Archives for April 8, 2004

“One of the troubles of our time is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.”

W.H. Auden, letter to Louise Bogan, May 18, 1942

I keep meaning to write something, but I can’t stop reading long enough to do so. Here are some more of my recent gleanings from the Web:

– Over in the Top Five module of the right-hand column, I’ve posted a few heartfelt words in praise of Jane Freilicher: Recent Work, up at Tibor de Nagy through Apr. 24. Now Hilton Kramer has reviewed the same show at length for the New York Observer:

Cloudy skylines and vivid floral bouquets, still-lifes and landscapes, nasturtiums and petunias lording it over Manhattan’s imposing cityscape, the rectilinear cityscape itself dissolved into a phantom Cubist still-life–these are some of the suggestive incongruities to be savored in Jane Freilicher’s new paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Brilliantly rendered floral color commands the foreground in most of these paintings, while views of the city, seen in a distant haze through an upper-story window, have a mirage-like quality–too shadowy to be entirely real, yet never venturing into the kind of fantasy we associate with surrealism….

Abstractionism in color is particularly evident in her two Flora paintings on handmade paper, with their shallow-spaced, all-over structure, and an abstractionist impulse can be seen in all of her recent paintings. It’s even more emphatically stated in Seascape, another painting on handmade paper, which has a structure of stacked horizontal forms.

All of this suggests that what we’ve been witnessing–though not always acknowledging–in the history of American art since the 1950’s is a widespread movement among representational painters to come to terms with the powerhouse influence of the Abstract Expressionists. Not only as a critic but also as a painter, this was an issue that Fairfield Porter was absolutely obsessed with: In writing about abstract painting, he often went looking for its subject matter, and in writing about realist painting, he was mainly concerned with pure pictorial form.

What this also suggests is that, in the long term, representational painters may have derived greater benefits–pictorial, aesthetic benefits–from the Abstract Expressionists than abstract painters have. It may be heresy to suggest this, but in the presence of Ms. Freilicher’s current exhibition, it’s a heresy worth thinking about….

Read the whole thing here. Then go see the show. It’s not to be missed.

– Golden Rule Jones has run 17 arts blogs through an on-line tool that tests Web sites for “readability.” According to the creator of the tool in question, “A level above 12 indicates the writing sample is too hard for most people to read.” Mr. Jones scored 12.9, Our Girl and I a paltry 12.2. The thorniest thicket, not surprisingly, was The Reading Experience (16.5), while Return of the Reluctant and Old Hag both racked up a spectacularly fluffy 10.1.

I guess that makes us lower-middlebrows, right?

– Sarah won an award! Good for her.

– Jeff Jarvis recalls his tenure at People, apropos of that magazine’s thirtieth anniversary:

I was at People during a few crucial cultural changes. While I was there, the audience fragmented before our very eyes. It used to be that we could put a No. 1 TV show on the cover and, zap, it would sell. But suddenly — thanks to the most revolutionary device ever invented, the remote control — that changed.

I remember my managing editor and mentor, Pat Ryan, coming down the hall more than once shouting at me, “TV’s dead, Jarvis, it’s dead.” That meant another Dallas cover had inexplicably bombed. The audience sat asunder.

Welcome to the future of media and culture.

The audience took control of their entertainment (just as, today, we are taking control of their news and media). Cable grew. VCRs were just starting to be sold. We were no longer captive to three networks. We watched what we wanted to watch.

The truth is that our time in a shared national experience was short — it lasted only from the moment TV reached critical mass until the mid-80s and the spread of the cultural bomb we called the clicker. “Who Shot J.R.” was our last single shared experience. Even now, when we watch a war, we watch it through CNN’s eyes or FoxNews’ or the Internet’s.

Some lament the passing of that shared national experience. I don’t. It was a tyranny: rule by the mass (or rather, what executives thought the masses should or would want). Now the individual is in charge again….

– Finally, MoorishGirl brings us this stunning story of a modest author:

When Edwidge Danticat went on Radio Times on WHYY-FM (90.9) the other day to talk about her new novel, The Dew Breaker, callers didn’t want to discuss plot or character. They had bigger questions for the Haitian-born writer. Like: “Is there hope for Haiti?”…

“I find it difficult being a spokesperson,” said the shy, soft-spoken, 35-year-old novelist, who gave a reading at the main branch of the Free Library. “I don’t think in an op-ed way. I don’t always have an immediate response. My work is my soapbox. What I hope is that people will read that and then want to find out more about Haiti.”

Excuse me while I relocate my jaw.

Newly minted Pulitzer laureate Anne Applebaum has an interesting take on the rise and fall of the middlebrow:

I’ve recently been to two literary award ceremonies — this week’s was just an announcement — and both times I’ve lost. Maybe losers bring their own bitter, twisted emotions to their recollections of such events, but I still don’t think it’s wrong to describe the “literary” contingent at both events as, well, bitter and twisted. On both evenings, prize committee chairmen got up to praise the novel or historical work they’d selected, invariably adding a phrase or two about how, in “today’s world” such works are “ever more necessary.” Anyone talking about criticism described the lonely life of a critic; anyone talking about poetry became downright defensive. Most of the winners, in fact, were very brief. It was as if the gap between the nice things being said about them inside the room and the hostility of the world outside was too unbearable to discuss.

I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, “The Known World,” won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?…

This happens to be one of the major themes of A Terry Teachout Reader, which The Elegant Variation (with whom I’m having lunch today) tells me is now on sale in a major New York bookstore, Coliseum. That’s my first Manhattan sighting.

Not to plug myself excessively, especially since Maud has made it unnecessary by posting an item about the Teachout Reader toward which I point you with immodest pleasure. She’s a friend (and says so), so you’re welcome to take her praise with a stalactite or two of salt, but I still hope you like it as much as she did.

Via artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, comes this fascinating story about a robot conductor (no jokes just yet, please):

The latest human activity to be mastered by robots was demonstrated recently when Sony’s QRIO bot successfully conducted an entire orchestra.

The 58-centimetre-tall humanoid robot led the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven’s 5th symphony during a concert held at the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo on 15 March….

The full story is here, together with a link to a short RealPlayer videoclip of an excerpt from the “unique rendition.” Take a look–but listen, too. While I can think of a few conductors on whom QRIO’s “interpretation” of Beethoven’s Fifth might possibly be an improvement, I think it’s likely to be a little while longer before Lorin Maazel needs to start sweating.

At our Studio 360 taping yesterday, Kurt Andersen asked me about the thumbs-up/thumbs-down tendency in modern-day reviewing. This morning, I found in my mailbox an essay about criticism from an interesting-looking Web site called Charlie Suisman’s Manhattan User’s Guide:

With a film, say, or a book, a negative review may not be helpful, but the thing itself continues to exist, regardless of critical reaction. The inherently ephemeral nature of restaurants and theatre productions means that negative critical reaction can effectively close a business down. That makes the critic’s words in those fields especially fraught. There are reviewers out there who consider themselves consumer advocates, helping readers spend their money wisely. It’s a thumbs up/thumbs down mentality and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But the best critics have always brought much more to their analyses: crucially, a sense of context and the weight of institutional memory.

If you’re reviewing a play by, say, Jon Robin Baitz, you can’t be an effective advocate for the reader if you don’t bring full knowledge of Mr. Baitz’s career to the table. And not just that: you should also be able to place the play in historical, stylistic, and theatrical context. Critics (good critics, in our view) have taken something of a curatorial role. Think of Pauline Kael on movies. It’s not really about nurturing, we wouldn’t call it “being supportive”, but it is at least cognizant of an artist’s career, of a trajectory, of how the threads have come to together. It may be tough love, but the love for the form (and often for the practitioners) comes through. The artist and the critic are in it for the long haul….

Institutional memory takes two forms. There’s the institutional memory of the critic’s own paper and there’s the institutional memory of the industry being reviewed. Both need to inform the analysis. Of course a reviewer will reach his or her own conclusions, but being heedless of what came before leads to exactly the kind of disjointed, decontextualized appraisal that understandably drives artists, and chefs, and readers to varying states of distraction….

I like that. And I wish I’d read it before the taping.

Read the whole thing here.