About Last Night

“It’s an odd mindset that sees hubris everywhere, but that cannot recognize evil.”

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, Sept. 11, 2003

I’m still here, and whatever was wrong with me yesterday isn’t today, thus allowing me to present you with a basically normal “About Last Night.” All art, all the time, or at least on weekdays when my color is good–you know the drill.

Today’s topics, from queasy to comfy: (1) A quick peek into Manhattan’s newest concert hall. (2) A museological smackdown. (3) Bare naked ladies on canvas. (4) The Thurber wars. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Tuesday’s numbers for this site were the highest since I took a week off to go play on the cliffs of Isle au Haut. I attribute this solely to your industrious plugging (though I have no doubt that the adorable Megan McArdle helped!). Keep it up.

Whither www.terryteachout.com? It all depends on you.

My most recent “Second City” column for the Washington Post (accessible in the right-hand column), a preview of the fall season in New York, started off as follows:

If you’re a music lover–and it doesn’t much matter what kind of music you love best–the big event will be the opening this month of Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium that Carnegie Hall has carved out of its basement.

Even before the New York Philharmonic announced its plans to leave Lincoln Center for Carnegie Hall, midtown Manhattan was greatly in need of a medium-size auditorium with good acoustics (Carnegie Hall seats 2,804, Weill Recital Hall 268). Assuming Lincoln Center doesn’t try to block the Philharmonic’s move, Zankel Hall will become an even more important addition to New York’s surprisingly short list of first-class concert venues, since Carnegie Hall will suddenly find itself with an 800-pound gorilla as its principal tenant. An impressive roster of inaugural-season performers is guaranteed to keep the house humming, so all that remains is to find out what it sounds like. I’ll be all ears at Wednesday’s media preview matinee–watch this space for details.

Sure enough, I was there, but I don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions. I’ll be seeing a lot of Zankel Hall in the coming weeks and months, and will have plenty of time to get used to its idiosyncrasies. In the meantime, I do have a few preliminary observations:

Design. Zankel Hall is an old-fashioned shoebox (the most acoustically reliable shape for a concert hall) set inside an elliptical shell. The walls and floor are made of blond wood. The ceiling is an exposed lighting grid painted pitch-black–it feels as if you’re sitting underneath a giant assemblage by Louise Nevelson. Though the modular stage area and seating allow for multiple floor plans, the basic arrangement is that of a traditional concert hall with a steeply raked parterre (the sight lines are excellent), two shallow rings, and a small balcony. I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism.

Comfort. Since Zankel Hall is underneath Carnegie Hall, the space available for public areas is necessarily limited. At first glance, the main lobby, which wraps around the elliptical shell, felt cramped and claustrophobic, even maze-like (some of the ceilings seem almost as low as the ones in the first-floor lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House), and it appeared as if the crowd was having a bit of trouble getting in and out of the auditorium, though that may have been due to the unfamiliarity of the floor plan. Again, this is something to which we’ll all have to accustom ourselves before drawing any conclusions.

In the seating setup used at the media preview, the parterre level of the auditorium had no center aisle and each row was about 20 seats long, meaning that latecomers will have to stumble over earlycomers, just as they do in the New York State Theatre. I hope the managers of the hall will try out a center aisle at some point.

Acoustics. Multipurpose concert halls are by definition acoustically impossible. Classical music requires long resonant times, pop music short ones. That’s why symphony orchestras sound good in Carnegie Hall, whereas amplified jazz groups sound soupy and unclear. Zankel Hall, by contrast, is meant to be used by everybody from Emmylou Harris to the Emerson String Quartet, though it’s a safe bet that the acoustics will be more flattering to some kinds of music than others.

The first part of the preview program consisted of six widely varied pieces of classical music: “Shatter Me, Music,” an a cappella vocal solo commissioned from John Corigliano for the opening of the hall; two piano-accompanied songs (one loud, one soft) by Richard Strauss; “Pagodes,” a piano solo by Debussy; the slow movement of Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos; and Concerto in slendro, a vest-pocket concerto by Lou Harrison for violin, two percussionists, and three keyboard players. Having listening to all these pieces, my snap reaction was that the hall seemed bright, clear, a bit dry, and distinctly bass-shy, a combination of qualities that I found to be unflattering to Ren

You don’t have to agree with Hilton Kramer (though I generally do) to appreciate his deadly bluntness, as in this report on his first visit to Dia:Beacon,
the new museum/palace/temple of minimalist art:

As for boredom, well, this was one of those attributes of Minimalism that its champions proudly acclaimed from the outset. “Boring the public,” wrote Barbara Rose in her “ABC” defense of Minimalism, “is one way of testing its commitment. The new artists seem to be extremely chary: approval, they, know, is easy to come by in this sellers’ market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to elicit. So they make their art as difficult, remote, aloof and indigestible as possible. One way to achieve this is to make art boring.” By this measure–both the boredom quotient itself and the scale of financial commitment to boredom as an artistic principle–Dia:Beacon’s achievement is destined to remain unrivaled for the foreseeable future.

Speaking as one who finds most minimalism of all kinds stupefyingly boring, I say, yeah! And then some.

2 Blowhards has launched a contest of sorts:

Choosing solely among the products of HFOP (i.e., High-Falutin’ Oil Painting), what would you choose as your favorite female nude?

O.K., I’m game. I stuffed this painting
In the Bag a couple of weeks ago, but it’s always worth mentioning.

Maud Newton (she’s so cool) has posted links
to three recent reviews of The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber (what a lame-o title!), including my own piece for the New York Times Book Review (also accessible in the right-hand column) and the “official” New Yorker review by Robert Gottlieb, who has metamorphosed in recent years into a highly impressive critic. Go here, scroll down to “No one goes there much anymore,” and catch up.

“How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?”

Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

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