The League of David

Narcissism, ideology, and moral hysteria, oh my!

When I was a Philistine, the New York Times' cultural coverage was something to be devoured.   Then something happened, and it wasn't just my own political change of heart.  The coveraged just began to suck.

It's nice to know I wasn't the only one who noticed:

The truth is, deterioration at the Times is a rich subject, full of cautionary tales about how a great liberal institution can go rancid by making a caricature of its principles and adulterating its work. When a great newspaper’s front page is indistinguishable from its editorial page, and its editorial page is indistinguishable from a transcript of a Democratic Party rally, journalistic decay is a certainty. But if what’s happened to the Times’s news reporting and opinion pages is an outrage—think only of the repulsive way in which the paper attempted to generate anti-Bush capital from the Katrina disaster—its coverage of culture is somehow more depressing than infuriating. Here, too, one finds the triumph of ideology over principle and an unseemly race to the lowest common denominator. Yet in matters of culture and the arts, the Times adds another dimension of depredation—we mean the element, half preposterous, half nauseating—of unthinking modishness.

Slowly, Things Are Changing

The DC area has its share of astonishingly ugly Catholic churches (architecture, not people).  Visit parts of northern Virginia or suburban Maryland and savor the fruits of Philistines' labor.  Decades of "experimentation" with "sacred spaces" has produced some of the ugliest insults to God.   Sorry folks, after centuries of unprecendeted beauty, you can't tell me that God prefers the Wal-Mart look.

Just think how long - how many more decades -- we're going to have to live with gymnasiums adorned with Catholic-stuff.

However, there's a glimmer of hope in Silver Spring.  The pastor of St. Michael's has proposed several renovations to the church -- some of them much needed, including a paint job.  More important, however, is the relocation of  the tabernacle "to a noble place in the center of the sanctuary."

Amen.

Now, they need a music director who can think beyond those vile Dan Schutte songs.

What's This?

Here's another in my series. 

What's this?

1.  Office building lobby art on display at the security counter.

2.  A very expensive bong.

3.  A very heavy back scratcher.

4.  Something no one will bid on at a silent auction.

Answer.

Life Imitates...Logan's Run

Ew.

It reminds me of the Carousel from Logan's Run.  Ew.

The World's Most Depressing Blog

Catholic Church Conservation.

Pictures at an Exhibition

What is it about an advertised gallery exhibition that turns generally nice people into pompous asses?

I learned my lesson the hard way during the second to last weekend of an exhibition of Rembrandt’s later religious portraits. 

I’ve never been much of a fan of the man.  Rembrandt reminds me of Renoir on Xanax, fuzzy and depressing. I can take him in small doses – a painting here, a painting there.  The problem is there are so many Rembrandts that you can’t seem to get away from him.  Go to practically any major museum in the US, and they’ve got a Rembrandt on display or an exhibition going on. 

It also guarantees a gallery filled with Philistines.

More than any other painter of the period, Rembrandt attracts the Philistines.  Why?  I asked myself as I overheard a conversion about brush stroke forms spoken in that tight-throated pose of someone trying to sound educated…smart…sophisticated.  There was one guy who just stood kouros-style  RIGHT IN FRONT of one painting.  I watched him for a few minutes.  He moved from a Greek statue pose to the pensive intensity of a Rodin.  I looked at the painting with Statue-man, trying to convince myself that if I just stare at it long enough a bright light of wisdom would pierce my mind and soul, and I would finally understand.

No luck this time.  The only noise I heard was an old lady trying to sound smart.  My friend returned from her sojourn through the exhibition.  “This sucks,” she said succinctly.  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Amen, sister.

She wanted to stop by an exhibition of the works of Gilbert Stuart.  I was obliged to follow.  What a pleasant surprise!  It's a lovely little exhibition (on through July 31 at the National Gallery of Art) of Stuart’s American portraits. 

I was surprised to find him a confident and insightful portraitist.  He reminds me of the John Singer Sargent, albeit without the baggage of a post-Romantic thinker.  There's a lovely portrait of a young woman -- I forget her name -- in a standing side pose.  She's looking right toward the viewer with her arms defiantly crossed in front of her.  Her left hand holds her riding bonnet, and she has the snarkiest smile on her face.  You can tell that all the early 19th century societal reserve in the world can't help this young lady from winking at us.

Stuart does for John Adams what Sargent would one day do for Theodore Roosevelt.  He paints the man, without pretension, in a moment of action that suits the sitter’s character.  For the aging Adams, it appears to have been the initial moment after relaxing on a couch, his eye turned to you, waiting for you to speak.

And of course, Stuart painted George.  Lots of George.

If you’re going to be in DC this summer, skip the pretentious Philistine exhibits, and head straight for Stuart and his fine American subjects.

Splendor of Old

Fr. Jim Tucker, a priest in Northern Virginia, noticed something about B16:  his pallium.  It's an ancient design, probably more common with the first millennium of Christianity than subsequent eras.  I also noticed something about the Pope's vestments from Sunday's ceremony. 

Look at this image:

I saw this image, and I couldn't help but think that there is something ancient about it.   It reminded me of the Gothic sculptures of seated bishops -- usually bishop saints like Ambrose, Augustine, etc -- that adorn cathedral facades.

I use the word "ancient"  because the word generates more respect in our world than words like "old" or "medieval."  And, I think that our postmodern age is so far removed from the civilization of medieval Europe that it appears as exotic as Nineveh or Crete.   

As my Three Readers know, my heart lingers in the Middle Ages.  I've never been to Europe for enjoyment, and so all of my experience with medieval art comes from American museums.  Some of these museums, granted, have incredible collections of medieval art -- The Cloisters, The Walters, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, etc. -- but I can't remember where I have seen sculptures of seated (or enthroned) bishops.  I've torn through my coffee table books and museum guides. I've Googled Augustine and Ambrose and others, and I get close, but the images are not the same.  I can't find one image of an enthroned bishop, but they do exist.  Right?

Regardless, if Fr. Tucker is right, then it says something wondrous about Pope Benedict XVI.   The pleasure of this  Papacy will be in the details.

Humanities As (Dishonest) Joke

Why don't people take academics and their profession seriously?  It may have something to do with the bullshit they write.  There are wonderful examples of it in Paul Johnson's review of Roger Kimball's new book, Rape of the Masters [Note: I've added the images]:

Kimball illustrates his case by a series of examples that are worth summarizing. Thus, Prof. Keith Moxey, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College, argues that all culture must be related to theory and politics. He gives Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as an example of an artist truckling to the social, economic, and political views of the patrons who paid for it.

<SNIP>

Of Sargent's enchanting and virtuoso pain-ting of The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), Prof. David M. Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, says it is an unhappy psychodrama fraught with exploitation, anxiety, and tension. He adds, arrogantly, that it does not matter "whether Sargent meant it this way or not."

<SNIP>

Prof. Griselda Pollock, who is at Leeds University, where she is Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Centre for Jewish Studies, and Graduate Studies and Research in Feminist Theory, History, and Art—amazing the way these people accumulate titles!—sees Gauguin's works and especially his Spirit of the Dead Watching (a black sleeping nude with dream symbols) as a case of colonialist, masculine, and capitalist exploitation, in addition to being racist and sexist. Manet's Olympia, to which she compares it, is "a representation of the spaces of bourgeois masculinity where working women's bodies are bought and sold.... The painting signifies commodity, capital's penetration of bodies and desires."

Oh, they tell us it's because we're ignorant.  We aren't learned enough to grasp the complexity of the ideas they're communicating. Besides, it's their world, and we're not necessarily invited to join the conversation.   It's the Philistine's only excuse for the inexorable decline of the academic class in the West in general, and America, specifically. 

Please, please, please don't tell me this just the way academics are -- you know, smart and all.  There are dozens of 20th century academics who successfully communicated to an audience broader than their faculty evaluating committees.  This is just cheap and dishonest laziness masquerading as academic insight.  There's nothing worse in the discipline of ideas.

St Peter's (1957)

As a Army sergeant in Europe during 1956-57, my father traveled all over western Europe.  He also took pictures, many, many pictures.  He used a Retina 35mm camera (still works), and dozens of rolls of Kodachrome slide film. 

In 1957or 1958 he visited Rome with two other Army buddies. 

Here is St. Peter's

Here he stands on the steps of St. Peters:

If I can ever get off my ass, I'll start posting many of his most impressive European images over at the blog I've been ever so slowly designing here.

Not A Happy Review

This New York Times reviewer is trying to be nice while writing some of the most dreaded sentences in the museum industry:

But the exhibits are where the problems begin in earnest.

Ouch.

I work near the National Mall, and on nice days I usually walk across the Mall and catch the Metro on the other side. Sometimes I'm walking through a protest; sometimes it's a party.  I remember the festivities commemorating the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in late summer.   I was startled by the sheer number of people who claimed American Indian decent, and I saw a variety of faces and shapes that made me think that "American Indian" is like "Asian," just an expedient bureaucratic phrase to describe an unbelievably diverse group of people. 

That is, however, everything I know and care about when it comes to American Indian art and culture.  There just aren't many American Indians here in an east coast,  blue state urban environ, and Indian kitsch doesn't blend well with DC-area decor. 

However, I hate the building that houses the Museum.  It's a great big eyesore in a strategic part of the Mall.  It reminds me of the old stucco walls in my grandparent's brownstone in Queens.  The hard, pointy stucco used to catch on my shirt or poke me in the arm.  It also matched perfectly with the green velvet and gold lame decor.  When I look at the building I'm reminded of the gilded busts of Ferdinand and Isabella in their living room.  After a childhood living of fear of visits to my grandparent's house, I'm less inclined to visit a place that brings back old memories.

For some reason the Museum's designers felt the need to stand out.  They couldn't build any old beige stone monstrosity like the other buildings on the Mall.  They had to be different.  Thus, ugly:

Some of these problems seem palpable in the Indian museum's building itself, which fills the last open spot on the Mall. In 1998 [chief architect] was fired from the architect job and multiple voices came into play; he called the result a ''forgery'' and refuses to take credit. His vision of a sweeping earth-form, shaped by nature's force fields, can still be sensed. But the northwest corner of the building is leaden, its Mall-facing facade only half-heartedly awakening as it leads toward the east-facing front. The landscaping, which includes 33,000 plants of 150 species along with various invocations of Native American elements -- a boulder from Hawaii, growing stalks of corn and a recreated Chesapeake wetlands -- is marred by fussiness.

Double ouch.

It also appears that the Museum suffers under the heavy weight of moral relativism and political correctness:

In fact, there is an astonishing uniformity in the exhibits' accounts of religious beliefs, which may have been homogenized by subtle forces within the museum itself. The building emphasizes a kind of warm, earthy mysticism with comforting homilies behind every facade, reviving an old pastoral romance about the Indian.

But these were communities that at least at one time were vastly different, which farmed or hunted, engaged in war, suffered indignity, inspired outrage. The notion that tribal voices should ''be heard'' becomes a problem when the selected voices have so little to say. Moreover, since American Indians largely had no detailed written languages and since so much trauma had decimated the tribes, the need for scholarship and analysis of secondary sources is all the more crucial.

But the museum almost seems afraid of distinctions. [Triple ouch] There are display cases of objects made with beads, organized with no particular logic; a beaded horse-head cover from 1900 North Dakota appears near a mid-19th-century sea-otter hat from the Aleutian Islands. One wall holds ''star'' objects, whose only connection is that they have pictures of stars on them. Some tribes are asked to present 10 crucial moments in their history; the Tohono Oodham in Arizona choose, as their first, ''Birds teach people to call for rain.'' Their last is in the year 2000, a ''desert walk for health.''

The result is that a monotony sets in; every tribe is equal, and so is every idea. No unified intelligence has been applied. Moreover, with a net cast so wide, including South and Central America as well as Alaska, the only commonality may be the encounter with colonizers -- and even this must be simplified.

What a shame.