The future of arts journalism

First, read this from Teachout. He makes some excellent points about the direction that the mainstream culture is going in regards to the fine arts. Our local bloated pig of an NPR affiliate gave up on its classical music programming years ago, leaving the field to a horrendous commercial classical station that seems to think that all Western Art Music can be reduced to a few dozen selections (each one individual movements, rather than complete pieces). Fortunately not all stations have gone this direction, in fact, the excellent Capital Public Radio out of Sacramento has great classical programming (in fact they have improved over the past few years), and there are scattered shows on other smaller NPR affiliates and community stations.

Teachout sees the future of arts journalism as the Internet, and he is probably right. The newspaper chain that I write for is doing a slightly better job of arts coverage than it did a few years ago, but all it would take is a change of editors and we would be joining the trend. The San Francisco Chronicle, which has never really been a powerhouse of arts coverage, has sunk to incredible depths since becoming a Hearst paper. I still see some good pieces in the LA Times, the NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal, but there is only so much they can do.

While there will still be some arts magazines, many of them have theorized themselves into oblivion, searching out avant-gardes in an age when the term "avant-garde" makes little sense. In the meanwhile, the Internet is free (or nearly free), and allows for rapid exchange between members of the arts community. Critics, artists, theorists, audiences, all can participate. The initial noise of excessive voices will diminish as various aspects of arts coverage become self-selective.

Happy Ramadan!

In honor of the beginning of Ramadan, I am launching a new contest! Wheeee! A free pork sandwich and glass of wine will go to the winner, as well as bragging rights. This year's Ramadan contest winner will be the one who provides me with the best plan for building the Basilica of Our Lady of Lepanto in Mecca. The criteria are:

It must account for the removal of one large black rock. Ideally the tabernacle or crucifix should be placed on that specific site.

It must be Triumphalist! There must be a lot of statues.

Dante's depiction of Mohammed must be featured somehow in the design, whether as a fresco, a frieze, of a full scale baroque sculpture out in front.

It must be Latin-rite. The easterners can have their own competition. Ideally the pipe organ and bells should be audible for blocks and blocks around the church.

This is partially tongue-in-cheek. I am not yet advocating total crusade against the Mohammedans. At least not on their own turf. Yet. But something like this should inspire us to think grandly, in terms of art as well as evangelization.

Proposals are due by the end of Ramadan.

Eat more pork!
Carthago delenda est!

Chagall

Amalia and I finally got around to seeing the retrospective of Marc Chagall at SFMOMA. I have never been totally smitten by Chagall, and was expecting to see a better view of him than I have ever seen. I was correct, as there were tons of paintings, including early works.

My verdict: Chagall was even worse of a painter than I used to think. Was he colorblind? Once in a while he would hit on a sound color chord. The rest of the time, his work was just garish. Combined with his weak sense of composition and his perfectly wretched paint handling, these works are astonishing in their utter lack of craftsmanship.

However, there is something there. His ideas were often good, and I think that there is a real thirst for portrayals of mythologies. The public is obvioulsy enthralled, as evidenced by the line around the block (fortunately we are members and could walk right up). Melanie thought that the crowd was probably in love with the color. Perhaps, but one can get powerful color in Pierre Bonnard, who was a much better painter. The difference in the public's eye is that Bonnard painted domestic scenes: the view out his window, his wife, the cat on a sofa, etc. Chagall gives us flying goats in wedding dresses, and touches on part of our imagination in a way that for many has not been touched since childhood.

Afterwards we went downstairs to the permanent collection. For reasons rather suspect, they have two Barnett Newman paintings on display. There never was a more overrated painter (if we can call him that) than Newman. The contrast between his work and Chagall's is illuminating. Chagall might have been a hack, but he was a hack who gave us flights of imagination that transcend even his own lack of painterly talent. I found myself enjoying paintings upstairs that were really quite atrocious as paintings.

But looking at Newman only brings feelings of contempt. This fellow was one of the few abstract expressionists (if we can call him that) to paint to the theory. Others may have claimed it, because it was good press, but they were first and foremost about the painting. Even the weaker ones, like Clyfford Still, had moments of greatness when they let go of the preposterous notions that were thick in the art world air in the 1950's and simply painted. There is none of that in Newman. His work embodies the worst of minimalism with the worst of the verbiage of abtract expressionism.

If you take a long look at a good Rothko or a Still (or better yet a Diebenkorn or a Ryman), you will be rewarded. If you take a long look at a Newman, you will find next to nothing.

I was also annoyed at the lack of Diebenkorns on display, considering the number of his masterpieces that SFMOMA owns. Certainly a 1955 Berkeley Diebenkorn abstraction would have been a better choice than a Newman.

In other depressing news, the contemporary art was all junk, derived from the worst ideas of the last 50 years, executed without a shred of talent, and puffed up with laughable text on the side. And it is time to put the hatchet in multi-media art and to start over. Sure there are some good pieces here and there, but to sift through all the rest is painful, and it has to be done with more time than one can dismiss a gallery full of paintings (an unfortunately easy thing to do these days).

On a happy note, we ran into Amalia's godfather at the beautifully restored ferry building, had a great conversation with an Armenian-American grape farmer from Dinuba (mostly on the finer points of roasting whole lambs), ran into a friend of mine from high school who I haven't seen in over seven years, had a wonderful dinner at the Fog City Diner, and (highlight of Amalia's day) got to ride in two choo-choos and a bus. It was a balmy day in the City, with a pale blue sky and views that make me wonder how anyone could ever leave the Bay Area (the other time I get that feeling is when I do venture out of the Bay Area).

One of the fun moments was walking down the Embarcadero with Amalia riding on my shoulders and proclaiming to her godfather that she was tall. She rides grasping my hair in both hands, so I think we may have a natural English-style rider on our hands.

Teachout's at it again, so here we go...

You can read the rules on the posting below.

CLASSICAL CD: Sophie Yates, Scarlatti in Iberia

POP SONG: Aretha Franklin, Respect

PAINTING: Richard Diebenkorn, Girl Sitting

FILM: Pane e Tulipane

BOOK: The Little World of Don Camillo, Guaraschi

In The Bag Again

Teachout has fired another round of In The Bag. You know the rules:

"Time again for "In the Bag," the game that challenges you to tell the truth about your taste. The rules: you can stuff any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering—the bad guys are beating on your front door. No posturing—you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how silly they may sound. What do you put in the bag?"

BOOK (FICTION): Italo Calvino's Baron in the Trees

BOOK (NONFICTION): A Traveller In Rome (cannot remember the author's name)

PAINTING: Birth of Venus, Boticcelli

CD: Paolo Conte's latest one (cannot remember the title)

FILM: Night of the Shooting Stars (Tornatore brothers)

I sound like a broken record again!

Once again, I am overjoyed to read today's Terry Teachout column. He waxes quite eloquently on one of my favorite altomen, Bud Shank. Of all the strains of modern jazz, my favorite has to be the work that came out of the Stan Kenton sax section in the 1950's (and the fellows who were loosely affiliated with those guys, even just in spirit, so I get to include Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, etc.). I have learned over the years that the distinctions between "West Coast" and "East Coast" jazz are nonsense when looked at with any sort of critical eye. Is Getz West or East? Cool or hot? Before you answer those questions, really think. Can you call Getz a Philly musician or an LA musician? Cool tone, but wasn't it really just an individual take on the quintessentially New Yorker Lester Young's sound? And what about when he played quite hot with Oscar Peterson?

Anyway, I have seen Bud Shank in recent years, and he is as good as Teachout says. The only problem for me in listening to Shank is that his sound really makes me miss Gerry Mulligan, who was one of the absolute greatest. Mulligan could pull off dates with Thelonious Monk and Astor Piazzola, fit in with either, yet still sound essentially like Mulligan. Shank shares tremendous artistic sympathies with Mulligan, and I can't help but have a tinge of sadness over Mulligan's untimely death whenever I hear Shank (or Desmond, for that matter).

In fact it is hard to listen to that great post-Kenton music and not feel a tinge of melancholy over the fact that those sounds are now distinctly sounds of a lost golden age. I am not saying that there will be nothing better, but we will never have that sound again. So, do not pass up the opportunity to see Shank or Brubeck if they come around your parts. John Salmon, in the comments box to the post about Teachout's post on Desmond, mentions that Brubeck is playing with some Maynard Ferguson alums. I do not want to miss that!

The second part of Teachout's post is a marvelous reflection on viewing art. I highly recommend it, particularly his part about seeing reputations rather than paintings. That sort of honesty is remarkable in a critic (take note, Kenneth Baker), and is someting any of us who care about art must always keep in mind. I try to fight it by taking really long looks at art (most people I know hate going to the museum with me, and the feeling is mutual for the most part. They find the time I want to spend utterly vexing, and I view their agitation as something akin to the persitant whining of a seven year old: "Are we there yet?" No, we are not there yet, and we cannot stop at the Nut Tree this time (sorry, but you have to be very familiar with Northern California to get the reference to the dearly lamented late Nut Tree. I apologize to you Ausländer). The only way for me to reach any sort of detante with my friends in a museum is if they allow me to be the tour guide. I find they at least get an idea of why I take so long, even if they are find my search for minor chords of minor chords of the golden section astoundingly dull) and by analyzing pieces by way of a variety of approaches.

Anyway, Teachout is fantastic. Read him!

What is the etymology of his name, anyway? Sounds like he has some rabid leftist heritage: Teach-in plus walk-out or something? I guess it beats archaic German for Wedgewood, though.

Speaking of Germans, I misquoted Monty Python in my response to Steven's comment. It is actually funnier:

Germans are very difficult to offend. Try setting them on fire or calling their Mercedes' Volkswagens.

Robert Ryman

WOW! For the first time someone was referred to this blog looking for Robert Ryman (and from France, nonetheless - Bienvenue!).

Most people do not know Robert Ryman, which is a terrible shame, but I think I know why. First, his work is almost completely resistant to reproduction. He paints often very close to white: white paint on white ground, or near-white ground, but sometimes has other colors delicately hidden in the mix. What one sees in his work are incredible subtlety of texture and hue.

Second, Ryman is mistakenly identified as a minimalist, and he is no minimalist, a la Judd. What he is closest to (and calling this brilliant sui generis painter anything is an error to some degree or another) is a subtle and restrained Abstract Expressionist. Ryman's work must be carefully studied, and not once either, to reveal its charms in full. Fortunately, when they built the new SFMOMA they had a small room entirely dedicated to his work. There was a period when I was going to the museum at least once a week, and would always spend a good twenty minutes in this room, usually looking at one or two paintings. I would see people walk in, quickly glance at the paintings, maybe mutter something like, "oh, all white canvas. titter titter." and move on, which was too bad, because if they had stopped, taken a good look, they would have seen something much more interesting and ultimately more rewarding than the works that always get more attention.

The first time I really got to look at his work was at a major retrospective at the old SFMOMA in the Veteran's Memorial Building at Civic Center. It was during my college years and had driven up to the City with some friends. I think they were not too impressed, but something grabbed me in those paintings. I went back again and again. When they opened the new museum, which still impresses me as one of the few contemporary pieces of architecture that I like, the first thing that I noticed was that the third floor collection of permanent works was called "From Matisse to Diebenkorn." Yipee! Diebenkorn is mentioned by name in the title! Sure enough, lots o'Diebenkorn. Perfect. On the fourth floor was the more contemporary stuff: boring crap by Gerhard Richter, moderately interesting dripped lead installation by Serra, hideous crap by Jeff Koons, and, what is in this little room? Stop breathing for a second. All Robert Ryman. Something like eleven paintings, arranged with ample space on the clean white walls, with the light wood, polished floor was incredible. Move over Rothko Chapel! For a modern space for contemplation, this was the ultimate.

It was in this room over the course of the next few years that I got to really study the textures, the compositions, and subtle colorations of this great painter. If our era has a modern artist in touch with the spirit of the Baroque, it is Ryman, yet he works his baroque in such subtle ways, that the experience is akin to walking into a silent church and very gradually noticing that a brilliant and loud Bach passacaglia is actually coming from the pipe organ, yet somehow obscured by silence, only revealing itself to those who stop and listen. That paradox embodies the experience of a long look at Ryman.

For good and for bad, the staff at SFMOMA changes things around from their permanent collection, and the little room is no longer the Robert Ryman exclusive room. They have a couple of his paintings up in the collection, and may some day restore this room to its Rymanesque purity, which would be wonderful.

I don't suppose that I recommend buying a book of Ryman reproductions, or searching him out on the internet. You really need to see it first hand, but next time you are in a museum and see his name, stop and look for a good ten minutes. Don't try to see anything in particular, just soak in the direction of the brush strokes, the shadows formed by the textures, any underlying marks. If you are getting distracted or not able to focus, move on and come back later, but do yourself the favor of really looking at the work of this often overlooked artist.

I am learning why I like Teachout so much

Today, Terry Teachout has posted an interesting post on Shostakovich, as well as a mention that Paul Desmond is his favorite jazz musician. I was in high school when Desmond made a huge impact on me (first with Brubeck's Time Out, then the rest). I still love to listen to the recordings he made with Dave Brubeck. Desmond was one of the most inventive alto saxaphonists ever. His conception of phrase was incredible. His relaxed tone hid some of the most complex melodies ever improvised.

I never got to see Paul Desmond live, as he died before I was going to jazz concerts, but I have seen Brubeck (even got to meet him once when he, Jerry Mulligan, and many other heroes of mine were on the same plane from New York to SF. I was returning home, they were coming over for Monterrey Jazz) many times. Brubeck with the talented reedman Bill Smith is fine, but there was something utterly irreplacable in Paul Desmond's sound. At least that sound was preserved on recordings!

Much Better than Friday Fives: Courtesy of Teachout

First, read the rules of the game over here, then post your own Bag of Art. Quickly now!

PAINTING: Richard Diebenkorn's Seawall.

MUSIC: Thelonious Monk's Solo Monk

NOVEL: Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine

FILM: My Father's Glory

POP SONG: Grateful Dead's "Sugar Magnolia"

Now, post yours!

Speaking of Teachout

I have not done a Sept 11 memorial here. Others have done them better. Instead I offer you artistic hope: Read this article on what comes after postmodernism. He is wrong on a couple of points, but overall he is correct. I am more than happy to see the end of postmodernism. It was a tedious fraud from the get go and will not be missed. Gallery openings had become wretched parades of insufferable hipsters, looking at art that was as humble in its achievement as it was arrogant in its pretence.

Teachout credits Sept 11 with bringing down the curtain on this crap. He may be right.

Art Reflections Part III

More Art Reflections.

In my brief outline of my own basic views on art, as well as discussions with Matthew of the Shrine of the Holy Whapping, I realize that an important issue must be dealt with: the relationship of objective beauty to individual taste. Certainly de gustibus non disputandem est. There is no point in arguing over whether or not it is correct to like the color orange, or the smell of skunks, or even to prefer Wagner to Scarlatti (God forbid!).

The problem comes in modern society, when the proper understanding of beauty is neglected and confounded with taste. The problem probably started when taste became a badge of class, and I will not be so foolish as to suggest a single time for that. I do know from studying the history of food, that there have been class-based food fads going way back. For awhile the nobility (and emerging bourgeoisie) shunned aromatic herbs, because that was how the peasants flavored their food. Then, the craze for spice was seen as incredibly nouveau, so spices were almost completely abandoned in savory dishes in favor of thyme, savory, marjoram, etc.

Once taste was linked to social standing, it became an imposed thing. Don’t like cardamom in your meatballs? Tough, cause that’s what the proper people are doing. Sage is vulgar. Naturally one cannot back up such an imposition of taste simply by resorting to whim, so a theoretical justification was sought after, and the ancients had already done some great work in aesthetics, so why not just borrow that? The result was a rigid and often erroneous use of the language of beauty to describe taste.

With all of the other errors of philosophical Liberalism and naturalistic philosophies came the outlandish notion of self-reliance in all matters. It was no longer acceptable to ignore one’s own taste if society called it ugly. But degeneracy takes awhile, so it was about 100 or so years before it really hit the fan, and some people noticed that official taste was often rather ugly. Now the obvious and correct way to attack official ugly taste is to resort to appeals to eternal beauty, but Liberalism was too prevalent, so the battle was fought in the arena of the dialectic of power. False tastes were imposed, but the basic human urge towards the Good recognized the hypocrisy. This reaction of our better natures was exploited by the Liberal cult of the individual, and the results were tragic.

No longer could you say that my taste was bad, nor that anything was objectively ugly. From “To each his own” to “Hey man, it’s all good.”

In the middle of this turmoil (which was necessary to break the iron fist of official taste, particularly when official taste reached the various ever-sinking nadirs it has hit) were a lot of artists, poets, musicians, sculptors, and architects who clung or grasped or blindly whacked around for the eternal. Some were better than others, some were even quite amazing, some failed, and some managed to achieve extreme beauty and extreme ugliness in practically the same breath. And that is the story of art in our culture for the past 200 years!

Now that the notion of the avant-garde has played itself out except in the minds of the dim-bulbs who curate most museums and probably some high school artist in Sacramento who has the idea that Van Gogh and Matisse are somehow controversial in the greater art world (I really did see the battles of 100 years before me as still being fought), we must make an important distinction between the appreciation of the Good and the True and the Beautiful and taste.

I am going to discuss an artist who I admire as a painter, yet loathe: Francis Bacon. I have not only studied many reproductions, but have spent considerable time face to face with his work. It is an experience.

The folksinger Leo Kottke, who is known for telling funny yarns in between his fantastic guitar work, tells a story on one of his live albums about looking through his father’s (who was in the Army Medical Corps) books on jungle diseases. “A book of jungle diseases is like pornography. The more you look the sicker you get, but you can’t help yourself,” says Kottke.

At the last retrospective of Bacon, I sort of understood. I was captivated by his paint handling, his control of color, his tightly constructed compositions. Basically, I had to give him credit: Francis Bacon could paint well. His figures betrayed a good hand with the pen as well. Yet there is something that really repulsed me from his work. I don’t think that it is the content, because I have no problem with looking at decay and the grotesque and macabre. I have to just chalk it up to taste, although there is something to talk about in our discussion of content when a piece of art repulses at the same time that it draws us in (we will deal with that in the next installment).

This is where it gets tricky: to recognize that I do not like an artist, although logically I realize that he was a good artist. As much as it boggles my mind, it is possible that there are people out there who can recognize that Richard Diebenkorn was a great painter and not like his work. I feel sorry for these poor souls, but we have to make allowances for that in our discussions of art.

I do believe that we are on the verge of a great era of Western art (or the complete collapse of civilization, although I tend to be an optimist), and I believe that part of this new springtime will be a flowering of figurative art (although non-figurative art is not necessarily modern, and will always be with us). However, many of the folks who are promoting “returns to sanity” and the such really seem to be arguing for a return to the imposition of taste. They argue, as I mentioned in the previous post, against the theories that were fashionable, rather than against the work itself, which they have not taken the time to really see. Their groupings of disparate painters, following the groupings of the various theorists of New York betrays them.

I admit that I do not always keep taste and aesthetics apart. I also admit that I share the weakness that many do in liking the occasional bad piece (no names, but there are a few pop artists that I like in spite of their general lack of anything really beautiful – liking garbage is a consequence of original sin, by the way, but we must leave that for later discussion). However, we must always struggle to make this distinction and should probably work to conform our taste to what we know is good from the intellect. But we must be honest with ourselves, otherwise we will end up with the old taste imposition, which is how we got to the problem to begin with.

Where I stand on art, part II

Where I stand on art in relation to society.

There are two issues that involve art and public policy. The first is the role of regulation by the government of art. The second is the role of the government to fund art. I am an anti-Libertarian in both regards, as I see it as an essential duty of the state to promote the public good by restricting art in both the public and the private sphere. In the private sphere subsidiarity demands that the government not excessively regulate what a man chooses to see behind closed doors, but the government has a compelling interest in trade, and must first and foremost regulate or see to the professional regulation of craft standards. An art litho must be in conformance to the accepted standards of art lithography: the artist must have worked the image himself, without recourse to photochemical means, the run must conform to the stated number, plus a reasonable number of artist’s and printer’s proofs, the stone (or plate) must be effaced and an effacement print made, etc. There is a lot of technical knowledge as to what constitutes an art litho, and the term is abused by the unscrupulous. Many times I see posters that were offset printed from photochemical plates, unsigned, un-numbered, yet called “art prints” or “art lithos.” To protect the consumer, this should be regulated.

Beyond certifying the veracity of the materials and processes, the regulation of art in the private sphere should mainly be concerned with outlawing only pornography or the patently blasphemous. Art in the public sphere, on the other hand, must be held to stricter standards. Contrary to mainstream public opinion, I believe that the local ordinary should have the power to at least restrict viewing of certain paintings, films, sculptures, etc. to adult audiences. The state’s role is to enforce his decision. If something is really bad, then let it be cast out of the public sphere altogether.

Obviously one will notice that I see the state and the Church working hand in hand to promote the public good. Obviously this gives you some idea of where I stand on politics! But that is for another entry on another day, when we will discuss syndicalism, Falangismo and Francisco Franco y Bahamonde. Meanwhile we will stick to art policy.

Part of the Church and state working together is the use of the Church tax as well as the young people in their national service term to work towards grand, publicly funded art in the form of Cathedrals, public sculpture, etc. Even in our debased secular era, even in the absence of my long awaited Catholic dictatorship, I believe strongly in the public funding of the arts. There has never been a time when the arts were not publicly funded. The nature of the state changed, but the patronage has always been from the taxes paid by the people (or the tithes).

Very little of what the NEA has funded has been complete garbage. Most of what they have done has been excellent. The NEA has brought art to crappy little burgs, I mean, uh, humble little towns that would otherwise have been completely devoid of higher culture. The NEA has funded some of the greatest achievements of the American performing arts, the preservation of many traditional arts, the education of countless children in at least the seeds of artistic contemplation.

Of course the best example of public funding of the arts is probably the US Army band. Countless jazz musicians honed their chops and learned terrific discipline as a result of their stints in the Army band. This is not to slight the Navy. On the contrary, I remember at the Stanford Jazz Workshop we had some Navy guys who were all around great musicians, and really good guys as well. I am sure the Marines and Air Force provide this service as well.

I am a big supporter of bands, and believe that every town of over 100 people has a duty to support a municipal band. The level of support could be nothing more than providing uniforms and a bandstand in the park, or it could be full-time salaries with benefits depending on the city. I am often saddened to see beautiful bandstands in parks that are neglected. The bands could do a lot to promote the civic identity of a place, too. Towns could stick to the Sousa basics or venture into Nino Rota arrangements or whatever, depending on the tastes of the town. I consider this a practical blueprint for society as it stands. It would be an easy, educational, and completely beneficial program for a town to sponsor a municipal band. Towns with a rich heritage of musicianship could even have competing neighborhood bands, the cream of which form the City Municipal Band. I guarantee you that a public band program would lower juvenile delinquency (otherwise, there’s trouble, right here in River City!).

I also believe that every parish should have a band for processions. I think that it is a disgrace how we have neglected these magnificent public displays of the Faith. Haydn and other composers have even written masses for wind bands. It is time to give these works a dusting off, and to bring back this tradition to our churches.

So, in addition to what was posted below, we have the following:

1. Keilholtz believes in regulating art to ban pornography and blasphemy.
2. Keilholtz believes in public funding of art
3. Keilholtz admires the military band tradition
4. Keilholtz has some funny idea that there should be municipal bands raising a ruckus in our parks on the weekends
5. Keilholtz wants Catholics to march around, raising a ruckus on Holy Days.

Now, on to more unfinished business. I spoke against the formulaic versus the experimental in art. Jeff rightfully questioned what I meant, figuring that I was not for anarchy. He is right. I do not advocate anarchy, but rather see good foundations of rules and structures to be the only way of breaking free of formula.

I gave a couple of hasty examples in the comments box, but let me offer them again, with some more detail.

Example One. I freely go at a canvas. I used the Jackson Pollock imitation model earlier, so now I will use the Thomas Hart Benton model. I do not base my work on “rigid” classical rules of composition, color, line, etc. Rather I go with the flow, painting objects and people undulating against each other. What will almost inevitably happen is formula. I will seize upon something and repeat it over and over and over. When I start a painting, it will become an exercise in doing it again. A painting will come out exactly as it was supposed to. There is no room for anything but me here!

If, instead, I work based on classical norms of composition, or within a structural system I have developed over time, with a lot of careful introspection and contemplation, the chances are much better that I will be surprised by some beauty in the painting that I did not predict. Often it will mean taking a calculated risk, but often the discipline comes from subjecting the art to the rules and using veto powers over the whim.

If I degenerate to formula, whether completely abstract or more realistic, I will end up with the painting I started with. Dead. Dull. Crank it out and get on with another one. It is the deadliest trap of modern art, avoiding the formulaic. OK. Enlarge a poloroid photo of the subject here. Silkscreen it with some outlandish color choices. OK, repeat it. Presto! Sign it and on to the next one! Yawn. The formulaic is the choosing of the facile over the long careful look. The formulaic is in self-imitation. The formulaic is in good craftsmanship married to poor ideas. Keanes, Kinkade, Koons are the most egregious after Warhol. Norman Rockwell verged on the formulaic but saved himself as an illustrator (just don’t call him a painter!). In milder cases the fomulaic results in bland, unoffensive but unremarkable art: Wyeth comes immediately to mind. You look at his work and get the idea that he could have put it together in his sleep, without a model, without thought.

Picasso could dip into the territory, and his worst work smacks of formula. After all, Pablo was a great commodity. Demand had to be met! However, simply because Picasso was such an able draftsman and a keen observer, even the paintings he threw together at the last minute had something going for them. A good idea becomes formula when the artist does the painting without thinking about it. Nathan Oliveira turned a great idea into a formula out of laziness. So did Georgia O’Keefe.

Not all repetition of idea is formulaic, though. Manuel Neri and Robert Ryman were able to do many works that differed from each other only slightly in basic idea, yet managed to carve out their own space. I particularly like Ryman, by the way, but absolutely do not recommend him in reproduction. You must not only see his work in person (preferably a whole room of it, like SFMOMA used to have), but need to take a long look at each piece. He remains one of my favorite painters.

Example Two. I offered the example of playing a baroque piece on the harpsichord. I can sit down and play through a Bach suite without much thought to performance practice and make a credible performance. It will be with a lot of feeling and expression and all of that. However, if I do not take the piece for granted, and instead study it with an eye towards historical performance practice, and theoretical analysis, I can end up with a much more interesting performance, one that even surprises me as a performer.

You want formulaic baroque? Sir Neville Marriner and the lumberjacks of St. Martin in the Fields. They can saw through Bach with the best of them, and they are all good musicians, so it will work, but listen to Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music doing the same piece. The contrast will be striking. One will be utterly predictable. You will know when the melody is going to turn, even if you have never heard the piece before, simply because they play firmly within our current cultural expectations.

Hogwood, on the other hand, will have the humility to approach the piece as an alien, to investigate and poke and prod with the greatest of intellectual vigor. None of this is to suggest that a historically informed performance jettison expression and feeling. On the contrary, a historically informed performance DEMANDS those things. It is through the discipline of study that we can tap into the music that is there rather than try to force the composition to yield to our own wills.

And finally, this brings us to some painters I neglected to mention in my list of favorites/influences:

Vermeer, Degas, Vuillard, Hodgkins, Terry St. John, Gustave Dore, Beardsley, Ruskin (more about him later, in his role as a critic), Whistler (had to put them together on the list), Marion Cavenaugh Wachtel, Maynard Dixon, Hassel Smith, Xavier Martinez, Bierstadt, Church, Constable, Turner, Klimt, the Brueghels, Kandinsky, Klee, Hans Hoffman, e&.

I have gone on too long to get into content of art, so that will have to wait another day!

Where I stand on art

Since I have been keenly interested in art since I was knee high to a duck, obviously this is only a brief overview of my views on the matter. As long as I can remember I have been drawing. I had my spaceship phase, my dinosaur phase, my spaceship and dinosaur phase, my beginning perspective phase (lots of train tracks fading off into the prairie), my boat phase (especially one masted sailboats), my World War II aircraft phase (particular the Messerschmidt Bf 109 and the P-51 Mustang), and so forth. As long as I can remember I have loved modern art, and started to seriously study Cubism around 5th grade. I still practice Cubist techniques.

I started oil painting around my freshman year of high school. Besides studies in class, my first painting was a collection of fish, taken from a photograph. Realist stuff. I was interested in Surrealism in high school and started to take an interest in Sacramento's local hero, Wayne Thiebaud. I went through a brief period of being interested in Pop Art, but realized that Thiebaud wasn't really a Pop Artist and that Andy Warhol's work was mostly dumb and ugly. Around this time I was falling in love with Abstract Expressionism, particularly the work of some Northern California painters who seemed to have some really interesting paint handling.

When I was travelling by train through Europe I noticed some peculiar things that happened to the passing close-up landscape. I think that I may be one of the few people who ignored the scenery of the Rheinland to focus on the ground right next to the train. I did some pastel sketches of this phenomenon and put them aside until I encountered the Italian Futurists, who had been doing the same thing 70 years before me. I was completely smitten by the Futurists and spent a year doing nothing but developing these sketches into paintings. I was in college at the time and decided against an art major, because the art department was being taken over by the most banal ideologues who really thought that the purpose of art was feminist, homosexualist, and Communist agitprop.

I took a brief interest in neo-Expressionist narrative paintings and did a series of which only two paintings are not complete doo doo (and those two are partially doo doo). Meanwhile as a musician, I was becoming smitten with the work of two Californian composers: Lou Harrison and Harry Partch. I began reading tons of California history and fiction and began to really look at Richard Diebenkorn (who passed away while I was in college). I was sketching the Central Coast daily (and neglecting the study of Beethoven and his ilk - however my theory professor was a neighbor and knew where I would go to sketch and would "happen" to walk by and say things like "wow. Good sketch. I assume that you have finished the analysis of the Rassumovsky quartet." I would dutifully get the thing done). I had been looking at a lot of Japanese woodcuts as well as Fauvist landscapes, and was applying the ideas from those to the Central Coast landscape, but there was something not quite there.

After graduation I happened upon Susan Landauer's The Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism published by the University of California Press. It suddenly put a lot into perspective, particularly my own work in relation to Diebenkorn's Berkeley series of paintings from 1955 and 1956. I had been working and reworking a particular view of land and sea from Highway 1 near Davenport, about 20 miles north of Santa Cruz, and had a medium size canvas with the subject that was supposed to be the final painting of it. It was mostly greens and blues and browns: the colors of the actual landscape. Inspired by Diebenkorn, John Grillo, Ed Corbett, and a couple of other painters from the 1950's, I went at the canvas with radically different colors: cadmium red, titanium white, French ultramarine. I let the colors explode with a lot of painterly brushstrokes, all kept in check by conforming to the basic structure of the landscape.

That painting was a turning point for me. I still love to look at it in the studio when I need ideas. From there I have been working with a variety of ideas borrowed from Diebenkorn, Matisse, Bonnard, Seldon Gile, Thiebaud, and others. It has been going well, except that I have felt the need to bring a new discipline to my work, which I wrote about earlier.

One of the recent great discoveries for me was the art of the Society of Six. Seldon Gile, William Clapp, Louis Siegriest, Maurice Logan, August Gay and Bernard von Eichmann were young painters in the East Bay who were taken by the fauvists and applied those techniques to the local landscape in the 1920's. Since they were on the West Coast they were almost completely ignored by the artistic establishment, although they have made a profound mark on painting by inspiring many of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Nancy Boas wrote an excellent book on them called Society of Six: California Colorists, which is also a UC Press book. Since much of their work is in the Oakland Museum, I have had the privilege of seeing a lot of it first hand, which brings me to how I have learned about art.

While I love to theorize about art, I discovered art almost entirely by direct experience with art. When I first fell in love with Picasso it was not because I had any idea that he was trying to present multiple sides of an object simultaneously, flattening the picture plane, etc. I just found something profoundly moving and interesting. This was not a completely subjective and emotional response, as I developed my own theory as to why the paintings worked, it just was not taken from the canon of New York criticism. I have since gone back and read Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg and the lot and have come to one conclusion: they were mostly fools who never took a deep look at a single painting.

To look at Pollock's "drip" paintings and come to the conclusion that he is negating the illusion of depth, respecting the picture plane, etc., is to be an idiot or blind or both. To think that Barnett Newman is an important painter, more important than Diebenkorn in his Bay Area Figurative phase is to be so crippled by the absurd as to hardly be worth talking to.

One of the big problems of these critics is that they have represented the side of various schools of painting incorrectly and have had a monopoly in academia. So when a middle to low brow like Tom Wolfe takes on modern art, he is really taking on New York (dare I say New Haven?) official criticism. The problem is that neither Wolfe, nor the critics who upheld the art really looked at the art with any depth whatsoever.

So, with that background, here is where I stand:

I like art, from the beautiful abstract cave paintings of France to the glorious frescos of Giotto and Piero della Francesca to the work of Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn. I like the humorous when it is married to solid structure (Robert Arneson or Claes Oldenberg for instance), but I have little time for hip, post modern "irony" (which is really an abuse of the word). I like making art, I like looking at art, I like talking about art, I like theorizing about art. I believe in objective beauty, although I recognize that it is always filtered through our subjective experiences.

I completely reject the notion of "progress" in art. Sure, some painters influence many other painters, but to say that the later painters are more advanced is hogwash, and part of the mania for the novel that has infected our culture for the past 250 or so years. I consider all great art experimental. If art is not experimental it is formulaic, and that is an error in any period, any style, any genre. Motherwell was no more daring than Watteau, in fact when the dust settles on the 20th Century, they will be seen much more as brothers than Watteau and Eakins (who was doing something different, although just as beautiful).

All art is abstract, even photography. The question is what to distill from the natural world and how to distill it. Don't tell me that Rembrandt was not abstract or I may ask you to show me the real world in those colors! Imitation of nature is a great tool for developing structure and keeping one's art from becoming formulaic. In my most abstract expressionist periods my sketchbooks will always show unceasing studies of the landscape, the figure, the object. In fact my strongest abstract works have come out of the most meticulous studies of the real world. When I feel the danger of formula lurking, my natural reaction is to take my portable easel and head outside.

Artists sometimes make misleading statements that should not be considered lies, but should be examined critically. Clyfford Still denied all sorts of external influences in his work, but a careful study of his better paintings reveals that he was first and foremost an abstract landscapist. In a rare moment he was caught off guard and admitted as such, but for the most part he would rant about internal demons and the sublime and so forth and so on to anyone who would listen.

I believe that artists must learn and hone their craft. Picasso would not have been the great cubist he was had be not mastered draftsmanship. Diebenkorn would not have been able to pull off the magnificent tension between order and collapse in his Berkeley paintings had be not been thoroughly in command of his brushes. Sometimes an artist has such good ideas that he can overcome poor technique, or he may have such a strength in one aspect of technique that he can compensate for a weakness in others. At a slide lecture Wayne Thiebaud stopped on a Van Gogh and said, "it's a pity he never learned how to paint, but he sure could draw with a paintbrush!" Still had poor technique, but in the few great paintings he did, the idea carried him. Milton Avery was a feeble draftsman, but he could create atmosphere like nobody else.

Good technique can only somewhat mask formulaic ideas, however. In 100 years Wyath will be forgotten. Same with many of the neo-Realists who trumpet their art as the restoration of sense in art. You want a good neo-Realist? Look at Lucien Freud or William Bailey.

New York is not the center of the art world, and was rarely as important as it makes itself out to be. Art goes to New York to retire in a museum, it rarely happens there. The New York school were for the most part precious imitators of automatic surrealism until Mark Rothko went to San Francisco and learned how to do something exciting. When he got back to New York he dragged Clyfford Still (also from SF) with him. They called the art that happened in this period the New York School, but the best practitioners had extensive roots on Chestnut Street on Russian Hill. Almost all of the art done in New York since those days has been minor, with a few exceptions.

In 100 years London and San Francisco will be seen as where the excitement was. I have been impressed with modern English painting until recently. They have, unfortunately, bought into the dicta of the New York art czars and their work has declined to the lowest level. The same thing has happened in the Bay Area, where the local establishment still looks to New York for leadership, ignoring the fact that in terms of creativity, the Bay Area has been ahead for a century. However, there is, in the words of the late Thomas Albright, "a tradition of the cantankerous and contrarian" in the area. We will survive the current silliness, and I can even suggest where to look for the leading lights of tomorrow.

Los Angeles is overrated as a cultural center, and Cal Arts (a Mickey Mouse school, if ever there was one) is almost totally useless in terms of fine arts. Los Angeles has produced some great art, and will continue to, but will always have much less than it should, given its population and the creative industries there. Sacramento will continue to provide fertile ground for up and coming painters, who are close enough to San Francisco to see some good examples from the past, but far enough from the art clique to follow in sheepish submission to whatever new idea comes down the pike. Portland should also be a great art center, but isn't for some reason. I really can't figure it out, since Portland does so many things so right. Probably because the Oregon Catholic Press is there, and the hideousness of their publications oozes by osmosis into the minds of the Portlanders. I don't know.

The question of Europe is a sticky one. All easel painters are European artists, whether they like it or not. America is a part of Europe. The day it looses its Western European identity is the day that it falls apart completely. I see Italy as the first nation to come to its senses and rejoin the greatest civilization on Earth. Iberia may come along soon after. At some point France may come back to the fold. I see the re-evangelization of Europe and America as the best hope for artistic greatness to come.

I do predict that the new greatness that we are on the edge of will be completely dominated by serious Catholic artists. Avantgardisti fool only themselves when they deny absolute beauty. If someone who labors for hours and days and years to create marginally accepted art he must believe that there is beauty there that transcends the fads of the day. Eventually the leftists in the arts who are serious about art will realize that there is nothing to be gained from the left besides betrayal. The die hards will drift into agitprop and the serious will find Truth where it is most abundant: the Holy Catholic Church. One of the fraternal connections to be made between artists of the last century will be to link the appalling ugliness of Thomas Kinkade with that of Jeff Koons. They will be seen as the opposite sides of the same ugly coin.

Here is an incomplete list of some artists that have been important influences on me (in no particular order). I recommend seeking out their work, particularly in person:

Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Titian, Pierre Bonnard, Camille Pissaro, Paul Cezanne, Gregory Kondos, Pablo Picasso, Fra Angelico, Robert Motherwell, Goya, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Robert Henri, Monet, Manet, David Park, the Society of Six, Lovis Corinth, Ed Corbett, Frank Lobdell, Robert Ryman, Alexander Calder, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Franz Kline, Elmer Bischoff, Winslow Homer, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Miro, Matthias Grunwald, Hieronymous Bosch, El Greco, Van Gogh, Seurat, Eakins, Jeffrey Camp, Lucien Freud, Balthus, David, Ingres.

Color in Landscape.

I have been recently having some real problems with color, mostly stemming from an over-reliance on the empirical world. In other words my palette has been too balanced, too even. Jared made a studio visit the other night and helped me identify the crisis that I have been having in the studio and helped me with a course of action: get out and paint outdoors with a pre-determined palette. Gulp.

Great advice, but a bit scary, so I did the natural thing and retreated to a stack of books: color theory, art books of my favorite painters, art survey books, museum catalogs. I have been studying the color relations in the art that is closest to the direction I am shooting for these days. It was a Pierre Bonnard painting that set the light bulb off. Red. Orange. Ah-hah! I have an aversion to using too much hot color, even though I really like some paintings that are very hot (particularly some orange Diebenkorns and Parks).

So, I have to do a red and orange painting. The thought makes my knees weak. I paint Cerulian blue and Terre Verte and high light on Naples yellow sand. I use a lot of white: there is something mesmerizing about the border between chalk and frosting. The red that creeps into my paintings is general Indian Red, or maybe touches of Alizarin Crimson, but not explosive Cadmium red!

So, I was driving from Sacramento to the Bay Area this morning, paying careful attention to the hills. Although it is foggy and grey here in El Cerrito, it was a particularly brilliant morning in the Central Valley. The hills are golden with Spanish grass, punctuated by oaks. The colors are a fairly tight-knit palette, basically the combinations that are proving to be boring on my paintings.

Then it hit me! The colors are not boring in nature because the cover so much of the retina. You see, in real life we can be completely enveloped by a hillside or a field. But to get that much yellow stimulus on our retina from a small canvas, we have to hop up the color a bit. Cad yellow! Pow! Then, thinking about the Symbolists made me think of ways to inject the color into the painting in a different way.

I cannot promise that this will be the best paintings I have done, nor even that they will not be the worst, but I have some exciting ideas to work with. If I can figure out how, I will post images in a couple of months.

Even though I love color, I remain convinced that composition and drawing trump all. For all of their chromatic majesty, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series can actually work in black and white reproduction as compositions. So, given this bent of mine, I am a little nervous about taking such an unabashedly coloristic approach to my work.

Meanwhile, I would love to hear from all of you about color experiences in art: stuff you have seen that really made an impact.

Later we may have to discuss the role color played in the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, because I have been astonished by the way it is dealt with in Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Fascinating stuff!

Teachout on Warhol

I have to point you in the direction of this WSJ article by Terry Teachout. I knew there was something good about this Teachout fellow, in spite of his New York perspective on the arts. With the exception of LA, the West Coast was immune from the Warhol style of Pop "Art". Some of our realists were stupidly cast into that category by New York critics who did not know any better (I am thinking primarily of the brilliant painter (and fellow Sacramentan) Wayne Thiebaud). The ones, like Mel Ramos, who touched on the "irony" of Pop Art tended towards actual substance in their work.

So, when I saw that a New York critic was writing about Warhol, I thought, oh dear, more drivel. Then I read the piece. Brilliant.

I am not going to write more on Warhol, since I am not in the mood to think about his wretchedly silly oevre right now. If, on the other hand, you want to discuss Diebenkorn...