Archives for July 2003

A reader writes:

Obviously, a critic should be rigorous, honest, and forthright, but how far is not too far? When the critic likes the work, there’s not much problem, but what if the work is deemed flawed or worse (an all too common situation in my experience)? Living artists, even those without significant talent, are still human and apt to be hurt. Furthermore, it’s always possible for a critic to be wrong, however honestly. It’s been said that Art is ruthless and only cares for its own goodness or quality. Should a critic simply serve Art, and artists be damned?

Whenever I think about that question–and any critic who doesn’t lose sleep over it from time to time is a boor and a cad–I think of this couplet by Alexander Pope: “Yes, I am proud! I must be proud to see/Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me.”

Terrible words, aren’t they? They say a great deal about Pope, and what they say, I don’t like. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that they have the rank smell of pathology–that they speak of a man whose ego was badly twisted, and who took it out on the people about whom he wrote. But I’m not going to try to tell you that they don’t hit the target: I know a lot of critics, and some of them are just like that. I also know a lot of critics who are incompetent, by which I mean they don’t know enough about their chosen art form to responsibly pass judgment on the things they review. Such critics make artists miserable, confuse audiences, and generally add to the sum total of unhappiness on this earth.

It’s not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics–not all, but most–have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don’t know that–and I mean really know it–you shouldn’t be a critic. And you’re more likely to know it when you’ve lived and worked in a city small enough that there’s a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission.

Writing for the Kansas City Star taught me that lesson, and it also taught me that critical standards have to be appropriate. You don’t review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That’s another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls “the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night.” It’s hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It’s scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like–of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up–then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.

You will find a contrary view in today’s almanac entry, written by Ernest Newman, one of the most distinguished music critics of the 20th century. I take his point–which doesn’t mean I agree with it.

Sooner or later, everybody with a computer discovers the Internet Anagram Server, a Web site that generates anagrams of any phrase you plug into it. What you mostly get are reams of garbage, but sift through it long enough and you can usually find some gems.

I got tired of writing the other day and decided to run my name through the Internet Anagram Server, and was surprised to receive in return a fairly large number of anagrams that could be related to my career as a drama critic: “Reroute thy act,” “Teary tech tour,” “Outcry at three” (how’s that for a play about a matinee murder?), and my favorite, “Hey, actor, utter!” I also got some vaguely naughty responses, such as “Etch your tater,” and a few sinister ones, including “Treachery tout” and “Cutthroat eyer.”

But all these are merest fluff compared to my Top Five Personal Anagrams. In ascending order of coolness, they are:

5. That cuter yore
4. Ratty, cute hero
3. Arty, cute other
2. Retract ye thou!
1. The Tory Curate

O.K, back to art. But I bet you can’t wait to check out that Web site, can you?

“In art the ideal critical ethic is ruthlessness. There the race is only to the fleet and the battle to the strong. There should be no thought of helping lame dogs–and still less sick or deformed dogs–over the stile; if the dog is going to be as helpless the other side of the stile as he is on this side, then let him stay on this side till he is strong enough to get over by himself. He is no worse off, while you have saved yourself a good deal of trouble (perhaps a biting also), and may have spared the people on the other side the infliction of a nuisance on them.”

Ernest Newman, Essays from the World of Music

A friend asked me the other night, “Do you think there are any really important artists who get completely overlooked? And do you think blogging might change that?”

This is an interesting question–more interesting than many critics might be willing to admit. In the long run, I think the answer is no, or at least probably not. Canons of excellence tend to sort themselves out over time (with a little nudging from critics), and I think it’s fairly safe to say that there are no truly great contemporaries of Shakespeare or Mozart about whom we have yet to hear.

In the short run, though, all bets are off. “Every morning a stock-market report on reputations comes out in New York,” Norman Podhoretz wrote in Making It. “It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it.” It also has an arts section, equally invisible but equally readable, and the numbers are quite volatile indeed. Most journalists are day traders–all they care about are today’s winners. Me, I try to buy low and hold. I’m old enough to trust my taste, and I don’t much care what anybody else thinks, though it’s always nice when smart people agree with you. I think, for example, that I’ll live long enough to see Fairfield Porter generally regarded as a major American painter and critic (his stock registered a healthy upward spike when Justin Spring’s excellent Porter biography was published three years ago), and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happens to Arnold Friedman one of these days, though that’s a longer shot.

I mention all this because I just paid a visit to the studio of a painter whom I believe to be absolutely first-class, even though it’s a safe bet that you’ve never heard of him. Albert Kresch has been around forever (he was born in 1922, back when Warren Harding was in the White House), and every once in a while he gets a bit of ink, but for some reason his work never seems to ring the bell of fame. Part of the reason–the biggest part, I suspect–is that he’s never been fashionable, not even for an afternoon. A pupil of Hans Hofmann, the great Abstract Expressionist teacher (and painter), Kresch embraced representation back in the Forties, at the exact moment when all the hip New York painters were going abstract with a vengeance. Yet he never completely abandoned abstraction, either, which made him even harder to pigeonhole. Instead, like Porter, Nell Blaine, and a number of other greatly gifted American painters, he bent it to his own subtle purposes.

Here’s how Kresch explains the seeming paradox:

We were using the abstract as an armature or a structure onto which to build a painting, and [the Abstract Expressionists] were using it as the be-all and end-all of the painting. And in a way, we felt that what we were doing was more difficult, because we were trying to interrogate reality, and what we saw, and the visual. They were in the first ecstasies of success and triumph and we just didn’t agree.

That’s what I call a recipe for unfashionability. But fashion be damned, for Kresch is still alive, well, and painting as wonderfully as ever. As a matter of fact, I wrote about a show of his last year in my Washington Post column:

His paintings are full of sweeping horizontal movement and hot, high-keyed color contrasts. Kresch’s work is rarely shown in New York, but I was dazzled by a solo exhibit last year at the Center for Figurative Painting, so I went straight to the opening of his current show, a roomful of small but compelling landscapes at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. For me, the pick of the litter was “Yellow Landscape,” scarcely bigger than a postcard but breathtaking in its focused intensity.

To look at some of the paintings from that show (including “Yellow Landscape”), and to read an equally enthusiastic New York Times review by Michael Kimmelman, go here.

I wish I could send you to an exhibit of Kresch’s work right now, but I can’t, because there isn’t one up at the moment. All I can do is tell you that I spent a couple of hours in his Brooklyn studio last Thursday looking at his latest paintings, after which we retired to a neighborhood café, where he told me amazing stories about hanging out with Charlie Parker in the Village a half-century ago. (He’s a jazz fan, too—one of his best paintings is of Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist.) Then I rode the subway back to Manhattan, thinking for maybe the thousandth time this year that when you live in New York, there’s no place like home.

I promise to let you know the next time any of Albert Kresch’s paintings are on display in the New York area. And to the friend whose original question inspired this lengthy reply, here’s my short answer: That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog.

I love Westerns, a taste not widely shared within my sphere of acquaintance. Even the cinephiles with whom I hang are disinclined to saddle up. So I mention the release on DVD of Four Faces West knowing that it’ll be a tough sell. Too bad. It’s a lovely little movie, and if you’ve never seen a Western before, you could do a lot worse than to start here.

Joel McCrea, the star, is now best known for having shared a swimming pool with Veronica Lake in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, but what he really liked was making Westerns, and in the second half of his career he didn’t do anything else. He always played good guys in white hats, and he had the face and voice for it. I won’t say McCrea never made a better Western than Four Faces West–he’s just about perfect in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, a film sorely in need of transfer to DVD–but this one ranks right up there with his best work. Traditional Westerns are all about the myth of the frontier, and Four Faces West, released in 1948, takes that myth at face value. A bit romantic and more than a bit sentimental, it was written and shot with a sharp eye for authentic period detail. The result is a 90-minute-long holiday from cynicism.

Incidentally, Four Faces West isn’t your usual shoot-’em-up. In fact, it’s the only Hollywood Western ever made in which no guns are fired. (Really.) But I bet you wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you.

I can’t imagine that the death of Bob Hope meant anything whatsoever to anyone under the age of 30, and for those much under the age of 50 it can only serve as a vague reminder of Seventies TV at its cheesiest (unless you happen to have served in the military, in which case your memories of him may be very different). Hope, after all, never quite succeeded in making the transition to the small screen. Though he made some pretty good movies, he was essentially a creature of network radio, and who remembers that? It was a wonderful medium, a generation of gifted artists poured their souls into it, and now their work is almost completely forgotten.

This, I suspect, is why some of us who aren’t quite old enough to remember Hope when he was funny (which he was, believe it or not) still felt queasy at the news of his passing. The world spins immeasurably faster today than it did when I was a boy, and the fixed stars I remember are mostly fallen now. Meanwhile, here I sit, writing about a hundred-year-old comedian for a journalistic medium that didn’t even exist five years ago. What will I be doing in another five years? In the words of my favorite refrigerator magnet, “Time passes quickly, whether you’re having fun or not.” (I wonder what that sounds like in Latin.)

That’s what makes you cling to the landmarks of your youth, cherished or not. The older you get, the more you cherish everything that used to be, not so very long ago.

“He was never in a hurry, never anxious to make an effect or sensation. He sat still and men came to him.”

Winston Churchill, My Early Life

If you wanted to, you’ve seen the pictures of the corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons by now. They were broadcast on TV and scattered throughout cyberspace last week, usually labeled “warning–graphic photos,” or words to that effect. And they were graphic, I guess…but I can’t say they shocked me. I’ve seen a lot worse (I used to work for the New York Daily News, after all). More to the point, the photos released by the Defense Department were tame compared to what you can see any day of the week by renting any reasonably violent Hollywood film released in the last 30 years or so, going all the way back to 1969 and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. For that matter, you can even view the “sealed” autopsy photos of John F. Kennedy at your leisure, 24/7–they’re scattered throughout cyberspace, too, easily accessible to anyone with a computer and a taste for the macabre, along with all sorts of other nightmare-inducing death-scene photos posted by peculiar folk. (And no, I’m not posting any links.)

It may also be relevant that I once witnessed a shootout in a big-city bank. Granted, I didn’t actually see guns blazing–I was around the corner, a few feet away–but I did stand over the robber seconds after he was shot dead by a security guard. Forgive the cliché, but the whole thing seemed less like real life than a scene from a movie. The sound of the guns going off was far more frightening than the sight of the corpse.

Is my experience commonplace? Have most of us become blind to the pathos of cooling corpses? Did Hollywood do that to us–or was it modernity? I can’t tell you. All I know is that I looked at the pictures of the Hussein boys and didn’t flinch, though I wish I had.