Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

"It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: "a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife." As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn't want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses 'ugliness' as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show "Ugly Betty" to Umberto Eco's art history tome On Ugliness, which I've recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton's Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:

In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I've pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty's is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It's Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it's more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.

Book Review: Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

Death of Chatterton

Who was Chatterton? Thomas Chatterton, while a teenager in the 1760s, sold his poetry as that of a medieval monk. Despite his precocious talent, he was unable to make his way in London. He chose to die by arsenic rather than starvation in 1770, at the age of 18. Posthumously, his forgery was discovered. Chatterton became celebrated as a key Romantic figure, which is why in 1856 George Meredith posed as the young poet for the famous Death of Chatterton done by Henry Wallis, immediately before Mrs. Meredith left him for Wallis. These things are true.

Peter Ackroyd's contemporary plot takes these stories in hand, and tells them in his own way, as they intertwine with the tale of idealistic poet Charles Wychwood, who ignores his sickness to his wife and young son in order to follow a "wild goose chase," as his wife puts it. Charles believes that a painting he had found of a middle-aged man was of a middle-aged Chatterton, meaning that Chatterton had faked his own death and written most of the English canon of the mid-1700s. Soon he has his acquaintances believing it. With Chatterton as a lodestone for the plot and for Charles, the characters each digress into this diaspora of quirks and questions.

To anyone who delights in whim and eccentricity, these characters are a hoot, from the energy of the slightly mad, narcisstic bulldozer Harriet Scrope to the elderly bickering queers who originally owned the painting. Similarly, the gallery owners with their backhanded insults make for an enjoyable madness, and the uncanny air of the antique shop extends to its owners. The oddball characters are classically British.

To increase the madness, the theme of reality and fakeness comes up so often and in so many contexts it is dizzying. The incidents of the plot suggest that either nothing or everything is real. In a way, we are denied an answer when the portrait bubbles up without revealing its secrets, as if possessed qualities akin to that of Dorian Grey. Ackroyd does suggest that through art we continue to live beyond death. Reality, as we experience it in Chatterton, seems bound together by a series of coincidences that links people between time and place. Thus, the deaths of Chatterton and Charles run parallel, and the reader finds the two together as the books closes.

Ackroyd is such an accomplished, humorous post-Modern writer who displays each of his characters with fondness that the reader ends up sharing. Like screwball comedies that transcends their genre, Ackroyd's intellect is an octopus that stretches the tentacles of a story to each corner to display the connectedness he finds in life. Ackroyd seems to be under read in America. Until I picked up this old book again, I had almost forgotten one of my favorite contemporary authors. His work includes The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and, as you can imagine, I'll read that soon.

ARTnews Bores Me

From the November issue of the venerable ARTnews comes a revelation: "Street art—including stickers, posters, murals, graffiti, and even 3-D sculptures—is making its way into mainstream galleries and museums." No shit, Sherlock. Is the air under your rock stifling you?

This is why I don't really read ARTnews: it bores me. You?

It bores me because the content is exactly what I could have surmised myself. In this leading article "Two way street," writer Carolina Miranda addresses street art's entry into mainstream channels of consumption. After Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, London’s Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York have each 'covered' the genre-- then ARTnews document it. Musuem have been paying attention, as have galleries and collectors. ARTnews is even falling behind the mainstream. Tsk tsk....

ARTnews tags itself as "The oldest, most-widely read fine arts magazine in the world." Congratulations! Now step up your act before you become "The oldest, most-atavistic art history magazine in the world."
More discussion of the effects of street art going mainstream would have been welcome. Their work has gone from the street to the inner sanctums, and artists no longer face the same resistance and challenges to spreading or selling their work. It's been made legitimate. This safe, generic article doesn't touch on these issues, but it does continue to erode the charm of illictness street art once possesed. To its (small) credit, it does mention Shepard Fairey, of Andre the Giant fame, Lazarides, whose show on Bowery I loved a few weeks ago, and also to my hometown. On the other hand, they work with and talk to all the right people, and there's something to be said for that.

More Cy Twombley...

Guggenhiem Bilboa, pass that Cy Twombly to NYC!

Cy Twombly's major retrospective is going up at the Guggenheim Bilbao. According to ArtInfo, this retrospective also coincides with the artist's 80th birthday. So if the Gugg. Bilbao has this great exhibition going up tomorrow, NYC should be getting it soon, right? Let's hope so. This collection of almost 100 of Twombley's works would make my year.

This exhibition will highlight the series 9 Discourses pictured above, as well as other large scale series he has done, such as Le Quattro Stagione, and sculptures and drawings.

Invierno, Quattro Stagioni (1993-94)

Twombley, a fellow Southerner, is one of my favorite contemporary artist. His work is evocative and painterly in a smearing, emotional kind of way that still manages to impress with restraint and control. Le Quattro Stagione never fails to leave me spellbound, from when I first saw it at the Tate Modern to when I rediscovered it in the atrium of MoMA here in New York. At least now I know where it went.

In their press release for the exhibition, the museum states, "Committed to collecting Twombly’s work, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has recently acquired the series Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963). The work around which the exhibition is designed, it consists of nine distinct canvases and was the first of the artist’s series to be conceived as a unified whole....[it] offers a closer look at the spirit of this marvellous artist who, as exhibition curator Carmen Giménez points out, 'not only irradiates a fascinating personal magic, but has also taken us to the most intricate frontiers of contemporary painting.'"

The below painting, from his 2007 show Blooming a scattering of blossoms and other things that I tragically missed at Gagosian, due primarily to Gagosian confusing me with the multiple addresses that make up his empire, has not been as well received in some circles. However, some found it particularly enticing. One, for example, was the French woman arrested for kissing it, later claiming "It was an act of love." Untitled

Found: Template

I think, with some tweaks, that this template is going to work well for me. Expect a few adjustments in the upcoming weeks. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, please let me know.

Wanted: New blog template

Blogger seeking attractive new template. Two columns preferred, with posts on the right. Clean and simple lines but must have some flair, as blogger writes on aesthetics. Readability is key, as is sense of humor and preference for Italian wines. Don't take offense, but no black and reds templates need apply. Similarly no skulls and no pink hearts. Prefer pale backgrounds. Looking for a long-term commitment; seasonal themes need not apply.

Self Inconization: Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde

Before MTV and Hollywood, there were superstars, rebel bad boys who captured the world's attention. Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde created themselves as symbols for their generations with no help from the Internet, TV, or movies. They self-consciously created themselves before more familiar figures like Andy Warhol were born.

Wilde is a patron saint of this blog not simply because he was an clever writer and interesting literary critic. He created a view of aesthetics that determined his life down to the boutonniere, and he did it so brilliantly that turn-of-the-century Britain and Europe watched, scandalized and delighted. His society plays inverted social mores, but so cleverly it was hard to realize it had happened. And they lionized him, this pudgy aesthete from Ireland, of all barbaric lands. Love, that Achilles heel of us all, is what brought his ascendancy to a crashing halt, when his lover Bosie got him involved in an infamous trial of homo sexuality, which did not go well, leading to his ruin, imprisonment and penniless death in exile on the continent. But prior to this low, Wilde achieved heights of fame that were improbable considering his origins, and lived out his convictions regarding art and life that were 'moral' in the highest degree. He champions artifice in The Decay of Lying, saying "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" and in he indeed wrote what he became to the public, as his plays were used as evidence against in his trial. He considers "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."


Paradoxically my other patron saint, Byron, held quite the opposite view. (Now--I know what you are thinking: these two dandies on the British 19th c. scene were both sensational and scandalous public figures and writers who, despite all their endeavors, dies rather unheroically in exile and out of favor. Their ascents to greatness were similarly unpredictable from their humble origins, and displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and ambition. And yes, of course, that even as they wrote within the Romantic and Decadent movements, scholars now consider their work to make stylistic leaps that distinguish them from those circles. One might also say they had extreme temperaments and the ability to behave with extreme selfishness. These bad boys were the ultimate rebels for their times.) Byron, living 80 years before Wilde, thought writing was secondary to living, "The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain." Life was a much higher thing, and "scribbling," as he called his work was merely a side item to living.

Art into life, or life into art: it amounts to the same thing. Wilde struggled for impersonal objectivity, and does not mention himself. However, he lived his life as art, so that in his writing he, rather than any imaginary characters, is what the reader sees. Byron said that "To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all." By the time he wrote his masterpiece Don Juan, he had taken life--his life as narrator--and injected it into his poem at every possible opportunity. The almost megalomaniac way the put themselves consistently in their audience's face is how they achieved super stardom.

The confluence of life and art brings the reader back to the same thing: the author. The author always dominates the work, and his legacy haunts his every word, as each of them very carefully like to manipulate. It is a fascinating thing to watch. A parallel to such success would be Warhol, another self-made icon.

Chanel Mobile Art in Central Park: Lagerfield encapsulated

Karl Lagerfeld and Zara Hadid

Karl Lagerfeld, the visionary designer of Chanel, and I are friends. OK--acquaintances. Fine--I saw him in his gleaming grey Rolls turn down Park as he was popping a breath mint or pill a few weeks ago. It was definitely him, or an aged Billy Idol. Lagerfeld's an avant-garde personality that has withstood the test of time in the fashion world, and his militant determination to design for Chanel brings up parallels with Coco Chanel's determination to create the brand. Forward-thinking, self aggrandizing, and involving the most talented artists and architect of the day, Lagerfeld created an environment that even made me, with my aversion to overt labelling, want to stamp myself all over with double Cs. This mobile unit has come from Hong Kong and will be off to Europe after New York, to celebrate the classic Chanel Handbag. Artists contributed 18 pieces inspired by the bag.

Structure first: Zara Hadid's designed the travelling capsule, which is rather like the traditional white spaceship, except placed over heat so that it gets melty and starts to bow and bend with soft curves. Versatile, functional and interesting in a way that still allowed one to consider it background. A light achievement, and I do love the sinuous curves.

The tour: Those black and white-suited attendants graciously set up your headphones for the 35 minute audio tour, of sorts. Coco herself directs your experience, as she takes you room by room and step by step through the installations. Her voice, by husky-voiced French actress and vocalist Jeanne Moreau, is more personality driven commentary that clarifies how the art relates to Chanel. Sometimes it is difficult to know. She is clever and naughty, and reminded me of the portrayal for her in that recent Lifetime movie. I wish all museums had such atmospheric tours--she really made you pause and see each work.

As for the art, I loved all of it. The artists and styles varied widely, though none were exactly unknowns. There were more Asian artists than I normally see. Favorites include Erlich's "Le Trottoir" installation is a cyclically-changing contemplative Parisian cityscape reflected in a puddle on black asphalt, so that one views the 2 foot floor level viewing space from standing height. "Fifty Years After our Common Era, or Handbags' Revolt" by the Blue Noses features cardboard boxes containing projected films of naked women of all sizes chasing after, bodyboarding on, and beating each over the heads with Chanel handbags.

Perhaps Coco and Lagerfeld have much in common. Both fashion of themselves an iconic presence, and exude ruthless self-determination. Highly successful, they never give up or let go. I also extrapolate that a shared controlling trait is on view here. Lagerfeld's staff had the uniforms of an severely chic SWAT team, and exquisite customer care. No images were allowed inside, cell phones had to be turned off, and all bags were checked at the door. On their website, you can watch live video footage of the site. Coco's voice dominates your every movement, and remember that the 2.55 handbag she designed for herself is not only iconic, it has several secret compartments.

I could say much about the confluence of art, fashion, culture, globalization and commercialization that this exhibition epitomizes so well. However, I refrain. I enjoyed it: some things are meant only to be consumed with gusto.

Getting in: Tickets (free) are all booked. If you show up early in morning, you can wait standby for tickets. It's worth it! Ignore any snark on my part: this is one of the best art orchestrations I've seen. I showed up a 8:30 this morning. A ticket wasn't available until 9:30, which didn't work for my schedule. I was leaving, disappointed, but I ran into a friend on the way out, and he hooked me up with a sooner ticket. And no, it wasn't Karl.

Paul McCarntey and Nicolas Sarkozy star in Art Gone Asunder

Two fabulous headlines for your Wednesday morning: Paul McCartney left his head on a train and Sarkozy is 'needled' by voodoo doll.

Ahhhh...Wednesday morning news...

Paul McCartney’s Head?

Yes, it's true. McCartney's head has been lost, rather, the ape-like wax representation of it. Professional transporter/grand bobby Joby Carter was taking it to an auction in Berkshire, England, where it was estimated to fetch up to 10,000 pounds. Then Carter, similar to Mrs. Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, left the baby, ahem, the head. The BBC reports: "The head was left in a bag under a seat on a train from London at Maidenhead station in Berkshire on Thursday. The service would have terminated at Reading."

I suspect McCartney paid him so that nobody would ever connect him with that terrible head again. And speaking of unwanted likenesses, Sarkozy's in a bit of a stitch across the channel. Oh the power of the public image! Oh life as art! Oh unwanted portraiture! Oh the horror!

Nicolas Sarkozy is not amused.
As one can tell from the image of the French President, left, Sarkozy is not amused to have been transformed into a voodoo doll. BBC reports that "Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company if it does not withdraw from shops a 'voodoo doll' in his image." It even comes with pins! According to BBC, "The publisher said Mr Sarkozy's reaction was 'totally disproportionate' and has so far refused to pull the doll from shops." Vive la revolution!

Ah, life and art don't really change, do they? As I wrote in an earlier post, a voodoo doll bears a remarkable similarity to a medieval portrait, and here we see the voodoo doll as portrait. In the Medieval ages after a regime change, the new rulers would scratch out the eyes in portraits of previous rulers.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this morning's news? If you are a public figure, people will do terrible things to your likeness, in which case you must either steal or sue the maker. Then after passing your hands three times over the false image, you must suck the tiny bit of your soul that is trapped in it out. (I recommend the breath they teach in Lamaze class.) Then you must burn the false, soul-sucking idol. Add its charred remains to the images you create of your enemies for a little extra oomph.

Housing prices are inflated? Let's discuss art prices

An artist, a recognized artist who sells his works, offered to pay my boyfriend in paintings. A little unorthodox, yes, but I was psyched. Then he told me he did not take it. A year ago I would have argued it was a great economic investment, not just a way for me to get art on the wall. But now, was his choice the wisest economically?

Even a year ago people considered he unprecedented demand and prices for fine art might be a bit of a bubble. Articles have been popping up left and right to debate that theory now. Here's a selection, from The New York Times, The Business Times, The Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Note that there's not an art rag among them.

Catherine Rampell wrote a blog for the New York Times entitled, dismally enough, The Art of Recession. Despite it being a dismal science, Rampell prognosticated on behalf of collectors, pointing to "the failure of a number of large banks may put their corporate art collections back on the market on the cheap" as an example of cheaper prices to come. Makes things a little insecure for the art investor though, with the prediction that "the market for contemporary art assets may soon plummet.”

On behalf of art as an alternate "passion" investment, The Business Times points to "Proponents of the segment argue that art, being a real asset and devoid of the mind-numbing complexity of derivatives, should retain its sheen as a 'passion' investment." They have an interesting quote from auction house Christie's president (Asia) Andrew Foster: "Art is a very real and tangible thing. Clients agree that art has inherent value....That doesn't mean prices don't fluctuate, but value is agreed upon and inherent, and it springs from cultural and global trends more than trading multiples." Is that true, though?

Also of note, the article mentions the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. According to which, all art for 2007 rose 20 per cent, a performance only surpassed by some of the annual returns achieved in the art bubble years of 1984 to 1990--more than the 5.5 per cent achieved by the S&P. Yet art, too, "has its boom and bust cycles, as Michael Moses, the creator of the index, told Reuters earlier this year."

But let's consider results of some recent big auctions. A headline from the Times on October 20, 2008 is 'Growing signs of art slump as Freud's portrait of Bacon fails to fetch £7m' and the IHT reports 'At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on.' These are not chipper reports on the auction front. Christies and Sotheby's have their big auction in November, so that will prove the true bellwether. Yet buyers in the art sector, like every other, seem to be skittish. Souren Melikian writes for the IHT that "The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson."

That's why she's saying. These do not herald good times ahead for people who count their worth in paintings. On the other hand, if you're a buyer of impervious fortune, times are great. Less competition for cheaper prices on works you love. What I'm saying: yippee! A Lucian Freud of Francis Bacon for £5.42 million! Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" for a song! If prices keep going down at this rate, I'll be able to buy something in 10 years.

Until then, all you art investors out there, you have my deepest sympathy. You poor souls, locked in your worthless mansions, staring across your foyer in your silk bathrobe looking at the now moderately-priced Picasso.

Milan Kundera: Can betrayl of another amount to betrayl of self?

A recent Economist story has made me very sad, indeed. It did not involve the economy, but Czech author Milan Kundera (b. 4/1/29) who moved to France to escape the censorship of the Communist government. Kundera's most popular book has been The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which deals with of identity and love and betrayal, also touches on his recurrent theme of lives clouded by totalitarianism. Ironically or logically enough, now similar charges are being brought against Kundera in his youth. Per the Economist:

"The story of Miroslav Dvoracek, a Czech spy for the West, would fit well into a Kundera novel. Caught by the secret police in 1950 while on an undercover mission to Prague, he was tortured and then served 14 years in a labour camp. He was lucky not to be executed. He has spent nearly six decades believing that a childhood friend called Iva Militka betrayed him; he had unwisely contacted her during his clandestine trip. Similarly, she has always blamed herself for talking too freely about her visitor to student friends. Now a police record found by Adam Hradilek, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in Prague, suggests that it was one of those friends, the young Mr Kundera, who was the informer."

Could this the face of a backstabber?

Kundera refutes the suggestion. While I might cheer to hear muck about a politician or the latest scandal of some pop star, this news really disappoints me. I find it quite likely that Kundera did betray Dvoracek. He was already in a bit of trouble with the political machine, and yet was allowed to continue his studies. Many in that time faced and made similar choices to the one he is purported to have made. If he did betray him, one could infer that he spent most of his life writing out the guilt from it. Perhaps that's why he is a recluse now.

Kundera writes poignant characters with a keen sensitivity to time and identity that I haven't found in other contemporary authors. I idolize his writing. But what if he had to make this choice to write the way he does? I think his writing is wonderful and valuable, while noting it sticks to much the same subjects, like a singer whose songs all sound alike. So what if this incident provided him with limited themes, a sort of stumbling block that he can't move past mentally?

What if this betrayal of his youth, betrayed his ability to write better and deeper novels?

The desire for life to be art: Oscar Wilde and myself

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Oscar Wilde

I sat in my kitchen this morning, attempting to write a novel. Wearing my sick boyfriend's overcoat and trying not to wake him, I was typing in the dark with cereal as my roommate and then his girlfriend came up from the basement wrapped in a blanket and a pashmina respectively. Allow me to state this is not the hip, drugged out bohemian love shack it may seem, although why my roommates slept in the living room with no clothes I'm happy not to know. I'm just relieved that the third roommate was not here. It left me wishing that life was different, was more like art.

To elevate the mundane and the ugly into something beautiful and irreducible is a creative act extraordinaire. To do so with one's life, the prime material of all art, requires genius and unflagging commitment. I'm not sure that I have enough of either either. But I admire Oscar Wilde's philosophy, and his statement that he has "put all my genius into life" rings true when one studies his life. Literature became his words, visual art his clothes and house, just as his plays were mirrors of his mind. In many ways, he, and Byron, have become patron saints of mine, for their lives as well as their works. Dandies and writers and lovers, they were controversial touchstones for the societies of their time.

My boyfriend has woken up and I can now crawl back in bed to type (if I can over the YouTube videos and complaining he produces). Wilde never had to deal with this. Actually Bosie was rather a no-good handful. But if only life could imitate art, or art I like more

A selection of Wildean-isms to inspire one on a Sunday morning:

• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

• Life is too much important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

• It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

• It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

• I can believe anything as long as it is incredible.

• I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.

• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Note: In his honor, I have made him a patron saint of this blog, in whose hallowed cyber halls his fellow worthies shall begin to join him.

Tidbit: how similar is a voodoo doll and a medieval portrait?

I've been reading about the history of the portrait lately. The section before the Renaissance, medieval Europe, seemed like a blip to get through. Really, one, if one were less aesthetically inclined, might use the word, dare I say it, boring?

Not really the case. Portraits functioned as more than just commemorating an occasion, such as marriage, or representing a person visually. It was not important that portraits resembled their subject at the court where people were idealized or to entice one into marrying a woman or to honor the noblest qualities of a ruler.

As it happens, the portraits depicting their subjects naturally were destroyed. These people were criminals who had escaped justice. Portraits had fetishistic properties, and could be used as a substitute for a person. So a criminal who could not be caught was depicted, and then his punishment was given to the portrait, limb by limb as the case may be. Referred to as "excutio in effigie," the portraits could even be burned publicly.

Hoardings of portraits have been found of persons with their eyes scratched out. Often when a regime changed, the new rulers would gather images of the former governors and scratch their eyes out. Images--often unflattering ones designed to provoke scorn--were placed in public view as well. All these have the ultimate aim of destroying the subject's authority through defiling the image of them.

So one function of the portrait is punishment? It's crazy to think that in the Middle Ages, when ruled by God in Christian lands, people gave such power to the graven image. Reliquaries were worshipped as holding real bits or traces of holy people. But did they believe the images of the saints and devils in the churches had the same power? What would happen if someone scratched the Virgin Mary's eyes out? Maybe the world still gives the same talismanic properties to images they deem holy.

There you have it: why a voodoo doll is like a medieval portrait. Up next, why a raven is like a writing desk, and other important questions.

Darius Goes West, then to HBO if New York

Being from Athens, GA, I've heard of Darius more than once. My parents and friends from home have talked to me about the film, and told me last year about Darius graduating. So when I got an email yesterday asking me if I wanted to meet someone for the screening of Darius Goes West at the HBO Screening room last night, I figured I had to take her up on it, despite my headache. This won't be the most aesthetically-inclined post you'll read from me, but I wanted to say: you should see this film.

(I have a copy--I'll send it to you)

Why should you see some obscure documentary made in my hometown?

Many reasons, including that it is a well-done film on the personal adventure of a boy with Muscular Dystrophy going on a journey to get MTV to "pimp his ride" and that it has a great message spread by great people. DMD, the type of Muscular Dystrophy, that Darius has, can happen to any child, effectively shortening their lifespan to about 20 years of age as the muscles degenerate until the heart stops. So the 19 year old who rolled up on stage last night and splits his time between public advocacy and rapping isn't working for himself--but for the next generation of children. Filmed in 2005, Darius and his crew of friends rent an RV for a 3 week trip to California all the while trying to get MTV to agree to pimp his ride. Darius has so many memorable firsts: seeing the ocean, being away from his mother, going to Las Vegas.



Darius Goes West did the film festival circuit in 2007, winning 27 awards throughout the country. This year, they are trying to spread the film's message about DMD. They have been visiting schools and meetings across the country. Darius and his crew of friends have formed a foundation, are living off the proceeds of selling t shirts, and are trying to raise money by selling 1 million DVDs this year. Find out more at http://www.dariusgoeswest.org/.

Fit the LAST

Something drastic has occured: I've suspended delivery of Confessions of an Opium Eater. I always finish books I start, even if it's terrible. But I could suffer no longer, and went to DailyLit (a service that emails installments of a selection of books) and suspended it. You know what--I feel great. Light as a feather. Free.

Why do I feel a compulsion to finish? It's gives a sense of completeness to my negative judgement, but why else? If it's really terrible, why woudl I care about the end? It's as if I had a duty to finish anything I pick up. If only that extended past my reading habits! It is much easier to quit a DailyLit subscription--they cater to a variety of tastes if you want to fit some literature in your workaday lives.

However, this is not quite Fit the Last. I'm still reading the Hunting of the Snark, which never ceases to bring a smile to my face. The beaver and butcher (or is it the bellman?) have become friends, and the company has discussed means of catching the Snark. Mostly the traditional ones, such as hunt it with a thimble and care and such stuff. Recently, the barrister had a dream, attempting to prove that lace-making would not help to find the Snark. The Snark took over the courtroom.

I would totally buy a Snark suffed animal. I wonder what it would look like. Would it make me vanish? No, that's the Bojum. Now that's a nasty beast.

Grotesque Old Woman: Why did Leonardo and Matsys depict you?

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) sketched the head of the woman to the left. Flemish painter Quentin Matsys (1466 - 1530) painted the oil portrait below. People have generally assumed that Matsys was copying Leonardo. Obviously, there is a remarkable similarity between the two heads produced in roughly the same time. Both artists had an interest in the ugly as much as the beautiful, and these images have popped up multiple times in my reading on ugliness and on portraiture. I think these two works say a lot about the nature of beauty and function of portraits.



I've read that Leonardo despaired of finding true beauty after struggling with the Vitruvian man, and turned more to grotesques and caricatures. I don't find this very convincing. Ugliness, just like evil to good, is so much more interesting than beauty. Also, throughout his life, Leonardo displayed an acute attention to all aspects of life.

So there are many questions about who this woman is, who drew her first (assuming she is the same woman), and why she was drawn. This oil is one of Matsys's best known pieces today, and, once considered simply a copy of Leonardo, is now thought to depict a real person with Paget's disease, though it is sometimes said to be a portrait of Margaret Countess of Tyrol, also known as "the Ugly" or "Satchel-mouth." Was it a commissioned portrait of an individual, or a grotesque head done for fun? Without answering any of these questions, I think one can delve into the ideas of beauty and portraiture that informs these works.

Beauty in the Renaissance era functioned as an outward sign of one's inner self. Beauty was associated with goodness, and ugliness with vice. Paradoxically then, females--as the original temptresses-- were either beautiful and pure, or ugly and lecherous. What a man is to do in those circumstances, I don't know. More and more in this time, we see men paying homage to ugliness as the safeguard to chastity, or ridiculing old women for their fading charms, or chastising women for using make up to alter their appearance and trick people. In this portrait, the woman is clearly ugly. She does not seem lewd, nor does she seem made up. In Matsys portrait, her old-fashioned bonnet would have made her seem additionally ridiculous. However, Matsys portrait--perhaps just because of the oils--makes her look like a real individual, especially in the eyes, whereas Leonardo's sketch seems like another of his grotesque heads even as the bulbousness of the figure is less pronounced.

Are the images of the grotesque women meant to depict a real person (or people)? I would argue that both fall into the tradition of the caricature, placing them squarely at odds with beauty. Notice, though, how despite her ugliness she is not revolting. Caricatures, by creating a harmony out of the disproportions of ugliness, neutralize the bad associations that ugly females had. Albeit at the same time as it mocks and dehumanizes its subject, caricature elevates ugliness to a kind of beauty. It is a really interesting phenomenon, documented in Umberto Eco's On Ugliness, which I highly recommend.

There are very few women who have spanned the centuries by being Quasimodos. Women are traditionally celebrated for their beauty or virtue. These two, or one, women interest me. If anyone know more about them, please let me know.

Review: Jill Sobule at Joe's Pub

Who is Jill Sobule?

Anyone?

If you're screaming to your computer, "I kissed a girl, " then calm down and try to reassure those around you about your emotional stability. Likewise to those of you who started singing that you wanted to be a supermodel.

Yes, Jill Sobule wrote the '95 hit "I kissed a girl" and Clueless soundtrack "I want to be a supermodel." However, I, pop culture retard that I am, had no clue who she was. Why did I go to her show then? Because Joe's Pub, part of the Public Theatre (that awesome organization that does Shakespeare in the Park) just had their 10 for 10 Festival this weekend. To celebrate 10 years of awesomeness, they had 10 free shows and I won tickets! However, I'll spare you my constant theme of how cool NYC, culture, and any free combination of the two are.

Jill Sobule, and for a few songs some charming bloke named John Wesley Harding (is he famous as well?), put on a fun, funny show. Harding provided a stirring interlude with kazoo. Sobule's charm is in her neurotic, quirky, childlike lyrics that have a charming simplicity. Altogether the quirks and rhymes are endearing, and make for a fun show especially in the intimate setting of the lounge. Maybe the rhyme scheme is a little too rhymey. But the simplicity and whimsy recommend themselves, and really cut to the heart of our "sophisticated" adult emotions. Sobule looks liked an aged 14-year-old and, in many ways, that's what her songs are like, on topics like Halloween costumes and what she would do with a jet pack as well as love and politics. (Hint: she had a crazy affair with Condaleeza Rice. It's true--just ask her.)

Overall, light, cheerful live singers who I never would have heard otherwise. I'm not sure Sobule's quite my thing...but I wouldn't have known who she was, or had the pleasure of such a lovely evening without this show.

Yay for free New York!

Check out: Outsiders NY, corner of Bowery and Houston

OUTSIDERS-NEW YORK

at 282-284 Bowery is open to the public until October 26 and then it will "disappear, like it was never here," according to Lazarides, the 'gallery' putting the show on. Lazarides has worked outside the mainstream art scene, primarily with street and outsider art (for example, the infamous incognito graffiti artist Banksy whose currently banking tons). However, you can see from the photos that they present a much wider spectrum of art than that. This excellent and varied grouping was one of the most interesting shows I've seen, and included works by:

FAILE DAVID CHOE PAUL INSECT SPACE INVADER POLLY MORGAN ANTONY MICALLEF REAS BAST MARK JENKINS MIRANDA DONOVAN

Do I know who all these people are? Nope. Now, I want to.







Two things of special note: that super cool golden donkey in sneakers, which make Gilbert and George look like asses for not having done it themselves--



and David Choe. The pieces in the gallery I consistenly liked, and evn my not-so-arty boyfriend liked, were by Choe. It had a subltey that many of the more pop-influenced works did not, but was truly strong and stunning as well. My pics didn't come out so well, so I snagged the one below that he took of the mural he did for the show on the building. Check him out at his website and blog.




Lazarides also notes on their website that Banksy has "on an unassuming corner of Manhattan, Banksy's latest offering sees a fully kitted out Pet Shop and Charcoal Grill open to the public. Fur coats with twitching tails, hot dogs frolicking under heat lamps and chimps touching themselves in front of National Geographic." Sweet--will be finding that next.

Now, how cool is it to live in NYC and run across this stuff all over town?

A gallery night in the LES and Williamsburg

"Yo, there's some kind of photo shoot going on up on Essex" my roommate said.

My boyfriend and I look at each other. Where? Just a couple block up?

"Yeah, there's tinfoil lights and everything. Some wierd people too."

Actually, it wasn't a photo shoot. The light and mirrored walls were from Gallery, where Shimon Okshteyn was having an opening this past Friday. My boyfriend and I had popped in earlier to check it out. It make me feel pretty cool to have a place like that, with a draw of such great, "weird" people in my neighborhood. (Apparently the owner is a very cool, very sweet 21 year old(!). 21, really?)
The gallery was even cooler than when Miranda from the Sex and the City movie moves to my block, although that was pretty cool. The tiny mirrored space was so full of young people that I can't actually review the artwork, which supposedly looks like this:

Shimon Okshteyn: Reflection of Reality

Between not knowing the super-trendy kids and not being able to see the work well, we left quickly. It looks pretty cool though, and I love the idea of painting on mirrors.

Then we were off to Williamsburg, walking up Bedford to check out a group show that my boyfriend's friend was in. What a difference: low-key hipsters walking between that gallery and the one next door, where a band played piano man. Both these scenes had such a different atmosphere than Chelsea--it was really exciting to get out of that box and see new spaces and tastes.



Then last night as I was walking down Houston, I stumbled upon a really cool advertising board on Bowery and Houston, where a projector shows a changing reel and targeted sound as you walk by supports the advertising. When I was stopping to check it out, I turned around and saw another gallery through a window. Very cool: but that will have to be another blog entry.

ADDENDUM: I walked back by Reflections of Reality, and it looks the composition of pieces of mirror with such precise painted patterns on it looks great, and much more interesting than it does in the image above when you get a better sense of texture and changing light.