steel columns be painstakingly sanded and covered with several coats of thick white paint to eliminate any sign of the welds and bolts that connect the column to the steel roof and floor beams. It's as if the architect wanted his house to be as perfect in its way as the gorgeous old sugar maple that shades it from the south.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of architects have gone to school on the building's nonpareil conjoining of outside with inside, man-made with nature. It is in a sense an observatory more than it is a house, a contemplative pavilion in a glade alongside a river. In fact, the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages.
Front-page story on IMs in today's WaPo: "Status Icons Show Who's Where When." Will the Internets never cease to amaze? Is this the singularity??
Speaking of misrepresenting Muslim people and nations, DCeiver tells us about Howard Kaloogian, a GOP Congressional hopeful in California who posted a lovely image of downtown Baghdad and wagged his shaming finger at the U.S. media for painting a grim portrait of a region where peace still obtains. Of course, by "Baghdad," Kaloogian meant "Bakırköy," a suburban area of Istanbul located 1,000 miles northwest of Iraq. 'S where the airport is. Nice sea coast, giant nightclubs, huge Western shopping mall. Not so much with the GWOT.
Needless to say it was a courageous citizen journalist who fingered Kaloogian, deftly recognizing the Turkish script plastered all over the ads in the picture. (Note to the 'loogian: "edo" is a popular ice-cream franchise. You can't swing your fez in Istanbul without landing your tassle in their dondurma.) So bloggers strike again, and that may very well be the point to take away: in the wake of Ben Domenech, America's enemies are back to doing what they do best.
Speaking of payola punditry, four newspapers—one in California, two in North Carolina, and one in Colorado—each published an identical paragaph in their respective papers' unsigned editorials in praise of stripping Davis-Bacon Act labor protections for Gulf Coast reconstruction projects. Same paragraph, four editorial columns. Have fun explaining that, eds.
UPDATE: As noted in comments, there's less than meets the eye to this story. It turns out that a shadowy megacorporation simply owns a number of small-market newspapers throughout the country, which they use to distribute pro-administration opinion.
If it weren't for the fact that the New York Times company owns not only the Boston Globe but also the Boston Red Sox* I think there would be cause for outrage. But, nah, just more crazy fishwrap fun.
* something like that
You really don't want to miss Ezra Klein's post (which he should expande into an article!) about Big Pharma's literary aspirations:
Big Pharma, furious that so many Americans are taking advantage of Canada's cheaper drug costs to undercut the industry's price-gouging, decided to commission a book that'd vault up the bestseller list, scare the daylights out of American consumers, and shut down the cross-border trade. The plot? A band of Croatian terrorists wreaks havoc on unsuspecting Americans by constructing a website that claims to offer cheap drugs from Canada but in fact ships out poison pills.That is fantastically creepy. And maybe a harbinger of art to come. Andy Warhol offered a pretty thorough critique of material culture, but I don't think his art anticipated a state in which even novels are a form of spam.
Tom writes more here. Now for a nonsequitor that's probably of very little interest to most of you. Last night Tom and I went round and round again in our continuing debate about marketing and determination. Here's what we're arguing over:
We've been going round and round over this stuff (see comments to Tom's post for more)—we're practically not even friends anymore. So as an olive branch, Tommy, I offer to you Libelous Claims About Large Corporations.
Having let my subscription lapse months and months ago, I'd forgotten about that New Yorker issue last month that featured ads by Target exclusively. Found it in a stack of recent issues and, really, I wasn't moved one way or the other. I mean, the issue that appeared in my mailbox last week (for reasons passing understanding—are companies picking up that tab, too?) was stuffed with a Starbucks coffee filter. Could a thousand Halliburton print ads be more annoying? I doubt it.
Michael Bierut at Design Observer mentions this issue and says the s-word: subliminal. Remind me, what's the HTML for rolling one's eyes? Sure, I don't doubt that images change our perception of the world even as we perceive them—certain kinds of images, anyway. The fact that the standard for brainwashing keeps changing without our evidently being brainwashed ought to tell us something. But television commercials, marching our minds toward an event horizon beyond which independent thought is, uh, unthinkable? Visual pollution, a public warp zone of negative visual input that sucks away at our capacity for information that doesn't come in megawatts? The Internet—with all those blinking parts? This brave new world, into which we have been having entered for so many decades now, is very ugly in spots but has never struck me as, or proven to be, particularly poisonous. Insofar as advertising images do affect our perception of life, I'm not sure it's obviously negative.
Observer notes that all the Target ads do amount to a context that doesn't complement the traditional New Yorker illustrations—that's a sharp concern, and good reason to tut-tut editor David Remnick and co. for the issue. But taken generally I think Remnick is making the right calls, however whorish it seems when you hold in your hands a magazine that won't close flat for all the bizarrely shaped junk inserts crammed inside. Blogs and online content have to be chipping away at his erstwhile subscriber base (maybe I'm a case in point), the strong brand name notwithstanding, and a print magazine has to make up the difference somewhere.
Notes
1. OK, now tell me about how I'm wrong about thinking that I'm not brainwashed. I'll welcome my new/longstanding marketing overlords!
2. Tried hard to work Expect More, Pay Less into the above, but it wasn't going to happen.
3. Read Everything Bad Is Good for You. Stephen Johnson's right—mostly. He never quite gets around to addressing the not-so-extreme behaviors associated with entertainment media. I would've liked to hear him address whether an active addictive entertainment (like MMORPGs) is preferable to a passive addictive entertainment (like TV). Stimulants or depressants, SJ?
Did you guys see that your humble correspondent merited a mention in WaPo Express today? They have a section on blogs, and they quoted a few crucial talking points from my white paper on Duffy's Irish Pub. Thanks, fishwrap!
I might've caught it earlier in the day, but today's Sudoku was set on "HARD," and lord, is it ever—at least an hour of my day has been spent staring at that grid. I've filled eight squares. Eight! Stupid MSM.
I was not kind to his work—in fact, I have to own up to calling him a hack over a relatively insubstantial matter—so it's with real regret I express my sympathies to Steven Vincent's family and friends in light of his tragic murder in Basra.
Yes, it's too easy to cock off on a blog. Yet I don't think it's appropriate or even possible to consider all the morbid possibilities of this world when we do write about other people and their ideas. I don't feel particularly ashamed for using the word "hack," but I am sorry that I was wrong. Dying as a result of pursuing the truth is a display of integrity that should never be asked of a journalist.
A couple weeks back Artnet reported that conservative media outlets in New York were raising a ruckus over one panel from A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Could Be Like, a 14-foot-long illustration featuring thousands of words of dialogue. The panel in question featured a drawing of the iconic hooded prisoner from the Abu Ghraib photographs, but the real controversy was caused by the fact that the Drawing Center—the space in which Wilson's work was exhibited—seeks to move to facilities at Ground Zero in the new World Trade Center.
Not so much any more, it seems. What with Governor George Pataki reportedly threatening that "[w]e will not tolerate anything on the site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on September 11," the Drawing Center is reconsidering whether it wants to relocate to the new facilities.
It goes without saying that freedom of speech from political suppression is one of America's most cherished values, and it's probably beside the point to note that a work celebrating freedom of speech from political suppression does not, in fact, denigrate America, New York, freedom, or anything else, except perhaps the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
I'm sympathetic to Wilson's complaint that Drawing Center chiefs aren't putting forth a robust defense of artistic freedom in light of these attacks, but the attacks themselves certainly come as no surprise. If the Drawing Center's board does decide to go through with the move to Ground Zero facilities, they had better build a bunker—anthing more controversial than a Crystal Bridges gift shop will be subject to constant shelling from those who neither understand art nor freedom. Lots of foot traffic, yes, but hardly worth the stress the artists or programming directors will surely endure if the Drawing Center isn't willing to go to the mat over the work it exhibits.
I admit, my gut reaction to Nike's, shall-we-say, "citation" of the iconic Minor Threat album cover was negative—Minor Threat inspiring nostalgia in me in a way that Nike does not, memories of dedication to Dischord Records's trademark abstinence regarding image-based commodity (t-shirts, etc.). Yet I read the apology issued by Nike—make that "Nike SB," which I take means "Nike Skateboarding," the division created to take this hit—and of course it's entirely reasonable. It's corporate wisdom and an eye toward the demographic that has the mega multinational pleading for mercy from mom and pop, but the letter is smart; I might entertain a Rove-ian interpretation of the homage-cum-scandal as a clever way to force the brand into a pretty insular niche market.
On another note, as Christopher Lynn observes, the no-doubt supremely offended reaction among any number of punk ethos/DIY adherents is a bit much: A robust appreciation for intellectual property rights has never exactly been a central feature of the punk platform. Frankly I think it would be inspired if every company whose logo has been molested by a rock band were to feature their music in an ad—unattributed, even! Teach you damn punks a lesson! Get outta my flowerbeds! You kids are on thin ice with me, thin, thin ice!
I used to have a t-shirt for a band called Seaweed—I think it was a play on a Motel 6 ad? This post is making me feel so old.
Courtesy of Clutch Pearls, it appears that the Internets will go through with a plan to extend a top-level domain to the porn industry: dot-xxx. ICM Registry—the part of the Internets, apparently, that sprouts new domains—lists the benefits to the .xxx registry. Dot-xxx is voluntary but is leveraged by incentives: By agreeing to the best practices guidelines (mandatory for the use of the registry), adult content producers become more appealing to major credit card companies, who sometimes refuse to enable transactions for online pornographers due to shady practices. Porndogs benefit from .xxx, which ensures minimum confidentiality and identity-protection standards. And an online red light district is a major victory for parents, who may soon be free from the fear that Precious Tot will visit whitehouse.com while writing a report on Sox the Cat and find, instead, Soxxx the Stripper. Here's hoping that everyone involved—family groups, pornographers, and porn aficionados—realizes this and plays ball.
WORD TO THE WISE: Add it to your MT Blacklist now!
Over the long weekend Sarah Boxer chimed in with a piece about PostSecret and clued into the most interesting observation about the site: the increasingly streamlined style of the entries. If you've checked in on the site before (or if you scroll from the bottom forward) you'll note the sine qua non to the appeals, an "I give you x—in defiance of y social expectation!" no less requisite than the "Forgive me Father" preface to the more traditional testimonial.
The visual vocabulary of PostSecret, a whisper-postcard project by Frank Warren (Boxer doesn't note the site owner and artist's identity), is pure Barbara Kruger; the rhetorical quality a cross between Jenny Holzer's letters-to-the-universe aphorisms and Cindy Sherman's context-deprived but wholly narrative film snips. Some postcards are more visually sophisticated than others—the visual sometimes helps to set 'em up or knock 'em down (here or here)—but mostly they aim for the same target, and it's somewhat more specific than just airing the dirty laundry.
So how does some motivated portion of the site's 2.5 million visitors come to collectively recognize a distinct way to realize a secret? There are of course limitations to what may be done within the confines of a postcard (at least one that stands a chance of being mailed, anyway); syntactically speaking, secrets have a structural quality that fits the mold. And probably it's easier to tell everyone the details about the skanky skeletons in your closet when there's a codified tradition to it, especially if it costs less than a full-price stamp to get involved, and more so if there's a certain way of doing it that onlookers find mutually rewarding.
I suspect that we see Warren's hand at work, too—his preferences bring some postcards to light but probably direct many more to large bins shoved under the bed or wherever. If that's the case, Warren is asking for something more specific than the site's modest instructions might lead you to believe, either by dint of his voyeuristic tendencies or perhaps inadvertent curatorial guidance in what the community of confessors has to say.
Or he may post everything he gets, or he may intend to eventually post everything he receives (barring, I imagine, Blake Boyd-types trying to use the space as a forum)—regardless of the degree to which Warren guides the page, there's a strong organizing principle at work. Beyond the level of pure pathos, it's the accretion of visual and narrative intuition that activates the site.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
So evidently a lot of people are excited that Fox is bringing back “Family Guy” after canceling it. I can’t really see why – while I always like to see a RISD grad make good, I could never get into that show. The character of the baby is not as funny as the creators seem to think, and the son’s voice is extremely grating, never a good feature. Can’t watch it.
I’m also a little bitter that a mediocre production like "Family Guy” is getting a second chance when the true comedy gold, “Greg the Bunny” was axed without a second thought. Sarah Silverman, Eugene Levy, and puppets? C’mon! Warren Demontague is a monkey god. How anyone can get through life without slipping “I’m going to be spending the weekend in wine country . . . that’s what I call the room above my garage” into casual conversations, well, I just don’t understand. But there it is, Fox kicked the show around for a few months and then killed it. A tragedy.
Other things no one in their right mind has any use for: Star Wars, anything involving any form of the word “Hitchhike” in the title, movies in general.
We can all breathe easy—The Wire has been renewed for a fourth season. If you haven't seen it, quit your job and rent seasons one and two.
Taking a momentary break from my hiatus to note Sarah Boxer's article about the New York Public Library image archive, which just went live. It can be found here and it's wonderful. The poor man's digitally reanimated Joseph Cornell (though I don't recall who has the claim to more images: Cornell's studio or NYPL). And on Cornell, Adam Gopnik.
Hiatus resumed, see you on Monday. If you need me I'll be at Jet Artworks tonight to see Molly Springfield's opening, whose work I'm jazzed to see.
Courtesy of the Begging To Differ forum comes this jewel from the Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON—The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website.Here's one example of the relief pitching Gannon provides for Scott McClellan:Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."
Called on last week by President Bush at a press conference, Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them "divorced from reality." During the presidential campaign, when called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard service.
Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy: Harry Reid, who's talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. You've said you're going to reach out to these people. How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?Both the "soup lines" and "verge of collapse" lines were auteured by Rush Limbaugh, a fact confirmed by a Rush Limbaugh transcript that's posted on Jeff Gannon's site. The GOP mails you the "divorced from reality" line (with a Cokie Roberts instructional video) once you publicly profess your desire to carry water for the administration. How is Daily Kos supposed to get a good grind on his ax if hacks like Gannon hide this stuff in the open?
Garrett Graff wants to do to Jeff Gannon what the Tampa Bucs did to Rich Gannon in Superbowl XXXVII. (Sack him a lot, block his passes, etc. . . . don't act like you didn't watch it, even if it was the Bucs.) But Choire Sicha thinks that asking the White House to revoke Gannon's press credential is bad business. Much as it shames the institution of the White House and American journalism that Bush gives preferential treatment to this douchebag, I'm with Sicha—Gannon deserves the credential so long as the White House wants to extend him that privilege. Every editor who has a problem with Gannon as McClellan's go-to man ought to clear out some space above the fold for the long overdue series of blistering feature-length 36-point-font reports on White House media abuse. Make these motherfuckers pay the rent! But as far as the White House itself is concerned, "press" and all those associated freedoms, especially in the age of the mighty, mighty blogosphere, has to include schmucks with keyboards—not just media-elite Medilldos.
And I understand what kind of respect and enthusiasm the White House brings to the media ethics conversation. When they keep Gannon around, it's because they agree with my in theory, not because they're Soviet creeps, right? Jesus.
One way to convince people that you're a douchebag while simultaneously politicizing a global tragedy is to call your political enemies stingy in the face of devastation. Two examples are so awful that I think they ought to be put up to a contest. Can you pick the more tasteless of the two?
Just wait until the folks at the Jackson-George Regional Library System of Mississippi hear about this:
["Nip/Tuck"]'s creator, Ryan Murphy, has declared that it is his goal in life to remove every barrier to depiction of explicit sex on over-the-air TV. He was quoted earlier this year saying, "It's tough to get that sexual point of view across on television. Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy."Who are we to stand between a man and his dreams?
Tyler Green discusses specialization vis-à-vis Slate's decision to give Lee Siegel yet another hat (improbably, Lee Siegel is The New Republic's television critic, The Nation's book critic, and now Slate's art critic). I don't think Slate is showing inexcusable judgment, given the medium that it is. They publish cocktail party–criticism. A generalist can write this well because he doesn't mind (or perhaps exceeds in) identifying trends, glossing the right details, and ignoring the nagging Jiminy Cricket–impulse critics feel to know the literature and know it thoroughly.
Be wary of the generalist who dismisses any concern about overstretch. "Everything’s the same," says Siegel, "I can write about anything," which makes Siegel sound like a cockatiel proud of his plume. (To be fair, it's far from the best interview that's ever been written.) So I wouldn't go to Siegel for anything instructional about the art world. Then again, I wouldn't go to Slate for that in the first place.
From "Regarding the Torture of Others," an essay that Susan Sontag wrote in response to Abu Ghraib:
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.Andrew Sullivan mocked her for her thesis, but Sontag was correct. Her aesthetic analysis especially cutting given the news that Navy Seals photographed and subsequently published photographs depicting their abuse—torture—of Iraqi detainees:[. . .]
So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
The story said the pictures appeared to show Sea Air Land force men sitting on hooded and bound detainees, holding a gun to a detainee's bloodied head, and placing a boot on a prone man's chest.Astonishingly, the Seals who photographed and then published pictures of their torturing Iraqis have sued the AP for broadcasting pictures available on the Internet. Without detectable irony they claim that the AP has endangered the lives of U.S. soldiers by showing the world what U.S. soldiers have done. The purpose of the Seals' lawsuit is to censure the AP for not censoring the images—while it is they who should be imprisoned. Their weak, mitigating failure to accept responsibility for their transgressions is reflected entirely by the public debate after the revelation of the Abu Ghraib incident:Others showed grinning personnel sitting on hooded prisoners in a pick-up.
The lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs are anonymous, says the photos were of regular special operations techniques.
It alleges that the pictures were shown on al-Jazeera, television and on anti-US billboards outside Guantanamo Bay, endangering the lives of the troops and their families.
It claims the photographs were taken from a navy wife's "personal digital photo album without notice or permission", a site she thought was password-protected.
AP said the pictures were discovered on a commercial picture-sharing site, Smugmug.com, and were not protected until after the reporter bought copies online and began making inquiries.
The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''"Words add, words alter, words subtract," Sontag advises, and she was proved right. How tragic that America has proved to be such a stifling place for a thinker who swears allegiance to truth over allegiance to country.
Lindsay Beyerstein also writes about Sontag's political criticism and the cowardice of American jingoism.
Jonathan Padget in the WaPo writes somewhat dismissively of artist Linda Hesh's recent Art Ads project, for which she attempted to post ads, in both the WaPo and the NYT, featuring photographs of couples combined with text that addressed the gay marriage debate:
[Hesh] dubbed the project "Art Ads" and created two portraits of friends—a mixed-race couple and a male couple—taken at a Sears Portrait Studio, "a familiar format that you can instantly relate to." But Hesh wrangled with both the Post and Times advertising departments over their objections to the original phrases she chose to accompany the images: "At least they are not gay" for the mixed-race couple and "They could ruin your marriage" for the male couple.Information artists are an easy target for that second question, especially when they can't claim the stature or project visibility of, say, Jenny Holzer—she put to bed this question of whether sloganeering can be done as art. Maybe we don't like Hesh's work, but let's not kid anyone—Hesh is working in a well-established genre and medium.Ultimately, Hesh says she gave up trying to clear the ads with the Times. They were finally approved by The Post's advertising department with the phrase "Do you notice their race or gender?" for the mixed-race couple and "Could they affect your marriage?" for the male couple. Each image ran in a not quite two-inch-square space in the Post's A section in October, along with a post office box number to which readers were invited to send feedback.
Cost for the ad space? $2,828. Number of responses? Six.
Given the effort, expense and outcome, Hesh may end up inspiring more dialogue about issues much different from marriage—such as "Was the project worth it?" and "Do tiny newspaper ads with cheap pictures and generic layouts count as art in the first place?"
As to Padget's first question—was the project worth it?—I'm not sure he realizes what a strong case his august employer has, unfortunately, made for Hesh's work just recently. Some of you may recall that around the time when Hesh's art ads were originally run, one weekend, print editions of the Post featured an insert called "BothSides magazine," a multi-page, full-color pamphlet that proffered anti-gay propaganda targeted specifically at Washington, DC's black community. Courtesy of the outraged liberal blogosphere, BothSides is available as PDF documents (sections one, two, three, and four), so you can see it for yourself.
I have a few highlights. From section 2:
Proponents of the homosexual lifestyle argue that as race is merely a byproduct of inherited genes, so is homosexuality. The weakness of this position is that people of color reproduce and pass on the DNA that makes the skin brown; however, homosexuals cannot reproduce. If homosexuality were a generic trait and homosexuals were true to their orientation, the trait would die in their first generation. Nature does not perpetuate homosexuality.Amateur hour with Punnett squares! I'll assume for the sake of space that you're all sufficiently crafty armchair naturalists to navigate your way through the allelic mayhem implied in that paragraph. Next: the Church takes on the myth of red-heads!
Elsewhere the median age of mortality for homosexual men (discounting AIDS deaths, even) is listed as 41—a notorious statistic from a 1994 study conducted by the discredited anti-gay researcher, Paul Cameron, the meaninglessness of whose data ought to be readily apparent regardless of your scientific background.
Needless to say, Family Guy James Dobson makes an appearance in section 3 to explain that while being black isn't black people's fault, homosexuals can and ought to be held accountable for being gay. "Civil rights is the shorthand way of referring to the struggle to overcome discrimination based on unchangeable physical characteristics, such as skin color or ethnic heritage." Emphasis added—it's a theme the pamphlet reiterates several times. Who thought it would make for good copy to reframe the Civil Rights movement in terms of its applicability to the nature/nurture debate? Moreover, who goes around talking about the "changeability" of being black—what?—or thinks that this has any mitigating impact on the culpability of white, heterosexual Christian intolerance?
I've strayed far from my original thread to show what a cooky job these fundamentalists can pull off—low-hanging fruit, maybe. A better point is that recombinant art serves multiple functions; in the case of Hesh's work, as both art and media criticism. While her ads did not spark controversy qua art, the questions naturally follow from the latter aspect of her work:
Linda Hesh, Art Ad, 2004
UPDATE: Michael O'Sullivan discusses Hesh's "(In)visible Silence" show at Baltimore's School 33 Arts Center. O'Sullivan grants Hesh more than Padget:
But Hesh doesn't measure the success or failure of her work, whose costs were underwritten by donors (each of whom received artwork in exchange), on how many people wrote in. Her main objective, she says, was simply to put the pictures in front of the largest possible audience, not the art-world elite who, presumably, will come to School 33 to look at the supporting, after-the-fact documentation. Most gallery-goers, Hesh believes, are liberal to begin with, and support the cause of gay marriage.Fine, fine, but I still don't think you can discuss the piece in any valuable way without evaluating its context. You know, how does the piece work, not just is it important that people people didn't write letters. O'Sullivan's responding more to Padget than the piece itself.
