Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
The Bloomsbury group bores me silly. Always has. All hat, no cattle–and that most definitely includes the only marginally readable Virginia Woolf. It’s the highbrow counterpart of the Algonquin Round Table, with better gossip and fewer one-liners. Now they’re all dead, and about time, too. The sooner they’re forgotten, the better for British literature.
Whee! I feel better!
I mentioned yesterday that you should go see The Artist’s Eye: Wolf Kahn as Curator, currently up at the National Academy of Design (one block north of the Guggenheim) through April 18. For those too lazy to scroll down to the Top Five listing in the right-hand column, here’s what I wrote:
The poet of magenta and orange culls 50-odd personal favorites from the Academy’s permanent collection, mostly (but not entirely) representational, mostly (but not entirely) landscapes, mostly (but not entirely) celebrity-free. The last gallery contains 10 recent paintings by Kahn, including “Chaos and Hidden Order,” a stunning natural abstract (my phrase, not Kahn’s) painted last year in Africa. Bright, fresh, engaging, and thought-provoking, especially if you think paint on canvas is soooo over. Definitely worth seeing, more than once.
What I didn’t mention, that being a capsule review, was that Kahn not only picked the paintings but wrote the wall labels for the show. I’m sure that’s not without precedent, but it isn’t common, either (Jane Freilicher didn’t do it when she curated last year’s “Artist’s Eye” show at the Academy). The texts are fascinating–informal, unpretentious, written from the practical perspective of a practicing painter. Here, for example, is Kahn on Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “Marine”:
Ryder is one of the artists who continue to influence me in my own work, because he really loved the substance of paint. Also, he never acknowledged finishing a painting but kept adjusting and changing it for years. He had the gift of translating paint into passion, but his aim, it seems to me, was to paint unchanging nature as simply and straight-forwardly as he could. Notice the uneasy coming together of water and sky at the horizon: white against black, but nothing stops. A wonderful little picture.
Wouldn’t you rather read a label like that than one by some anonymous museum staffer?
Sarah Weinman and I have been exchanging e-mail apropos of my recent posting about Glenn Gould, and we’ve gotten into a conversation about what I call “practitioner criticism,” by which I mean arts criticism written by working artists. This kind of criticism intrigues me precisely because it isn’t “objective,” and rarely if ever pretends to be: instead, it’s all about the critic-artist and his personal priorities, and is all the more illuminating as a result. What George Bernard Shaw had to say about Shakespeare, or Hector Berlioz about Beethoven, is by definition more interesting than anything I could possibly say about either man, regardless of whether Shaw or Berlioz happened to be right or wrong.
Here’s what Wolf Kahn has to say about curating “The Artist’s Eye,” which I think could reasonably be described as an exercise in applied practitioner criticism:
I have only cursory knowledge of American art from 1825 (the date the National Academy of Design was founded) until about 1930. It’s likely that I know a bit more from 1930 to the present. Still, how to choose from the ample racks in the storage area those pictures which it seems important to show at this time?…The best thing, it seems to me, is to put my faith on my “eye,” and to cull fifty or so paintings from the collection which succeed to engage my personal “eye.” Is a picture coloristically exciting? Are the elements dispersed on the canvas, or the panel, in a visually beautiful way? Is the picture the carrier of strong feeling? Is it eccentric? Extreme?…Let my eye, therefore, be the surrogate for yours–we may end up shaking hands in agreement–sometimes.
I love that, syntactical slips and all. And I don’t see how anyone could resist going to see a museum exhibition curated on such a basis. So don’t resist–go. Now. The National Academy of Design is never crowded, even on weekends. And when you’re there, keep an eye out for me, because I’m planning to come back soon with a friend or two in tow.
I see from Our Girl’s last posting that she’s on a Howard Hawks kick, of which I heartily approve. Oddly enough, I happened to watch To Have and Have Not day before yesterday, during my self-imposed two-day sabbatical from blogging, and it pleased me greatly, as it always does. I seem to recall that I described it as “Casablanca for grownups” when I posted the newly released DVD in the Top Five module of the right-hand column a couple of months ago. That’s true enough, but it doesn’t mean To Have and Have Not isn’t entertaining, just that it doesn’t take itself seriously, as Casablanca does. On the other hand, it isn’t a nudge-and-wink self-parody, either, like John Huston’s over-clever Beat the Devil, a Humphrey Bogart film for people who don’t like Humphrey Bogart films. The very idea of Truman Capote writing dialogue for Bogart makes me giggle, and not in the right way, either.
Let us know what you thought of To Have and Have Not, OGIC. I think you’ll find it a perfect hoot. In the right way.
“It was Dortmunder’s belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it–burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes–there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else.”
Donald E. Westlake, Nobody’s Perfect
A reader writes:
I went to the local public library Saturday looking for Richard Pipes’s recently published memoir (which was out), and I came home instead with a Richard Stark. I hadn’t heard of Stark until your posting, though of course I know Westlake. The title of the novel is Comeback
from the Parker series. The first half was excellent — nicely plotted, credible, solid dialogue. But after the midway point, the story began to require a serious suspension of disbelief. In my experience, that is typical of crime and detective novels (and movies): great build-up followed by a (frequently precipitous) falling off. Nevertheless, I liked the novel enough to want to give Stark another try. Can you recommend one that won’t give my credulity quite so difficult a workout?
This note from a regular reader of “About Last Night” interests me for an unexpected reason. What mystery or suspense novel, if any, doesn’t require “a serious suspension of disbelief”? And why would that matter? I go to that kind of fiction in search of amusement, not plausibility, and so long as the imaginary world portrayed within is both internally consistent and involving on its own terms, I’m happy. Whoever thought Nero Wolfe or Philip Marlowe were plausible? In fact, I suspect it’s their very implausibility, even outrageousness, that makes them interesting to us. Wolfe is Dr. Johnson transplanted into a fancy Manhattan brownstone with a greenhouse on the roof, Marlowe is Raymond Chandler transplanted into a seedy detective’s office in Los Angeles, and the incongruity–the clash of sensibilities–engages the reader from the first sentence onward.
The Parker novels (which are written by “Richard Stark,” a pen name of Donald Westlake) aren’t interesting to me because of the comparative feasibility of the crimes portrayed by the author. I read them because I’m fascinated by Parker, a professional thief who is amoral to the point of sociopathy. The novels are told mainly from his point of view, which anyone not a sociopath will find totally unsympathetic. Yet the reader identifies with Parker, even cheers him on, as he does whatever he finds necessary to steal large sums of money and stay out of jail, up to and including cold-blooded murder. I’m not up for amateur psychologizing this morning, so I won’t speculate as to the appeal of a character like Parker, but appeal he does, and for me, at least, it doesn’t much matter whether his capers and scores pass the test of plausibility. They divert me.
Having said all that, I’ll return to the problem posed by my reader. Westlake wrote the first sixteen Parker novels between 1962 and 1974, then put the series aside until 1997, when he resumed with Comeback. The later novels are somewhat different in tone from the earlier ones–a little less traditionally “hardboiled,” a little more self-reflexive, even discursive (Westlake is a very funny man when not pretending to be a hardboiled mystery novelist). Those who find Comeback slightly unbelievable will prefer the earlier books, most of which are out of print, though they can usually be found in libraries or used book stores. Of them, the most conventionally “plausible” is The Rare Coin Score. Of the later Parker novels, the one I suspect my correspondent would find most acceptable is Flashfire. But as I say, don’t look to Parker for how-to-do-it guides to heisting. His interest lies elsewhere.
A reminder: Westlake has written a parallel series of comic crime novels under his own name about a hapless heister named John Dortmunder, and these books are a deliberate, almost systematic inversion of the Parker novels. Readers familiar with both series will find the Dortmunder books (which not infrequently make reference to the Parker books) even funnier, but you don’t have to get the inside jokes to appreciate them. Unlike the Parker novels, all of the Dortmunder novels are currently available in paperback, and that series starts with The Hot Rock.
Now, back to high culture!
UPDATE: Sarah has major Dortmunder-related news….
As a Netflix newbie, I can report so far that watching the movies is only about half as fun as setting up the queue. (A warning: think twice before you go comparing the size of your queue with cinetrix‘s; trust me, you’ll come up short.) Coming to the end of my trial period, I’ve received three movies and watched two. First was L’Auberge Espagnole, which made it into my queue on the strength of director C
…about love, obvs. I’ve had some gratifying responses to my silly post about a pro-literacy conversation heart I stumbled on last week. A friend tried to put himself in the minds of the makers:
I was much amused by your story of the candy valentine heart inscribed with LETS READ. I’m trying to imagine some corporate brainstorming session with marketing people sitting around throwing out suggestions for pithy romantic sayings: BE MINE, KISS ME, LOVE YOU, LETS READ, hunh? Do you suppose someone in the stenciling department at candyland is reading bodice rippers?
And two readers delighted me by sending along their own personalized creations–
READ
OGIC
and
LAST
NITE
–both generated at a splendid little webspot that you should know about this week.
Has anybody noticed that I’ve been keeping up with my mail for the past couple of weeks? This in spite of the fact that the box is often crammed full of MyDoom-generated spam, Viagra ads, and letters from Liberia.
Today, it was also crammed full of letters to Our Girl, which reminds me to remind you that we have two e-mailboxes, which we do not share. If you want to write to OGIC, go to the top module of the right-hand column and click on her mailbox link, not mine (mine is directly above hers).