Category: Aesthetics

“Righteous Rage” Against “The Absence of a Cure”

The commentary quoted below advocates a productive rage against “the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas); a sense of urgency.

(p. D6) Dr. Sacks, who recorded his heavenly highs and hellish lows in “A Leg to Stand On,” believes that those with a disability often oscillate between grateful rejoicing and bitter denouncing of their circumstances. The same dynamic may hold true for cancer patients. So how does one sustain the joy while avoiding the rancor?

There can be no simple answer, but I seek clues in works of art created by terminal cancer patients. Take, for example, the paintings of Hollis Sigler, which have been shown in hospitals across the country and collected in the volume “Hollis Sigler’s Breast Cancer Journal.”

. . .  She depicts a shocking lack of control in a painting with food and silverware unexpectedly flying from a table in a tornado of debris. The image reminds me of Dr. Benedict B. Benigno’s perspective on cancer: “If life is a banquet, then cancer takes away the knife and fork and pulls the chair out from under us.”

To document the ravages of metastatic breast cancer, Ms. Sigler, who died of the disease in 2001, used spacers between frames for prose on the dire statistics and facts she had learned. On the edges of the paintings, she recorded additional words from her journals and those of the poet and breast cancer activist Audre Lorde. Bitterness and rancor certainly get expressed in these testimonies, but righteous rage is channeled toward the real enemies: the absence of a cure, the lack of preventive measures, inadequate detection tools, degrading and injurious treatments, miserable mortality rates, contaminants in the environment.

. . .

Not repressing but directing her anger, Ms. Sigler managed, through her dazzling artistry, to contest and revise the poet W. H. Auden’s advice: “Let your last thinks all be thanks.”

For the full commentary see:

Susan Gubar. “Living With Cancer: Curses and Blessings.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 21, 2015 [sic]): D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 16, 2015 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The book of paintings by Hollis Sigler, mentioned above, is:

Sigler, Hollis, Susan M. Love, and James Yood. Hollis Sigler’s Breast Cancer Journal. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999.

“I Do What I Want; You Don’t Like It, Don’t Buy It”

(p. 27) Terry Castro, a New York-based jewelry designer whose knack for blending the fantastical with the elegant propelled him from selling on the sidewalks of New York to adorning celebrities like Rihanna and Steven Tyler, died on July 18 [2022] at his home in Istanbul.

. . .

Mr. Castro, who worked under the single name Castro, considered himself a “creator of dreams.”

. . .

Passionate and at times confrontational, Mr. Castro considered himself a rebel within the industry.

“I do what I want; you don’t like it, don’t buy it,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Black Nouveau, a style blog. Recounting his scattered efforts to “go commercial,” he concluded that the income was not worth the creative price paid.

For the full obituary, see:

Alex Williams. “Terry Castro, 50, Rebel Who Created Exquisite Jewelry.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, August 7, 2022): 27.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Aug. 4, 2022, and has the title “Terry Castro, a Proud Outsider in the Jewelry World, Dies at 50.”)

Environmentalists Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Landscape

(p. A7) Two climate activists threw mashed potatoes on a glass-covered painting by the celebrated French Impressionist Claude Monet on Sunday [Oct. 23, 2022] inside a German museum, the latest art attack intended to draw attention to climate change.

Videos show the activists dousing one of the artist’s works, “Grainstacks,” with a thick yellow substance that covered the painting’s warm red hues. The oil on canvas is one of 25 paintings the artist made around 1890 of stacks of hay in the fields near his house in Giverny, France.

The activists, a man and a woman, each glued a hand to the wall by the painting. Then, the woman shouted in German that the world was in “a climate catastrophe, and all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes in a painting,” referring to a similar attack this month in London by activists who threw cans of tomato soup on a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

. . .

Across Europe, climate protesters have sought to capture headlines in recent months by engaging in similar stunts tied to beloved pieces in the art world. In Britain, activists glued themselves to about a half-dozen masterpieces, including a 16th-century copy of “The Last Supper” at the Royal Academy, a major art museum in London. And in Italy, activists glued themselves to a sculpture held in the Vatican and to works in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence.

For the full story, see:

Eduardo Medina. “Monet Painting Is Splashed In Latest Stunt Over Climate.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 25, 2022): A7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 8, 2022, and has the title “Climate Activists Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Painting.”)

The “Silly, Elitist,” and “Venal” in Modern Art

(p. A26) Suzi Gablik, an art critic, author and theorist who once championed modernism — and was once an artist of that persuasion — but found fame when she turned against it, died on May 7 [2022] at her home in Blacksburg, Va.

. . .

At the invitation of the United States government, she began to lecture about American art around the world, an experience that altered her thinking about contemporary art. It was not just daunting but embarrassing, as she wrote later, to try to describe “some of the aggressively absurd forms of art that dominated the decade of the 1970s in America: Vito Acconci putting a match to his breast and burning the hair of his chest; Chris Burden crawling half-naked across broken glass.”

She began to feel that modernism — her religion — had reached its limits. Its provocations were no longer transgressive but silly, elitist and even venal, having been co-opted by corporate sponsors and the growing art market. Her salvo of a book, “Has Modernism Failed?,” arrived with a bang in 1984, and all of a sudden she was a sought-after speaker in her own country, a dissident voice pilloried by some critics but welcomed by others.

. . .

Decrying the pointlessness and commercialism of contemporary art was hardly a new position — Tom Wolfe had gleefully staked it out in “The Painted Word,” in 1975 — but Ms. Gablik’s book nonetheless struck a chord.

For the full obituary, see:

Penelope Green. “Suzi Gablik, Art Critic and Author Who Took Modernism to Task, Dies at 87.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 21, 2022): A26.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 20, 2022, and has the title “Suzi Gablik, Art Critic Who Took Modernism to Task, Dies at 87.”)

Gablik’s “salvo” against modern art is:

Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? Revised 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004 [1984].

As a student, I greatly annoyed one of my philosophy professors when I favorably quoted:

Wolfe, Tom. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1975.

If Jony Ive Had Designed a Hand Axe for Steve Jobs 200,000 Years Ago

Photo source: WSJ commentary cited below. (Original source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

(p. C14) From the beginning, the purpose of the Masterpiece column has been to highlight artworks of surpassing cultural significance and discuss the particular qualities that make them so. How, then, to explain the intrusion into this august company of a utilitarian object, in this case a biface, or hand axe, dated 700,000-200,000 B.C.?

Behind the creative impulse is the aesthetic sense, the desire to make something beautiful, or at least pleasing to the eye. For almost all of human history, utilitarian objects, by contrast, were all about practicality, crafting something that can get the job done. Never the twain shall meet.

Two factors, though, suggest that here the dividing line might not be crystal clear. The first is the biface’s location, not in a natural history museum where they are usually to be found, but the Metropolitan Museum, a repository of art.

The second is its label. “This is one of the largest and most finely crafted bifaces found in France,” we are told. “Its size and the care with which it was made raise the question of whether it was meant to be a tool, or if it was chiefly valued for its appearance and reserved for a different use.”

. . .

From a broadly rounded bottom the two sides flare out then turn inward, ever so gradually tapering to a rounded point that mirrors the bottom edge in miniature. Its changes in depth are equally subtle and well-calibrated, maintaining a uniform thickness along its length and slowly thinning to a shallow wedge starting about three quarters of the way up.

Then there is the material. Flint comes in many colors. The rich caramel hue of this one, lighter in spots than others, may be what caught the eye of our anonymous artisan in the first place. It has veining, too, which likewise seems to have been an attraction, since its curves are echoed by the adjacent edge of the stone.

For the full commentary, see:

Eric Gibson. “The Dawn of Aesthetics.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 10, 2021): C14.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 9, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Environmentalist Regulations Inspire Vigilantes to Destroy Fairy Houses

(p. A10) Monhegan and a growing number of other environmentally conscious locales are fighting the scourge of fairy gardens, miniature habitats built by children and young-at-heart adults to attract tiny mythical creatures.

Typically they include a pint-size house with a path leading to its entrance and surrounded with small plants. The houses can range from rustic lean-tos handmade from twigs, bark and pebbles to store-bought plastic castles accompanied by LED lights, artificial plants, colorful glass beads and a family of fairy figurines.

On Monhegan, it is easy to run afoul of the regulations, which forbid picking living plants or using anything brought from the shore. No items are to be used “from your pockets,” including coins, food and anything plastic.

It is also easy to run afoul of Ms. Durst, a retired computer consultant who, like several other like-minded vigilantes, calls herself a “stomper” and has crushed many a fairy house over the years.

. . .

Julie Cole, . . . , is something of a scofflaw. She oversees a 5,564-member fairy-garden discussion group on Facebook, sells fairy furniture online and teaches fairy-gardening classes near her home in Jefferson, Ohio. “It’s a true taste of serendipity to be along a trail and see a little fairy door on a tree,” says Ms. Cole. “I can’t imagine anyone not liking that, but there’s always someone.”

For the full story, see:

Ellen Byron. “‘Fairy Houses’ Are Violating Building Codes.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 18, 2018): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 17, 2018, and the title “Hey Tinkerbell, Get Your Fairy House Up to Code or It’s Coming Down.”)

Fashion Designers Catch Up with Arthur Diamond on Pockets

After decades of wearing shirts with two to four pockets, and cargo pants with many pockets, I am gratified to finally be vindicated as a fashion-forward trendsetter.

(p. D1) IN 1901, Levi’s gave its famous 501 jean its famous fifth pocket. It wasn’t, as many assume, the teensy pocketwatch slot above the right front pocket–that had been there since the jean’s beginnings in 1879–but rather the back left pocket. That unassuming addition granted generations of men (and eventually women) double the rear-end real estate in which to stash bifolds, bandannas, crumpled bar receipts and, of course, awkward hands. For a mere sliver of space, it marked a revolution in clothing.

These days, our relationship to pockets is undergoing a similar sea change. Whereas Levi’s took a subtle approach, menswear designers are now stitching pockets on garments with the abandon of Jackson Pollock flinging paint on canvas. No longer an afterthought or mundane change-holder, pockets are the defining component of many designs.

For the full story, see:
Jacob Gallagher. “Pick Pockets.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): D1-D2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “Think Your Clothes Have Enough Pockets? Think Again.”)

“The Oppressive Communality” of Open Floor Plans

(p. D1) These days, people are taking another look at developing basements or attics as getaway bonus spaces to ensure family peace. As the idea of the open-plan home–the combination kitchen, living and dining room that’s long dominated residential layouts–has aged, it’s revealed its flaws. When parents are relentlessly texting children all day and then corralling the whole family into a single living space all night, there’s no escaping each other, and nerves can fray.
. . .
(p. D2) The oppressive communality of the open plan has fueled the backlash, as has constant connectedness. Jen Altman, a child family psychologist of 17 years, sees the pendulum beginning to swing away from helicopter parenting. These days, she hears parents howl versions of “I just need 10 minutes to myself.”
“I’ve always thought that aloneness and separation are as vital to development as attachment and connection,” said Dr. Altman, who practices in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J.
. . .
“It’s hard to get away from the open plan because of the way we live,” she said. “It’s the space where everyone congregates–meals are prepared, kids do their homework.” But she found herself seeking respite in the detached room–“sort of an at-home getaway,” she said. Though bright bands of colored paint ring the walls, “the space never reads ‘playroom,'” she said, thanks to a floor of black rocks and shells, and a muted Oriental rug. After Ms. Vidal moved in her beloved midcentury Heywood Wakefield vanity, her design books and mementos made the space hers.
“It’s a bit of separation from being on top of one another,” she said of the room. “It helps me focus.”

For the full story, see:
Elizabeth Anne Hartman. “Hideaway We Go.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 19, 2017): D1-D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 17, 2017, and has the title “The Open-Floor-Plan Backlash: How Family Members Are Escaping Each Other.”)

Pineapple Displays “Plodding Banality” of Conceptual Art

(p. A4) LONDON — How did a pineapple become a postmodern masterpiece?
The aesthetic merits of tropical fruit inadvertently entered Britain’s national cultural conversation after two students jokingly placed a store-bought pineapple on an empty table at an art exhibition this month at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, a port city in northeastern Scotland.
When they returned a few days later to the exhibition — part of the Look Again festival, which aims to highlight Aberdeen’s cultural heritage — they were shocked to discover their pineapple protected by a glass display case, instantly and mysteriously transformed into a work of art.
After one of the students, Lloyd Jack, 22, who studies business, put a photograph of the pineapple on Twitter, along with the words, “I made art,” the image was shared widely on social media, turning the fruit, fairly or not, into a cultural sensation. To some, though, the stunt was a self-promoting social media prank befitting the digital age.
Mr. Jack’s post received nearly 5,000 likes on Twitter. Before long, the work, which the two students titled “Pineapple,” had been deconstructed on art blogs and social media worldwide; parsed in Paris, Texas and Tokyo; and even featured on Canadian television. Some on Twitter lauded its “genius,” while others ridiculed it as the latest example of conceptual art’s plodding banality.
. . .
Others saw hidden meaning in the pineapple, including an art professor at the university who, Mr. Gray said, enthusiastically lauded the “purposeful way” in which the display case had pressed down on the fruit’s leaves.
“It just goes to show the ludicrousness of conceptual art and how anything can become art,” Mr. Jack said.
. . .
Peter York, an author and cultural commentator, noted that the pineapple display, consciously or not, wittily reflected Duchamp’s notion that if you declare something art, it becomes art.
“I rank pineapples quite highly as they are quite decorative objects, sort of colonial superfruits, with leaves that look like green fountains at the top,” he said. “But you wouldn’t really want a pineapple exhibited in your home.”

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “Scots Plumb a Pineapple’s Hidden Meaning After it Becomes Accidental Art.” The New York Times (Fri., MAY 12, 2017): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 11, 2017, and has the title “How a Humble Pineapple Became Art.”)

Abstract Art Belongs in “the Trash Heap of Art History”

(p. A20) . . . , Mr. Safer sometimes raised hackles, as when he questioned the basic premise of abstract art in a 1993 report, calling much of it “worthless junk” destined for “the trash heap of art history” and saying it was overvalued by the “hype” of critics, art dealers and auction houses. The art world recoiled, but Mr. Safer, who described himself as a “Sunday painter,” stood his ground.

For the full obituary, see:

ROBERT D. McFADDEN. “Morley Safer, Chronicler of Vietnam and Mainstay of ’60 Minutes,’ Dies at 84.” The New York Times (Fri., May 20, 2016): A20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 19, 2016, and has the title “Morley Safer, Mainstay of ’60 Minutes,’ Is Dead at 84.”)

Old Photographic Technology Makes a Limited Comeback

(p. C1) The Phoenix artist Annie Lopez wanted to stand out among her contemporary peers. Instead of trying to invent something utterly new, she has been turning to a 174-year-old photographic printing process — cyanotypes, once used for copying architectural drawings — and giving it her own distinctive twist.
Ms. Lopez created a dress pattern cut from tamale wrapping paper and printed all over with cyanotypes, which have a distinctly cyan-blue color. She printed the cyanotypes herself, in a process that took about 25 minutes per sheet of images. No darkroom was needed.
That ease has brought cyanotypes roaring back to relevance, attracting a surprising number of true-blue adherents showing their work in galleries.
, , ,
(p. C2) Anna Atkins, considered by many to be the first female photographer and the first person to create a book of photo-based images, blended science and art in botanical cyanotypes, starting in the 1840s. Atkins’s “Honey Locust Leaf and Pod” (circa 1854) is featured in the Worcester show.
The fine-art application was scarce for more than a century after Atkins’s day — rare enough that Steichen once called his use of cyanotypes a “secret” in a letter to his friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz. For fine artists, it was often considered an “ugly stepchild” of the larger medium, Ms. Burns said, “because it was too easy.”
Amateurs embraced cyanotypes more easily. “In terms of popular usage they were big until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and women’s periodicals were giving people instructions on how to make them,” Ms. Burns said. “But then they fell off the map of photography.”
Well into the 20th century, the long-dormant medium was awakened by artists looking for something different.
“As of the 1960s, people started to be interested in reviving old photo processes,” said Dusan Stulik, a former senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute who has studied cyanotypes for decades. “Cyanotypes handle subtle light well, and they are fairly sturdy.”
On a gut level, cyanotypes produce a result that is universal. “The color blue strikes some chord in us that goes beyond words,” said the San Francisco photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel. “It’s that simple.”

For the full story, see:
TED LOOS. “Photography’s Stepchild Snaps Back.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016, and has the title “Cyanotype, Photography’s Blue Period, Is Making a Comeback.”)