American Dream Nicked

Posted on September 26, 2019 by JMN
golden toilet

The golden toilet made by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Credit Tom Lindboe, via Blenheim Art Foundation.

Someone recently stole a solid gold toilet from an exhibit at Blenheim Palace, the family home of Winston Churchill. Its Italian creator named it “America.” The toilet was functional. Its theft “caused significant damage and flooding.”

Dominic Hare, the chief executive of Blenheim Palace, said he hoped the art piece would be recovered… “It is deeply ironic that a work of art portraying the American dream and the idea of an elite object made available to all should be almost instantly snatched away and hidden from view,” he said.
(Kaly Soto, “Going, Golden, Gone: 18-Carat Toilet Is Stolen,” NYTimes, 9-14-19)

Really? The American dream is a golden crapper? If the elite object is recovered, I suggest it find a permanent home in the Churchill family “palace.” Dreams are for sharing.

(c) 2019 JMN

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

Possum Mechanics

Posted on September 15, 2019 by JMN
quantum

Alejandro Guijarro, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London.

Max Planck invented the term “quantum,” writes Deepak Chopra, a professor of family medicine and public health, in a letter to the NYTimes. He quotes a 1931 interview with The Observer of London in which Planck said, “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

Google riffs on “quantum” as “a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents.”

I have coined the term “possum” to mean “a discrete quantity of possible understanding proportional in magnitude to the clarity of the assertion it measures.”

Sean Carroll, in “Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics” (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, Sept. 7), asks whether consciousness is somehow involved in our observations of the world. How could it not be?… Physics… went down a path that either took consciousness for granted or shrugged it off as part of our fickle, subjective world… [A] new generation of physicists is open to the notion that you cannot get around consciousness. I’d say it’s about time.
(“From Deepak Chopra: You Can’t Get Around Consciousness,” 9-15-19)

The possum of understanding I receive from Dr. Chopra would be augmented in magnitude if he defined “consciousness,” and also mentioned exactly what he intuits so clearly that the physicists have missed.

(c) 2019 JMN

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

When Is Kill Not “Over”?

Posted on September 15, 2019 by JMN
dystopia

Samplerman.

The illustration made me read this essay by Michelle Goldberg (“Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours,” NYTimes, 9-14-19). On first glance, the picture’s Dairy Queen Blizzard ™ of cartoon imagery made me grumpy. Whatever it purports to symbolize, I thought, this illustration is overkill.

So I read the essay, and the illustration wasn’t. The topic is grim, but the language Goldberg unleashes is upscale and anomalously bracing. The illustration aptly evokes the cacophony she pillories.

She mentions the “salvific” potential of words.

She introduces me to a mock Latin phrase, “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” Like most mock language, it needs little translating.

She refers to a reality that “feels as if it’s disintegrating under the weight of digital simulacra and epistemological nihilism [my emphasis].

American journalism traditionally targets a sixth-grade reading level so as not to leave too many in the lurch. This piece, however, flouts tradition. Whereas I’m often guilty of using words as shields, Goldberg uses them as swords. They’re “elite” words, yes — but penetrative, and wielded unflinchingly.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Twice Broken

Posted on September 14, 2019 by JMN
kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “White House in Sertig Valley,” 1926. Credit via Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.

Roberta Smith describes Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as “the best and most versatile of the German Expressionists.”

Like many 20th-century German painters, Kirchner was twice broken, by World I, which resulted in his nervous breakdown, and the rise of Hitler, which ultimately drove him to suicide in 1938.
(Roberta Smith, “Modernism Reboots at the Museums — ‘Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’,” NYTimes, 9-13-19)

Smith mentions Kirchner’s “joltingly innovative color” and his “exuberantly jagged line.” These contributed to the “acidifying” of his images of modern life, she writes.

That captures some of what I admire in his “White House in Sertig Valley” (1926).

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A Pioneer Gallerist

Posted on September 14, 2019 by JMN
jacob lawrence

Jacob Lawrence “The Music Lesson,” from the “Harlem Series,” 1943. Credit The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; New Jersey State Museum.

In 1926, Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), an émigré from Ukraine, opened the Downtown Gallery on West 13th Street. It was the first gallery in Greenwich Village and she was the city’s first female gallerist… Horace Pippin, Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler and Georgia O’Keeffe were among the many others she showed. Intent on reaching everyday people and selling them art — on the installment plan if needed — Halpert was looked down on by male dealers.
(Roberta Smith, “Modernism Reboots at the Museums — Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art,” NYTimes, 9-13-19)

Ms. Halpert gave African-American artist Jacob Lawrence his first show, “the famed ‘Migration’ series.” I’m drawn to his painting called “The Music Lesson” (1943) for the contrast between the extremely stylized figures of teacher and pupil and the meticulous depiction of the piano and the music they are playing.

(c) 2019 JMN

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

Grisaille

Posted on September 14, 2019 by JMN
amy sherald

Artwork by Amy Sherald in her solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, clockwise from top left: “A single man in possession of a good fortune,” 2019; “The girl next door,” 2019; “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be (Self-imagined atlas),” 2018; and “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” 2019. Credit Artwork via Amy Sherald and Hauser & Wirth.

Roberta Smith situates artist Amy Sherald within a group of youngish painters

… who have broken with, absorbed or simply ignored modernist abstraction. Instead, they work with the figure as a way of reaching broader audiences; dealing with issues of identity, gender and sexuality… The many African-American artists working in this vein are also dismantling Western painting’s racial homogeneity, populating it as never before with images of black people.
(Roberta Smith, “Amy Sherald’s Shining Second Act,” NYTimes, 9-12-19)

Smith describes Sherald’s paintings as

… startlingly spare… paintings of confident, black people whose stylish clothes and backdrops contrast with their faces, which are uniformly grisaille… She also uses grisaille, she has said, because she wants to take race out of her paintings.

And yet for all that they are grayed, Sherald’s subjects are unmistakably African-American. And that seems to be an essential aspect of her art, the part she professes to take out.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Worry: An Original Poem

Posted on September 13, 2019 by JMN
dream

“Wet Dream,” by D. English.

It’s said worrying about the future is paying interest on a debt not owed. Yet, who worries about the past? The essence of worry is that it targets the unhappened.

Do not worry about Bahamians in Dorian’s path. Their flesh is being scraped from the shambles of huts. Worry about the pain when Nature eats your gizzard.

Do not worry about the Amazon burning. The environment is over. Worry about how your grandkids will fare in the competition for water and oxygen.

Do not worry about the Confederate flag. It flew. Worry about how it may fly in the hearts of the unborn.

Do not worry about disgracing yourself last night. It’s done. Worry about where the commas should go in something you haven’t written yet:

Here, here, and sometimes, here,…

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Anthology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sashaying Words

Posted on September 9, 2019 by JMN
Adverbs Ahead

Jargon Ahead

As a linguist I collect jargon from exotic domains such as counterpoint, quantum mechanics, cricket — and now, children’s drag. The topic has surfaced in a current article by Alice Hines: “Sashaying Their Way Through Youth,” NYTimes, 9-8-19.

I’m currently processing the following data points:

Queen Lactatia, Desmond Is Amazing, Ophelia Peaches, and E! The Dragnificent are drag kids with substantial Instagram followings. They are 10-, 12-, 14- and 14-years-old respectively. Desmond Is Amazing wants to be an ornithologist or roller-coaster engineer when he grows up.

Ophelia Peaches‘s mom founded Dragutante, an 18-and-under runway show, in Denver.

There are girls who also do drag, known as hyperqueens.

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Nearly Inexplicable Love

Posted on September 9, 2019 by JMN
molly ivins

Molly Ivins in 2001. Credit Carolyn Mary Bauman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via AP.

I used to think that her Professional Texan act was just that, but I see now that it was also a way to show that we Texans were all in it together, and that the things that united us — our expressiveness and expansiveness, our culture and our nearly inexplicable love of a nearly uninhabitable place — were more important than our divisions.
(Mimi Swartz, “This Texan Showed That Liberals Can Fight and Have Fun, Too,” NYTimes, 9-8-19)

Molly Ivins was a Texas journalist and political commentator who died in 2007. She is the subject of a new documentary, “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.”

(c) 2019 JMN

Posted in Anthology, Quotations | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Arcadia for Straw

Posted on September 9, 2019 by JMN
orkney chairs

Iterations, from left, of the New Craftmen’s Brodgar chair (an unfinished lounge chair and a dining chair) next to traditional chairs on Mainland, Orkney. Credit Sophie Gerrard.

One can understand a place by what its people make… Locals [from Orkney] have a special relationship with straw, which they have long used for everything from roofing and bedding to shelving, rainwear and furniture. Perhaps the most famous local product is the original Orkney chair: a winglike seat with a tall curved back, sometimes with a hood, made from coiled and woven straw and a frame of reclaimed timber. The shape provided warmth in winter and served as a wind block inside drafty houses. “I love that the most humble of materials, like straw, can become immensely precious and useful in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing,” says [Catherine Lock co-founder of New Craftsmen, a London gallery].
(Deborah Needleman, “The Windswept Scottish Islands Producing Beautiful Artisanal Goods,” 9-9-19)

And I love that persons from Orkney are called Orcadians.

(c) 2019 JMN

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