Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“It is always easy to talk to someone with whom one is going to become intimate; the future casts its shadow backwards, and there is no explaining to be sone, even though there is everything to explain.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss Nan Goldin’s protests at museums that accept charitable contributions from the Sackler family. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nan Goldin, a fine-art photographer hitherto best known for her interest in sexual politics, has found herself a new cause. It is now her mission to force art museums not merely to stop accepting charitable donations from members of the Sackler family, but to give back donations that they’ve already accepted. Having previously staged anti-Sackler protests at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, she has just informed London’s National Portrait Gallery that she won’t permit that museum to mount a planned retrospective of her work if they accept a proposed million-pound donation from the Sacklers….
So who are the Sacklers? Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, two now-deceased brothers who gave millions of dollars to the Met back in the ’70s, are better known nowadays for having launched Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin, the painkilling drug introduced in the U.S. in 1996 whose present-day popularity is widely thought to have driven the opioid-abuse epidemic in America. Ms. Goldin, a recovering OxyContin addict who contends that Purdue Pharma seems to have marketed the drug in such a way as to encourage mass addiction, thinks that any museum that takes or has taken Sackler money should be publicly shamed….
Nowadays social media makes it dangerously easy to convene spur-of-the-moment outrage mobs, and the activists who have come to be known in recent years as “social justice warriors” (or SJWs) are quick to resort to public protest whenever their sensibilities are inflamed, especially by the seeming misconduct of the rich. The problem, however, is that Ms. Goldin is also targeting the family of the late Arthur Sackler, the older brother of Mortimer and Raymond and a major donor to the Met and the Smithsonian Institution, even though he had no connection whatsoever with OxyContin….
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Read the whole thing here.
Johnny Mercer is interviewed by Ralph Price in 1962 on WSAV-TV of Savannah, Georgia, his home town:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I have never been able to relate my feelings about people as individuals to my relations to their public attitudes and behaviour, whether approving or disapproving—something that has often got me into trouble.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time
From 2009:
Read the whole thing here.Eric Gibson, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, called to tell me of the death of John Updike. “What city are you in?” he asked. I went blank. “Wait a minute,” I said, then looked out the window and saw ice in the river eighteen floors below me. “Chicago,” I replied….
“It is terrifying how suddenly fate becomes invincible and how unsuspectingly we accept it.”
Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers
Wes Montgomery plays Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on Belgian TV in 1958. He is accompanied by Harold Mabern on piano, Arthur Harper on bass, and Jimmy Lovelace on drums:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.”
Honoré de Balzac, The Social Catechism
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In Ireland, Seán O’Casey is a great writer. In America, he’s a footnote, a playwright whose name is known to everyone who loves Irish drama but whose work has never quite caught on over here. Only two of O’Casey’s plays, “Juno and the Paycock” (1924) and “The Plough and the Stars” (1926), continue to be staged in this country, and it’s been more than 30 years since either of them was last seen on Broadway. Now, though, the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York’s foremost off-Broadway troupe, is celebrating its thirtieth season by presenting “Juno,” “Plough” and “The Shadow of a Gunman,” O’Casey’s first successful play, in repertory. These three plays, collectively known as the Dublin Trilogy, constitute a major artistic achievement by any imaginable standard, and judging by Ciarán O’Reilly’s stunning revival of “Shadow,” the first of the three to open, it looks like the Irish Rep’s O’Casey Season (which includes readings of his other plays) will be an equally major theatrical event in its own right.
First performed in 1923 and set three years earlier, at the height of the Irish War of Independence, “Shadow” is a portrait of a country convulsed by political violence. It is also—characteristically for O’Casey—a tragedy disguised as a comedy. (As one of the characters explains, it is the way of the Irish to “treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.”) The action takes place in a grubby one-room Dublin tenement flat that is shared by Seumas (Michael Mellamphy), a door-to-door salesman and booze-soaked blowhard, and Donal (James Russell), a Shelley-spouting, politics-shunning poet whose attempts to write are constantly being short-circuited by the building’s other tenants….
What wrenches “Shadow” out of the smiling land of comedy is the fact that Donal’s fellow tenants have somehow come to the mistaken conclusion that he is an IRA gunman in hiding. He goes along with this crackbrained notion, partly because it’s easier to do so and partly because it pleases him to be treated with the kowtowing respect due to such a personage. “What danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?” he asks himself, not realizing that in a country whose people have tasted the insane root of irredentist politics and been corrupted by its seductive flavor, such misconceptions can lead to tragedy with perilous quickness….
Mr. O’Reilly, the Irish Rep’s producing director, has a long and unbroken track record of artistic distinction, and this production is up to his now-familiar high standards….
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Read the whole thing here.A featurette about the Irish Rep’s revival of The Shadow of a Gunman:
His trio came to my once-segregated Missouri hometown in 1969 to play a concert that made a lasting impression on me. Would that the film’s brief performance sequences offered more than a tantalizing taste of his playing! The Shirley I saw on stage a half-century ago was a man of polished urbanity whose private melancholy—he appears to have been a closeted gay—is depicted by Messrs. Ali and Farrelly with sharp, sad clarity.
I recall that concert vividly, in part because it was the first time I ever saw a black musician perform in person. I was thirteen years old and had only just started listening closely and attentively to my father’s albums and 78s, many of which featured the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, and (my favorite) the King Cole Trio. Unlike them, Shirley wasn’t a true jazzman: he was a classically trained musician who took up popular music only after being warned by Sol Hurok, the Russian-American classical-music impresario, that a “colored man” couldn’t hope to make a living as a concert pianist in America. From then on, he played his own written-out arrangements of pop tunes and spirituals accompanied by a classical-style “rhythm section” of cello and double bass, and had considerable success doing so throughout the Fifties and Sixties. Nevertheless, Shirley was the closest thing to a jazzman that I’d seen in the flesh, and I was so impressed by him that I blew a week’s allowance on a copy of The Don Shirley Trio in Concert, then taught myself how to play by ear the bass part to his arrangement of “Water Boy.”
The “Don Shirley” of Green Book is in many ways very much like the man I saw on the stage of the Smalltown Middle School gymnasium, the same stage on which I saw my first play, a high-school production of Blithe Spirit, later that year. Surviving interview footage suggests that Shirley, unlike Ali, was more than a little bit campy, but I was too naïve in 1969 to know a gay man when I saw one. (Not until years later did I finally figure out that my best friend at the time was gay.) What struck me about him, rather, was his absolute self-assurance, a quality that Ali conveys with perfect fidelity.
Needless to say, I couldn’t possibly have known what it took for a black man—much less a gay black man—to stand up in front of a white audience in a small town located a stone’s throw from the Deep South and conduct himself with that kind of unflappable poise. Shirley hinted at what it took, though, when he spoke to a New York Times reporter in 1982:
I am not an entertainer. But I’m running the risk of being considered an entertainer by going into a nightclub because that’s what they have in there. I don’t want anybody to know me well enough to slap me on the back and say, “Hey, baby.” The black experience through music, with a sense of dignity, that’s all I have ever tried to do.
These, however, are reflections very much after the fact. At the time, I knew only that the elegant man seated at the piano was one of the most fabulously gifted musicians I’d ever heard, and listening to him made me think that I might possibly want to become a professional musician, too.
I did, at least for a time, but I never saw Don Shirley play again, and when I read about Green Book last fall, it was the first time I’d thought of him in years. I wish our paths had crossed in later life: I would have liked to tell him what it meant for me to see him perform in Smalltown in 1969. Perhaps it would have pleased him, for he died in semi-obscurity, his great talent all but forgotten.
It is for this reason that I have no trouble forgiving the failings, such as they are, of Green Book. Everyone who watches it, after all, comes away knowing exactly who Don Shirley was, and what he did. I can’t see anything bad about that.
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Don Shirley’s 2013 New York Times obituary is here.A rare film clip of Don Shirley playing Richard Rodgers’ “Happy Talk” in concert, accompanied by Robert Field on bass:
The Don Shirley Trio plays Shirley’s arrangement of “Water Boy” at Carnegie Hall in 1968. Gilberto Mungula is the cellist, Henry Gonzalez the bassist: