“The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.”
Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent
“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Irish Repertory Theatre webcast of Geraldine Hughes’ Belfast Blues. Here’s an excerpt.
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Geraldine Hughes gave a great performance earlier this year in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s webcast of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a “staging” so technically innovative and incontestably superior in artistic merit that it set a high-water mark for online theater in America. Now Ms. Hughes is back, this time with “Belfast Blues,” her 2003 autobiographical one-woman play about how she grew up in and survived Northern Ireland’s violent Troubles. Filmed live at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2019, it was first performed in New York in 2005, at which time I saw and reviewed it. I was impressed then, but I’m even more impressed a decade and a half later…
“Belfast Blues” starts out as a sweet comedy about growing up poor—four kids to a bed, no indoor plumbing—in an urban slum. You don’t have to be Irich, much less Catholic, to be charmed by Ms. Hughes’s tales of her childhood, including a vignette about her first communion (“If you chew it, you go to hell”) that made me laugh out loud, something that doesn’t often happen when you’re watching a show alone. She conjures up character after character smoothly and skillfully, eschewing props and scenery to assist in spinning her illusions. All she needs is her lovely, accent-perfumed voice and infinitely expressive eyes (the “Belfast blues” of the title) to lure you into a world that she recalls with understandably mixed but rarely harsh feelings.
The tone of Ms. Hughes’ play is so joyous at first that you’ll sit up straight when she refers, in passing and with deceptive casualness, to “the first child killed in the Troubles.” With these words, she starts to change the key of “Belfast Blues,” and a few minutes later, the overheard words of a soldier put you fully on the spot: “So far, one fatality. Young boy. Decapitated, sir. Blew his f—ing head off.” From then on, the happy parts are tightly interwoven with violence…
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the disastrous decision of a small museum in upstate New York to sell its only important painting—and what it means for the future of museum management in America. Is there an alternative? Maybe. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you want to own a canvas by Jackson Pollock and have $18 million to spare (assuming the bidding doesn’t go even higher), Christie’s is putting one on the block in New York two weeks from now. One can only imagine the number of super-rich collectors who are salivating at the chance to buy “Red Composition (Painting 1946),” which is not only a compact (just under two feet wide), vividly colored epitome of Abstract Expressionism but a work of high historical significance, Pollock’s second drip canvas ever.
Should you plan to bid on it, though, you’d better brace yourself for controversy….
“Red Composition” is owned not by another wealthy collector but by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. It is by far the most important painting in the Everson, a small regional institution that specializes in American art. None of the other modern pieces in its permanent collection is remotely as significant, or as beautiful. Given the price tag, to sell “Red Composition” at auction almost certainly means that it will pass into private hands and never again be seen by the public….
According to the museum’s press release, it plans to use the proceeds to “establish a fund for acquiring works created by artists of color, women artists, and other under-represented contemporary and mid-career artists.” This is, needless to say, a wholly admirable goal, especially since the population of Syracuse is more than 50% non-white or Latino. But to seek to diversify the Everson by selling off the jewel of its collection flies in the face of a fundamental tenet of museum governance: An art museum is a public trust. In return for its special tax status and similar privileges, it is expected to treat its holdings with that fact firmly in mind….
Now consider the case of “Red Composition.” Not only is it the Everson’s sole destination piece, a work sufficiently important to justify paying a visit to an out-of-the-way art museum of no particular distinction, but it is the very embodiment of the Everson’s historic mission: In 1911, it became the first museum anywhere to dedicate itself to the collection of American art. How, then, is it possible for a museum of American art to rationalize selling the only truly great painting in its modest collection?
