Archives for February 2005

“How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.”

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

For those of you who’ve never visited the Teachout Museum, here are the five pieces that will be on display at my Duncan Phillips Lecture in Washington, D.C., on March 9:

– John Marin, 1870-1953

Downtown, the El, 1921

Etching

Second impression,

published by The New Republic

in Six American Etchings, 1924

– Milton Avery, 1893-1965

March at a Table, 1948

Drypoint

Published in Laurels Portfolio,

No. 4, 1948

– Fairfield Porter, 1907-1975

The Table, 1971

Color lithograph

– Neil Welliver, 1929-

Night Scene, 1981-82

Color woodcut

– Jane Freilicher, 1924-

Late Afternoon, Southampton, 1999

Color hard ground etching

with spit bite aquatint and drypoint

Come and see!

I don’t care for conceptual art and have no opinion of Christo, but I do live half a block from Central Park, making it hard for me to be altogether indifferent to “The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005,” seeing as how it’s visible from my doorstep. Bass Player came by my place on Saturday for a pre-ballet hang, so we figured we might as well stroll into the park and take a peek on the way to brunch. Ten minutes later we strolled back out again. The Gates hadn’t struck either one of us as beautiful or memorable, though it might simply have been that we weren’t in a receptive mood (I intend to try again next week).

Obviously others felt differently–the park was crowded and the atmosphere festive–and it occurred to me that I ought to be pleased that so many people had come to Central Park to experience a work of art, regardless of its quality. But the more I eavesdropped, the more clearly I realized that most of them were doing nothing of the kind: they’d simply come to see what everybody was talking about. Art had nothing to do with it. They might as well have been going to Six Flags to ride a new roller coaster.

After brunch we went down to Lincoln Center to see New York City Ballet. The bill of fare consisted of a fair-to-goodish performance of a masterpiece, George Balanchine’s Jewels, and the orchestra played badly. Yet the flaws didn’t matter. Maybe it was that Bass Player had never seen any Balanchine, and was self-evidently carried away. Or perhaps it had something to do with the strong emotions that had been discharged in me earlier in the week by the response to my piece
about Nancy LaMott. Whatever the reason, I was overwhelmed by the performance. It was as though some obscuring veil had been peeled away: I saw through a glass, but not darkly. As I watched the dancers, I couldn’t help but think of Christo’s spectacle, and wonder what definition of the word “art” could possibly encompass both phenomena. (The performance, by the way, was sold out.)

I returned home from the ballet, climbed into my loft, and immediately fell into a deep, dream-laden sleep. I woke up spontaneously an hour later, as fresh and happy as could be, and stayed that way for the rest of the weekend.

Arthur Miller died too late on Thursday for my Wall Street Journal drama column to note his passing. Instead, I’ve marked the occasion with a piece on today’s Leisure & Arts page.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that I’m pretty tough on the author of Death of a Salesman, for whom my admiration was sharply qualified:

I recently described “After the Fall,” the 1964 play in which Miller first made fictional use of his unsuccessful marriage to Marilyn Monroe, as “a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see,” written by a man “who hasn’t a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does).” For me, that was his biggest flaw. He was, literally, pretentious: He pretended to have big ideas and the ability to express them with a touch of poetry, when in fact he had neither. His final play, “Finishing the Picture,” was yet another rehash of the Monroe-Miller m

VLADIMIR: Moron!

ESTRAGON: Vermin!

VLADIMIR: Abortion!

ESTRAGON: Morpion!

VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!

ESTRAGON: Curate!

VLADIMIR: Cretin!

ESTRAGON (with finality): Crritic!

VLADIMIR: Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I’ll be giving two lectures in Washington, D.C., early in March. In case you’d like to come to one or both, here’s the official scoop:

– I’ll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute at 5:30 on Monday, March 7. The topic is “The Problem of Political Art”:

Can political art fully satisfy the claims of truth and beauty? Or is it fatally compromised by the passionate desire to persuade? The drama critic of The Wall Street Journal offers a report from the front lines on the increasing politicization of art in 21st-century America–and the growing inclination of contemporary artists to take the political views of their audiences for granted.

For more information, go here.

– I’ll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 9. The topic is “Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips”:

For much of the twentieth century, the Museum of Modern Art’s version of modernism dominated American taste. Foremost among the dissenters from its austere canon was Duncan Phillips, whose color-driven, explicitly sensuous “modernism” stands in sharp contrast to the Gospel According to MoMA. Unlike most New Yorkers, critic Terry Teachout formed his tastes by looking at The Phillips Collection, and when he began to collect American art, he kept Duncan Phillips’ precepts firmly in mind. In this lecture, Mr. Teachout looks at Phillips’ alternate canon and speculates on what might have caught Duncan Phillips’ eye if he had lived another quarter century.

The lecture will take place at the Women’s National Democratic Club, and reservations are required. Five pieces from the Teachout Museum, including Milton Avery’s “March at a Table” and John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” will be on display.

For more information, go here.

If you’re an “About Last Night” reader, stop by and say hello!

“Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.

“Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean ‘dumbness’ or ‘noiselessness’; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (trans. Alexander Dru)

A couple of cynical ones that caught my eye:

– Gwenda Bond’s funny memories of a detractor:

In college, I wrote a column about how much I hated V-day. I turned it in late, as usual, handing it in to lay-out and going off to sleep a few hours. I walked in to my first class the next morning to the hush that can only be brought about by one’s editor putting one’s mug shot above a giant heart with a giant NO symbol across it.

– And the inimitable prose stylings of Mr. Outer Life, which it would be pointless to try to excerpt.