Category: The Arts

From Orlando Ribas:

From Abhishek in India.

From dsr.

Here is one notice.  I regard his The Buru Quartet as, after Orwell, the great political novel of the twentieth century.  At a deeper level it concerns different notions of what a life consists of.  As you read each volume, your understanding of what has come before shifts radically.  Most of it he wrote while in prison.  Of the living writers he was my "no brainer" pick for a Nobel Prize.  Here are other notices of his death.

The videos are great but according to the Washington Post, Hubbard was being impersonated.

Here are images by a few painters I like:

Feng Zhengjie

Fu Hong

He Sen, who seems to only paint women smoking.

Li Dafang

Wang Xingwei

Zhang Xiaogang

Shi Xinning reminds me of Mark Tansey.  Try his Christo’s Temple of Heaven, Pride and Prejudice, or Chairman Mao in Vegas.  Here is his Duchamp painting, which of course is also about the Chinese fascination with capitalism:

The value of “accountability” is often counterproductive when applied to direct subsidies for art. To be sure, accountability is critically important in many contexts. For instance CEOs should be accountable to shareholders. But we do not stress accountability in every sphere of human activity. For instance, tenured college professors are not (usually) accountable to university administrators for the content of their ideas. Instead we believe that an ethic of academic freedom will best promote the mission of the university. Supreme Court Justices are not accountable for the content of their decisions, although Congress may respond by passing new laws, or the Constitution may be amended.

Along these lines, direct subsidies stand the greatest chance of making a positive difference when they are insulated from many pressures of accountability. We should return to the stylized facts about artistic discovery, namely that there are many failures for every success. Too much direct accountability causes the funder to be excessively afraid of failure. This limits risk-taking and in the longer run limits the number of successes. Accountability works best when the quality of the average outcome is a good indicator of the tails of the distribution; this is not generally the case with the arts.

By the way, here is the last paragraph of the book:

Given that so much of the aesthetic is hidden, what appears to be the subordination of poetry to philosophy is an illusion, albeit a creativity-enhancing illusion. Rather than subordinating poetry to philosophy, at most I have subordinated the public conception of art to philosophy. Poetry remains secure in its diverse and hidden niches, and indeed is healthiest when philosophy directs the public conception of art toward a regime of markets, indirect subsidies, and decentralization. In this sense we can put philosophy at the service of art, and not at war with it. I wish to overturn the victory that Socrates pretended to award to philosophy over poetry, and to paint an alternative vision of the broader compatibility between the two enterprises.

Of course, in dreaming of arriving on butterfly wings, Bonnard could
not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operate in a
commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairs and
museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter
endless objects once and mostly never again. This, the artist and
writer Art Spiegelman pointed out to me recently, may be the biggest
change in art during the last half-century or so: that more and more
artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day
in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or
museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby’s attention without
needing to be experienced twice.

Here is the story, which is about the new Bonnard exhibit in Paris.

Often governments support the arts best when they are intent on some other purpose:

The very existence of government jobs subsidizes the arts. Even in the best of times, most writers find it difficult to make a living from book sales alone. Many accept government jobs, hoping they will have time to pursue their own projects. Bureaucracy, despite its deadening effects, stimulates creativity by creating a realm of personal freedom for many employees.

William Faulkner worked for a time as postmaster at the University of Mississippi postal station. He called his section of the post office the "reading room." Nathaniel Hawthorne worked in a customs house, after failing to get a postmaster job. Walt Whitman revised his Leaves of Grass while working for the Department of the Interior, although his superior fired him because he regarded the book as immoral. Herman Melville worked in a customs house as well, although not at the time of his greatest literary productivity. William Charvat estimated that between 1800 and 1875, 60 to 75 percent of American male writers "who even approached professionalism either held public office or tried to get it." 

The role of government jobs is no less prominent in the history of literature more generally. Chaucer was a career public servant, Dante pursued politics, Goethe was a bureaucrat for much of his life, and Anthony Trollope held a job in the postal service, during which time he wrote most of his sixty novels. William Wordsworth, Daniel Defoe, and the Roman poet Horace worked as tax collectors. Jonathan Swift was clergy in a tax-supported church. Stendahl worked in the Napoleonic bureaucracy. In the social sciences, Adam Smith worked in the customs house and Edward Gibbon was a member of Parliament and lord of trade.

It is a moot point whether we should count prison as a government "job," but many notable literary works have been written in enforced confinement, most notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Prison literature has been a growing genre in the United States since at least the 1960s. A longer list of incarcerated writers includes Boethius, Villon, Thomas More, Campanella, Walter Raleigh, Donne, Richard Lovelace, Bunyan, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Thoreau, Melville, Leigh Hunt, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Genet, O. Henry, Robert Lowell, Brendan Behan, Chernyeshevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.

I don’t have to tell you whose book that is from.  I wrote it, of course, while working for a state university.

The most common benchmark uses “peaks” to compare one culture to another. Government funding is praised, for instance, for having supported Bach, Velàzquez, and Edmund Spenser. The same invocation of peaks has been used to compare “the moderns” to “the ancients.” We might ask what modern composer compares to Beethoven or what modern poem measures up to Homer’s Odyssey. Or we might ask "Which age has produced the best symphony?"

Why should the greatness of the best composer, or the best poet, be the relevant unit for judging a culture? What if one culture (modernity?) produces lesser creative titans, but produces many more of them? How are we to weigh the quality of the peak versus quantity of the total?

It is also an open question what is the right unit for judging a peak. Instead of looking at the highest peaks, we could judge an era by how good its "one hundred best composers" are, or by the aesthetic worth of its “best five thousand hours of music.” Or consider a peak of a different kind: “How many excellent musical genres does an age have?” By these standards, contemporary times fare better, vis-à-vis the era of Beethoven, than if we just compare the best composer from each period. We have many talented composers today, in many different musical fields, even though today’s best composer is not the equal of Beethoven.

Why the focus on a single artistic work and its greatness? Mozart’s Don Giovanni has musical beauty, terror, comedy, and a sense of the sublime, making it a favorite of opera connoisseurs. But what if consumers draw their comedy from one work, their terror from another, their beautiful music from yet another, and so on? Artistic peaks typically bundle qualities together. Yet arguably a world with unbundled qualities is superior, since it allows consumers to pick and choose how much of each quality they want, and from which source.

We cite “peaks” when making an aesthetic assessment because they are relatively easy to observe and talk about. Few individuals know much about eighteenth century culture except for its peaks. But the peaks standard remains incomplete. The notion of a peak does not correspond to how much aesthetic value is produced in an era or to how much that value is enjoyed.

That is from my Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.  Comments are open…

Ah, to be on the road again…  Most of my reporting from Louisiana will likely appear in another venue (links in due time); for now you must be content with these notes:

1. Favorite song: King Porter Stomp, by Jelly Roll Morton.  I didn’t think about this one much, though many Louis Armstrong songs are fair contenders.  To sort through music more generally would take hours.  In addition to jazz, Cajun music, zydeco, and "swamp pop," there is Jerry Lee Lewis, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Lucinda Williams, and yes Britney Spears.

2. Movie, set in: Southern Comfort remains underrated.  Interview with the Vampire was better than expected.  Water Boy has a few funny jokes.  There is also Streetcar Named Desire (not my thing), Big Easy, The Drowning Pool, The Apostle, and last but not least The Blob was filmed in Abbeville. 

3. Writer: I don’t much like Truman Capote, though I can see he was important at the time.  John Kennedy Toole is a good pick, don’t forget Kate Chopin, plus I will confess a weakness for the best of Anne Rice; Witching Hour and Lasher are my favorites.  Elmore Leonard rounds out a strong category, and I am likely forgetting some notables.

4. Artist: John James Audobon did some of his work in Louisiana, plus he was born in Haiti.  Does that count?  Clementine Hunter is one pick from the Naives.  Here is another picture by her.

5. Dish: Boudin blanc or peppered, boiled crayfish.  Overall I prefer the simple rural food to the New Orleans Creole style and its heavier roux-based sauces. 

6. Architecture: There are many wonders, try this typical and not even extraordinary house from the Garden District.

The bottom line: Riches await you here.

You can’t enjoy the bread if the rioters have cut off the path to the bakery.

Robert Schwartz in the comments section of my post, Le problème du pain.

It feels like an eon since I have traveled, plus I have been at home with the sniffles and a nasty cough.  So here goes:

1. Music: Right off the bat we are in trouble.  Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News but she is overrated (overly mannered and too self-consciously pandering to the crowd).  We do have Patsy Cline and Maybelle Carter, the latter was an awesome guitar player and a precursor of John Fahey, not to mention the mother of June Carter.

2. Writer: There is Willa Cather, William Styron, and the new Thomas Wolfe.  Cather moved at age ten to Nebraska.  Some of you might sneak Poe into the Virginia category, but in my mind he is too closely linked to Baltimore.  If you count non-fiction, add Booker T. Washington to the list.

3. Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Person: I have to go with Helen Keller.  If you choose her for "20 Questions," no one will hit upon her category.

4. Movie, set in.  The first part of Silence of the Lambs is set in Quantico, Virginia.  No Way Out, starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner, is set in DC and around the Pentagon.

5. Artist: Help!  Can you do better than Sam Snead?  George Caleb Bingham was born here, but I identify him with Missouri.

6. The Presidents.  I’ll pick Washington as the best, simply because he had a successor, and Madison as the best political theorist.  Jefferson’s writings bore me and Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst Presidents we have had.

The bottom line: Maybe you are impressed by the Presidents, but for a state so old, it makes a pretty thin showing.  It has lacked a strong blues tradition, a major city, and has remained caught up in ideals of nobility and Confederacy. 

There are three lectures, available here.  Here is a previous post on Galenson, here is basic background on his work on the time path of creative achievement within artists’ lives.  Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the pointer.