Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
August 2004:
What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn’t get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?…
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
August 2004:
What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn’t get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?…
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
– Glenn Gould’s average fee for a solo recital in 1964, the last year he performed in public: $3,500
– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $21, 124.58
(Source: Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange)
– Glenn Gould’s average fee for a solo recital in 1964, the last year he performed in public: $3,500
– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $21, 124.58
(Source: Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange)
“An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”
Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World
“An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”
Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World
I mentioned the other day that I’d bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love (you can read all about him in Jed Perl’s New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century). What’s especially striking about this etching, at least from my point of view, is that it’s one of only three figurative works of art out of the two dozen pieces in the Teachout Museum, and the only one in which the subject’s face is fully visible. Milton Avery’s March at a Table is a portrait of March, the artist’s daughter, but her face is concealed, and in Pierre Bonnard’s Femme assise dans sa bagnoire, Marthe, the artist’s mistress, has turned her head away from the viewer. Since people who buy art normally buy what they like (unless they’re snobs or investment-oriented collectors), I always took it for granted that my unconscious avoidance of the human face said something significant about me. But I never did figure out what it was, and in any case my purchase of “Woman’s Head” presumably says something no less significant.
The woman in question, by the way, is a most interesting piece of work–pensive, not conventionally “beautiful” by any conventional definition of the word, and yet I can’t take my eyes off her. It’s been that way ever since I first saw her on line (I bought “Woman’s Head” from a Florida auction house). I couldn’t have told you why I found her so irresistibly fascinating, but I did, and do.
I reviewed
a biography of Maria Callas four years ago for the New York Times. This is part of what I wrote:
Thelonious Monk, no stranger to paradox, once wrote a splintery, deliberately awkward jazz waltz to which he gave the title ”Ugly Beauty.” He could have written it with Maria Callas in mind. A jolie laide with hard, bony features and a startlingly long nose, she contrived through sheer force of will to persuade audiences that she was a great beauty with an even greater voice. It was, of course, a con job. Her technique was full of holes, and the voice itself was more than a little bit peculiar-sounding, thick and foggy and apt to crash through the guardrails with no warning. The wobbly high C she sings in her 1955 recording
of ”O patria mia,” the big soprano aria from the third act of Aida, is one of the scariest moments in all of recorded opera–it sounds as if someone had grabbed her from behind and was shaking her like a cocktail.
The beauty of Callas’s voice was so strangely proportioned that some very discerning people simply cannot hear it…
No doubt some of my friends will be just as puzzled when they first see the ugly beauty who now makes her home in my living room. Nor will I try to persuade them that she’s pretty, because she isn’t. All I know is that I decided the moment I saw her that I couldn’t live without her. Love is like that.
I mentioned the other day that I’d bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love. What’s especially striking about this etching, at least from my point of view, is that it’s one of only three figurative works of art out of the two dozen pieces in the Teachout Museum, and the only one in which the subject’s face is fully visible. Milton Avery’s “March at a Table” is a portrait of March, the artist’s daughter, but her face is concealed, and in Pierre Bonnard’s “Femme assise dans sa bagnoire,” Marthe, the artist’s mistress, has turned her head away from the viewer. Since people who buy art normally buy what they like (unless they’re snobs or investment-oriented collectors), I always took it for granted that my unconscious avoidance of the human face said something significant about me. But I never did figure out what it was, and in any case my purchase of “Woman’s Head” presumably says something no less significant.
The woman in question, by the way, is a most interesting piece of work—pensive, not conventionally “beautiful” by any conventional definition of the word, and yet I can’t take my eyes off her. It’s been that way ever since I first saw her on line (I bought “Woman’s Head” from a Florida auction house). I couldn’t have told you why I found her so irresistibly fascinating, but I did, and do.
I reviewed a biography of Maria Callas four years ago for the New York Times. This is part of what I wrote:
Thelonious Monk, no stranger to paradox, once wrote a splintery, deliberately awkward jazz waltz to which he gave the title “Ugly Beauty.” He could have written it with Maria Callas in mind. A jolie laide with hard, bony features and a startlingly long nose, she contrived through sheer force of will to persuade audiences that she was a great beauty with an even greater voice. It was, of course, a con job. Her technique was full of holes, and the voice itself was more than a little bit peculiar-sounding, thick and foggy and apt to crash through the guardrails with no warning. The wobbly high C she sings in her 1955 recording of “O patria mia,” the big soprano aria from the third act of Aida, is one of the scariest moments in all of recorded opera—it sounds as if someone had grabbed her from behind and was shaking her like a cocktail.
The beauty of Callas’s voice was so strangely proportioned that some very discerning people simply cannot hear it…
No doubt some of my friends will be just as puzzled when they first see the ugly beauty who now makes her home in my living room. Nor will I try to persuade them that she’s pretty, because she isn’t. All I know is that I decided the moment I saw her that I couldn’t live without her. Love is like that.