Yves Saint Laurent Collection at Auction

Legendary clothes designer Yves Saint Laurent died last June at his residence in Paris, where he and his partner Pierre Bergé had created a house of style in bricks and mortar. Their art collection is now hitting the auction block at Christies this February. The collection is a testament to Saint Laurent's style in its wide-ranging combination of mediums, time periods and styles.

Quite conveniently, just as this collection comes to auction another style maven, moi, is moving to a new apartment and is in serious need of furnishings. Thus I did some online shopping at Christie's.

First there are practical matters to consider: how to sit, how to drink martinis, and how to eat cereal. My solutions:

Reading Chair

Amazing Silver and Coral Spoons

YSL bar: now that's a beautiful thing.

But what shall I contemplate, not that I'm set up in that luxurious chair, enjoying a martini and cereal? Leger's Profile and Hooch's Parrot, I think. Then for sheer exuberance I'll add Calder's Dancers and Sphere. But I'll have to find a table on which to display it.

Fernand Leger, The Black Profile

Pieter de Hooch, A Young Woman Feeding A Parrot Alexander Calder, Dancers and Sphere

This style, as I like to call it, is 'Manhattan Spartan-Chic,' combining essential luxuries in limited space. My new apartment will be a joy once I purchase these lovelies. There were many other temptations, but a blogger can only afford so much. As it is, I won't have any funds leftover for Vermouth.

Louise Bourgeois' Spiders

"My work has always been a recording of my emotions. It’s not a concept that I’m after, but an emotion that I want to keep or destroy. All of my sculptures have the sense of vulnerability and fragility. Sexuality is one theme tied to those two states of being." --Bourgeois, 2006 interview

Bourgeois, 97, still lives and works in New York City. Her spider, shown above, was there on my visit to Dia:Beacon. It fuses metal plates together in a way that suggests contained energy and torque. Balancing that strength, the heavy body rests on pins that end in sharp points. It's a fragile stasis. In Dia's small space, I was torn by the desire to examine it and nervousness that the spider would jump!

Despite the delicacy of the legs, these spiders seem less vulnerable than threatening. Spiders, such as the ones pictured above, have been a part of her work for many years. Even placed in an outdoor setting, they look as natural and harmless as Godzilla. They are fascinating works that draw you in even as they unnerve you.

Does anyone know more about why Bourgeois uses this spider motif?

The Modernist's Versailles, Dia:Beacon

If the city isn't wintry enough for you, take MetroNorth out of Grand Central some morning up to Beacon, New York. Along the frozen Hudson River, this small town is home to Dia:Beacon, and Dia is a monument of a museum to Modernist art.

The scale of the place lends Modernism a lighthearted air. One feels distanced from the small people walking on the other side of the gallery and more immersed in an aesthetic experience. The huge works beg to be played with just as they play with your perceptions. The atmosphere invites you to touch the works (Dont!, however). It even begs for you to do a little dance inside the center of a Richard Serra sculpture. This sense of exploration is with you around every corner.

A former Nabisco factory, its proportions are suited to the huge works its showcases. Galleries of open windows and bare white wall, stretching miles, make it a pared down Versailles. The works, of Sol LeWitt and Joseph Beuys and other important Modernist figures, take up the space beautifully. Rooms bigger than most New York City apartments contain rows of Robert Ryman's white paintings or compacted cars.

Robert Ryman, Vector, 1997.

Dia also has spaces set off from the main galleries on the ground floor, so that smaller, darker brick rooms hold Louise Bourgeois's womb-like sculptures and her impressive bronze cast of a spider resting its huge weight on spindly legs. On the basement level, there are dark rooms showcasing neon light sculptures and movies playing on the walls. In a former loading dock are Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, large circular wall installations of to wander in and out of.

Such extremes of Modernism can be overwhelming. I left wondering if the canvases painted white, the pieces of string attached floor to ceiling, and the compacted cars really hold meaning or if the whole experience was a colossal joke. Yet it does feel wonderfully playful to wander there, and the whole trip is a pleasant escape.

Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1997

Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, Darwinism and a Question

The following piece on Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct, originally published yesterday in Blogcritics Magazine, is a case of 'ask and ye shall receive.' I wrote the review of a book lecture around a question: does a Darwinistic basis for art mean we can judge art's merits by its popularity? Then the author answered my question!

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The heady realms of aesthetic theory floated during a recent Friday afternoon when I attended a lecture at NYU's School of Philosophy. It was not so heady as it might have been given that lecturer, Denis Dutton, rebels against the jargon of much aesthetic criticism. He was promoting his new book, The Art Instinct, which argues for a Darwinian basis to art and aesthetic tastes in man.

Note that this Darwinism contradicts the common assumption of art as a cultural construct. It also implies that art has helped humans survive in some way. Yet nobody knew how, including Dutton, for certainly art seems to be a useless, weird, and inexplicable impulse.

Dutton, inspired by how “weird” our aesthetic tastes are, investigated the human reason for creating and valuing art. He believes that strong roots in Darwinism complement our understanding of why art is important and what, in fact, art is. It's a contentious argument for an ambitious book. Dutton starts by defining art.

For all the audacity, Dutton made some interesting points. For instance, why is it that humans have developed from their sense of hearing the tonal music of Beethoven that so delights us instead of using their sense of smell to create nose symphonies? Smell is just as useful as hearing. Yet very few people pick out the notes of a perfume the way they do out of a symphony, nor are perfumes created out of a structured set of notes.

Dutton also commented that humans, unlike other animals, constantly seek out imaginative representations of reality rather than true, real things. That is, they seek out lies rather than truth. Think of all the time that is spent watching TV shows, reading stories, or looking at pictures. How have lies proven a more useful trait, in an evolutionary sense? By extension, how has art?

A different question bothers me, and I wished I had asked Dutton for his opinion. His theory considers art a natural need and that we are uniquely configured as a species to appreciate it. A Darwinian basis for art suggests a set of universal aesthetics that people everywhere use to appreciate and judge art. If aesthetics are universal, are artworks that appeal to the most number of people better?

I don't know if Dutton would agree. In fact I doubt it, despite the fact that he ridiculed the academics who congratulate themselves on being sophisticates for understanding modern and contemporary art in comparison to a “bourgeois” majority.

One could argue that Darwinism provides a biological basis for elitism. In fact, Dutton's theories are more useful for enticing one to form arguments than they are at answering questions. Often enough I'm satisfied with discussions with no answers, yet this particular question fascinates me. While I'm no philosopher, my art instinct suggests that popular art equals better art.
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Dutton's response to the original article here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

City People ala Giacommetti

This small bronze by Alberto Giacommetti at MoMA has always enchanted me more than its small size and simple compisition seem to allow. I love how his contoured bronze people seem strong despite their unnatural slenderness and the sense of movement overall.

Entitled City Square (1948), for me it encapsulates how people walking by each other in the city, each absorbed in his own world and striding purposefully. This is probably true anywhere, but I associate the sculpture and the feeling with New York City.

Sonic Youth: A Case of Art and Rock n' Roll

There used to be few things cooler than expiremental guitar band Sonic Youth. Despite the unfortunate fact that years pass regardless of one’s coolness, Sonic Youth has remained vibrant and interesting. I don’t even mean that in a senior citizens way. Recent activities include: Sonic Youth Etc.: Sensational Fix, an multidisciplinary and collaborative art exhibition, and playing along with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to choreographer Merce Cunningham’s latest project at BAM.

So in addition to rocking out, they're doing art. Or as their press release documents, exposing the band's historical connection to the art world:

"By the early 1980s, an alternative scene emerged in downtown New York City in which music and visual art were tightly connected. Both the raw and rebellious attitude of punk and the atonal, violent guitar music with abstract lyrics of no-wave inspired artists like Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon to play in bands, while performances by these 'art-rock' bands were held in exhibition spaces and so-called 'art lofts'.... The natural crossover between art and experimental music, as was apparent in those days, laid the foundations for the multidisciplinary activities of Sonic Youth. "

Sensational Fix is in Europe until 2010. (It won’t be coming to New York as far as I know.) However, there is a great looking catalog. The 720 pg. book is limited to 600 copies and includes two 7″ records, each one recorded by a different member of the band.

Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

Art’s commercial aptitude was apparent last night in the unlikeliest of places—my block. I’ve written about the spread of gallery hopping in Manhattan, but it’s officially reached the last stop of the F train in Manhattan. Seth Price had an opening at Reena Spaulings Fine Art last night. I googled the location, 165 East Broadway. I knew the google map was wrong because there was nothing on the block it showed but a Chinese restaurant.

How wrong was I, I discovered when I climbed the old stairs after a crowd of mid-20s folks who seemed to know where they were going. The floor above the Chinese restaurant is Reena Spaulings Fine Art. Instead of 4 people milling about, there were over 40 drinking, smoking and chatting around—oh yes—the art.

Sitting around the corner from said gallery now, having coffee, watching Chinese people practice New Years dances in the park across the way, the scene of the neighborhood just gets better now that I can include galleries. I understand why Renee Spauling and the LaViolaBanks Gallery, also on East Broadway, are here. The spaces are enormous. There are many tiny gallery spaces in the area immediately north of here, but these are massive. Based off last night, I’d say they draw a good crowd.

But where was art’s commercial potential last night? That takes us back to the art; Seth Price’s works are so polished and intelligent they might sell themselves even in this market.


Stressing the importance of dates, Price has created a series of calendar pieces where he has painted older paintings in a square in the top of a canvas and a calendar locating them in time along the bottom. For me, works like the one featured above, where molded objects or faces break through a flat, plasticine surface were less explicit and more appealing. I didn't stay for the video, which I suspect was the best part.

Absinthe as a Lifestyle: Rimbaud and other French Decadents

"For me, my glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe drunk on the sly, with fear of treason and if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!" - Paul Verlaine

"After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world." - Oscar Wilde

In addition to Van Gogh, famous absinthe drinkers (make that addicts) include the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. A new book by Edmund White, Rimbaud, highlights the affair and drinking habits of these two poet maudits, and the Time's review of it gives you condensed insight into the poet's embroiled lives. Rimbaud, left,

"cultivated the lice in his hair and tried to make them jump onto other people; he smashed up heirlooms; he sold his hosts' furniture to buy gallons of booze, especially absinthe, on which he would proceed to get blotto, waking up in pools of his own merde (one of his favourite words). Finally, he seduced Verlaine, made him abandon his wife and infant child, and led the poor sap off on a sordid set of adventures that culminated, a couple of years later, with an exasperated Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist and serving a term in prison."

Also from Parisian society of the time--called Decadent with good reason--we have Edgar Degas's L'absithe. Intersetingly, the French had no illusions about absinthe's addictive nature, but rather seem drawn to and fascinated by sin. Absinthe at that time was like heroin chic of the 90s. So despite my earlier denunciation, I can see now where all the cultural stigma, and thus its sinful appeal, stems from. Absinthe was a lifestyle.

Why art auctions might not meet their reserves

On one hand, great hope of new leadership and a seachange in the fortune of the U.S. is in the air, and on the other hand, we have visual confirmation of the art market's decline. The below is estimated to sell for 2 to 3 thousand GBP. What exactly is it, you may ask? As Art News Blog put it, bold mine:

An item of interest in Sotheby's upcoming London auction on the 6th of February is a piece of shit, literally. It's called CLOACA FAECES (NEWYORK, 26.01.2002, 2.30 P.M.) by the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye.

Is it any wonder that the art market's not doing so hot? More disgusting than interesting, it's called Cloaca Faeces, it's art, and it's on sale at Sotheby's in early Febraury. Sure, shit has been done before in the art world, in cans and other places, but that's no reason to repeat the feat.

Maybe President Obama can add to his agenda for change: don't let the failing art market commit suicide.

Cindy Sherman: One Trick Pony?

That glorious thing, a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, was awarded to photographer Cindy Sherman in 2005. As it’s only the beginning of 2009 now, she has this year to still enjoy the substantial prize money. But what does she do with it?

What's she did before she won: dress up and photograph herself as other people, often women fulfilling cultural roles. Allow me to say, I like her body of work in general. She creates series of portraits as I described, as well as ‘film stills’ that aren’t film stills so much as portraits she shoots of herself. Sherman has dabbled in other projects as well, like video direction, but her art is mainly clever identity and gender politics photographs that are well-shot and fascinating. All the more intriguing when you recognize her face behind the makeup and costume.

Yet not endlessly intriguing. After years of portraits of herself as others, Sherman hasn’t really strayed, much less innovated. Some jokes aren’t as funny the tenth time around, some shticks get old. Sherman, who constantly reinvents herself in her work, has failed to reinvent the work itself. It makes me wonder if she didn’t merely happen on a successful trick of playing dress up and now can’t come up with (or is afraid to try) something new.

It’s easy to start out a genius, and it’s certainly possible to develop into a great artist bit by bit over a career of 30 years. It’s not always so easy to stay a genius.

American Populists: Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell

Andrew Wyeth, Benny's Scarecrow

The painter Andrew Wyeth died last Friday. In a way, he was a most unpopular populist. As the New York Times describes here, his main value to most art historians was that he provided an alternative to Modernism in the 1940s and 50s. Not quite high praise. The American public, the part that didn't go in for Modernism, tended to be much fonder of Wyeth's realistic images.

His form of realism seems to be what endears him to the common man, placing him in the class of Americana with Norman Rockwell. A spiritual opposite of Norman Rockwell, however, his negativity and earthiness depict another side of America's identity. His subject matter is rural and humble; his style accessible, that is to say, it looks like real objects. His excellently composed scenes have an almost magical realism, but ultimately, I find them a little dull.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's Field

His most famous painting, above, is of a woman in his community who was crippled and pulled herself through fields rather than use a wheelchair. Wyeth admired her independence and determination. In this and much of his work, he overlays the American landscape with foreboding atmosphere and Puritanical ethos. Whereas Wyeth seems like the last of the Puritans, Rockwell's work shows a New American optimism.

Norman Rockwell, The Roadblock

Is it fair to say Wyeth represents an older, Puritan ethos and Rockwell represents the exuberant America coming out of WWII?

Who is more American?

Reflections of Mylar

Here we have me, Iphone photo taker extraordinaire, taking photo of Josephine Meckseper’s photograph on view at MoMA, with reflection of other huge print on facing wall.

Call me conceited, but I think it does more justice to the size and quality of her work than the MoMA's exhibition images. She prints on mylar, which gives a viewer/viewee quality in its reflections of dull images of consumerism from a typical 1970s German catalog. Her work seems a little dated to me, both in the images she choose (quite purposefully dated on that account) and in the themes of consumerism, societal construct, and advertising effects on how we view ourselves.

MoMA is showcasing her work along with another photographers as noteworthy of 2008. Ah how quickly we pick favorites from the old year and move in. And I'm not over 2007 yet.

"Beauty and the Best" and a Boyfriend

“Artists should be separated from people who do creative things” was my boyfriend’s response to my description of Theodore Dalrymple’s article in The New English Review, mentioned previously here.

By that, he meant that saying a chef was an artiste was hyperbolic, only meaning he cooked very well. He also meant that more conceptual and non-traditional works of contemporary art, such as rings of circles in duct tape or performances where a person sits on a box for days or even Pippilotti Rist’s video and sound installation in the atrium at MoMA, are cool, are visual, and are creative but that they are not art.

Dalrymple’s trenchant article has stayed in my mind, but all my conclusions from it seem to be drawing lines in the sand, much as my boyfriend’s statement does. “This is Art; this is not.” As if there were a right and wrong, and a good and bad when it comes to art.

But in fact, isn’t there? Art requires a set of aesthetic values to be judged by, if we are to make judgments at all. Life and art, or at least my life and art, are more than a series of perceptions. They have meaning to me, and they do because I assign to all things value. This is no formal declaration of organizing principles either for myself or of culture in general. But as my life has meaning, and art has meaning to me, and I think some organizing principle guides my perceptions of art.

Dalrymple’s article feels true to my experiences. He considers popular contemporary art to be shallow and created by egoists who are too afraid to create something beautiful, not to mention lacking the technical means and knowledge of an artistic heritage to do so. Think of Jeff Koons, who he mentions, or Damian Hirst or Murakami. To strive for beauty seems too earnest, almost gauche today.

So perhaps my boyfriend and Dalrymple are saying similar things. One feels it is not art, the other that it is bad art. Perhaps I agree. My amusement and interest with much of contemporary art is just that; and those feelings are different than a reaction to something beautiful. People who look can find beauty and an expression of the human condition in a falling leaf or the texture of a wall. A beautiful work of art makes those qualities apparent to those who weren’t looking.

The Green Fairy Resurrected

Absinthe, ah the decadent wonder of late nights and green fairies. Ah the miraculous release from life's troubles. The scintillating pleasure of dissolving sugar in its neon depths.



Absinthe has saturated bar menus in Manhattan of late as the drink du jour. As far as I'm concerned, that jour is past.

However cool it may be that Van Gogh might have cut his earlobe off because of it, it doesn't taste so delicious. You see the face of the woman in Picasso's 1901 Absinthe Drinker? Nobody smiles in the paintings of absinthe drinkers. It's because a vile green herbal liquor is sitting in front of them, reflecting a sickly pallor upon them. Absinthe was deliciously illegal and hard to obtain in Manhattan (which would make even toadstools a luxury good) but now it's plentifully available. It tends to taste like anise, a flavor that I've always detested.

So what is there to be said in favor of this over-available, under-tasty liquor? Vintage poster art for one, and paintings like the one by Picasso for another. Artists seem to love portraying absinthe, whether its advertisements of smiling people and lascivous green lady fairies or paintings of sallow, dejected loners in bars. Could absinthe have been different then?

Proust and Time

Swann's Way is the first volume of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), and I found it easy to dip into the lives of the boy Marcel and the dilettante Charles Swann for my first foray into Proust.

Where is the first volume going? Somewhere along the life of a little boy and a Mr. Swann, but apparently that will be wherever life takes them and not where plot demands. To enjoy this novel one must allow a companionable closeness with the protagonist, and if you do, you'll find yourself as torn up as he is over the refusal of a mother or lover, and as overjoyed to see his beloved. How closely you can identify with a character when you know the minutest details of his thoughts!

Describing the charm of Proust's writing is difficult because his virtues are old-fashioned and rare. He doesn't skimp words. He is circuitous and his relates much more than is necessary for any plot; his writing is the opposite of what we are taught. His flow lacks the modernity of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, and yet has an expansive, naturally drifting quality that revolves around an intense personal consciousness. Unlike Joyce, reading Proust is the most easy, natural thing to dip into, but he requires patience. The longer read, the better sense you gain of the cumulative meanings that lend poignancy to his writing.

"the memory of a particular image is but the regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years"

Proust might be writing fiction, but it reminds me of Fernando Pessoa's autobiographical The Book of Disquiet. À la recherche du temps perdu is to a great point autobiographical (I think that is what allows him to write it so well.) Proust names the protagonist Marcel, his own name, and his title suggests that he is trying to write his life back. What a lovely thing, to be able to write a fictional account of one's own life. How much closer one might get to the heart of the matter, as Proust does.

Up with The Man! Save the Art!

Edward Winkleman’s blog post yesterday on the hows and hopes that the new presidency would support the arts led me to thinking about funding. I appreciate an impressive amount of sponsorship from big corporations that in themselves I don’t always love. For instance in New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has Target First Saturdays, MoMA has Target First Fridays, and the Whitney After Hours program is sponsored by law firm Clifford Chance. Banks commonly sponsor major exhibitions.

This is not to say individuals do not play a role; on the contrary, the donations and loans by individuals are the traditional mainstay a museum depends on, for pieces of art as well as programs. Yet individuals don’t seem to be able to wholly fulfill that role anymore. Consider the Morgan Library. Once the home of art patron and financier Pierpont Morgan, the Morgan Library is a museum that was once a home, like the Frick Museum, but now made in to a public scpace and run by a board. Individuals still help support these institutions, but individuals are no longer the primary consumers or supporters of art. It’s a sea change from an individual to corporate level as a world of domineering steel age barons of America has given way to the dominate institutions of today.


Unfortunately, those institutions aren’t likely to be flush with money in 2009. Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has a plan to my liking: utilize the parts of the collection in storage rather than host expensive traveling exhibitions. Some are excited by the potential sales of private art collections that recent financial collapses have encouraged, but they should be more nervous about the future of sponsorship that also signals, as institutions become less likely to pledge funds. All the more reason for the hopes that a new White House administration can fix everything. Rings a tad naïve to my ears, but here’s to hoping.

Self Lubricating Plastic, Oh My

On the left is The Deportment of the Host, a large installation, and on the right is a print entitled Drawing Restraint 9: Shimenawa. These seem very different in size, style, material, and theme, so that one might think all they had in common the room they are in.

These two works have in common 2 qualities: the artist, Matthew Barney, and a material, not immediately apparent, of self lubricating plastic. Matthew Barney is a contemporary American artist whose works spans performance, sculpture and video art, with a tendency toward cryptic personal stories and erotic themes. Quite a few of Barney's works incorporate this material. In the print, it forms the frame around an image of Matthew Barney and Bjork. His use of this odd material certainly seems cryptic.

But to the point, what is self lubricating plastic, and why does Barney use it? It seems like a high tech product used to little effect, except perhaps the fondness of a biology major for cool technology. He tends to cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic and self lubricating plastic in his sculptural pieces like The Deportation of the Host. Using anything lubricating in regards to framing a print doesn't make sense to me.

The plastic didn't seem to be wet, although I was stopped from touching it. Any ideas?

Watertower at MoMA

Can you spy the water tower? It's in the top right.

The rooftops of NYC are filled with water towers, but this one is deceptive. It is not actually a water tower, but a commissioned piece Water Tower by British artist Rachel Whiteread. Cast in clear resin of the inside of a real water tower, it actually has no color of its own. A fact I didn't realize when I was trying to take a picture of it and couldn't quite get it.

Whitehead says:

So it's a single clear plastic casting of a full–sized water tower that sat on the roof on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, on a dunnage.

I had originally thought of making this piece solid but that's technically impossible. So we had to make it empty, so the whole thing is a skin of about four inches all the way around. And it has the texture of the inside of the water tower, so it's really about solidifying water and trying to make this water look like it's just frozen in a moment of time. It's like the actual water tower has been stripped away and there's this solid water left behind.

It's translucence means that in different lights it shows up more or less visibly, like a sky ghost over Manhattan.

Rachel Whiteread. (British, born 1963). Water Tower. 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12' 2" high x 9' in diameter.

Book Review: A Quiet Adjustment

A cursory glance at the jacket copy makes clear why I picked this book up: it's a fictional account of Lord Byron's wife, and thus Byron. Byron's work is delightful, he was a fascinating person, and I'm a tad enamoured. I love Byron no less after this imaginative and vivid account of his cruel humor and selfish megalomania, not to mention his more depraved side, but I don't recommend anybody actually read A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (Fathers and Daughters, Imposture).

Is Byron's character pure imagination on Markovits' part? Hardly. He embellishes the facts but not the characters of the ill matched pair of Annabella Millbanke and Lord Byron. Prudish, self-righteous, and dignified Anabella had no idea what she was getting into when she ended up marrying tempestuous, willful, and perverse Lord Byron. Their marriage seems like an accident on both their parts, as Annabella felt little love and Byron less. Byron's antics from shattering bottles on the ceiling during her confinement to carrying on an affair with his sister in front of her eyes are horrid. Markovits tackles Annabella's inept reaction to his behavior that put off divorce for too long, and then refused to name the most terrible ground for divorce. (What that unnamed reason was remains a mystery, rumored to be incest or sodomy.)

Would I recommend this novel to those who couldn't give 2 figs about Byron? Absolutely not; it's dull. The monotony of A Quiet Adjustment, with its accomplished character development and good sense of setting, stems from the plot and not the author. Of course, I happened to know the ending, but the more basic failure is that its plot follows that of the real Annabella's life. Life does not often form the arc of suspense and conclusion that a satisfactory plot requires.

Unless you happen to be Lord Byron, and then you continue to live, love and write the rollicking Don Juan until your death fighting for Greek Independence. Byron makes a much better story than a person, and no doubt Annabella was a better person than she makes as a story. Markovits choose an angle for his story that is more of a straight line, which is shame because as a writer he seems capable of more.

Bottom line: read Byron instead.

Beauty and the Best: A Call to Arms

You probably already seen this link, you just don't recognize it yet. I've seen it twice in blogs today, and I read it myself yesterday. Entitled Beauty and the Best by Theodore Dalrymple in the New English Review, it hashes up much pertinent and heady classic art debate in order to "understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west" that contemporary art is incapable of serious, informed and moving art.

One is almost tempted to call him atavistic, or say his ideas are charming in an grandfatherly sort of way. Unless, of course, you've ever wanted more from your art than Damien Hirst could give you or you were ever struck by the craftsmanship of a statue by Bernini or some other forgotten barbarian. If that is the case, you will enjoy the spirit of Dalrymple's argument immensely.

Book Club: Extreme Decisions

The Good: I'm starting a book club! It's called, creatively enough, Contemporary Fiction Club (CFC to those in the know). At least for now anyhow...

The Bad: I'm floundering in impossible choices. A good book club is a lot of pressure!

What books should my fledgling book club read? My co-founder and I think focusing on contemporary fiction would be fun. But then, I've picked up some poor fiction choices lately. The book should obviously be well-written and discussion-worthy. Hopefully it will lure people of all kinds into thinking CFC is the best book club ever. I feel like this is an impossible decision, and important because I want everyone to come back. Any thoughts?

And then there's the additional worry of how to handle the meetings. Should I have questions? Let people just talk?

All suggestions welcome. Also please note, despite the above pathetic ramblings, I'm actually hosting a lovely brilliant book club full of intelligent and fascinating discussion, so it would be the highlight of your literary life to come to our first meeting--Feb 2!

Connections: VanGogh and Nietzche; Too Much in the Sun

Both died mad at the end of the 20th Century, and their incipient fame and death in their prime only suggested how much more of which they were capable. But the similarities between philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) and painter Van Gogh (1853-1890) are more than the biographic (e.g. syphilis) or zeitgeist-related. I imagines the same anguished ethos formed the works of both, but I could be imagining things. Their style, however, is palpably similar in different mediums. According to Nietzsche, all philosophers had to be artists in order to completely express their thoughts.

Reaper. 1889.

Deceptively joyous, their works make one feel as if the creator has stared at the sun too long without seeing the fingerprint of god on it. They take radical ways to express a view of the world that is intense and yet accessible on the surface. Influential as they have been, they remain isolated iconoclasts in their paeans.

Their works are accessible only in their apparent joyousness. Van Gogh is repeated on shirts and posters because people find his work pleasant. Nietzsche becomes the easy catch phrase for the undergrad searching for a strident, carefree tone. This view confuses the bright veneer of a conclusion with the strenuous wrestling that went into its making. Within Nietzsche words lies the horror that is in the root of the oldest fairy tales, and Van Gogh paints as one who must paint the flatness of life in the purest pigments and thickest layers because the world enters his consciousness with the cunning of the light that finds the hungover man and makes him wince. Such heightened feeling is not always pleasant, even when it has been transformed into the aesthetic object.

"There are endless corn fields under dull skies, and I've not shied away from portraying this sadness and utter loneliness..."- Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Cypresses

Painted around Saint-Remy in early June 1889

Merely the madness of artists on view? Perhaps, in that these men used their art to express a worldview that Conrado de Quiros, a writer for the Phillipean Enquirer, puts it well by saying, “That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it."

It is a mistake to view these two artists as unrelated raving lunatics. I would venture rather that they are raving artists depict the intensity of life head on and struggle in their valuation thereof. If their similarities do not depict the same temperament exactly, they do the same view of a world as one to reckoned with, in all its glory. A glory that became overwhelming.

Go Guggenhiem Tonight

I have a cold, and am lame, etc, so I will not be attending, but this day- (or night-) long free event at the Guggenhiem is jampacked with cool stuff. So if you're free all tonight, or tommorow all day, definitely head out to the 24 Hour Program on the Concept of Time, based off the theanyspacewhatever exhibition.

"Comprising interviews, lectures, discussions, and performances, the 24-hour event will function as a platform for the presentation and exchange of ideas, research, and projects across a wide spectrum of fields, engaging diverse participants in vibrant, mutually illuminating dialogue. Modeled on the renowned thematic "marathons" conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, this New York-based program organized by Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector will be conducted as a strenuous, experimental exercise geared toward both the academic and the general, art-going public."

Stendhal Syndrome and the Uffizi

Where medicine and art align, from my friend Sarah (and the Wall Street Journal):

"Stendhal Syndrome. The tendency to develop a rapid heartbeat, dizziness and hallucinations when exposed to great art seems like a great exit line for tired museum-goers. But it seems particularly prevalent in Florence, Italy. An Italian psychiatrist observed it in more than 100 visitors in the 1970s and named it after the French author, who described similar symptoms upon visiting Florence in 1817. More than 100 additional cases have been documented, including some in which a particular detail of a painting seemed to bring on acute anxiety. Effects are usually temporary."

Anxiety like in Stendhal Syndrome isn't the emotion I would have imagined a trip to some museum in Florence would impart, unless it was because of the crowds of tourists.

Florence is where I had one of my best museum experiences. I reserved a ticket in line exactly when the Uffizi opened on a Sunday. I was the first person in the U-shaped museum and rushed to the other end in a mad dash. Then I made my way through the galleries backwards, so methodically room by room I was alone with Rebramdts, Rubens, and Raphaels. It felt deliciously illegal and private--not at all anxiety inducing. Yet I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see a guard or someone. My solitude lasted for one glorious wing, and then I met the crowd again in that wide corridor that overlooks the Arno. Those Medicis knew how to live--being alone with the foundations of the Western canon was incredible.

I wonder what sort of hallucination art would inspire in the case of Stendhal Syndrome. Would you get drawn into the world of the painting, or would they reach out to you from beyond the frame? If I had only had both wings of the museum to myself, I could probably tell you.

Papercut Recession Specials at Heist

Prominent price tags remind one of specials at Wal-Mart at Heist Gallery's new exhibition Papercut. Mostly works on paper, the exhibition either looks like a college graduation show (as it is rather accomplished) or the cast-off sketches of artists capable of much bigger and more work intensive projects.

Chris Rubino, This Once Was an Island
In the current market though, art from a gallery for less than $100 is refreshing--let's hope its a new trend. If Vogue can capture the charming possibilities offered to consumers at Target and Wal-Mart, why not let recently laid-off art collectors see the possibilities?

No doubt it's all the more appealing at one of the owner Talia Eisenberg's hip parties. Eisneberg says in an interview, "I have always believed, but even more so now during this economic predicament, art should be socially democratic and affordable for all. Not just for the socialite but for the socialist!"

All works come in a limited edition of 10. What could have sold as unique (well, almost unique) holiday presents are still hanging on the walls, so maybe the true art bargain shoppers out there should wait until those prominent price tags have sale written on them.