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.
