Anger. That's number seven.

I always forget about anger. That really pisses me off.

Another question that I forgot to list is "What can I put on the wall above this piece of furniture so that I will feel a sensation of muted happiness when I walk through the door in the evening or out the door in the morning?"

And now for something completely different:

Linda Mitchell's subtle evocations of childhood and more than childhood in her new works at Mason Murer probably answer a whole bunch of questions at the same time. At least, that's what I think. Having watched Mitchell's work evolve over many years, I feel like she's attaining new and consistent heights as a serious artist, and doing it with nursery-style animals that are far more than merely cute, combined with archetypal arches that remind us of why arches are archetypes. Part of the appeal is that the symbols don't quite add up, or the cutesiness is undermined by some grotesquerie that doesn't quite belong there:



But when you see the work under less than optimum conditions, you don't trust your own judgment. Go look, and tell me whether I am an idiot.

sometimes I ask joculum questions on Counterforces and vice versa. I'm cool like that

A joculum thought for Counterforces



I have been thinking again about the tale regarding the man who showed up shabby-looking at a swank site, and then was treated shabbily by the staff. He tipped extravagantly on departure. Next visit, he was treated royally, and stiffed the staff on departure, remarking, “Last time, I rewarded you for this time. Now I am rewarding you for last time.”

It is not at all the same as Charles Williams’ Way of Exchange and certainly not like “paying it forward,” but it is good whenever a new way is found to disrupt the expectation of quid pro quo. Done rightly, the operation of exchange and preparation permits all parties to the transactions to observe the operations of their own lust, greed, pride, envy and what have you (gluttony, inertia and the seventh sin that I can never remember, but heedlessness or cluelessness makes a good substitute), and this is indisputably a good thing. For it is better to know when one previously did not know, and to understand in part in a way that one previously did not understand in part.

It's all about me. No, really. It is. And it's about you, too. But not about him or her. They can shove it.

We love the works of art that we do (as distinct from merely understanding the ones we don't love) because they answer the questions that we have.

Some of the most common questions are, "How can I replicate the feelings of contentment I had when I was a small child?" and "How can I get a really long-lasting emotional high without using illegal substances?" and "How can I invest my money in a way that will also increase my social standing with my peer group?" and "How can I be grossly self-indulgent while feeling that I am doing something that is worthwhile?"

Other questions include "How is it possible to portray a complex mathematical operation using only blocks of color?" and "How can I learn something real and also boost my sense of smug personal superiority at the same time?" and "How can I be less disgusting than the unsatisfactory creature that I ordinarily find myself being?" and "How can I learn that I am asking for answers to questions without knowing what it is that I am really asking for?" and "How can I learn that I usually ask two-thirds of these questions on the same day?" and "How can I learn that I ask the wrong questions, this one included?"

The answer to all of these questions is, "Art."

We never reach the realm of pure and unalloyed questions, much less answers. We shall always be self-aggrandizing two-year-olds learning how to solve ever more complex equations.

But we have the option of learning how to ask a wider and more self-aware variety of questions. And then we have at least the possibility of a few better answers.

Or at least we have the option of looking every once in a while at some better art.

worlds in collision...fortunately, not Velikovsky's or the other guys'

Looking at some books by local authors I have never been able to get into (we have some globalization theorists at Emory like Frank J. Lechner and John Boll who have written books on the topic and co-edited the 2003 Blackwell anthology The Globalization Reader), I have been reminded of how many autonomous areas of discourse (as the academics like to call them) exist to describe exactly the same phenomena.

And the fields of discourse themselves generate phenomena, as with the artworlds in which power and money are exchanged and the art itself is written about in the global magazines, versus the many others that are barely described but that function as limited scenes of aesthetic and commercial action, and the ones that are never described but are sustained by carefully directed hype and/or commercial need.

Lechner and Boll seem particularly committed to some areas of theory I haven't thought of in a while ("macroanthropology" being a case in point). Their take on the implications of the civil aviation system links them to the impressionistic (lovely impressions) studies of Pico Iyer on the lives lived until recently by the economic classes for whom "flying across oceans has become a mundane routine" rather than the once-in-a-lifetime experience it sometimes is for those emigrants who don't have to sneak across lightly defended borders at night. (There was a recent artwork in a global exhibition that commented on the alternate phenomenon, the forcible-deportation flights that the world's airlines do not advertise.)

Lechner and Boll belabor points that I wouldn't care to make, personally, but it is a reminder that what is commonplace (and has been since age twenty-three) for some people is completely never-thought-of-before for others. They feel compelled to begin with the point, for example, that while "extraordinary events like the Olympic Games" and the more ordinary events of world commerce exemplify world culture, all sorts of seemingly local enterprises such as a chess club already depend on a network of previously agreed-upon global structures. (I would say that they always have, the problematics of cultural hybridization dating back at least to the rise of world trade networks some time in the Late Neolithic.)

I'm still not sure that World Culture: Origins and Consequence asks the questions that I want to have answered—though I would need to read it closely to answer that question; though Lechner and Boll are serious theorists asking serious and valid questions, and do include many of the authors in their bibliography that I would want to see cited in such a book as this 2005 effort that has sat for a couple of years in my To Be Read Someday pile.

It is as Thomas Pynchon wrote in his Proverbs for Paranoids, if They can get you to ask the wrong questions, They don't have to worry about answers. But it is the fact that the world culture that they address is an actual entity at such right angles to the one I want to address that has got me to thinking.

International bureaucratic structures impose all sorts of implicit categories, as in the UNESCO lists of sites worthy of historic preservation...all of them more than exemplary and important to save for the sake of our common human inheritance, but somehow the very act of categorization creates the sort of artificial perspective that obscures as much as it enlightens.

For example, the plunder that has traveled around the world in the wake of invasions from time immemorial has as often preserved objects as it has destroyed them...and even this preservation has come under discussion, as in the case of Oceanic artifacts that were meant to rot but were carried off to museums instead. Museums in the countries involved own no such artifacts because the ones left on site decayed as they were intended. Yet there are now those in the countries in question who would like to get a few examples of what the local curators themselves no longer believe in, having gone on to prefer other cultural ways of organization instead.

And some philosophers of global culture such as Kwame Anthony Appiah have argued that instead of gathering up all the, say, Benin bronzes in West Africa it would be good to distribute Benin bronzes to museums in Greece and France that don't have any and send a few Greek vases and French medieval madonnas to museums in Africa with insufficient acquisition budgets.

But such issues maintain the salaries of a fair number of bureaucrats as well as museum curators and university professors, and the worlds in contention are seldom those of the folks on the ground who would like to have some say in what their local museum has or doesn't have. (Sometimes, those folks want to burn down or bulldoze the local museum, and that is a separate issue. As is the issue of whether the world's historic legacy ought to disappear into private collections as wantonly as the output of the world's art fairs currently does, or used to before at least a few collectors started prioritizing between buying paintings and keeping their private airplanes. I look forward to the ongoing reports in world newspapers from the various global art venues as 2009 continues.)

and by now you are happy that this is part three of a three-part post: on the Neues Museum and others

Michael Kimmelman’s architecture review on David Chipperfield’s renovation of Berlin’s Neues Museum [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/arts/design/12abroad.html ] brings back memories of one of the exactly two press tours on which I have ever been invited—or, rather, in this case, not invited.

Actually, the High Museum invited editors and salaried art writers from around the nation to be their guests on a December 1989 press tour of Berlin in conjunction with Gudmund Vigtel’s magisterial historical survey of “Art in Berlin.” (Being only a freelancer and a second-tier editor, I had not expected to be invited. Such invitations are for the elect, not the preterite. The one exception, for which I shall be eternally grateful, being the 2007 press tour to Glenfiddich's Artists in Residence exhibition, for which I have never been able to recompense William Grant & Sons with any degree of adequacy...even though I thought the residency program was a daring idea, which the corporate bean-counters may have been trying without success to kill. Some of them certainly disagreed with the notion that artists should be invited to hang out in Scotland and make art instead of advertising. I have occasionally written in this journal about this and about 2007 resident artist Romeo Alaeff, whose socially and politically charged work may have surprised many. But I digress.)

Getting back to Berlin 1989: My dear colleague the late Mildred Thompson, who at that time was reportedly the only African-American serving as a member of an art magazine’s senior editorial staff, went to the Goethe-Institut and got the both of us sponsored as a two-person freelance Parallel Action that served as subversive shadow to the authorized press junket, with which I kept crossing paths by accident.

Mildred and I pursued independent professional itineraries from our respective spare-bedroom bases of operation (mutual friends had helped us couch-surf avant le lettre in widely separated neighborhoods. My chosen way into East Berlin via Friedrichstraße station led straight to the Museum Island, where I was stunned to see evidence of reconstruction on the New Museum. It had remained a bombed-out ruin while Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Old Museum had been painstakingly restored and filled with appropriate exhibitions. I snapped lots of pictures of the cordoned-off structure, since my official reason for going was to write about architecture (which I did, at length, including discussions of hypothetical building designs by Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind that were unrelated to later actually constructed projects).

Kimmelman now explains that the German Democratic Republic had undertaken a restoration just before German unification, but it required new funding and Chipperfield’s sensitive redesign to finish the decades-delayed job. And he has left the ruins in place where it was possible, while incorporating them into a fully contemporary museum building in which, as Kimmelman writes, “the new parts ... look clearly new, the old, old, while the two go together gracefully.”

This is an elegant departure from the postwar tendency in so much of war-ravaged Europe to create a sort of Disney World of architecture in which one thinks one is seeing a meticulously and miraculously preserved building until one sees, in photographs of the site, how few stones or bricks were left standing upon one another circa 1945. Friedrich August Stüler’s 1855 building didn’t have the cachet of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s legendary design for the Old Museum, and Stüler's New Museum has gotten little enough respect in the sixty-five or so years since its devastation. Maybe this will get it a little fresh attention, if not indeed a new respect.

It had long struck me as painfully appropriate that some of the large-scale plunder (or effort at preservation) of German archaeologists was cemented into the wall in the Neues Museum, such that the Chinese murals in question couldn’t be removed for safekeeping like the rest of the ancient art. Looking in West Berlin at the fragments of Buddhist and Nestorian paintings from the Silk Road, I wondered what scraps and fragments, if any, still adhered to the New Museum’s ruins.

If I ever have the resources to get to Berlin again, which I strongly doubt, I suppose I shall have the chance to find out. Chipperfield used every scrap of the original building that could be adapted to the reconstructed and renovated one.

a further note regarding Samuel Beckett: part two of a three-part post

In case you wonder why, apart from the presence of two authors so world-famous that an enormous number of Atlantans have read them, a performance of the early letters of Samuel Beckett (being published by Cambridge as an international project under the aegis of the Emory University graduate school) might be of interest, I offer this extract from Gabriel Josipovici’s review essay in the TLS:

“’My dear McGreevy, The abominable old bap Russell duly returned my MSS with an economic note in the 3rd person, the whole in a considerably understamped envelope. I feel slightly paralysed by the courtesy of this gesture. I would like to get rid of the damn thing anyhow, anywhere (with the notable exception of “transition”), but I have no acquaintance with the less squeamish literary garbage buckets. I can’t imagine Eliot touching it – certainly not the verse. Perhaps Seumas O’Sullivan’s rag would take it? If you think of an address I would be grateful to know it.’

“This [extract from one of Beckett’s early letters] might remind readers of two other ambitious and irreverent young men writing to each other for support and to try out their literary skills: Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. But what follows certainly will not. After quoting two lines of Dante in Italian to make the point that his sunburn makes sleep impossible, Beckett goes on to comment on Proust, whom he was reading with a view to fulfilling a commission to write a short book on him:

“’I have read the first volume of “Du Côté de chez Swann”, and find it strangely uneven. There are incomparable things – Bloch, Françoise, Tante Léonie, Legrandin, and then passages that are offensively fastidious, artificial and almost dishonest . . . . His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore’s, but no less profuse, a maudlin false-teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. He drank too much tilleul. And to think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!’

“This ability to tear into what he dislikes but not let it blind him to what is admirable in a work or artist would remain typical of Beckett.”

I am tempted to go far beyond fair use (but it’s all available online in any case: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5885981.ece ) as I discover fresh joys in Josipovici’s essay (in this passage, I've altered for American sensibilities one jarring anglicism):

“At some point in the 1930s Beckett toyed with the idea of becoming an art dealer. His comments on works of art are therefore slightly different from those on music and literature. He spends hours in the National Gallery in Dublin, relaying to McGreevy (who was himself to become, in time, Director of that gallery) what the new Director has done with the rehang and commenting in detail, especially on his beloved Dutch and Flemish masters. In London it is the same with the National Gallery, and in Paris he often drops into the Louvre to examine this or that work or artist he has grown interested in, duly reporting his impressions back to McGreevy. Among the most surprising and fascinating letters are those Beckett sent back to family and friends when he undertook a six-month trip to Germany, from September 1936 to April 1937, specifically in order to study the art on view there. He travelled from Hamburg to Berlin via Hanover and Brunswick, to Leipzig, Dresden and on to Munich via Bamberg and Nuremberg. Everywhere he went he tried to see all that was on show and much that wasn’t, for under the Nazis much art was starting to be withdrawn as “decadent”. Beckett badgered directors to give him access to these pictures in the vaults, and made friends with (usually Jewish) patrons and collectors, who invited him to their houses and introduced him to some of the banned artists. The weather was bitter; Beckett was depressed both by his health and by what he saw happening to Germany; finally, exhausted, abandoning plans to visit Stuttgart and Frankfurt, he flew home. The letters not only tell us a great deal about Beckett, but form an invaluable record of the state of German museums and art galleries in the 1930s, and include descriptions of paintings, by artists from Signorelli to Van Gogh, which have since disappeared, the victims of Nazi looting or Allied bombing.

“By the end of the decade friends were showing him pictures they had purchased with queries about provenance and authentication. But Beckett could no more become an art dealer than he could become a lecturer in French, a commercial pilot, a student of Eisenstein or any of the other careers he briefly toyed with but either resigned from when they became a reality, or simply left to drift in the realm of possibility.”

And by a lovely coincidence, that bit about “victims of Nazi looting or Allied bombing” segues into my final topic of the day, Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times essay today on the reopening of Berlin’s Neues Museum.

architecture, news reporting, and all that: part one of a three-part post

The morning’s New York Times (March 12, 2009) contains the typical spread of articles regarding the momentous set of shifts in sensibility and organization through which global culture is currently going.

The abrupt inability of newspapers to earn their keep is one of the most obvious and immediate of such shifts. As has been pointed out by, most recently, James DeLong (http://american.com/archive/2009/february-2009/preparing-the-obituary), the problem is one of business models rather than consumer wishes: people need information, and the information needs to be compiled and analyzed by someone, but someone has to pay the expenses of doing so, and right now the major means of information retrieval are in the hands of clever mammals getting a free ride on the backs of the perishing dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, as happened in the great disruptive extermination to which I’ve alluded, we may end up with an era in which the shifts change the very color of the geologic strata before and after, but in which it takes a few hundred lifetimes before the new operators evolve sufficiently to get it right.

Culture, of course, evolves more rapidly than biology, but the analogy sometimes turns out to be disconcertingly exact: there is a huge amount of exploring evolutionary dead ends, wastage of unexplored opportunity, and, as Walter Benjamin said of history, an immense piling up of wreckage. No wonder his Angel of History looks with dismay at the junk pile heaping up behind him as he is swept backwards into a future that he cannot see. He knows exactly how to fix things, if only he could jump over there on his own just a little and rearrange the wrack and ruin.

Atlanta is one of the cities being served poorly by the information gathering technology for which people are willing to pay anything. The blogs and the websites being maintained by various public-spirited folk at their own expense and on their own time do the best that they can, but in the best of economic times the city has never shown much inclination to treat the arts as anything but a marginal enterprise, slightly more suspect than pop culture because fewer people are willing to drop their extra dollars on them. “The arts,” as a certain elected official said some years ago, “are, by definition, self-sustaining.” (He then disproved his thesis by mounting a very elaborate exhibition that was unable to earn back its own expenses.)

These days, the result of unsystematic information distribution is that people don’t even get to know about the free events they might like to attend.

Some, such as the public performance of extracts from Samuel Beckett’s letters by the writers Edward Albee and Salman Rushdie and the Atlanta actors Brenda Bynum and Robert Shaw-Smith, one would like to keep a secret because one would like to get a seat. (And for those of you in Atlanta reading this before Saint Patrick’s Day, given the parking situation and my tendency towards early exhaustion, I would happily accept the offer of a ride from downtown Decatur.)

Other recent events, such as Kemp Mooney’s lecture last night at the central Atlanta public library, also illustrate the need for analysis and contextualization. I read the evite and made note of it, though in the end I was too fatigued to get on MARTA and go. Only this morning did I realize how many people may not have been on the e-mail list who might have filled the auditorium to overflowing.

A systematically edited website that readers check as regularly as they once did the daily newspaper would have offered a nuanced discussion of the issues that probably were raised by this distinguished longtime Atlanta architect commenting on the design of Marcel Breuer’s building. It was a historic occasion, both because of the insufficiently appreciated nature of the building and the person offering the perspective (with the added attraction of the opportunity to see parts of the structure not ordinarily open to library patrons).

That Atlanta has one of I. M. Pei’s first buildings and Marcel Breuer’s last illustrates the city’s tendency to be ahead of or behind the curve but all too rarely directly on it. We get the work of the soon-to-be-famous because we like quality, as long as it’s cheap; and we get the work of some of the supremely famous because we like to bask in reflected glory, so long as everybody knows that it is glory. If nobody local knows that the person is supremely famous, why spend the money?

It’s a town where the only thing that counts is what you did last week, or actually more like last night or last lunchtime, so the incentive to hire the best to do anything except for the prestige value just isn’t there. A city capable of repeatedly revisiting the possible demolition of another of its famous library buildings, designed only a quarter-century ago by two of its most celebrated architects, continues to illustrate why some of its most successful publications have been those that print photographs of the people who attended last month’s gala rather than the people who made possible the past decade or so of culture.

And since this is a city that focuses on what happened last week (which, apart from the nineteenth century, is what it considers history) and on what is going to happen tomorrow (because next week is too far away to think about…as Scarlett O’Hara famously said, we’ll think about that tomorrow)…why then, oughtn’t there to be a better way of analyzing and disseminating the information about what is going to happen tomorrow?

Locals who read this weblog a week from now will already have missed not one but both of the events to which I have referred. (Assuming the event at the library actually happened…I’ve not confirmed that independently…and assuming that nothing interrupts the scheduled course of next week’s history in the interim.)