About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 2006

TT: Saturday in Manhattan

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I wrote a piece this morning, then met Maccers at the Dahesh Museum of Art, which has a very nice restaurant. Afterward we strolled up to 59E59 and saw Amy Irving in A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop. At play’s end we walked over to Tibor de Nagy to ogle a exhibition of paintings by Jane Freilicher (about which you can read more in the right-hand column).


I’d planned to spend the rest of the afternoon at the gym, but I didn’t feel like staying indoors, so even though I wasn’t wearing a coat, I walked all the way home at a spectacularly brisk clip. The southeast corner of Central Park was a symphony of pale greens and tans, so I entered the park and headed for Seventy-Second Street, exiting at the Dakota. It was the first time I’d taken so long a walk through the park since Ms. in the wings paid me a visit
back in November. By the time I finally charged up the stairs to my apartment, I’d worked up a sweat and felt like a couple of million bucks.


I also felt amazingly grateful, which is something I haven’t been feeling nearly enough of late, preoccupied as I’ve been with thoughts of mortality. Needless to say, the fact that I took a long walk on a pretty day doesn’t mean I’m not going to die sooner or later, but the Distinguished Thing seems far, far away as I write these words at the end of a perfect afternoon.


Life is good. Please, Sir, may I have some more?

TT: My world (and welcome to it)

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I’m back in my Washington hotel room once more, having just wrapped up another excruciatingly long day.


I’ve been too busy to visit the hotel gym, so I decided to work up a sweat by walking to the Old Post Office instead of taking a cab. As I left the hotel at eight-thirty, I noticed two Secret Service snipers lurking on the White House roof–a sight I’d never seen–as well as a hardy little group of picketers marching up and down the sidewalk, chanting “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Wal-Mart’s got to go!” to the accompaniment of a banging drum as a nearby cameraman clicked away.


The National Council on the Arts met from nine to six (we worked straight through lunch, dining on pasta salad at the conference table). Afterward I hopped a cab to the Phillips Collection, my favorite museum, where I saw a lovely show called Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910, assembled in collaboration with Tate Britain and installed with exceptional elegance and lucidity by the staff of the Phillips. You can read all about it by clicking the link, so I’ll say only that I just saw more paintings by Walter Sickert in a single evening than I’d previously seen in my entire life, in addition to which I also made the acquaintance of some interesting works by several other English artists who are rarely if ever shown in this country. I especially liked a Max Beerbohm-like caricature of Toulouse-Lautrec
by William Rothenstein, Beerbohm’s classmate and close friend.


(Incidentally, I learned at today’s meeting that the Phillips Collection has digitized its entire collection of American paintings, an undertaking for which the NEA helped to pay. Go here and you can browse the museum’s online collection, which is a model of art-related Web-site design.)


I went from the Phillips to Olives, where I had a tasty, unhurried, and solitary dinner (I was supposed to meet a friend, but she had to cancel at the last minute). Now I’m about to curl up in bed with Michael Ruhlman’s Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit, a remarkable book that Our Girl gave me for my fiftieth birthday but which I’ve only just looked into, perhaps because books about heart surgery aren’t the most comforting leisure-time reading for someone who recently survived a bout with congestive heart failure!


On Friday morning the NCA holds a public meeting, after which I’ll take the next train back to New York, rest a bit, then head down to the Zipper Theatre to see a press preview of the new off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. I have yet another show on Saturday afternoon, followed by a full day of writing for The Wall Street Journal.


Sigh.


* * *


I’ll be holed up in one of my secret hideaways all next week, working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I’ll probably post a daily almanac entry and the usual Thursday and Friday drama-related stuff, but absolutely no more than that (though I’m sure Our Girl will have something to say from time to time).


Later.

TT: The road to nowhere

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I got out of town for the first half of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, a review of Two River Theater Company’s new production of Waiting for Godot, which I reviewed in tandem with an off-Broadway stage version of The Screwtape Letters:

Samuel Beckett would have turned 100 next month–but so far, next to no attention has been paid to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s centennial. Except for an Off-Broadway “Waiting for Godot” that got swallowed up by the transit strike, there have been no Beckett revivals of significance in New York this season (though the Irish Repertory Theatre mounted a very fine “Endgame” last year). According to samuel-beckett.net, the semi-official Beckett Web site, only two full-scale Beckett festivals are being held in the entire U.S., one in Atlanta and the other in Red Bank, a small New Jersey city best known to culture vultures as the home town of Count Basie and Edmund Wilson.


It was news to me that Red Bank is also the home of a theater company, much less that the company in question had the gumption to put on its very own Samuel Beckett Festival. My curiosity having been piqued, I rented a car, drove there last Saturday, and saw a production of “Waiting for Godot” that couldn’t have been better….


Clowning about matters metaphysical is not the exclusive privilege of unbelievers. Fellowship for the Performing Arts, an organization that supports “the integration of faith and the arts,” is currently presenting an Off-Broadway stage version of C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” the wickedly witty epistolary novel in which His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, Under Secretary of the Satanic Lowerarchy, instructs his nephew Wormwood, a doltish junior tempter, in the fine art of persuading unwitting humans to part with their souls. It is–if I may say so–one hell of a good show….

No link, naturally, so do the right thing: buy a copy of today’s Journal and read the entire review (which is ever so much longer!). Or, as always, you can go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the full text of my review, along with an abundance of additional art-related coverage.

TT: Gotcha

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– A reader writes:

Re: strong-voiced opinions and readers who object.


My all-time favorite complaint came from a reader who wrote a letter to the editor near the beginning of my career at the South Bend Tribune. He was objecting to a theater review I had written. The letter began: “Who is this Mark Stryker? He doesn’t seem to have any opinions but his own.”

Ha!


– A friend writes:

“…some of the paintings are very familiar….attracting hordes of noisy visitors….”


From About Last Night, April 1, 2010: “I was happy when they turned the National Gallery into a Duane Reade, and I’ll be even happier later this week when they do the same to the Phillips. These institutions, which have long outlived their day, should be doing something useful, like selling hairspray, cheap soda, and bowel prep kits.”

Double ha!


(P.S. To order a really nice book of postcards from the National Gallery’s C

TT: Almanac

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“There’s an incredible amount of comedy in this world, and a horrendous amount of tragedy, and you don’t want to let the tragedy define what you do.”


Dr. Frank Moga (quoted in Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit)

TT: Peekaboo

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Guess who said this?

I seem to be really drawn to minor keys. Some people would say, well, they’re melancholy or they’re dark, but I don’t think so. I think they’re richer and I get a sense when I listen to a minor key that the composer has somehow worked harder at it.

You’ll be surprised.


(Thank you, Alex Ross.)


Incidentally, here’s something relevant that I wrote for Commentary a couple of months ago apropos of Mozart’s minor-key works:

I refer to the comparatively small number of multi-movement works cast in minor keys–two piano sonatas out of 17, two piano concertos out of 27, two symphonies out of 41. For while these and other minor-key works of like scale are not necessarily of higher quality than their major-key counterparts, they do share a special intensity of expression not found in such major-key masterpieces as the C Major Symphony, K. 551, familiarly known as the “Jupiter.”


This intensity manifests itself in many ways, from the turbulence of the first movement of the D Minor Piano Concerto, K. 466, to the crisp austerity of the E Minor Violin Sonata, K. 304. Sometimes, as in the G Minor String Quintet, K. 516, one perceives the minor-key quality as a tint, a single aspect of a carefully balanced, classically poised totality. At other times, as in the unabashedly stern A Minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, it becomes overwhelming, infusing an entire piece with its distinctive coloration. In every case, though, the large-scale minor-key pieces, different as they are from one another, are similar in their power to stir the listener’s emotions, just as one feels, whether rightly or wrongly, that Mozart’s own emotions were more fully engaged in the act of their creation–that he was somehow playing for higher stakes….

I’d say I’m on the same page as our mystery guest!

TT: On the town

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I’m writing from Washington, D.C., having just gotten back to my hotel after a very long day, so I’ll keep it fairly short:


– I started things off by going straight from the train station to the National Gallery, where I saw C

TT: Dear Sir, you cur

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Like most people who sell their opinions for a living, I get a certain amount of mail (and e-mail) from readers who beg to differ with me, sometimes quite forcefully. Their letters are typically concise, fair-minded, and intelligent, and I make every effort to answer them personally. From time to time, I also get letters that usually run to about six pages in length and are invariably single-spaced with very narrow margins. More often than not, these correspondents start out by explaining why I’m all wrong about something trivial, and end up revealing that their fillings have been bugged by aliens in the pay of the CIA. Hard experience has taught me never to reply to such mail, though I always enjoy reading it.

Perhaps the most common complaint I get is from people who claim that my writings are full of “unsubstantiated pronouncements” (or nastier words to that effect). This never fails to throw me. Virtually all criticism, after all, is full of “unsubstantiated pronouncements.” They’re called opinions, and yours are as good as mine. The only difference is that I get paid to write mine down. To be sure, I like to think that my opinions have at least some validity, based as they are on a lifetime of intense professional involvement with the world of art. In the end, though, you must be the judge. If my opinions rarely tally with your perceptions, then chances are you’ll stop taking my criticism seriously, no matter how cleverly written it may be. Conversely, if I have a history of steering you straight (or at least making you think twice), then chances are you’ll be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt when I praise a book you haven’t read, or a play you didn’t see. That’s the main reason why I write criticism: I want to share my pleasures. Yes, I sometimes feel the need to smite the heathen, but I’d be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life writing solely and only about things I like.

Alas, I’ve found over the years that many people (especially midwesterners, who are trained to say “sir” and “ma’am” and be polite to strangers) become uncomfortable whenever they’re confronted with strongly expressed opinions on any subject whatsoever–even positive ones. It took me a long time to figure out the reason why, which is that all positive opinions have negative implications. If the Copland Piano Sonata is the best piece of piano music written by an American, then it follows logically that the Barber Sonata isn’t as good. But there’s plenty of room at the top: just because the G Minor Symphony is Mozart’s finest work for orchestra doesn’t mean the “Jupiter” isn’t uniquely great in its own way. Besides, it’s only my opinion, right?

Lest you suspect me of having succumbed to spineless relativism, let me make haste to declare my firm belief in the existence of absolute artistic truth. When I say I think The Great Gatsby is a better book than The Sun Also Rises, I mean I think The Great Gatsby is a better book than The Sun Also Rises, and I don’t mean maybe: if I were appointed Keeper of the Canon of American Masterpieces tomorrow morning, my first act would be to send a memo saying so to every librarian in America. As I see it, then, my duty as a critic is to speak my mind–in this case, my opinion of the relative merits of two great books–as clearly and compellingly as possible. In time this opinion will either be forgotten or make its way into the vast mass of criticism through which posterity will slowly winnow, a process that ultimately leads to the emergence of a consensus of taste. The critics of 2106 may well consider Gatsby to be less good than The Sun Also Rises, or maybe even not very good at all. They may not like either book. The one thing of which you can be sure is this: if I don’t speak frankly now, it won’t matter what I thought, be it a hundred years from now or next Friday.

But will it matter at all? If artistic truth is absolute, then won’t it emerge inevitably over time, regardless of what critics have to say? I believe so. In art, the good guys always win, sooner or (usually) later. Critics can’t turn a bad play into a good one, or vice versa. What they can do, if they’re perceptive and persuasive enough, is speed up the process by nudging their contemporaries in what they believe to be the right direction. It’s fine with me if you like Hedda Gabler better than Three Sisters. I don’t feel threatened by the fact that we differ, nor do I feel any compulsion to try to change your mind. I’m not in the mind-changing business–I’m in the mind-opening business. If I can get you to go see a play you’ve never seen before, and at least consider the possibility that it might be good, then I’ve done my job.

Having said all this, let me close by speaking directly to those readers who get all steamed up whenever I write something with which they disagree: I’m genuinely sorry that my work upsets you. I don’t set out merely to make anyone angry or stir up a fuss. I always mean exactly what I say. Naturally, you’re entitled to your opinion–but so am I. So the next time you write, please do me the favor of giving me the benefit of the doubt. Merely because you happen to disagree with me doesn’t necessarily mean I’m stupid, or even ignorant. Who knows? I might even be right.

March 2006
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