Scandal to Debate: National Poetry Scene

If you're British, you've been inundated by news of the Oxford Professor of Poetry. If you're American, you probably just yawned at the words. Perhaps if I had written the Professor of Poetry sex scandal you would have pricked up your ears (although after the Clinton scandal we might have become blase about lesser sex scandals). But poetry in Britain is a scandalous, lecherous business of machinations and ambition taken seriously by a surprising number of people.

What happened is this: Oxford University nominated esteemed poet Derek Walcott as Professor of Poetry, a largely honorary position with light lecture duties. Then allegations of sexual misconduct toward female students from 20+ years prior came to light (most notably in a book titled The Lecherous Professor). Anonymous letters about the allegation were sent to 100 Oxford faculty who would be voting on the professorship in a smear campaign. Amidst the scandal, Walcott stepped down from the candidacy. Whether these past allegations should have prevented Walcott from taking the position has become a contentious issue.

The saga continues: another candidate, Ruth Padel, was selected. A few days ago news broke that Padel had tipped journalists off to Walcott's allegations of sexual misconduct via email, effectively forming a part of the smear campaign against her rival. Padel resigned May 25 before officially holding office (while denying misconduct), and Oxford University is again left in a lurch. Poetry can be a dirty business!

This dirty business hides a wonderful secret: Britain is experiencing a poetic Renaissance in the public consciousness. In measurable news inches (just look at the culture section of the Guardian or the Times), British people are talking about poetry in their country more than ever. Aside from scandalous poets, a fuss has also been made over their new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, first woman and lesbian, the BBC is showing a series of programs examining poetry, and six new hardback editions of 20th century poetry have come out as part of an affordable line from Faber. Poetry is getting attention on a national level, and, if you look at comment boards, you'll see that people honestly care about who holds the Oxford position, other candidates, and kind of role it should be.

It might be a scandal, but one that fell on receptive ears. I doubt American poets are so much more virtuous. Where are America's poetry scandals and news inches and television programs? Why aren't we talking about poetry?

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine.

Bamboozling Forger Defends his Non-Nazi(?) Honor

...by proving his forgeries were in fact his.

The story of Van Meegeren's Vermeer forgeries is legendary. The New York Times has a series of in depth articles about his life, the forgeries that pulled the wool over the eyes of the biggest collector of the day, no less than Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, and how he later had to prove that the paintings he had sold were actually forgeries to escape charges of being a Nazi collaborator (which he likely was).Van Meegeren's story is fascinating in all its details, likes how he mixed bakelite into his paintings and baked them to give them the appearance of age or the book of sentimental drawings he made Hitler.

The articles are based on two books that came out this past year, one of which, The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick, I read and would recommend. In fact, I did recommend it, and included an interesting side story to boot. Interviews with both authors were interesting, and I can't wait for part 3 to come out.

You can also gawk at how bad some of Van Meegeren's 'Vermeers' were.


Just Kidding--the last one is a real Vermeer. And it's actually coming to New York, as a loan to the Met for a Dutch painting exhibition in the fall.

Ravels in Review

This week will no doubt go down in your minds and blogger history as being that of my birthday. Good--please remember that next May 26.

• As I learned in doing historical research, historically few great things have happened on May 26 aside from my birth.

• I wrote about my experience buying art (none) and some of the difficulties of buying art on a budget. Just a note: the gallery called my boyfriend back yesterday to say that the work in particular that I had liked was available.

• The Hernan Bas show at Lehman Maupin predicts the future to be lush and lonely, and that says a small part of how much one could say about the artist's most recent paintings.

• Lastly, I was so struck by an old book that accidentally came into my hands that I had to share the artist/author Eugene Fromentin's extremely dated travel book of Dutch painters with you. He is in rapture over Rubens and Rembrandt. Hero worship like his doesn't exist anymore in criticism, maybe to our loss.

On the other hand, Fromentin is not so kind to his contemporary (1870s) art scene in France. The Impressionists, apparently, have no sense of value or line or color, and only Corot and Delacroix are worthy of respect. In fact, let me leave you with a few more of his words;

Landscapes make every day more proselytes than progress. Those who practise it exclusively are not more skillfull in that account, but there are more painters who try it. Open air, diffused light, the real sunlight, take today in painting, and in all paintings, an importance which has never before been recognized, and which, let us say it frankly, they do not deserve.

Photographic studies as to the effects of light have changed the greater proportion of ways of seeing, feeling, and painting. At the present time, painting is never sufficiently clear, sharp, formal, and crude.

The abuse of useless roundness has driven into excess flat surface, and bodies without thickness. Modelling disappeared the very day when the means of expression seemed best, and ought to have rendered it more intelligent, so that what was progress among the Hollanders is for us a step backward; and after issuing from archaic art, under pretext of new innovation, we return thither.

Hero Worship is Passé

Falcon Hunting in Algeria, Fromentin

Eugene Fromentin's The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland sounds more like a textbook than memoirs of an artist's 1875 trip to Holland to see Dutch paintings, which is why I borrowed it from the library. I quickly discovered my mistake. It might sound charming, but this book is actually full of long-winded, vague descriptions and similarly long, vague rhapsodies over the genius of Rubens and Rembrandt. (With some sleights to the new Impressionist school in France.)

Fair enough, you might say. Rubens and Rembrandt are generally thought to be great and important painters. But when I say rhapsodies I mean full-blown, adulatory praises ala:

that morose and witty dreamer, who without living apart had no relation with any of them; who seemed to be painting his epoch, his country, his friends and himself, but who at bottom painted only one of the unknown recesses of the human soul. I speak, as you must know, of Rembrandt.

[Rubens] fills the last division of the gallery, and there sheds abroad the restrained brilliancy, and that soft and powerful radiance which are the grace of his genius. There is no pedantry, no affectation of vain grandeur or of offensive pride, but he is naturally imposing.

Hero worship of this sort if dead. In every artistic field, we practice new forms of criticism that analyze structure or context or socio-political aims. Anything but pure, old fashioned worship. We use more naunced words that genius, and we certainly don't assume the great art stems from souls of great moral worth, as Fromentin does. He sees valour and searching wit and genorosity of spirit in the lines of Rembrandt's drawings. I see lines--and maybe it is my loss.

Arabs, Fromentin

Fromentin was no great critic, not like Matthew Arnold or Baudelaire who practised and preached. But when it the last time you read a review that put the artist on a pedestal? We treat artists as cultural specimens to be dissected. The only critic not afraid of the term genius is annoying Harold Bloom, and I suspect that's only because he wants to be able to include himself in his self-defined pantheon. I wouldn't mind hearing a little simple admiration. I don't mind the damming reviews, as they tend be better written and more intersting. Yet with all the snark floating about, earnestness can seem almost too exposed, too simple.

Maybe more appreciation would be appropriate. That is what moves us to write about and talk about these things in the first place.

The Future is Lush and Lonely: Review of Hernan Bas at Lehman Maupin

Hernan Bas's show at Lehmann Maupin, up through July 10, is many things; the first adjectives that come to mind are worth-seeing, interesting and ambitious. These scenes of verdant landscape enclosing small figures create a sense of narrative, cataclysmic and lonely, and are visually mesmerizing as your eye tries to take in all the detail of these large canvases.

Ubi Roi

Bas breaks up the landscape with angular planes and covers them in expressive brushwork. There's a chaotic element to the landscape, which looks like tectonic plates smashing into each other to create contours, and its warring colors.


While the angular planes of the landscape are lushly and loosely painted, this contrasts with his treatment of human figures. They are small in relation to the landscape and tightly delineated. His figures are the more telling than his deceptively loose, chaotic landscapes. You can see it in the hard edges he creates, seemingly by painting in layers over strips of paper that he then pulls off, how precisely controlled the enviorns are.

A Landscape Heard

Bas's images work from far away, when the wild colors seem more balanced and you get an evocative sense of a landscape in ruin, and up close, where his painting becomes mesmerizingly complex. There are some instances of really beautiful color, like below. Yet I also felt that the angular planes of the landscape, instead of creating depth, pushed everything in the picture to the forefront. Without depth, the complexity becomes dizzying, at times to the composition's detriment.

As Bas says in an interview with BlackBook, "The whole show is based on a newfound interest that I had in Futurism and 1920s Absurdist performance," and there's no lack of references to it within the show (e.g. The title of the show, The Dance of the Machine Gun & Other Forms of Unpopular Expression). This conscious use of art history can seem heavy handed, and I think the New York Times might have put it best when, in an article on the artist's show at BMA that just closed, "The cumulative effect of the exhibition is of a young man still finding himself as an artist."

The Bagpiper in Exile (or, The Sad Wind)

'Finding himself' seems to be a rewarding process for the viewer as well as the artist based on this show. It bodes well that the artist is willing to try new things, as here he to incorporate new elements into his visual language and risk different subject matter (previously homoerotic scenes of young boys, like the show at BMA). Bas is an artist to watch.

g

World According to Art

May 26 is a massively important day. The preparation and celebration of said day tore me away from my blog for two whole days, yet surprisingly, this historical importance of this day is rarely taught in schools. Even so, May 26 fills the annals of history with exciting events and interesting personages.

For example:

1521, Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and his writings banned by the Edict of Worms.
1647, Alse Young becomes the first person executed as a witch in the American colonies
1689, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, English writer, bluestocking and eccentric was born
1799, Alexander Pushkin was born
1805, Napoléon Bonaparte assumed the title of King of Italy in the Duomo di Milano
1828, Mysterious feral child Kaspar Hauser was discovered in Nuremberg
1964, Lenny Kravitz was born
1984, I was born.

I'll leave you to imagine which of these occasion caused such feasting and recovery that I couldn't even post, and also what 7 pounds of lamb kebabs look like.

It's rather an odd birthday for me, or rather part of an odd year. I took a ridiculous administrative job in a field that I have no interest in; it happened to pay more than my last job for a 4-day work week. I decided to take a year to pursue my interest in writing and art. It's flown by. My birthday just reminds me how close I am to the end of my year, as of September 15, and how I have no clue what I will do (or am doing) with my life. Even worse, September 15 is my personal due date for my novel--and the novel is not cooperating!

On the upside, I saw a really interesting painting exhibition that I can't wait to share. Thanks for your patience with the absence of posts, and happy 25th birthday to me!

And now for your regularly scheduled blog...

Buying Affordable Art: Go Small or Not at All?

When I walked by Heist Gallery up the block from me yesterday, I noticed a thin row of Polaroids lining the walls, and this started a long train of thought. It was a group show entitled "12 Instances," and interestingly the last exhibition I saw there, Papercut, was an assortment of affordable works on paper. Both exhibitions were put together with an eye to being reasonably-priced. Affordable, small-scale works seem sensible given the big "R" word (Recession) and they suit my budget. Affordable art might just be a case of buying small, but I find it interesting, perhaps telling, that given my enthusiasm for art, I've opted for not at all over small.

Polaroid by Braden King

Here's the thing: I love art and I'm no Rockerfeller. I'm democratic and think art should be accessible to all. I like the idea of being able to afford art. YET I don't want to buy the relatively reasonable Polaroid. I just wasn't that impressed, and I felt the same way with a lot of the lower end works at the Affordable Art Fair. There were some nice enough postcard-size sketches, but I didn't fall hundreds-of-dollars in love with them. Maybe my eyes are just bigger than my budget.

I'm more impressed with the website 20X200, which offers limited editions of new works each week beginning at $20. They go up through $2,00o dollars, depending on the size of the print. They have an impressive quality and some really nice images, and I'll likely buy from there in the near future.

I'm even more impressed with my boyfriend, even if his plans for my birthday didn't quite work out; he wanted to buy a (smaller, more affordable if possible) painting from an artist in Chelsea that I raved about. So he contacted the gallery, saying he was interested in this artist's work. Nobody ever responded to his message. (Can you not leave a voicemail saying that you are interested in a certain artists work and expect to be called back?) I'm fairly certain said artist is 10 times above our price range anyhow, but I do find it odd that he didn't hear back.

Buying affordable art seems to involve shrinking it on cheaper mediums. That's ok, but I'm going to have to do a lot more scouring to find works that I love. As I have blank wall syndrome, I've filled my apartment with paintings of my own as a temporary (and not particularly impressive) solution. Suggestions welcome, both for blank wall syndrome and buying art.

To prove it's not impossible to buy great art on a budget, check out the Vogels below.

Ravels in Review Memorial Day Weekend

Ubi Roi, Hernan Bas at Lehmann Maupin

Yes, it has been a week already, and luckily things have calmed down since the fire on my block last week. In fact, they have slowed to a crawl, which is about the pace my sinuses can handle right now.

• Despite the fog in my brain, or perhaps because of, I tried to explain the greatness of Erasmus based on the fact he named himself 'Desire Desire.' He did some other things too.

• I questioned whether Francis Bacon could qualify as the greatest painter of the 20th twentieth, and got at least a few votes for greatness, if not greatest painter ever. I'm hanging out on a limb until I see the retrospective up at the Met now.

• The oldest sculpture ever was discovered, and there is some very scientific discussion about how sex-obsessed early humans were.

• Dr. Seuss made taxidermic sculptures. Who knew?

• A note on public art at the Lever House, Richard Woods is giving it a Tudor-style makeover.

All in all, a good week. Some things to look forward to in the art world, like Francis Bacon at the Met and promising-sounding Hernan Bas exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Lehmann Maupin, and a long Memorial Day weekend ahead.

H

Another Kind of Bird: Erasmus's In Praise of Folly

Glutton for edification (or punishment) that I am, I finished Erasmus's In Praise of Folly yesterday. Oh, you might say, the humorous points of that 15th century thinker's wit shouldn't be so difficult to follow (discounting the shifts in language usage, ignorance of medieval theological debate, or amount of interest in people speaking in the persona of minor Roman deities)? But I will reply, I was suffering from such extreme sinus pressure I couldn't even remember the name of 'that thing you take a temperature with'* when I was describing my awful pain to my doctor.** I was too fuzzy-headed even to post!

But Erasmus was a fascinating man:

Exhibit A: The bastard child of a monk, Gerrit Gerritszoon renamed himself 'Desire Desire,' first in Latin and then Greek (Desiderius Erasmus). That's excellent.

Exhibit B: When Martin Luther led the Reformation and others defended Catholicism, Erasmus stood alone. Erasmus was one of the greatest critic of the Catholic Church, yet thought it should be reformed from within, and part of that was to translate the scripture as accurately as possible from the original Greek, leading to his Latin version of the New Testament. Erasmus wanted it to be free of corrupting Medieval theology. (Martin Luther found his translation useful when creating a German version of the New Testament.)

Written in 1509 and dedicated to his friend Sir Thomas Moore, In Praise of Folly would no doubt have been more funny to me if satirical portraits of princes and monks struck home. He is unrelentingly witty, saying of theologians, in the persona of Folly: 'That short-tempered and supercilious crew is unpleasant to deal with. . . . They will proclaim me a heretic. With this thunderbolt they terrify the people they don't like. Their opinion of themselves is so great that they behave as if they were already in heaven; they look down pityingly on other men as so many worms." Erasmus leaves no one out, including the Pope, so you can see why the Catholic church prohibited this, and all his other works, from being read.

A freethinker whose only allegiance was to books, he was also a witty correspondent to some 500 of the most important individuals of his day. He died in Basel still at odds with the majority of the world. When Erasmus was accused of having "laid the egg that Luther hatched," he is said to have replied that he did, but he "had expected quite another kind of bird!"




*A thermometer.
**Apparently, I don't even have a sinus infection like I thought, so I feel like a wimp. ; (

Francis Bacon at the Met

Painting

Francis Bacon, the British painter (not Renaissance thinker Sir Francis Bacon), has always stuck out like a sore thumb in the history of painting. A sore gangrened thumb at that. When everyone else was painting abstractly, he remained resolutely figurative. Where people went to art school, he taught himself by going to museums. And when most people shy away from the sheer horror and grotesqueness of his jailed male figures surrounded by meat, he delved into it.

Triptych, 1974-77

The artist broke a record for contemporary art sales when a triptych of his sold for $86 million dollars last year, and he was the subject of two retrospectives at the Tate during his lifetime, and another last year. (He died in 1992.) Now the retrospective is moving to the Met (of all places). It opens tomorrow--and I look forward to seeing it. Jerry Saltz wrote an excellent article on Bacon in this week's New York Magazine because of the new exhibition, asking the question "Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?" "Greatest painter of the twentieth century" is quite a title, and not one I'm sure I'd grant Bacon, although he was a good painter who created resonant, interesting works of great color. (If you want to see what a fascinating mess he was, Saltz touches on his life history.)

Figure with Meat

Bacon is a tough artist to understand: His paintings create such a visceral reaction in the viewer that I think it can be difficult to look beyond the subject matter. Margaret Thatcher famously described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures." People commonly assume that such repetitive grotesque angst can't be real, that he's hamming it up. (Excuse the pun--and just be glad I haven't tried my cleverness on his last name yet.) Saltz feels it becomes gimmicky, and so did quite a few people I was talking to the past Sunday. Yet the artist is at his best with these bruised mutants encased in flat rooms of color.

So what do you think, a yay or a nay for Bacon?

See Two Coats of Paint for more information on the exhibition itself.

Sex: Inspiring Ivory Sculptures Since 35,000 years ago

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered the oldest known sculpture: a small ivory figure with no head or feet and very large breasts. It's believed to be 35,000 years old, which argues that humans had developed a capacity for abstract thinking and creating symbols at an extremely early point in human history. When asked about the motivation for creating this piece, " 'It's very sexually charged,' said University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the figure in September."

What was the impetus for this first sculpture? That's anybody's guess, and opinions range between fertility object or some sort of goddess worship. According to at least one archeologist, the reason humans first created a sculpture was sex, pure and simple. "These people were obsessed with sex."

The figure bears this out: it's feet didn't break off--nor did its head. Similar sculptures of naked women without head or feet were made in the region at much later periods. An archaeologist from the University of Cambridge argued that "We now have evidence of that sort of artistic tradition of Venus figurines going back 6,000 years earlier than anybody ever guessed." This figure changes both the estimated development of humans at this point in time and the context and meaning of the earliest art made.

Who knew sex was the thing that inspired us to crawl out of the primordial ooze?

Dr. Seuss's Taxidermic Sculptures

Am I the only person who did not know that Dr. Seuss created large, taxidermic sculptures of imaginary creatures? I'll file this under "Things you learn at a wine and cheese party on a Saturday night."

The website has reference to Dr. Suess's 'secret' art as well, but it's not nearly as exciting as you would think.

A Tudor-style Skyscraper: Richard Woods at the Lever House

When I wrote about Public Art in Manhattan, I ended writing that it's often not successful as it becomes more and more part of the landscape. Well, what better way to shake things up than to do a renovation?

The Lever House, above, at 53rd St and Park is doing just that. The Lever House is an important and seminal building that paved the way for the glass box skyscrapers we have today, and today it features an impressive contemporary art collection. The glass street-level room is used to show pieces of contemporary art, such as Damien Hirst or, currently, Tara Donovan. The public courtyard flows into the sidewalks and streets, and offers benches, a fountain, and enormous, white Hello Kitty statues by artist Tom Sachs. Perhaps it shows how jaded I am that I could become blase about this public art, which, on reviewing my sentence, sounds pretty awesome.

The Lever House rotates the art it shows in the ground level room, but in this upcoming year it plans a more serious make-over. This modernist landmark is going to renovated by artist Richard Woods, who is planning to wrap the walls and outdoor columns in...Tudor-style prints. Yes, Tudor, like England in the 1500s. Reportedly they will be "flora and fauna images a la William Morris." William Morris opposed Victorian opulence and yearned for a return to the days of Merry ol' England in his work, and Woods will be echoing the move back in time in his approach to the Lever House.

For an example of Wood's work, the Perry Rubinstein Gallery in Chelsea is showing the image below. On the walls of the Lever House, this will be a dynamic and interesting change to the boxy, clean-lined glass temple.

I hope he doesn't touch the Hello Kitties!

Fire! Goodbye to Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown

View from Henry St. and Pike St.

Last night the smoke I thought was from a neighbor grilling turned out to be from the biggest fire I have ever seen--at the end of my block. I watched for a few hours as Hong Kong Supermarket, a Chinatown landmark, and the apartment building attached to it burned down. It felt surreal, like a film noir movie in color: rain, mist, smoke, fire, trenchcoats and dramatic lighting. The streets were full of Chinese in pajamas and reporters with big cameras standing in the rain.

Unfortunately, the huge fire that drew trucks from across lower Manhattan destroyed these buildings. It was a 4 alarm fire (which is apparently a lot.) If it started in the bottom of the building next door, as the news reports, then my boyfriend and I were right to guess that it started as a kitchen fire in the subterranean Chinese restaurant.



Like a postman, I could carry on through smoke, and rain, and fire to our weekly ravels in review, but that seems decidedly anti-climatic. So let's skip it and get to the photos:

The blaze kept coming back on the roof of Hong Kong Supermarket.

Water pouring out the back door of Hong Kong Supermarket as it is being hosed through the roof on the front.

At the intersection of Allen/Pike St. and East Broadway

Luckily the fire didn't spread to the gas station across the street, or anymore buildings than Hong Kong Supermarket which, stuffed with packaging and boxes in an old warehouse, went up like a tinderbox.

This was taken at about 11:30, when the fire was under control and you could finally see through the smoke.

There were tons of photographers from the news there, and I even ended up on 1010Wins, a local station, myself (you have to listen to the audio to hear me).

I left the scene just before midnight and then couldn't settle down until 2 AM, so I'm exhausted. I still can't believe Hong Kong burned down. While there are no end of fruit and vegetable stands, nothing else in Manhattan's Chinatown has that range of products. They imported all Asian products, so that the ramen you bought there was packaged in Manadarin characters and the soy milk you bought was literally soy+water (not quite to my taste.) It became a staple in the Asian community: I know three different friends whose parents are Asian immigrants and still shop there whenever they get the chance, even after moving to New Jersey or Queens. I hope they rebuild it.

It's Official: I'm lovely

The word 'lovely' begins with an affecting root noun and adds an adverbial -ly to make it a descriptor. It's a generally nice word that I'm rather fond of. All the more so when it is applied to none other than myself. Anna, the around the way girl, an 'editrix' who covers things sartorial and all around the way, plus some great images, gave me my first blog award.

Here are the rules:
1. Add the logo to your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received this award.
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs.
4. Leave a message on their blog, letting them know they are One Lovely Blog!


Step 3--oh dear, I read almost a hundred blogs. Obviously, I read them because I like them. They're on hundreds of topics. Should I only mention great art blogs? Should I mention the ones that fit 'lovely' best? I finally chose the blogs written by people I would like to know based on his or her personable, lovely blog (da da dum):

• Boredom's Bounty: For the Love of Pictures takes pictures of her life in NYC and posts them every day. I like pictures, I like her stories. Like real life here, they aren't all of the Empire State building. I see it and I think, 'I should do that.'

• The Blue Lantern: Jane not only works for NPR (cool), she writes arts journalism for the love of it. But she attacks it an a culturally voracious way that will take you from painters and design to hedgehogs. You must see the hedgehog post. Delightful.

• The Age of Uncertainty: A lovely blog by a lovely man in Steerforth, England. You're all free to be madly jealous of him, seeing as he recently took on an amazing job where he gets to sort through old books all day looking for gems.

• Little People: A Tiny Street Art Project: OK, so this isn't a person. The blog is of a series of miniature human figures placed around London in ways that create the most endearing and humorous storylines. It always a pleasure. Scroll down the page a bit to some great images like Crappy Christmas or Last Chance to Impress.

• Wurthering Expectations: A new find, this blog is by a reader whose voraciousness surpasses mine. He is storming the bastions of English literature, and his blog might be a good refresher course for those of you who miss you old Victorian lit class. (Granted, I might be the only one who feels exactly like that.) The blog is lovely for many other reasons, as I'm sure you will see for yourself.

• Under Construction/Art Contemplations: Bill is a blogger who knows about Medieval witch hunts AND art. Quite the combination. An artist himself, he shares his own work on his blog too.

• The Lusty Reader: OK, the girl likes her Romance novels. I like the Romantic movement. So aside from a love of reading in general, we have little in common. Thus it says a lot that I enjoy reading her blog as much as I do.

Aside from my lovely blog award, what's new with Art Ravels you might ask? Actually, let me frame that as a series of questions directed at you, dear Reader.

• Is it true that you have to floss your teeth twice a day to prevent cavities? I floss mine once a day, which seems like more than enough, and my dentist told me I need 4 fillings from not flossing. REALLY?

• How do you keep voracious, herb-eating, pepper-popping, all together EVIL birds out of your container garden? They have nibbled my mint to stubs in a matter of days, the basil looks depressed, and the oregano is diminishing at a rapid rate. I'm afraid the sage and thyme are going to walk out of the planter in protest. And don't even get me started on the topless hot cherry bomb. (a plant, people, a pepper plant.)

• If you are driving a taxi in midtown rush hour traffic and you see a biker in midtown biking in a straight line down the bus lane, do you speedily pull in front of him and stop to pick someone up? NO! No, you do not endanger said biker's life. You take the extra 90 seconds to pull in behind them. May you heed the safety warning before said biker with a lovely blog becomes squashed.

In sum; dentists lie, birds are evil, and bikers must not be driven over. On the upside, Art Ravels is a lovely blog and so is my ride along the East River park before I hit Midtown.

Sophie Calle's Take Care of Yourself (I'd Rather She Didn't)

I did not want to write about the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Paula Cooper gallery. Then I read this piece in Interview magazine, and thought Calle's dialogue with interviewer Louise Neri so interesting it should be shared. For background, Calle was emailed a break up letter ending with the phrase 'Take Care of Yourself.' The artist did not take well to the phrase, and sent the letter to be interpreted by 107 women in different professions. They cry, they rage, they analyze, they dance and one even teaches a parrot to repeat, "Take Care of Yourself" over and over. This work first appeared at the Venice Biennial in 2007.

SOPHIE CALLE: The rules of the game are always very strict. In Take Care of Yourself I asked the participants to answer professionally, to analyze a breakup letter that I had received from a man. The parameters were fixed. For example, I wanted the grammarian to speak about grammar—I wanted to play with the dryness of professional vocabulary. I didn’t want the women expressing sentiment for me. Except maybe my mother . . .

NERI: Yet, typically, she was one of the least sentimental! [laughs]

CALLE: I have my own sentiment—I don’t need that of others. This work was not about revenge. Even so, all the women spoke from their own points of view and, probably, many of them had been abandoned by men at some point in their lives.

Note: When this subject was brought up at the lovely art salon I frequent, 3 of the 5 women present had received an email break up message. None of the men had. Those women tended to be more accepting of Calle's exhibition, though I don't believe any had seen it. When I saw it, I was struck by the sheer volume of items in the exhibition, but didn't gain any insight into Calle or heartbreak. In anything, it made everything seem senseless.

NERI: Louise Bourgeois once said that art allows you to re-experience the past in a proportion that is objective and realistic. I could say the opposite about this work because one letter gave rise to an entire universe of response and nuance. It’s both a torture and a tribute!

CALLE: Yes! At the beginning, one of the titles I had in mind was “The Muse,” because this man was, in fact, a muse. Finally I didn’t, because “Take Care of Yourself” was more ironic. And, more strictly, it’s what I did.

NOTE: I rather like the idea of the man as a muse. But if you are a muse to so many women, why is Calle the artist? Because she was broken up with? Because she collected the responses? Because she arranged them on the gallery wall?

CALLE: It’s true that when I speak in public, everyone asks me about life and I always have to bring them back to the fact that it’s a work of art. The difference with many of my works is the fact that they are also my life. They happened. This is what sets me apart and makes people strongly like or dislike what I do. It is also why I have a public beyond the art world. I don’t care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.

NERI: At times, art struggles because reality can be so overwhelming . . .

CALLE: Art is a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts. I didn’t make Take Care of Yourself to forgive or forget a man—I did it to make a show in Venice. The show came to my mind because I was thinking, What can I do to suffer less? But once I got the idea, it took over, and I didn’t care about the therapeutic aspect anymore.

NOTE: The confluence of art and life that she speaks about in the first quote reminds me of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and all the accompanying questions of truth that stalked them. Calle, like those lovely men of mine, makes me feel as if she knows that she is manipulating her audience and she knows that the flux between art and life has brought more fame than she would have had otherwise. When Calle then explains how she uses her pain as a catalyst for the Venice Biennial, it seems cold and contrived.

CALLE: I never had victims. Well, there were only three cases, twice with lovers: Exquisite Pain and Take Care of Yourself, and The Address Book.

NOTE: Calle has a history of exploring intimacy in ways that might violate one's notions of privacy, and it's pretty fair to call her anonymous ex a victim here.

Whether it's revenge or a way of working through something, the exhibition feels like its meant to tug at heartstrings rather than create an aesthetic object. The artist did little more than stage a scenario and collect responses in an way that feels like overly-pointed rhetoric. Whether the exhibition is heartless manipulation or angsty literalness, it doesn't remain visually interesting enough to keep my attention. It merely poses as art.

Photography Everywhere: Avedon to Leibovitz

The Model as Muse exhibition is up at the Met, a show of photographer Richard Avedon's work will be up at the International Center of Photography as of Friday, and I'm reading Annie Liebovitz's At Work, a biography of her photographic life. So photography is on my mind.

Avedon, as you can see above, is know for breaking up the static, staid poses used before and introducing movement and energy. ICP also says he anticipated "many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years."

This brings us to Leibovitz's body of work quite concisely.

Fashion, check.

Commercial art, see litany of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue covers.

Fine art, see image above of artist Keith Haring dressed as his work.

Advertising, check.

Her career began in art school in San Francisco. In her third year, she began taking photographs for Rolling Stone magazine, then a small publication. She worked with them for years, going on tour to take photos of the Rolling Stones and taking the last photos of John Lennon before he was assassinated.

Later she came to New York to work for Vanity Fair, and it was only then, between fashion and political shoots, that she begun to consider doing advertising. Before she had always been held back by her fine art background and her difficulty photographing to someone else's standards. The advertising she did end up doing was a series a black and white portraits of famous people for American Express--one where her creativity was allowed to come out. That was the beginning of many successful advertising campaigns--and you get the sense Leibovitz never let her creativity be trampled upon. (Of course, as one of the biggest photographers of her day, she does had some clout.)

TeedleDee and TweedleDum with Alice from the Alice in Wonderland series

Chuck Close, artist, as the Wizard of Oz

Looking back over her work, the photographs I still enjoy most are from some of her more imaginative fashion sets. She does fantastical storylines with clothes to match, like the ones above. She has a range of different, innovative work and her portraits wonderfully capture a range of interesting personalities (including Queen Elizabeth of England). The collection of her photographs in this book show someone who had been in touch with pop culture and made more of it and who has seen people and done more than document them, she exposes them.