Monthly Archives: January 2009

“Beauty and the Best” and a Boyfriend

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“Artists should be separated from people who do creative things” was my boyfriend’s response to my description of Theodore Dalrymple’s article in The New English Review, mentioned previously here.

By that, he meant that saying a chef was an artiste was hyperbolic, only meaning he cooked very well. He also meant that more conceptual and non-traditional works of contemporary art, such as rings of circles in duct tape or performances where a person sits on a box for days or even Pippilotti Rist’s video and sound installation in the atrium at MoMA, are cool, are visual, and are creative but that they are not art.

Dalrymple’s trenchant article has stayed in my mind, but all my conclusions from it seem to be drawing lines in the sand, much as my boyfriend’s statement does. “This is Art; this is not.” As if there were a right and wrong, and a good and bad when it comes to art.

But in fact, isn’t there? Art requires a set of aesthetic values to be judged by, if we are to make judgments at all. Life and art, or at least my life and art, are more than a series of perceptions. They have meaning to me, and they do because I assign to all things value. This is no formal declaration of organizing principles either for myself or of culture in general. But as my life has meaning, and art has meaning to me, and I think some organizing principle guides my perceptions of art.

Dalrymple’s article feels true to my experiences. He considers popular contemporary art to be shallow and created by egoists who are too afraid to create something beautiful, not to mention lacking the technical means and knowledge of an artistic heritage to do so. Think of Jeff Koons, who he mentions, or Damian Hirst or Murakami. To strive for beauty seems too earnest, almost gauche today.

So perhaps my boyfriend and Dalrymple are saying similar things. One feels it is not art, the other that it is bad art. Perhaps I agree. My amusement and interest with much of contemporary art is just that; and those feelings are different than a reaction to something beautiful. People who look can find beauty and an expression of the human condition in a falling leaf or the texture of a wall. A beautiful work of art makes those qualities apparent to those who weren’t looking.

The Green Fairy Resurrected

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Absinthe, ah the decadent wonder of late nights and green fairies. Ah the miraculous release from life’s troubles. The scintillating pleasure of dissolving sugar in its neon depths.

Absinthe has saturated bar menus in Manhattan of late as the drink du jour. As far as I’m concerned, that jour is past.

However cool it may be that Van Gogh might have cut his earlobe off because of it, it doesn’t taste so delicious. You see the face of the woman in Picasso’s 1901 Absinthe Drinker? Nobody smiles in the paintings of absinthe drinkers. It’s because a vile green herbal liquor is sitting in front of them, reflecting a sickly pallor upon them. Absinthe was deliciously illegal and hard to obtain in Manhattan (which would make even toadstools a luxury good) but now it’s plentifully available. It tends to taste like anise, a flavor that I’ve always detested.

So what is there to be said in favor of this over-available, under-tasty liquor? Vintage poster art for one, and paintings like the one by Picasso for another. Artists seem to love portraying absinthe, whether its advertisements of smiling people and lascivous green lady fairies or paintings of sallow, dejected loners in bars. Could absinthe have been different then?

Proust and Time

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Swann’s Way is the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), and I found it easy to dip into the lives of the boy Marcel and the dilettante Charles Swann for my first foray into Proust.

Where is the first volume going? Somewhere along the life of a little boy and a Mr. Swann, but apparently that will be wherever life takes them and not where plot demands. To enjoy this novel one must allow a companionable closeness with the protagonist, and if you do, you’ll find yourself as torn up as he is over the refusal of a mother or lover, and as overjoyed to see his beloved. How closely you can identify with a character when you know the minutest details of his thoughts!

Describing the charm of Proust’s writing is difficult because his virtues are old-fashioned and rare. He doesn’t skimp words. He is circuitous and his relates much more than is necessary for any plot; his writing is the opposite of what we are taught. His flow lacks the modernity of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, and yet has an expansive, naturally drifting quality that revolves around an intense personal consciousness. Unlike Joyce, reading Proust is the most easy, natural thing to dip into, but he requires patience. The longer read, the better sense you gain of the cumulative meanings that lend poignancy to his writing.

“the memory of a particular image is but the regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years”

Proust might be writing fiction, but it reminds me of Fernando Pessoa’s autobiographical The Book of Disquiet. À la recherche du temps perdu is to a great point autobiographical (I think that is what allows him to write it so well.) Proust names the protagonist Marcel, his own name, and his title suggests that he is trying to write his life back. What a lovely thing, to be able to write a fictional account of one’s own life. How much closer one might get to the heart of the matter, as Proust does.