About Last Night

If it’s Tuesday, this must be “About Last Night.” I decided to spend Monday afternoon catching up with the recent doings of some of my fellow arts bloggers, and it got out of hand. Hence today’s topics, from hither to yon: (1) Fallingwater is not the Guggenheim Museum, and vice versa. (2) There’ll always be an NEA. (3) The significance of snarkery (and no, this one isn’t about The Minor Fall, the Major Lift). (4) Speech Codes on Campus, or, The Case of the Twice-Gored Ox. (5) Who called me a gorilla? (6) The latest almanac entry.

Heaven only knows what I’ll write about tomorrow, but don’t you think your best friend will want to know, too? A simple e-mail alerting him/her/it to the existence of www.terryteachout.com will ensure his/her/its happiness forevermore.

“About Last Night” received 17,000 page views during the month of August. Let’s not stop there.

I weighed in
recently on the Great Frank Lloyd Wright Cyberspace Imbroglio, prompting this crisp response from the normally thoughtful City Comforts:

Teachout repeats the conventional thinking that FLW was a “genius” but then gets on to the interesting stuff: anecdotes about FLW’s personality….my preference is that we would leave the poor tortured man alone and in peace and simply consider the merits or demerits of his work without the use of conclusory terms such as “genius.”

Ah, yes, as opposed to inconclusory terms like “poor tortured man,” right? I fear this isn’t quite good enough (aside from being the least little bit snippy). For openers, it isn’t merely “conventional thinking” that Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius–it is a long-standing and near-universal manifestation of the consensus of taste. And when I call Wright a “genius” in a very short posting, it’s a piece of shorthand intended to suggest my own considered view of the merits and demerits of his work.

Much of the recent wrangling has centered on Fallingwater, the Wright-designed Pennsylvania home whose roof leaks and whose unusual design required substantial ex post facto structural work in order to keep it from fallingdown. Of course I don’t know what it would feel like to live there, but Fallingwater–as well as many of the other Wright houses I’ve seen and in some cases toured–seems to me both remarkably and self-evidently beautiful. This says nothing about the no less self-evident structural unsoundness of the house’s design and original construction, but I don’t really think that’s relevant to the issue of its beauty. Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?

As for the leaky roof, well, I think I’d be willing to put out the occasional bucket in return for the privilege of spending my days and nights in a house that looked like this. I know, I know, that’s a matter of opinion, but I dare say my opinion of Fallingwater is far more widely shared than that of Wright’s detractors, and not just by art critics, either.

On the other hand (there’s usually another hand, isn’t there?), I was sorely disappointed by “From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art,” the Guggenheim Museum’s ongoing exhibit of works from its permanent collection (it’s up through Sept. 28), and Frank Lloyd Wright was partly to blame, though not entirely. Let’s start with the description of the show posted on the Guggenheim’s Web site:

Featuring more than 100 works spanning six decades, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s exceptional collection in great depth….Wright’s visionary building is presented as he intended: as a haven for spiritual and artistic contemplation. Baring the original ivory-colored, curved walls and allowing natural light to stream in from the oculus, the museum is once again, as the architect stated, “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully.”

The complete version of this statement rates a thorough fisking, but I’ll restrict myself to a few words about the Guggenheim’s exhibition policy, which has something to do with the fact that “From Picasso to Pollock” provided a “unique” opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s permanent collection in “great depth.” And why, pray tell, should that opportunity be so unique? Because (1) the Guggenheim now regularly devotes most of its available space to temporary exhibitions of ephemeral interest (Matthew Barney, call your agent) and (2) the Wright-designed main building eats art. The attention-grabbing rotunda and inward-slanting walls pull your eyes away from the paintings on display as effectively as a fireworks display. If Wright really thought he was creating “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully,” he was as wet as the occupants of Fallingwater on a stormy day.

Me, I think it more likely that he meant to draw attention away from the art. After all, his houses, Fallingwater very much included, tend to do exactly the same thing. To me, that’s their one drawback: the visual statements they make are so powerful that they snuff out any possible competition. I can’t imagine a serious collector of art wanting to live in Fallingwater–which is perfectly all right, of course, so long as you don’t collect art. The Guggenheim is by definition a different story, a museum building so beautiful in its own right as to be paradoxically ill-suited to its intended purpose.

On the other hand (yes, there’s a third hand), the Guggenheim happens to be more beautiful than much of the art that it houses. It’s an odd collection, at once idiosyncratic and strangely lacking in absolute distinction, not at all like such indisputably first-class one-man shows as the Frick and Phillips Collections. The fact that so little of the permanent collection has been regularly displayed in recent years has tended to obscure that fact. “From Picasso to Pollock,” by contrast, rubs your nose in the deficiencies of the Guggenheim’s holdings. Once I’d trudged all the way up the spiral, having looked earnestly at everything, I was struck by how few of the paintings I longed to take home with me (as opposed to taking them straight to the nearest dealer). Sure, there were a few treasures, including some luscious Brancusis and one of the Guggenheim’s zillion-odd Kandinskys, the show-stopping Black Lines, but after that, the pickings were surprisingly slim.

What kind of architect designs a museum that upstages the paintings it was built to display? A bad one? Or a supremely great one who knew he had to give the patrons something cool to look at? I never enter the Guggenheim without asking myself that question, which is a tribute, albeit something of a backhanded one, to–yes–the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Lileks, the King of Us All, pulls off one of his patented enharmonic modulations, side-slipping from politics to the arts in a half-beat:

It is more likely that a true unalloyed Democrat will be elected than a brass-tacks Republican. Get used to it. The number of people who want a particular Government program exceeds the number who want none. You want the NEA abolished? That will require two nuclear attacks on American soil. After the first the NEA will be more important than ever, as we sort out our feelings about the event through a nationally coordinated series of interpretive dances. After the second, the economy will be so far down the crapper-pipes that someone will point out that we shouldn’t fund the Mimes-for-the-Blind symposium when we really need the money for anti-radiation drugs.

As I always say after watching a Fred Astaire dance routine, I wish I could do that.

You’ve heard about Snarkwatch, right? If not, Colby Cosh explains it all for you:

Have you seen Believer magazine’s new weblog Snarkwatch? It’s the latest manifestation of Dave Eggers’ infuriated conviction that Anglophone literature is being destroyed by critics. The mission statement of Snarkwatch reads thus: “This is a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to

“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

A. J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

Get this: I took most of the weekend off! Instead of writing, which is what I usually do all weekend, I slept late, dropped into a half-dozen art galleries, went to hear Bill Charlap at the Jazz Standard, and–yes–got a little work done on Sunday. Nothing too serious, though: I spent the morning and afternoon indexing and proofreading the introduction and first 58 pages of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I’m doing my own index to save money so that I can buy another lithograph.) Did I mention that I didn’t write anything?

For those of you wondering when I’m finally going to get around to answering my mail again, here’s my reply: I want to thank you all for contributing to my improved mental health by giving me the weekend off. (Pretty clever, huh?) But I didn’t forget about you, and here’s the proof, from ridiculous to sublime: (1) What I didn’t read on my summer vacation. (2) “In the Bag.” (3) An insufficiently celebrated jazz trumpeter brings an all-star group to town. (4) The latest almanac entry–with a twist.

“About Last Night” expects that each man will do his duty, and women, too. Tell everyone you know about www.terryteachout.com this week. Fill the air of cyberspace with tidings of aesthetic comfort and joy.

As some of you will recall, I’m judging a literary award this year, and as a result, I’ve had to spend much of my spare time reading books chosen for me by other people (which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy them). This weekend, though, I took a busman’s holiday and treated myself to a pair of books that I read solely and only because I wanted to read them.

The first, George Jacobs’ Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra (HarperCollins), the ghostwritten autobiography of Frank Sinatra’s valet, is a piece of lowbrow trash, though I will freely admit that I gulped it down in a single sitting, pausing only to perform necessary bodily functions, and not always even then. I read it partly for the dish value (which is considerable), but mostly because it sheds a strange half-light on Sinatra’s artistry. He was and is one of the unsolved mysteries of American culture, a man of limitless vulgarity who made art of the utmost sensitivity, and the more I learn about his life, the more puzzled I am by the fissure in his soul that made it possible for him to record albums like Only the Lonely, then go out and do the things Jacobs describes with seemingly unselfconscious relish in Mr. S.

Because Jacobs had no understanding of Sinatra the artist, his book supplies a shockingly lucid portrait of the dark side of a double man. Perhaps not surprisingly, it barely hints at the existence of the other Sinatra, the self-conscious introvert whose record collection consisted mostly of classical music and who sang the great American popular songs as tenderly as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang Schubert. I hope somebody will get around to writing a book about that Frank Sinatra, and I’ll read it with equal attention, but I’d never make the mistake of supposing that the sensitive Sinatra was the “real” Sinatra. Both Sinatras were real, which is why the man they comprised was so endlessly interesting–and, I suspect, ultimately unknowable.

The second book, John Updike’s Just Looking: Essays on Art, is a paperback reissue by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts of a 1986 collection of fugitive essays about the visual arts by a famous novelist for whose books I’ve never much cared. Still, it’s always interesting to see what a distinguished artist (and Updike is nothing if not distinguished) has to say about a medium not his own. I wish more such folk would write this kind of “amateur” criticism, which more often than not turns out to be surprisingly good. Philip Larkin, for example, was both a very great poet and an eccentric but hugely entertaining jazz critic.

While Updike isn’t that good, his occasional ventures into art criticism are both readable and not infrequently illuminating. By coincidence, he writes in Just Looking about a painting by Fairfield Porter that I just saw for the first time, Cliffs of Isle au Haut. If you’ve been keeping up with the blog lately, you’ll remember that I went to Maine last month in search of the actual cove portrayed in that painting. (Porter used it as the basis for a 1975 lithograph of which I own a copy.) Here’s what Updike had to say about it:

From the Abstract Expressionists Porter learned boldness, the boldness of broad monochrome expanses and of loaded brushstrokes. Often he defines a tree’s structure by slashing into its mass with daubs of the background color. Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors. In Cliffs of Isle au Haut (a canvas that seems to borrow some of the color-by-number texture of Welliver’s landscapes), a spiky blob as opaquely black as anything in Kline or Motherwell overspreads the foreground without “reading” as the natural phenomenon it undoubtedly was. The two children’s heads peeping over the lichenous rocks restore us, however, to Porter’s domestic world.

Not too shabby for a novelist, I’d say.

Time again for “In the Bag,” the game that challenges you to admit what art you really like. The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering–the death squad is pounding on your front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how silly they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

PAINTING: Edouard Manet, Roses, Oeillets, Pensees (Flowers in a Crystal Vase)

CD: Bill Evans and Eddie Gomez, Intuition

NOVEL: Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

FILM: John Ford, The Searchers (yes, I’m on a Western kick)

DANCE: Merce Cunningham, Beach Birds

Your turn.

I received the following e-mail last week from jazz trumpeter Marvin Stamm:

I just wanted to let you know that my group, the Marvin Stamm Quartet, will be performing for four evenings, Sept. 10-13, at Birdland. The group will include Bill Mays, piano; Rufus Reid, bass; Ed Soph, drums; and special guest John Abercrombie on guitar. Sets will be at 9:00 and 11:00 p.m.

In all my years of playing, this is the most exciting and musical group I have ever been a part of. Though I am always right in the middle of things when we play, the creativity of these gentlemen never fails to astound me. It is really something to hear. While we tour quite a bit, this is the first time we have had the opportunity to appear in a major New York City jazz club as a group. I hope all of you will come hear this group play. I guarantee a great evening of music for us all!

I concur, and then some. Stamm is a musician’s musician, one of those brilliant players who are universally admired by their colleagues but unknown to the public at large. I haven’t heard his quartet in person, but I did hear a live CD privately recorded at a recent gig, and it blew me out of my shoes. I was so impressed that I wanted to do a print-media profile of Stamm and the group to promote this gig. Alas, it fell through, so the least I can do is let all of you know that starting on Wednesday, Birdland is the place to be.