Art Isn’t Dead

DUH.

I’m hoping the embed option for this video actually starts to work. If not, check it out at New York Magazine’s website. Jerry Saltz did a tour of 24th Street to show that Chelsea is still functioning and thriving. Going to Gagosian might not prove that, but it will provide some nice clips of the work by Murakami I was discussing yesterday. He starts the video with the other show in the gallery, which I didn’t love. To his credit, he focuses on the less annoying works.

Shiny metallic purple = 80s much?

The video is meant to accompany an article that says the gallery system isn’t dead–galleries are existing and new artwork is being shown and made. I like Jerry Saltz and I like his writing. I would like to take a class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation he talks about. But in this video he highlights a few very well established and commercially successful galleries that are still showing art. But of course.

Hero Worship is Passé

Falcon Hunting in Algeria, Fromentin

Eugene Fromentin‘s The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland sounds more like a textbook than memoirs of an artist’s 1875 trip to Holland to see Dutch paintings, which is why I borrowed it from the library. I quickly discovered my mistake. It might sound charming, but this book is actually full of long-winded, vague descriptions and similarly long, vague rhapsodies over the genius of Rubens and Rembrandt. (With some sleights to the new Impressionist school in France.)

Fair enough, you might say. Rubens and Rembrandt are generally thought to be great and important painters. But when I say rhapsodies I mean full-blown, adulatory praises ala:

that morose and witty dreamer, who without living apart had no relation with any of them; who seemed to be painting his epoch, his country, his friends and himself, but who at bottom painted only one of the unknown recesses of the human soul. I speak, as you must know, of Rembrandt.

[Rubens] fills the last division of the gallery, and there sheds abroad the restrained brilliancy, and that soft and powerful radiance which are the grace of his genius. There is no pedantry, no affectation of vain grandeur or of offensive pride, but he is naturally imposing.

Hero worship of this sort if dead. In every artistic field, we practice new forms of criticism that analyze structure or context or socio-political aims. Anything but pure, old fashioned worship. We use more naunced words that genius, and we certainly don’t assume the great art stems from souls of great moral worth, as Fromentin does. He sees valour and searching wit and genorosity of spirit in the lines of Rembrandt’s drawings. I see lines–and maybe it is my loss.

Arabs, Fromentin
Fromentin was no great critic, not like Matthew Arnold or Baudelaire who practised and preached. But when it the last time you read a review that put the artist on a pedestal? We treat artists as cultural specimens to be dissected. The only critic not afraid of the term genius is annoying Harold Bloom, and I suspect that’s only because he wants to be able to include himself in his self-defined pantheon. I wouldn’t mind hearing a little simple admiration. I don’t mind the damming reviews, as they tend be better written and more intersting. Yet with all the snark floating about, earnestness can seem almost too exposed, too simple.

Maybe more appreciation would be appropriate. That is what moves us to write about and talk about these things in the first place.