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Sitting on the floor of his monastic chamber, Lobsang Lungtok pointed to the canvas with the thousand-faced goddess.
It had taken him three months to finish the painting. Her many faces, all gold, were stacked atop one another in a pyramid. A thousand arms fanned out in a radiant circle.
There are rules, he said, that have been handed down from one Tibetan painter to another through the centuries: The head and body must be perfectly proportioned; the gold paint goes on after the pencil outline; this particular deity has a thousand faces and a thousand arms — no more, no less.
Out of that had emerged Chenresig, the bodhisattva of compassion.
“Why do we draw this god?” said Lobsang, 33, who, like many Tibetans, goes by his given name. “If we don’t, in the future how will people know what the gods look like?”
The monasteries in this mountain valley are some of the most important centers of art in the Tibetan world, famed for the creation of painted and cloth scrolls called thangkas that depict Tibetan gods and other religious iconography. In 1999, artists in the area finished the 675-yard-long Great Thangka, which Guinness World Records certified as the biggest thangka in the world.
The artists here practice the Rebkong style of thangka painting that has flourished since the 17th century. Thangkas from this part of northwestern Qinghai Province are commissioned by monasteries as far away as Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. In recent years, thangkas have gained a following among some ethnic Han Chinese, and individual collectors from Chinese cities and foreign countries have driven up the prices. (For his painting of Chenresig, Lobsang was asking 3,600 yuan, or about $530, a fortune for most Tibetans.)
The commercialization will “drive thangkas far from their origins, from their use as religious objects,” said Zhang Yasha, a teacher of fine arts at the Minzu University of China who specializes in Tibet. “We see more young people learning the art because it’s lucrative.”
The paintings hanging in the back room of Lobsang’s chamber show the range of traditional thangka subjects: Gods like Padmasambhava and White Tara and Green Tara, and the circle of life with people reclining in heaven and roasting in hell.
The thangkas are explosions of color. The paint powder comes from grinding materials like coral, agate, sapphire, pearl and gold.
Of the monks in the two monasteries in Sengeshong, about 60 can paint with some skill, said Lobsang, a compact, cheerful, Red Bull-drinking man who entered the monastery at age 7 and began studying thangka painting seven years later.
“There are only a few good ones, and a lot of ordinary ones,” he said of the painters.
This valley outside the town of Rebkong, known in Chinese as Tongren, offers the kind of isolation that artists often crave. The upper monastery is set against snow-covered hills. The sweet smell of juniper incense drifts through the air. On a recent afternoon, a steady drumbeat emanated from the dark recesses of the main temple, while dozens of monks sat on the temple steps wiping brass yak butter lamps.
Lobsang’s chamber is plush compared to rooms at other Tibetan monasteries. The carpeted living area has a central stove and a framed portrait of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans. There is a photograph of Lobsang standing in his red robes in front of the Shanghai skyline; he lived for five years in Shanghai and Beijing painting thangkas for a businessman.
A safe in the rear room contains some of Lobsang’s more expensive thangkas. The front wall of the foyer has wide glass windows, and it is in this sun-drenched space that Lobsang paints during the winter.
Skilled thangka and mural painters are valued across Tibet, with artists sometimes traveling thousands of miles to do commissions for prominent monasteries. Many monasteries and temples were destroyed or sacked during the Cultural Revolution, and those that have begun rebuilding are in need of painters.
“That’s meant the painters of Rebkong are wealthy compared to other groups in Tibetan society,” said Mark Stevenson, a senior lecturer in Asian studies at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, who has studied the painting community here.
Painting thangkas is simply one component of an array of artistic skills among monks, Dr. Stevenson said.
“Every monk has a need for artistic talent,” he said. “They make and assemble tormas, which are offering cakes. Many may have to work on mandalas as well. This is part of being a monk. Every monk needs some manual skill dexterity in designing ritual objects.”
The first monastery in the Rebkong area was founded at the start of the 14th century, when the Mongols ruled China and turned to Tibetan religious leaders to guide their practice of Buddhism. But the distinctive Rebkong school of painting, with its brighter colors and finer lines, did not emerge until the 17th century, when the Gelugpa sect became dominant. The Dalai Lama, believed to be the reincarnation of the thousand-faced Chenresig, belongs to this sect.
Rebkong achieved fame in modern times because it was home to several notable artists, in particular a monk named Shawu Tsering.
“Watching him paint was remarkable, as if the lines were already there, and he was just moving his hand to bring them forward,” Dr. Stevenson said. “It was just so effortless, and the skill and memory were there to allow him to do that.”
The art tradition here suffered a break from 1958 to 1978, when Chinese authorities shut down the monasteries, first during the suppression of a rebellion, then during the Cultural Revolution. Monks were persecuted. Shawu Tsering, for example, was forced to wear a dunce’s cap.
In the 1980s, the government opened up an art research institute in the town of Rebkong, eventually converting it into a gallery. The gallery supported local artists. After the revival of thangka painting, monks took up the art in large numbers again.
In warm weather, Lobsang sits in his front yard with a brush in hand, working 10 to 12 hours a day.
It is an art that he now teaches to others, some of them laypeople from nearby villages.
“We want them to transmit Buddhism,” he said. “We want them to teach people that the gods are kind.”
Edward Wong
New York Times Asia Pacific
James Castle at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art includes, above, “Untitled (Pram Construction),” an undated work by the artist, constructed of found paper, string, soot and ribbon. (Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art)
James Castle was the artist of silence, grayness and folded cardboard. Silence because he was born deaf and refused to read, write, speak, sign or finger spell. Grayness because of the velvety, overcast drawings he made all his life: extravagantly tonal images of landscapes, farmyards and interiors rendered in a mixture of soot and spit applied to found paper with sticks and rags. Their muted yet solid forms in some way embodied both Castle’s silent world and his loyalty to it.
And folded cardboard because of the flattened yet bulky toylike sculptures — figures, farm animals, articles of clothing and pieces of furniture — that Castle made from discarded boxes, string and paper. This detritus he gleaned from the post office and general store that his parents oversaw in their house in an Idaho farming community named Garden Valley. In his understanding of structure, moving parts and the abbreviation of familiar forms, Castle used cardboard as brilliantly as Alexander Calder used wire, but with more corners.
Castle was born in Idaho in 1899, nine years after it became a state, and died there in 1977, without ever venturing very far from the three successive farms on which his family lived. He probably never knew the meaning of the word “artist,” but he must have sensed his specialness on some level. You can feel his conviction in the drawings and constructions in the two latest New York gallery shows of his extraordinary work, which has been known to the mainstream art world only since the late 1990s.
Knoedler & Company has mounted its fourth Castle show, a display of 34 of the atmospheric, intimate drawings that make Castle something like the Vuillard of the American West; the works in this show have not been previously exhibited. Ameringer Yohe Fine Art is showing drawings and constructions, including an especially imposing one of a big, black pram whose square wheels are highlighted with foil.
These substantial shows are coincidental and taken together offer compensation if (like me) you missed the lavish Castle retrospective that was mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall and that will travel this fall to Chicago and Berkeley, Calif., with a possible final stop in New York.
Castle’s artistry is implicit in his work’s consistency, optimism, command of perspective and proportion, and psychological delicacy. His soot medium permitted a singular range of grays — charcoal blacks to cloudy-day silvers — as well as variously wet-dry surfaces that suggest charcoal, then ink, then ink wash, then crayon.
The constants are a fervent concentration and an affection for both the process and the subject. His many views of the farmstead of his childhood (executed largely from memory) include everything from doorknobs to open vistas, all methodically studied and recorded in a way that makes his environment feel safe and firmly grounded.
Castle not only spent most of his waking hours making art, he also fit the classic if not clichéd persona of an artist. He was touchy about the reception, display and preservation of his work. He insistently showed his drawings to visitors, wanted a positive reaction and noticed when he didn’t get one.
As Castle’s niece, Gerry Garrow, remarks in a documentary on view at Ameringer Yohe, the less than enthusiastic were not shown anything the next time they visited. (Directed by Jeffrey Wolf and produced by the Foundation for American Self-Taught Artists, the DVD comes with the catalog of the Philadelphia show.)
Castle’s curatorial tendencies included storing much of his art in wrapped and tied bundles, putting his drawings up around the house and objecting if anyone moved them. As Ms. Garrow notes in the documentary, he liked to commandeer empty sheds or chicken coops for use in making and displaying his work. From the film you get the feeling that given more leeway, Castle might have created his own private, diminutive Marfa, à la Donald Judd.
The pride and pleasure artists take in their efforts is nowhere more evident than when Castle’s depicted his own art. Once he had installed his pieces to his liking, he often made drawings of the arrangement. An especially elaborate one at Knoedler shows several drawings mounted on two sides of what appears to be a stall with books that were also his handiwork laid out on the floor.
(There are no books in either show, although they appear again in a kind of close-up rendering, also at Knoedler, of the scene in the stall. Made primarily by copying images, words and letters from other books, magazines or comics, Castle’s books tend to resemble either school primers or photo albums.)
Roberta Smith
New York Times
One thing you hear about the current economic mess is that some banks and companies are “too big to fail.” This is the idea that if a mega-corporation like AIG goes down, the repercussions are so enormous that other companies will fall in its wake and the whole financial system might fall apart. Thus an argument for tax-payer bailouts.
That got me thinking about the culture of failure. Science is built on failure. Make observations, posit solutions, try them out, fail, learn from your failure and try again until you find a solution. Scientific breakthroughs wouldn’t be possible without failure. Funding for research is predicated on extremely high rates of failure. Ask a successful person what they learned on the way up and they’ll likely talk about how they dealt with their failures, not their success.
The hippest, most interesting and successful arts programmer I ever knew told me once that the secret to his success was failure. “If more than 10 percent of the things I do are successful (he was, after all, a programmer of new work), I feel like I’m not doing my job,” he said. What he meant was that without trying many things that didn’t work, he couldn’t be open to the possibility of greatness. It was only his willingness to learn from mistakes and embrace failure that produced transcendent success.
Yet why does it so often seem that the goal of arts organizations is to neutralize failure or deny it? If AIG was “too big to fail” maybe it stopped learning from failure and found itself in trouble only after it was too late. In the 90s the arts economy expanded and many arts organizations got bigger and more institutional. With growth and soaring expenses, the cost of failing [read: the capacity to fail safely] often got priced out. And how many arts organizations, when they do do something that fails, rush to deny that it failed? Like admitting failure is a bad thing.
Arts funders have tended to want more and more assurances that the things they fund are successes. One manifestation of this trend is the way so much arts funding has become project-based. Funders prefer to have projects they can point to for tangible, measurable results.So it’s much easier to raise money for a new building than it is for operational support to keep the doors open. And it’s much easier to fund programs in multiculturalism or arts education than it is a new play or symphony.
As a result, we have a system set up to reward expansion of buildings and the building of infrastructure [a real estate bubble?] which then must be sustained in ways that make failure not an option. That is: guess wrong and you might put your organization in danger, so don’t guess wrong. And so we have arts organizations who are thought to be “too big to fail” even as they 1. get safer and safer in the artistic choices they make. and/or 2. get into bigger and bigger trouble because they can’t afford the little failures along the way that they could learn from.
The situation in the arts then, would seem to be exactly opposite of what we understand to be best practice in science. Funding for science is at a whole different level than funding for the arts, and yet, it seems to me that being good at funding the right kinds of failures in the arts might lead to a much healthier arts community.
Douglas McClellan
diacritical
Le Corbusier — The Art of Architecture” has drawn crowds to the Barbican Center in London, part of a complex designed in a Brutalist vein that Le Corbusier inspired. (Steve Forrest for The New York Times)
It’s odd to think that the Modernist architect Le Corbusier has had a bigger influence on housing in Britain than in any other European country.
Odd because he never designed a building here, and also because so many Britons have long held him in particular contempt. Since the 1970s he has been about as popular around here as the French national soccer team, and more than a few concrete, Corbu-style projects, large numbers of which were constructed after the war to ease a convalescing nation’s housing shortage, have since been torn down or fallen into disrepair.
But as Peter Rees, a longtime city planning officer in London, put it recently, about the whole range of such projects, “They were either blown up, or they’re now loved.”
Loved may be an exaggeration. But there is at least fresh debate about whether to preserve what used to be regarded simply as bad Corbu-derived architecture. Occasionally a cultural figure provides a little window into a nation’s shifting identity, and in Britain the self-regarding Swiss-born, Paris-based architectural genius who died in 1965, at 77, may now be one such figure.
An excellent traveling overview of his work, at the Barbican Center here, has turned out to be, of all things, popular. Big crowds have been visiting the gallery, itself a sign of some Corbu revisionism in that the Barbican, opened in 1982 near St. Paul’s Cathedral and designed by the British firm Chamberlin, Powell & Bon in a Brutalist vein that Le Corbusier partly inspired, has always been a place Londoners loved to hate. They voted it the city’s ugliest building in a poll in 2003, and have long moaned about its inscrutable labyrinth of concrete walkways and underpasses.
But Corinna Gardner, an assistant curator for the exhibition there, said that smart Londoners have actually been moving into the Barbican Estate and Golden Lane Estate, vast concrete apartment complexes that, with the Barbican Center, make up what Mr. Rees described as the largest Corbusian-inspired urban development in all of Europe. Likewise the refurbished Brunswick Center, near Russell Square, another Brutalist behemoth, with a ziggurat design, once an infamous example of failed council housing, has become fashionable. Well-heeled Londoners promenaded through its fancy shopping mall the other day.
Ms. Gardner added that “ladies who lunch” have even been turning up at the Le Corbusier show, when not long ago most wouldn’t have been caught dead at the Barbican. That hardly proves a national cultural volte-face, but just three years ago a survey of modern design at the Victoria and Albert Museum provoked an angry passel of letters in local newspapers, which singled out Le Corbusier for a special caning. His problem, it seems, wasn’t only that a generation or two of modern British architects latched onto his urban plans to devise their own concrete, modular apartment blocks, which often weren’t very good.
There was also something, well, un-British about him.
“We have always thought in terms of living in homes, not apartments, and we tend to be very traditional,” Ms. Gardner explained. At that moment she was standing before a model of Corbu’s proposal to demolish a swath of central Paris and replace it with a suite of concrete towers. Across the gallery was his plan, also never realized, to wreak similar havoc in Algiers.
Mr. Rees, contemplating those sweeping schemes in his office at Guildhall, elaborated. “Corbu said, ‘I am to be worshiped,’ which is very French, to see architects on a higher plane.” Mr. Rees spoke like a true Englishman, although he made clear that he is Welsh.
“Architects are seen here more as public servants rather than as gods,” he continued. “We value individuality in Britain and resist being told how to live. The Romans tried to plan London, but what they did was quickly undone. We’ve been added to by waves of immigrants, from the Normans and Vikings on, bringing with them different cultural ideas. We’re a mongrel people. More than 300 languages are spoken by children in London today, and if you live in London for three months, you’re a Londoner. You will never be a Parisian unless your grandparents were Parisians.”
I tried that chestnut about British individualism on Peter Mandler, a Cambridge historian. “It’s a self-regarding British myth that we’re special and that there is something foreign out there called the Continent; that we’re the land of liberty, and here the Englishman’s home is his castle, never mind that most people in Britain never lived in houses with their own gardens. By the ’60s more Britons lived in apartment blocks than anyone else in Europe.
“But there was during the 1920s and ’30s a visceral reaction here against Continental culture, and Paris was beginning to be seen not as a healthy rival but as something dangerous. It had to do with ‘othering’ the French who, unlike the British, the British liked to tell themselves, lived in bee hives. After the war this same attitude was predicated on nostalgia for Britain’s last moment of greatness, around 1940, and so the story had lingering cachet into the ’60s and ’70s. We’re not talking, in other words, about a timeless narrative but about a powerful one implicating Le Corbusier, which gained a purchase on British thinking during the high water mark of modernism.”
In truth, only about 7 percent of the British population today is black and Asian, much of that demographic in London. The benign melting pot myth itself goes back to imperial days.
But stories people tell themselves, whether true or not, can be as good as true to the people who tell them. Visiting Tate Britain after seeing the Corbu show one morning, I stopped into the “Van Dyck and Britain” exhibition, and noticed an oil sketch by Rubens and two Van Dyck portraits that the Tate had recently bought: pictures by foreigners who worked here, acquired by a museum for British art. Upstairs, in the permanent galleries, on loan from Andrew Lloyd Webber, there was also a view of London by Canaletto, hanging not far from a painting by Samuel Scott, an English artist and follower of Canaletto’s.
All of which is to say that the canon of British art seems to be expanding along with Britain’s view of itself, and maybe this helps to account for some small change in the climate around Le Corbusier. And of course then there is the simple matter of fair play, a British obsession.
“The problem with so many apartment developments built in the U.K.,” Mr. Rees said, “was that there was no taking into account the vital French ingredient of the concierge.” He didn’t literally mean French buildings all have concierges, obviously. He meant British housing wasn’t planned with long-term maintenance in mind, and Le Corbusier became a scapegoat for what resulted.
The show, a large and elegant affair, reminds us instead of the many beautiful buildings he designed and of his paintings. Like other groundbreaking figures, he wanted to be admired for something he didn’t actually do very well. He imagined Picasso and Mondrian to be his peers.
On the other hand, he left us the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, the modular housing project that became the model for countless bad imitations. It’s a remarkable building. An old black-and-white photograph of the roof, devised as a public square with parapets tall enough to block a view of the city and frame the mountains beyond, shows children playing in the sunshine.
On the barren concrete patio outside the Barbican it happened to be warm and springlike when I left the show.
Usually almost nobody’s out there. But what do you know?
That day there were children playing in the sunshine.
Michael Kimmelman
New York Times
Springfield Courthouse
When “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” opened last November at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA) in the old mill town of North Adams, the reviews were rapturous. Having just returned from there, it’s easy to see why. This may be the most perfect union of contemporary art and architecture in the United States. It’s our Sistine.
The building — a 27,000-square-foot, three-story historic factory — now holds 105 of LeWitt’s signature large-scale wall drawings. They span the artist’s career, from 1969 to his death at 78 in 2007. LeWitt designed the installation, although he did not live to see it finished, and it took my breath away.
While LeWitt was working on the Mass MOCA show, he was also preparing one of his last wall drawings for his final public project — a mammoth black-and-white work for a new federal office building and courthouse in Springfield, roughly midway between North Adams and the artist’s home in Chester, Conn. Running the full length of a curved, 300-foot corridor outside the third-floor courtrooms, it’s the largest LeWitt I’ve seen. I walked the length of it for the video posted above.
“Wall Drawing No. 1259: Loopy Doopy (Springfield)” is a gem. In the last decade or so of his life, LeWitt made a number of drawings by …
… taping together two pencils and rolling them through his fingers and twisting his wrist as he moved across the page. That became the template for the mural.
The energy of the piece derives from the way it negotiates the crazy play of its linear twists and turns with the strict rationality of the architectural setting. (The building was designed by Boston architect Moshe Safdie.) On a black acrylic ground, the wide white lines seem to emerge from the surrounding white-walled interior, which merges a rectilinear grid with a compound curve. Buildings can be eccentric, but they must also subscribe to the logic of structural codes — which an artist can happily ignore. The loopy-doopy drawing, flooded with natural light from the building’s glass facade and skylights directly above, takes that fundamental difference and runs with it.
Most any pilgrimage route to North Adams from the south or east goes through Springfield, but as far as I can tell this final LeWitt work hasn’t been written about before now. Commissioned for the Art in Architecture Program run by the federal General Services Administration and installed last summer, it’s worth a detour to see. More pictures follow below.
Meanwhile, the Mass MOCA website also has a terrific array of information about its retrospective exhibition, including time-lapse pictures of the installation in progress. Like the single Springfield work, the show was designed so all the drawings (with one exception) are on interior walls, which leaves the windows exposed around the building’s perimeter walls. The LeWitt retrospective is on view until 2033 — yes, a 25-year run — which makes sense given the complexity, breadth and expense of what was involved in putting on the show. The museum worked with the art galleries at Williams College and, especially, Yale University on the project, and the partners will evaluate what to do when the quarter-century is up.
Call me loopy-doopy, but I suspect America’s Sistine will become a cherished permanent fixture of the artistic landscape.
Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Kate Moss modelling for Topshop were cited as contrasting ideals of beauty by Roger Scruton in a debate on whether or Britain has become indifferent to beauty. Photograph: Corbis/AFP
The great thing about the present economic calamity is that it is forcing a thoughtful re-examination of values, rather than the coarse pursuit of acquiring more stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have.
So, right on cue, the National Trust, guardian of collective memory, has held its first public “Quality of Life” debate, organised by Intelligence Squared, the business that makes brainy argument into an extreme sport for urban intellectuals. During last Thursday’s cocktail hour at the Royal Geographical Society, 700 guests paid to hear a debate on whether “Britain has become indifferent to beauty”.
For the motion was David Starkey, the rebarbative, reactionary telly-don who has turned history into a queenly costume drama. With him, the amiable Roger Scruton: a foxhunting High Tory philosopher in corduroy who is everyone’s idea of a dotty professor. Starkey and Scruton see culture as a serial that has been recorded in episodes and canned in perpetuity for posterity. The task, in their view, is not to augment architectural history with up-to-date improvements, but regularly to revisit the past for edification and instruction.
Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, they see no value in contemporary life. Nothing to them is so howlingly funny as poor people going shopping in Tesco. In their panelled common rooms they slap their thighs and shriek with laughter at the crude appetites of people who drive cars or go on holidays.
John Betjeman was the same. He found dual-carriageways and council houses signs of perdition. Betjeman called Nikolaus Pevsner, our greatest architectural historian and unblinking champion of Modernism, “plebsveneer”.
Against the motion, Germaine Greer and myself. Greer is, after Clive James, our Greatest Living Australian National Treasure, although – to be honest – being told that she recently appeared on television in pop socks had made me a bit alarmed about the integrity of our argument. Greer is, her strident feminist years now gone the way of Starkey’s codpieces as a fashion accessory, an ocean-going intellect of, pop socks notwithstanding, some grandeur.
For me, the debate was a chance to go rhetorical about the single cultural principle I hold most dear: that history and tradition are things you build on with pride and conviction, not resorts you scurry back to when you can think of nothing better to do. I believe that to deny the present is to shortchange the future. These things I learnt from Nikolaus Pevsner.
The debate was chaired, with steely aplomb, by the Guardian columnist and National Trust chairman, Sir Simon Jenkins.
My argument was that, while Britain is most certainly in radical need of wholesale top-to-tail improvements to its fabric and its manners and attitudes, it is insulting and ignorant to say that this entire civilisation is “indifferent to beauty”. Beauty is fugitive and takes different forms at different historical moments. No one, Dr Starkey, writes madrigals any more.
On the other hand, Scruton and Starkey argued that no one discusses beauty any more. What they mean is that in their arid, isolated and increasingly irrelevant academic circles, beauty is a taboo. They need to get out more. Where I travel, in architectural offices and design consultancies and advertising agencies, beauty is discussed all the time.
And the public, consciously or not, is always in pursuit. I don’t know when Starkey or Scruton last visited TopShop on Oxford Street, but here they would find a huge, inspired and energetic audience in pursuit of … beauty, or, at least a version of it. The clothes in TopShop fall straight out of the British art school system, the oldest and best in the world, one that gets Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Matthew Williamson to be in charge of international fashion houses whose ideas feed beautiful clothes to the high street.
This same art and design education system stimulates the liveliest architectural culture on the planet. Most car designers are educated in Britain. And this same art education system produces Jonathan Ive, designer of the iPod. Last year millions of British consumers bought one because they are passionate about its beauty. They paid a premium price for a machine which, technologically, is no different to its MP3 rivals.
Britain, the country that Starkey and Scruton believe is indifferent to beauty, has by far the world’s most active design culture. Italy (the traditional home of bella figura) is pitiably backward in comparison. Scruton showed a picture of Botticelli’s Venus shoulder-to-shoulder with Kate Moss and told the audience how cruddy our culture is. I had to explain to him that Botticelli’s model was a common Florentine hooker called Simonetta Vespucci, painted nude to titillate his client.
Whether in fashion, products, packaging or buildings, design is by definition mass-market and to satisfy that mass market, you have to design beautiful, attractive objects. As pioneer design consultant Raymond Loewy knew, “ugliness sells badly”. But Starkey feels that selling is a transaction between pimps and whores, a view which may reveal more of his personal experience than it does of national life.
The motion wobbled as the audience saw the prejudice inherent in it: greater interest in beauty existed in the past. Yet people have a selective view of the past and its benefits: Starkey did not, I think, travel to London on an Elizabethan train. And he is corrupted by “survival bias”, the fact that only the best of the past survives and influences us disproportionately. Anyone who has read the accounts by Daniel Defoe or Celia Fiennes of travelling around Ye Olde Britaine know the squalor and ugliness of the past. Engels’s Condition of the Working Class (1844) describes a culture contemptuous of beauty. And let’s not forget George Orwell during his down-and-out period. I personally would not swap Wigan Pier for the London Eye or Liverpool Seaman’s Orphanage of 1885 for the impressive new Westminster Academy.
Design is about the popularisation of beauty. So, far from being “visually illiterate”, we enjoy popular advertising whose visual sophistication and coded language would have baffled a Sorbonne professor 25 years ago. It is readily de-coded by millions of adepts every night. Scruton called this sophisticated act of interpretation “pollution”.
Then there are our art galleries and museums. Seven out of 40 of the world’s most popular galleries are in London. Tate Modern gets 5.23m visitors a year and they are not all tourists: 67% are from the UK and are repeat customers. And what of the National Trust itself? Scruton and Starkey had problems arguing that its 3.5 million members belonged to an aesthetically indifferent culture.
But beauty can be abstract as well as visual. London is the cultural and gastronomic capital of the world. Better now to eat here than in Paris. Same goes for music and theatre. We spend more time in and more money on gardens than any other culture.
Britain is not indifferent to beauty. Anybody who has been on a diet, gone to a gym, dreamed about a holiday or wondered about a new car, watched Dan Pearson on television, enjoyed the London Eye or admired Tate Modern or felt Swiss Re makes an interesting contribution to the London skyline is in dedicated pursuit of … beauty.
Greer and I won the debate overwhelmingly, by a margin that made chairman Jenkins blink. This was not because we were so very clever, but because Starkey and Scruton were so very wrong. And what was the turning point? One, Greer said what a beautiful spring day it was. Whose mood was not enhanced by sunshine and flowers and blue skies? No dissenters, there. Two, in despair at their negativism, cynicism and defeatism, I asked Starkey and Scruton: “Why is it I like what you like (which is to say: medieval, renaissance and Victorian), but why you are so limited and snitty and crabby you see no value in what I like?” No dissenters here, either.
Wonderful to prove that the British are not, indeed, indifferent to beauty.
Stephen Bayley
Guardian
What the Art World Needs Now…is more Jack Nicholsons. Seriously.
This revelation came in Monday’s New York Post, which said that a new memoir from Allegra Huston, Angelica’s sister, included a passage on Nicholson’s acquisition habits. “He collected paintings to the point of obsession,” she wrote.
A little snooping around turned up more details. Nicholson apparently owns an eight-room home, modest by Hollywood standards, on Mulholland Dr. that is stuffed with just part of his collection — not just on the walls, but stacked in unoccupied rooms. The rest is in storage. Among his paintings are works by Picasso, Magritte, Bonnard, Matisse, Bacon and Dufy. In late 2007, he told the Times of London:
“I just like art…I get pure pleasure from it. My grandmother was an amateur painter.”
And:
“I got involved in buying paintings when Diana Vreeland [the former Vogue editor] got me to an auction in England. Up came this beautiful Tiepolo drawing at Sotheby’s. I bought it for Anjelica Huston as a present. That’s how I got started.”
And:
“People look at an abstract painting and ask, ‘What’s it supposed to be? What’s the point?’ Hell, it’s a painting, that’s the point. It’s not supposed to be anything. Its job is to get you to look in a different way. That’s also what actors are supposed to do. Provide a stimulating point of departure for thought and feeling.”
Spoken like a true collector.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Most great stories revolve around decisions: the snap brilliance of Captain Sullenberger choosing to land his plane in the Hudson, or Dorothea’s prolonged, agonizing choice of whether to forsake her husband for true love in “Middlemarch,” or your parents’ oft-told account of the day they decided to marry. There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals have drives, emotions, problem-solving skills, but none rival our capacity for self-consciously weighing all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. As George W. Bush might have put it, we are a species of deciders.
Jonah Lehrer’s engaging new book, “How We Decide,” puts our decision-making skills under the microscope. At 27, Lehrer is something of a popular science prodigy, having already published, in 2007, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” which argued that great artists anticipated the insights of modern brain science. “How We Decide” tilts more decisively in the thinking-person’s self-help direction, promising not only to explain how we decide, but also to help us do it better.
This is not exactly uncharted terrain. Early on, Lehrer introduces his main theme: “Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions.” Most readers at this point, I suspect, will naturally think of Malcolm Gladwell’s mega-best-seller “Blink,” which explored a similar boundary between reason and intuition. But a key difference between the two books quickly emerges: Gladwell’s book took an external vantage point on its subject, drawing largely on observations from psychology and sociology, while Lehrer’s is an inside job, zooming in on the inner workings of the brain. We learn about the nucleus accumbens, spindle cells and the prefrontal cortex. Many of the experiments he recounts involve fMRI scans of brains in the process of making decisions (which, for the record, is a little like making a decision with your head stuck in a spinning clothes dryer).
Explaining decision-making on the scale of neurons makes for a challenging task, but Lehrer handles it with confidence and grace. As an introduction to the cognitive struggle between the brain’s “executive” rational centers and its more intuitive regions, “How We Decide” succeeds with great panache, though readers of other popular books on this subject (Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” and Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence,” for example) will be familiar with a number of the classic experiments Lehrer describes.
In part, the neuroscience medicine goes down so smoothly because Lehrer introduces each concept with an arresting anecdote from a diverse array of fields: Tom Brady making a memorable pass in the 2002 Super Bowl; a Stanford particle physicist nearly winning the World Series of Poker; Al Haynes, the Sully of 1989, making a remarkable crash landing of a jetliner whose hydraulic system had failed entirely. The anecdotes are, without exception, well chosen and artfully told, but there is something in the structure of this kind of nonfiction writing that is starting to feel a little formulaic: startling mini-narrative, followed by an explanation of What the Science Can Teach Us, capped by a return to the original narrative with some crucial mystery unlocked. (I say this as someone who has used the device in my own books.) It may well be that this is simply the most effective way to convey these kinds of ideas to a lay audience. But part of me hopes that a writer as gifted as Lehrer will help push us into some new formal technique in future efforts.
A book that promises to improve our decision-making, however, should be judged on more than its narrative devices. The central question with one like “How We Decide” is, Do you get something out of it? It’s fascinating to learn about the reward circuitry of the brain, but on some basic level, we know that we seek out rewards and feel depressed when we don’t get them. Learning that this process is modulated by the neurochemical dopamine doesn’t, on the face of it, help us in our pursuit of those rewards. But Lehrer’s insights, fortunately, go well beyond the name-that-neurotransmitter trivia. He’s insightful and engaging on “negativity bias” and “loss aversion”: the propensity of the human brain to register bad news more strongly than good. (Negativity bias, for instance, explains why in the average marital relationship it takes five compliments to make up for a single cutting remark.) He has a wonderful section on creativity and working memory, which ends with the lovely epigram: “From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.”
For this reader, though, the most provocative sections of “How We Decide” involve sociopolitical issues more than personal ones. A recurring theme is how certain innate bugs in our decision-making apparatus led to our current financial crisis. We may be heavily “loss averse,” but only in the short run: a long list of experiments have shown that completely distinct parts of the brain are activated if the potential loss lies in the mid- or long-term future, making us more susceptible to the siren song of the LCD TV or McMansion. So many of the financial schemes that led us astray over the past decade exploit precisely these defects in our decision-making tools. “Paying with plastic fundamentally changes the way we spend money, altering the calculus of our financial decisions,” Lehrer writes. “When you buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss — your wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract.” Proust may have been a neuroscientist, but so were the subprime mortgage lenders. These are scientific insights that should be instructive to us as individuals, of course, but they also have great import to us as a society, as we think about the new forms of regulation that are going to have to be invented in the coming years to prevent another crisis.
“How We Decide” has one odd omission. For a book that plumbs the mysteries of the emotional brain, it has almost nothing to say about the decisions that most of us would conventionally describe as “emotional.” We hear about aviation heroism and poker strategies, and we hear numerous accounts of buying consumer goods. But there’s barely a mention of a whole class of choices that are suffused with emotion: whether to break up with a longstanding partner, or to scold a disobedient child, or to let an old friend know that you feel betrayed by something he’s said. For most of us, I suspect, these are the decisions that matter the most in our lives, and yet “How We Decide” is strangely silent about them. Perhaps Jonah Lehrer will use his considerable talents to tackle these most human of decisions in another volume. Until then, we’ve still got “Middlemarch.”
Steven Johnson
New York Times
On a surprisingly regular basis, the tiny Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania here mounts exhibitions that make the contemporary-art adventures of many larger museums look blinkered, timid and hidebound. The institute’s current show is a lively case in point, never mind the ungainly, uninformative title: “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay.” Only the last word hints that this convoluted syntax might signal an exhibition of ceramic vessels and sculptures.
When this show is seen in person, it is unmistakable that it is wildly, exuberantly, yet quite cogently about things of a ceramic nature, many different things: large and small, abstract and representational, glazed, unglazed and painted, old and new.
The show’s determination to integrate ceramics into the art mainstream is nothing new. But its refusal to do so simply by slipping some universally agreed-upon ceramic exceptions into a show of painting, sculpture and so forth is close to groundbreaking.
Putting all its eggs in one basket, “Dirt on Delight” argues for ceramics as a more than worthy subject. It reminds us that the art form incorporates quite a bit of painting and sculpture, thank you, and has one of the richest histories of any medium on the planet. Ceramics also plays well with all kinds of artistic ideas and needs no propping up by supposedly serious fine art or, incidentally, by much in the way of explanatory labels.
In addition, the sheer visual force of the show, with its saturated colors, varied surfaces and inventive forms, foments a fond hope: Perhaps sometime soon the religion of Minimal-Conceptual-Relational art (important as it is) will finally wither away, and more and more curators of contemporary art will regain full use of their eyes and thus their brains.
I was not the first to ask about the show’s title, and was told that dirt meant “the latest word,” “the lowdown.” These days the word sounds kind of negative, even without the definite article. Perhaps the all-over-the-place title should be taken as the show’s rambunctious id, or at least be chalked up to the curators’ excitement at having such a rich area of endeavor largely to themselves.
In any event, Ingrid Schaffner, the institute’s senior curator, and Jenelle Porter, its associate curator, have organized their exhibition with almost palpable glee. Their selections range over more than 100 years and mix art-world, crafts-world and crossover talents. Postwar figures like Peter Voulkos, the multitasking Lucio Fontana and Beatrice Wood are on hand, along with current exemplars like Ken Price and Arlene Shechet. Crossovers include Kathy Butterly and Betty Woodman. Although perhaps Ms. Woodman should cross over some more; her glazed surfaces are as interesting as her forms are not. She might do better just painting with glaze on flat pieces of clay, like Mary Heilmann and Joyce Robins (either of whom could have been in the show).
Roberta Smith
New York Times
The Korean art gallery at the Metropolitan Museum is a trim, tall, well-proportioned box of light. But it’s just one room, and a smallish one at that, reflecting the museum’s modest holdings in art from this region and the still scant attention paid to it by Western scholars.
So no surprise that the expansive-sounding exhibition called “Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600” is, by Met standards, a small thing too, with four dozen objects. Most of them — ceramic jars, lacquer boxes, scroll paintings — are compact enough to be stashed in a closet.
What the show lacks in grandeur, though, it makes up in fineness, and in rarity. All of the art dates from a period of cultural efflorescence and innovation in Korea. Experimental art was on the boil; utopian ideas were in the air. Yet much of what was produced then was lost in the series of invasions and occupations that began at the end of the 16th century.
In short, while the number of objects gathered here, more than half on loan from Korean museums, isn’t large, it’s a lot of what survives. And anyway, it makes for a comfortable display, ideal if you’re in the mood for some close looking rather than a drive-through blockbuster sweep.
Change was the essence of the Choson dynasty, which was founded in 1392, around the time the Renaissance began in Europe, and lasted for more than five centuries. Choson means “fresh dawn,” and the dynasty perceived itself as a broom sweeping the country clean of tired old ways, which in its early phase it did.
The end of the 14th century was a heady time in East Asia. In 1368 China finally rid itself of Mongol occupiers and established the Ming dynasty. In the process it revived neglected art traditions and asserted neo-Confucian thinking, with its concepts of philosopher-kings, government by scholar-officials and a code of ethics based on loyalty to state, community and family.
Three decades later a similar shift happened in Korea. An old governing aristocracy was pushed aside to make way for a state-trained bureaucratic elite known collectively as yangban. Institutional Buddhism, a political and spiritual force for the better part of a millennium, was officially suppressed in favor of Confucian secularism. As in China, traditional art forms were revived and revamped to convey new meaning.
But history is rarely cut and dried. As often as not, it’s a story of coexistence, not replacement; of retreat, not defeat. So it was in Korea. Buddhism didn’t go away. Like a pilot light on a stove, it may have been hard to see, but it kept burning, its flame sustained primarily by the ruling elite that had banned it.
And it is Buddhist art of the early Choson that gives the exhibition its flashes of color and spectacle. A large hanging scroll painting of the Healing Buddha, his skin gold, his robes purple, his throne wreathed by a tangle of celestial bodyguards, is especially magnetic. It looks both old and new.
Prototypes for it go back centuries in China and Korea, but details of the Buddha’s persimmon-shaped face — the tiny slit eyes, the beanlike mouth — blend Choson and Ming styles, making the painting very much of its 16th-century time. It was of its time too in being both illegal and a royal commission, paid for by an avidly Buddhist dowager queen whose son was a neo-Confucian king.
It was China, rather than Buddhism per se, that provided Korean artists with an aesthetic template. Sometimes cultural differences are all but impossible to discern. A magnificent picture of a falcon, long attributed to the 14th-century Chinese animal painter Xu Ze, has recently been reattributed to the 16th-century Korean painter Yi Am, partly on the basis of a seal stamped on the picture’s surface.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
