Archives for September 2003

The skies over Manhattan were preposterously beautiful last night, full of colors that looked as if Wolf Kahn had squeezed them out of a tube. Too bad I was in no mood to appreciate them, for my personal color was yellowish green. So please forgive this truncated edition of “About Last Night.”

I’ll be back with something more ambitious tomorrow.

Guess what? I’m starting to open my e-mail again! (Or at least I was.) Here’s one I want to share, from a reader who went to see Turner: The Late Seascapes at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which is a little bit too far off the beaten path for most New York art lovers:

I did do the crazy, quixotic thing Labor Day weekend–went up to W’mstown and back in a single day (Bonanza Bus Co. makes Greyhound look like Concorde, except that they do take a very scenic route through the Berkshires). The Turner show was really marvelous (why is it a truism of art shows that the work you most want on a postcard isn’t available? there were two astonishing watercolors, one of which made me feel distinctly larcenous) and the Clark’s own collection is surprisingly world class…

Aside from the good report on the show, I was struck by my correspondent’s observation about museum postcards, which tallies precisely with my near-universal experience. It isn’t true of permanent collections–I’ve had pretty good luck there–but whenever I go to a touring show, the museum shop never has a postcard of the painting I like best (unless the show is small enough to stack the odds in my favor). The only exception that comes immediately to mind was MoMA’s Jackson Pollock retrospective. I was knocked out by an uncharacteristically small 1946 painting (19 by 14 inches) called “Free Form,” and sure enough, there was a postcard waiting for me in the gift shop–but the painting belonged to MoMA, so it didn’t quite count. (Nor is a link to this lovely painting to be found anywhere on the Web, at least as far as I can see, arrgh.)

Perhaps even more irritating, though, is when you spend an hour or two trolling the permanent collection, retire to the museum shop, and find a half-dozen postcards of the paintings you’d really like to have seen…none of which is currently on display.

Did I say arrgh?

“So, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, Yes, sir?”

“I was endeavouring to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: ‘Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.’”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season

If it’s Tuesday, this must be “About Last Night.” I decided to spend Monday afternoon catching up with the recent doings of some of my fellow arts bloggers, and it got out of hand. Hence today’s topics, from hither to yon: (1) Fallingwater is not the Guggenheim Museum, and vice versa. (2) There’ll always be an NEA. (3) The significance of snarkery (and no, this one isn’t about The Minor Fall, the Major Lift). (4) Speech Codes on Campus, or, The Case of the Twice-Gored Ox. (5) Who called me a gorilla? (6) The latest almanac entry.

Heaven only knows what I’ll write about tomorrow, but don’t you think your best friend will want to know, too? A simple e-mail alerting him/her/it to the existence of www.terryteachout.com will ensure his/her/its happiness forevermore.

“About Last Night” received 17,000 page views during the month of August. Let’s not stop there.

I weighed in
recently on the Great Frank Lloyd Wright Cyberspace Imbroglio, prompting this crisp response from the normally thoughtful City Comforts:

Teachout repeats the conventional thinking that FLW was a “genius” but then gets on to the interesting stuff: anecdotes about FLW’s personality….my preference is that we would leave the poor tortured man alone and in peace and simply consider the merits or demerits of his work without the use of conclusory terms such as “genius.”

Ah, yes, as opposed to inconclusory terms like “poor tortured man,” right? I fear this isn’t quite good enough (aside from being the least little bit snippy). For openers, it isn’t merely “conventional thinking” that Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius–it is a long-standing and near-universal manifestation of the consensus of taste. And when I call Wright a “genius” in a very short posting, it’s a piece of shorthand intended to suggest my own considered view of the merits and demerits of his work.

Much of the recent wrangling has centered on Fallingwater, the Wright-designed Pennsylvania home whose roof leaks and whose unusual design required substantial ex post facto structural work in order to keep it from fallingdown. Of course I don’t know what it would feel like to live there, but Fallingwater–as well as many of the other Wright houses I’ve seen and in some cases toured–seems to me both remarkably and self-evidently beautiful. This says nothing about the no less self-evident structural unsoundness of the house’s design and original construction, but I don’t really think that’s relevant to the issue of its beauty. Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?

As for the leaky roof, well, I think I’d be willing to put out the occasional bucket in return for the privilege of spending my days and nights in a house that looked like this. I know, I know, that’s a matter of opinion, but I dare say my opinion of Fallingwater is far more widely shared than that of Wright’s detractors, and not just by art critics, either.

On the other hand (there’s usually another hand, isn’t there?), I was sorely disappointed by “From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art,” the Guggenheim Museum’s ongoing exhibit of works from its permanent collection (it’s up through Sept. 28), and Frank Lloyd Wright was partly to blame, though not entirely. Let’s start with the description of the show posted on the Guggenheim’s Web site:

Featuring more than 100 works spanning six decades, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s exceptional collection in great depth….Wright’s visionary building is presented as he intended: as a haven for spiritual and artistic contemplation. Baring the original ivory-colored, curved walls and allowing natural light to stream in from the oculus, the museum is once again, as the architect stated, “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully.”

The complete version of this statement rates a thorough fisking, but I’ll restrict myself to a few words about the Guggenheim’s exhibition policy, which has something to do with the fact that “From Picasso to Pollock” provided a “unique” opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s permanent collection in “great depth.” And why, pray tell, should that opportunity be so unique? Because (1) the Guggenheim now regularly devotes most of its available space to temporary exhibitions of ephemeral interest (Matthew Barney, call your agent) and (2) the Wright-designed main building eats art. The attention-grabbing rotunda and inward-slanting walls pull your eyes away from the paintings on display as effectively as a fireworks display. If Wright really thought he was creating “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully,” he was as wet as the occupants of Fallingwater on a stormy day.

Me, I think it more likely that he meant to draw attention away from the art. After all, his houses, Fallingwater very much included, tend to do exactly the same thing. To me, that’s their one drawback: the visual statements they make are so powerful that they snuff out any possible competition. I can’t imagine a serious collector of art wanting to live in Fallingwater–which is perfectly all right, of course, so long as you don’t collect art. The Guggenheim is by definition a different story, a museum building so beautiful in its own right as to be paradoxically ill-suited to its intended purpose.

On the other hand (yes, there’s a third hand), the Guggenheim happens to be more beautiful than much of the art that it houses. It’s an odd collection, at once idiosyncratic and strangely lacking in absolute distinction, not at all like such indisputably first-class one-man shows as the Frick and Phillips Collections. The fact that so little of the permanent collection has been regularly displayed in recent years has tended to obscure that fact. “From Picasso to Pollock,” by contrast, rubs your nose in the deficiencies of the Guggenheim’s holdings. Once I’d trudged all the way up the spiral, having looked earnestly at everything, I was struck by how few of the paintings I longed to take home with me (as opposed to taking them straight to the nearest dealer). Sure, there were a few treasures, including some luscious Brancusis and one of the Guggenheim’s zillion-odd Kandinskys, the show-stopping Black Lines, but after that, the pickings were surprisingly slim.

What kind of architect designs a museum that upstages the paintings it was built to display? A bad one? Or a supremely great one who knew he had to give the patrons something cool to look at? I never enter the Guggenheim without asking myself that question, which is a tribute, albeit something of a backhanded one, to–yes–the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Lileks, the King of Us All, pulls off one of his patented enharmonic modulations, side-slipping from politics to the arts in a half-beat:

It is more likely that a true unalloyed Democrat will be elected than a brass-tacks Republican. Get used to it. The number of people who want a particular Government program exceeds the number who want none. You want the NEA abolished? That will require two nuclear attacks on American soil. After the first the NEA will be more important than ever, as we sort out our feelings about the event through a nationally coordinated series of interpretive dances. After the second, the economy will be so far down the crapper-pipes that someone will point out that we shouldn’t fund the Mimes-for-the-Blind symposium when we really need the money for anti-radiation drugs.

As I always say after watching a Fred Astaire dance routine, I wish I could do that.

You’ve heard about Snarkwatch, right? If not, Colby Cosh explains it all for you:

Have you seen Believer magazine’s new weblog Snarkwatch? It’s the latest manifestation of Dave Eggers’ infuriated conviction that Anglophone literature is being destroyed by critics. The mission statement of Snarkwatch reads thus: “This is a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to

“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

A. J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

Get this: I took most of the weekend off! Instead of writing, which is what I usually do all weekend, I slept late, dropped into a half-dozen art galleries, went to hear Bill Charlap at the Jazz Standard, and–yes–got a little work done on Sunday. Nothing too serious, though: I spent the morning and afternoon indexing and proofreading the introduction and first 58 pages of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I’m doing my own index to save money so that I can buy another lithograph.) Did I mention that I didn’t write anything?

For those of you wondering when I’m finally going to get around to answering my mail again, here’s my reply: I want to thank you all for contributing to my improved mental health by giving me the weekend off. (Pretty clever, huh?) But I didn’t forget about you, and here’s the proof, from ridiculous to sublime: (1) What I didn’t read on my summer vacation. (2) “In the Bag.” (3) An insufficiently celebrated jazz trumpeter brings an all-star group to town. (4) The latest almanac entry–with a twist.

“About Last Night” expects that each man will do his duty, and women, too. Tell everyone you know about www.terryteachout.com this week. Fill the air of cyberspace with tidings of aesthetic comfort and joy.