EthicalDative

A Descendant of Ralph the Wrecker

Posted on November 5, 2019 by JMN

Prime Minister Boris Johnson may be the death of the United Kingdom. Credit Pool photo by Aaron Chown.

A mighty union that had lasted hundreds of years, running from the Orkneys to Cornwall, from Belfast to Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, would have been torn asunder….

(Nicholas Kristof, “Will Great Britain Become Little England?” NYTimes, 11-2-19)

I would like to visit that last place in particular, to hear how it’s said. Columnist Kristof is the “descendant” of the title.

One of my British ancestors was Ralph the Wrecker, a pirate from Hunmanby in Yorkshire who set lights on the coast to fool ships so that they would crash on the rocks. He was finally arrested and sentenced to hang. As he stood on the gallows, the noose ready, a messenger galloped up with a pardon. Otherwise I might not be here.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, toponyms | Leave a comment

George Condo

Posted on November 3, 2019 by JMN

George Condo’s new sculpture, “Constellation of Voices,” on the terrace of the Metropolitan Opera’s facade. Credit George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Antonio Santos for The New York Times.

Mr. Condo, 61, is best known for his bold figurative paintings that blend old master techniques and cartoonish characters, capturing a range of emotions from many perspectives in a method he calls “psychological Cubism.” “In the early days of Cubism, you would see a violin from four different angles simultaneously,” he said. “I like to create a chaotic imbalance that then needs to be reassembled back into something aesthetically pleasing.” At the Met, he has translated his manic approach massively into three dimensions, creating a head at once classical, futuristic and abstract.

(Hilarie M. Sheets, “A Sun God? A Cyborg? No, It’s a George Condo Creation,” NYTimes, 10-29-19)

I was introduced to George Condo’s painting several years ago by a profile of him in the New Yorker. The article described in some detail his palette and his technique. It was extremely helpful to a novice painter.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, painting, sculpture | Leave a comment

Meaning vs. Making

Posted on November 2, 2019 by JMN

The “All Connected” show features Hans Haacke’s “Oil Painting: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers,” 1982, with a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Credit Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Vincent Tullo for The New York Times.

I do wish [the show’s curators] had enforced a bit more critical distance. Mr. Haacke, as each gallery proudly proclaims, has written every single wall label himself — which offers helpful context, but turns the show into an uncomfortable act of self-justification. The words put too much emphasis on what Mr. Haacke meant, and not what he actually made.

(Jason Farago, “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners “ NYTimes, 10-31-19)

Farago’s comment supports a bias of mine that an artist’s work may breathe more the less he verbalizes about it.

On a language note, this article acquaints me with the word “exudation,” a derivative from “exude,” meaning to ooze, as from a pore or wound.

… A giant flat-screen television displays the president’s most recent Twitter exudations….

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, language | 3 Comments

The History of Art, Minus Art

Posted on November 1, 2019 by JMN

Steve Martin with Synchromy by Stanton MacDonald-Wright, painted in 1917 and now held at MoMA. Photograph: BBC.

I want to find this slightly bizarre article interesting, but I’m distracted by astonishment that it does not show a single illustration of the work of the artists it discusses: Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Well, unless you count the headline photograph of Steve Martin pointing to an indistinct painting. Absent anything else to look at, make of the following what you will:

They soon began to believe that colour was just as important as music to people, and that a painting should simply celebrate this, without straining to represent real life… “In Paris they started working in this completely abstract way of painting,” Martin said. “They called it synchromism, which means ‘with colour’… Yet the pair’s claim to have invented their own school of painting was challenged later by other well-known European abstract artists, such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who argued that the Americans had copied their own ideas about the use of colour and shape, referred to as orphism… For Martin, though, the work of the synchromists has been undervalued as a result and it is time for a reappraisal… It is not necessary to understand the technical principles of synchromism, he argues, because the works still communicate… “I don’t generally care about theories. The result of working from a theory could be fantastic, but you don’t really need to know the theory to look at it.”

(Vanessa Thorpe, “The history of art… according to Steve Martin,” theguardian.com, 9-21-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged art, painting | 3 Comments

“We live without a future”

Posted on November 1, 2019 by JMN

Virginia Woolf: detail from her final session with a professional photographer, Gisèle Freund Photo: Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC.

Virginia Woolf’s house was destroyed by bombings in the Second World War. One of the last entries in her journals before her suicide has imagery that lacerates. She sounds almost bemused by the despair she conveys, as if observing it at arm’s length from outside herself, ever the writer even in contemplation of vanishing. Her penultimate jotting limns awfulness with simple, slamming force — begging the question: Has the future returned?

“A kind of growl behind the cuckoos and t’other birds. A furnace behind the sky. It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo. . . . We live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door.”

(Quoted by Erin Overbey, archive editor, The New Yorker, 10-30-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language | Leave a comment

Can a Lie Be “Unintentional”?

Posted on October 30, 2019 by JMN

The Independent.

I propose as a reflection on semantics that a lie, strictly speaking, cannot be “unintentional.” A lie must know itself to be such in the mind of the liar. Consider the following quotation:

“I am unquestionably, undoubtedly, the greatest human artist of all time. It’s not even a question at this point. It’s just a fact.”
— Kanye West

(Quoted in “Say What?” — G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury,” washingtonpost.com, 10-30-19)

Mr. West’s unquestionably droll assertion is a proper lie because if he is sane he knows it not to be true. In a play for attention he is posing as tip of the turdberg of mendacity that floats worldwide. Otherwise, he would melt into a cast of rivals seeking slots in the Olympiad of hubris by lathering copious blush on their snouts. I credit him with being more artful than that.

Mr. Muilenburg testified before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Credit Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times.

The case is different with Mark Forkner of Boeing.

The representatives [of the U.S. Congress] also questioned [Boeing chief executive Dennis A.] Muilenburg on messages by Mark Forkner, the plane’s chief technical pilot, who said in private messages during the plane’s development that he was having trouble with MCAS during simulator training and had unintentionally lied to regulators.

(David Gelles and Natalie Kitroeff, “Irate Lawmakers Confront Boeing C.E.O.,” NYTimes, 10-30-19)

By being under-informed about the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System” that augmented two 737 Max airliners out of the sky, Mr. Forkner apparently passed on bad information. He did not lie, however, because it was not his intention to do so (if he is to be believed). He misspoke out of ignorance. By analogy with the sliding scale of culpable killing applied by pettifoggers, it might be said that he contributed to manslaughter in the deaths of 346 people, but he did not negligently do so. The jury may still be out on his bosses.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, semantics | 1 Comment

Sequelae

Posted on October 29, 2019 by JMN

A poster for the “Joker” movie in Burbank, California. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

[“The existing Hollywood order, the current pop-cultural regime,”] is built, to an extent that would have been unfathomable even 20 years ago, on the commercial exploitation of what was once called “genre” entertainment — the comic-book movie especially, the Marvel empire above all, with a wider range of science fiction and fantasy blockbusters and sequelae around that superhero core.

(Ross Douthat, “Against the Superhero Regime,” NYTimes, 10-26-19)

Doff of the cap to Ross Douthat for teaching me the plural of “sequel.”

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, screen | 1 Comment

Get Thee to a Nonery

Posted on October 29, 2019 by JMN

Punning Ahead

Pew’s latest report found that nonbelievers are gaining ground fast. “Nones” — those with no particular religion — now account for more than one-quarter of the American population. There are substantially more nones than Catholics.

(Nicholas Kristoff, “We’re Less and Less a Christian Nation, and I Blame Some Blowhards,” NYTimes, 10-26-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, religion | Leave a comment

War and Art

Posted on October 26, 2019 by JMN

In this article about Hilma af Klint two themes draw my attention.

First, not having been clobbered by twentieth-century wars is a sad and sobering distinction to apply to a city.

While there is not currently any comprehensive display of af Klint’s abstract works in Sweden… I discovered… that it is possible to move around Stockholm… and connect with her life… and its artistic context… It helps that Stockholm was untouched by the destruction of 20th-century wars….

(Andrew Ferren, “In Search of Hilma af Klint, Who Upended Art History, But Left Few Traces,” NYTimes, 10-21-19)

Much of Stockholm still looks as it did in Hilma af Klint’s time, with ornate, low-rise buildings, many from the 19th century, and vessels darting to and fro on the city’s bustling waterways. Credit Erika Gerdemark for The New York Times.

An author whose name escapes me wrote some years ago in The Atlantic magazine that, although the twentieth century saw the advent of cars, planes and computers, what history will record most will be its wars.

Second, the report of persons bursting spontaneously into neutral tears (“neither happy nor sad”) upon viewing af Klint’s paintings is something to think about.

Iris Muller Westermann, who curated a 2013 af Klint exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet remembers leading tours “with very pulled-together bourgeois types who appeared completely in control of everything until they suddenly burst into tears. Neither happy nor sad, it was as if spending time with Hilma’s paintings spurred something inside them that needed an outlet.”

Hilma af Klint was the unexpected star of last year’s cultural calendar with a show at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum that set attendance records. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times.

Before shrugging off those bourgeois tears as not pulled-together, I reminded myself that only recently I got slightly soppy myself while describing to a friend the vocal stylings of Aretha Franklin in one of her songs. Art can spur.

Posted in Anthology, Quotations | Tagged art, language, music, painting | Leave a comment

Catch of the Day

Posted on October 25, 2019 by JMN

(Detail) Protesters in London on Saturday calling for a second referendum on Brexit. Credit Niklas Halle’N/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

I qualify only as a spectator to the Brexit scene; however, the informal allegory cited by Roger Cohen in his opinion piece travels well in other precincts.

As a British friend wrote me recently, “I’m just saying if I narrowly decided to order fish at a restaurant that was known for chicken, but said it was happy to offer fish, and so far I’ve been waiting three hours, and two chefs who promised to cook the fish had quit, and the third one is promising to deliver the fish in the next five minutes whether it’s cooked or not, or indeed still alive, and all the waiting staff have spent the last few hours arguing about whether I wanted battered cod, grilled salmon, jellied eels or dolphin kebabs, and if large parts of the restaurant appeared to be on fire but no one was paying attention to it because they were all arguing about fish, I would quite like, just once, to be asked if I definitely still wanted fish.”

(Roger Cohen, “An Election Is the Only Answer for Britain,” NYTimes, 10-23-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged allegory, Brexit | 3 Comments