Category: The Arts

Donald Pittenger offers some observations on how to visit or walk through a museum.  Here are my tips:

1. In every room ask yourself which picture you would take home (if you could take just one) and why.  This forces you to keep thinking critically about what you are seeing.  More crudely, you have to keep on paying attention.

2. Almost all museums (MOMA is one exception) hang large numbers of second-rate paintings by first-rate artists.  Try to find them.  Don’t think it is all great, it isn’t.

3. You are probably better trained at shopping than looking at pictures.  Do some basic research on prices and pretend you are shopping for pictures on a budget.  This will improve the quality of your viewing.

4. Go with a variety of people (but not all at once).  It forces you to see the art through their eyes. 

5. If you are visiting a blockbuster exhibit, skip room number one.  There is too much human traffic, as the people have not yet admitted to themselves they don’t care about what is on the wall. 

A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don’t just love "art for art’s sake."  You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image.  It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you.  Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going.  This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.

Comments are open, in case you have further suggestions for how to visit a museum.

Having once spent a year living in Wellington, this one is easy:

1. Movie and movie director – Forget Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, I’ll opt for Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, where a group of medieval peasants suddenly emerges in late twentieth century Auckland.  Ward’s Map of the Human Heart might count as Canadian, but I love its surrealistic treatment of love and memory.  What Dreams May Come is sappy in parts but has Robin Williams doing a serious take on Bergman and Dante, doesn’t that sound strange?  Note that this category is especially strong – for instance Andrew Niccol directed the underrated Gattaca.

2. Music – The Kiwis have many good indie bands but Split Enz is the peak, buy their greatest hits.  Otherwise I’ll nominate the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, if only for their name.

3. Fiction – Keri Hulme’s The Bone People or Janet Frame’s autobiography are both first-rate, catch the movie too.

4. Painter – Umm…things slow down a bit here.  The obvious pick is Colin McCahon, here are some images.  Here is my favorite, but I will admit some lameness in the category overall.

5. Food – Fish and chips is to New Zealand as barbecue is to Texas — tops in the world.  The best places are owned by Greeks.  New Zealand is also a first-rate locale for Malay, Cambodian, and Burmese cuisines.

6. City – Wellington is for me the single most beautiful city in the world, make sure you go to the lookout on Mount Victoria, here is alas only part of the panorama.  Wellington is also full of lovely Victorian homes.  I will Napier as an underrated second, here is some Art Deco, the city center was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1920s and rebuilt in that style.

The problem? I like New Zealanders so much, I wish there were many more of them.  Here is a brief photo tour, if you haven’t already decided to go. 

Machu Picchu illustrates the real estate adage, location, location, location.  Everywhere you look you are assaulted by beauty.  For the mathematicians, MP sits on a saddlepoint so if you look North (I’m not sure of the directions but you will get the idea) you see one mountain, turning South you see another, on the East is a sheer cliff falling onto a river, on the West another cliff falling down onto the tiny town of Agua Calientes.  Even further out on the East and West horizons are snow-capped peaks.  And then there are the ruins themselves, majestic and mysterious.  The picture to the right, taken from Putucusi (see below) gives some idea of the location but no picture can take your breath away like the real thing (or perhaps that was just the altitude!).  Click to expand.

Adding to the magic is the fact that getting to MP is still relatively difficult.  The most common route is by train from Cusco.  It’s only 68 km but takes over 3 hours because the train must go backwards and forwards along trackbacks to make it up some of the steep terrain.  The ride is not boring, however, as it takes you through mountain ranges alongside a raging river.  As you get further and further into the Andes you begin to understand why MP was not formally discovered until 1911.  At Agua Calientes you board a bus which takes you on a one-lane dirt road up the mountain.  There are no guard rails on the road and the bus drivers periodically have to slam on the brakes as they meet one of their fellows coming in the opposite direction – one of them then has to back up to let the other pass.  True, trains and buses are not the stuff of Indiana Jones but neither is this like negotiating the traffic of Rome in order to see the colliseum, there is a definite sense of exploration.

The ruins are a tourist site, of course, but the poverty of Peru means there are few guard rails, plaques or tour guides pushing you on (you can hire a local guide if you want).  Again, to me at least, the experience was more like exploring ruins than visiting ruins.

 Recommendations

My most important recommendation is to stay the night in Agua Calientes.  Most people come in from Cusco for the day – what this means is that they don’t arrive at the site until about 10:30 and they leave by 2:30 to catch the 3:30 train back to Cusco.  Outside of these times there are surprisingly few tourists.  If you stay the night you won’t have MP to yourself but in the morning or late afternoon you will be able to explore at leisure and take pictures of the site sans tourists.

On the morning of my second day, I climbed the mountain opposite MP, Putucusi, and had the whole mountain to myself on the climb and the summit.  Only on the way down in the afternoon did I meet others. 

I recommend climbing both Huayna Picchu and Putucusi (but not on the same day!).
Huayna Picchu is the mountain in all the photos directly connected to MP.  Climbing it is not technically difficult but it can be arduous as the air is thin.  When I reached the top huffing and puffing, I was shocked to find an ancient Incan laughing at me.  At the top is a fort!  After doing the climb yourself your appreciation of the work and engineering that went into building at the top of a mountain is increased immeasurably.  Also the ruins at the top are dangerous!  No guard rails, guides, or people telling you where to go or what to do.  Very cool – see picture to the right – off the equilibrium path and you are a goner.

Putucusi is more difficult to climb, there are long sections where you are climbing nearly vertical ladders but reaching the top is worth it.

You can find the video here.  This may be a more direct link.  Here is the Smithsonian summary:

Tyler Cowen and Benjamin Barber present two different perspectives on the role of market liberalization and cultural diversity and representation.

Tyler Cowen advocates working within a liberal market paradigm, using UNESCO as a ‘marketing tool’ for cultural representation and has a positive trade-enhancing vision towards culture.

Benjamin Barber critiques the structure of neo-liberal market expansion, pointing out the inherent structural inequities that maintain this system and do not allow equal representation of cultural groups, communities, and increasingly, nation-states.

1. Movies: Lots to choose from here, I’ll opt for Nicholas Roeg’s dreamy-erotic Walkabout (they actually let us gaze upon the naked Jenny Agutter in a 1977 NJ high school showing), or Jocelyn Moorhouse’s brilliant Proof.

2. Novel: Neither Peter Carey nor Patrick White clicks with me.  How about David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life?

3. Book about: I remain a fan of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore.

4. Music: Sorry mates, I’ve got to call this one a clunker.  My desperation pick is Paul Kelly, here is a broader list to choose from.  No need to write me about Crowded House or the other mostly mediocre indie bands from Down Under.  If I can opt for a whole genre, my pick is didgeridoo music.

5. Painter: Fred Williams, here is one image, here are many more, here is my favorite.  Aboriginal art is in the running as well.

6. Sculptor: Ron Mueck, yes he did the giant man sitting in the Hirshhorn Museum.

7. Disgusting culinary anecdote: I am told that in South Australia they take meat pies, turn them upside down, and add mushy peas and then ketchup.  They call it a floater.

My list will not be so informed as one of Tyler’s but I was pleasantly surprised to find that with a little thought I could come up with some credible items.

Literature: Mario Vargas Llosa – an easy pick.  The War of the End of the World is his masterpiece – an epic in the style of Hugo and Tolstoy, filled with religion, fanaticism, obsession and violence.  If Vargas Llosa were a leftist he would have won the Nobel by now but he is a classical liberal.  For lighter reading try Aunt Julia and the ScriptWriter or his tale of running for the Peruvian presidency, A Fish in the Water.

Movie: Motorcycle Diaries has some great shots of Machu Picchu and is not without interest but even if it didn’t romanticize an authoritarian it is too slow and unsophisticated to be a great film.  Thus, I am going to cheat a little and go with Touching the Void which takes place in the Peruvian Andes.  As I wrote earlier it is "a harrowing, awe-inspiring, true-story of two climbers made into a great movie/documentary. Aside from the sheer entertainment value, very sheer in this case, the move has a lot to say about the diversity of preferences, the will to survive and believe it or not, how to achieve goals."

Music: Susana Baca, the best of black Peruvian music.  Once nearly lost, this music is now popular in Peru and is earnings worldwide recognition, in part due to the promotional efforts of David Byrne and his LuAka Bop label.

Art: I confess to liking the amazing sex pots (nsfw) of the Moche.  Produced some 1500 years ago by the Moche civilization these erotic ceramics depict all manner of sexual act including oral sex, anal sex, threesomes, homosexuality and more – a real sextravaganza.  Many were destroyed when the Spanish inquisition came to Peru.  Others were hidden away in the basement of museums as objects not fit to be shown or even acknowledged. 

Alfred Kinsey introduced the sex pots to the West in 1954 writing that the Moche artifacts were "the most frank and detailed document of sexual customs ever left by an ancient people.”  Hilariously, quite a few archaeologists at the time argued that the pots were symbolic warnings about what not to do!

Aside from prurient interest, I think the pottery is a fascinating demonstration of how variable are society’s sexual conventions yet how immutable is human nature – tell me, for example, that this guy ain’t proud!

Read here, with photo, and did I mention it is eleven by eight inches?

Addendum: Here is a good film made for $218.

See the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal:

Since his schizophrenia was diagnosed in 1991, Alfonso Lorenzo Santos has divided his time between a psychiatric clinic in Cuernavaca and his tiny lime-green house in this remote mountain village. At home, he often gets so violent his neighbors chain him to a wall.  Yet despite his anger and terrifying delusions, Mr. Lorenzo has become one of Mexico’s most innovative folk painters, piling points upon points of paint on paper, like tiny tiles in a mosaic.

Mr. Lorenzo, now around 54 years old — he was orphaned and doesn’t know his age exactly — is part of a generation of Mexican-Indian artists from the Balsas river region, about 75 miles from Acapulco. These artists started painting in the 1960s for tourist dollars on bark paper, called amate in the Nahuatl language.

One group of amate painters moved to Cuernavaca in the 1970s to live with Edmond Rabkin, a New York expatriate who introduced them to Western literature and music. Those artists, especially Marcial Camilo Ayala, whose work is now displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, often paint romantic visions of village life.

Some Ameyaltepec artists developed a harder edge, especially Mr. Lorenzo, whose figures rarely smile and whose birds have menacing claws. In the 1970s, Mr. Lorenzo moved to Mexico City, where an art dealer promoted him as the descendant of Aztec princes, and where he had his first psychotic episode, says Gobi Stromberg, a Cuernavaca art patron. Complaining to friends that his heart was exploding, he returned to Ameyaltepec around 1980, wandered the arid mountains, cursed at neighbors and flung stones at them. Barely 5 feet tall, but stocky, Mr. Lorenzo became a threatening figure. After villagers decided he had to be restrained, several volunteers wrestled him to the ground and chained him to a wall in his house, where he remained for several years…

"He likes the goriness of Catholicism because it depicts a kind of scary world he lives in," says George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who has written a book on amate paintings.

Here is the story (WSJ password required, so just buy the paper, and note that the above links are mine, not theirs).  I am pleased to have served as translator for much of the work behind this article.  Here is my previous post on Alfonso, and an extensive link to photos.

Music: How about Blind Willie Johnson, a pinnacle of the blues tradition?  Buy it here.  Can I overlook Scott Joplin and his "Euphonic Sounds"?  Lightnin’ Hopkins?  Woody Guthrie (if only he had read Economics in One Lesson…)?  Leadbelly?  Janis Joplin?  Roy Orbison?  Jimmie Rodgers?  Charlie Christian?  Ornette Coleman?  Buddy Holly?  Here is a longer list.

Painting: Robert Rauschenberg?  Look at this one with the goat, I believe it is in Stockholm.  I bet you, like I, say naaaah, but the field is thin.  I’ll opt for his "Bed" as an important work, however.

Literature: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the obvious choice, or try Katherine Anne Porter.

Food: Texas barbecue has a strong influence (sausage!) from German migrants.  That is also why Tejano music has so much accordion, with a hat tip to Poland as well.

Comedian: Steve Martin.  All of Me and Planes, Trains and Automobiles both make me laugh.

The bottom line: I love Texas, but I am surprised that the weight of achievement is so unbalanced toward music and food.  By the way, I’m in El Paso, doing research for my next book.

Addendum: Several readers write to tell me Guthrie is not a Texan…

Or is this item another reason for vouchers?  I think it is sad, but then again I sell the contents of my brain so who am I to object?

Thanks to Chris Rasch for the heads up.

South Korea, historically more worried about fending off cultural domination by China and Japan than spreading its own culture abroad, is emerging as the pop culture leader of Asia. From well-packaged television dramas to slick movies, from pop music to online games, South Korean companies and stars are increasingly defining what the disparate people in East Asia watch, listen to and play.

The size of South Korea’s entertainment industry, which began attracting heavy government investment only in the late 1990’s, jumped from $8.5 billion in 1999 to $43.5 billion in 2003. In 2003, South Korea exported $650 million in cultural products; the amount was so insignificant before 1998 that the government could not provide figures.

But the figures tell only part of the story. The booming South Korean presence on television and in the movies has spurred Asians to buy up South Korean goods and to travel to South Korea, traditionally not a popular tourist destination. The images that Asians traditionally have associated with the country – violent student marches, the demilitarized zone, division – have given way to trendy entertainers and cutting-edge technology.

Here is the full story, and yes some of the material is getting to North Korea as well.

Last weekend I visited Alfonso Lorenzo — one of the greatest of the amate painters — in a Cuernavaca mental hospital.  Life in rural Mexico can be tough.  Did you know that Alfonso spent several years of his life chained to a wall, and by his relatives?  I asked one compatriot what he thought of this, and received (roughly) the following answer:

Yes, it is sad.  But we have people chained to the wall in most of our villages.

In fairness, if he were not chained to the wall he might well be in jail.  Did I mention that your relatives have to bring your food and the jail is several hours away?

Here are his unique amates.  Yes one is of a naked woman but rest assured it is true art, I believe it is office-safe.  My favorite is the stations of the cross picture.  You’ll be hearing more about Alfonso soon.