The painting over the sofa

---

I was reading a little vignette about a writer I’d never heard of, Nathan Englander, in the Financial Times a few days ago.  He is evidently an up-and-coming genius of 42.

 

 

I have decided that I don’t like him.

 

 

The FT often does something like the Proust questionnaire with certain celebrities.  They ask them questions from a list: What’s your favorite virtue?  What do you most dislike about yourself? If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?  (New York Magazine does it, James Lipton does it on “Inside the Actors Studio,” everyone does it.  If the interviewee is intelligent or witty or (insh’allah) both, the results can be a lot of fun.  If not, it can be excruciating.)

 

 

Mister Englander tends toward the excruciating.  His answers are leaden and pompous: he mentions that he finds writing “all-consuming” in the same breath that he claims to take exactly 49 minutes to brush his teeth.  He is trying too hard.

 

 

This answer especially brought me up short:

 

 

If you could own any painting, what would it be?

“Guernica.”  I remember being taken to say goodbye to it in New York by my mum.

 

 

Dear Jesus.  Can you imagine “Guernica” hanging over your sofa?  How charming to come home after a hard day of work and sit down in the living room in front of a Cubist painting of lightbulbs and corpses and mutilated cattle.

 

 

I’d find it a little unnerving.

 

 

I asked myself the same question, and the answer came to me easily.  And the painting lives right now the road from me, too.

 

 

About ten blocks away from our apartment, in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, hangs a painting by a Dutch landscapist named Salomon van Ruysdael called “The Ferry Boat.”  It was painted in 1645, and it looks as fresh today as it ever did.  I always spend a few minutes with it when we visit the RISD Museum.

 

 

The above image doesn’t capture all of the detail, but it will give you the general impression.  First: the soft colors, especially the pale blue sky and drifting dark clouds, and the dark green foliage, and the gray water.  Then the composition: the trees leaning right, the clouds leaning left, the church in the center (or just off-center) pointing straight up, the sailboats just a little askew.

 

 

It is perfect peace.  It is a country morning, and the day will be mostly sunny; the clouds are a little dark, so it might rain a bit later, but it will certainly clear up again.

 

 

Now this part you’ll have to take on faith.  You can’t really see the faces of the people on shore or on the ferryboat, but if you could, they would surprise you: they are grotesque little figures, some of them grimacing and leering.  The first time I took a really close look in the museum, I nearly jumped back.

 

 

I love the painting even more for that.  It’s perfectly serene, an ideal landscape for over the sofa.  And it has hidden secrets that it only reveals if you look at it closely.

 

 

And, if I really worked at it, I could probably steal it and bring it home.

 

 

Perfect.

---

 

 

Ray Davies, the greatest Kink of all

---

New York Magazine has an online feature called “21 Questions.” They choose a celebrity – an artist, an actor, a random NYC flash-in-the-pan – and ask the same set of questions: What do you think of Donald Trump? How much is too much to pay for a haircut? Do you give money to panhandlers? (The best set of answers ever were given by the actor Bernie Kopell, whom you will probably remember as Doc on “Love Boat,” but who for me will always be Siegfried on “Get Smart.” He's in his late seventies and funny as hell.)

Anyway. This past week they gave the questions to Alexis Bledel, AKA Rory from “The Gilmore Girls.” She did okay; she's no dummy. But on “Who's your favorite New Yorker, living or dead?”, she surprised me with “John Lennon.” She's right, of course. He lived in NYC for a long time, a good chunk of his life, and he died there.

So it made me think about the question, all of a sudden. And suddenly I thought: of course! Ray Davies!

Yes, I know he's English.  But he was a Manhattanite for a long time in the Seventies and Eighties and into the Nineties.  And he comes back frequently.  So he's eligible.

Ray is/was the lead singer and songwriter of the Kinks. You remember. “Lola.” “Apeman.” “Waterloo Sunset.” “Village Green Preservation Society.”

My friend Joanne, who is a pretty amusing person herself, is the number-one Kinks fan in the world. She got me listening to them back in the Seventies. Then, in 1978, when we were both graduate students at Brown, she convinced me to go with her to Lawrence, Massachusetts (or was it Lowell, Massachusetts?) and see the Kinks perform. It was a low point in their career; the hall wasn't very full. We raced outside after the concert to stake out the stage door, and found only one other fan waiting. The band members passed by: Mick Avory the drummer, who was very funny; Dave Davies, Ray's brusque angry brother, who pushed past us without talking.

And finally Ray.

And he was wonderful. He had sunglasses on at eleven-thirty at night. He signed everything Joanne gave him, including the copy of “Pippi Longstocking” she had in her purse. She complimented him on his sunglasses, and he said, with the biggest grin in the world: “They're Cool-Rays.”

Ever since, whenever I encounter a celebrity (or something resembling one), I remember Ray Davies, and how gracious and funny he was at eleven-thirty at night after a not-very-successful concert in a working town in Massachusetts.

It's settled, then.  Ray Davies is my favorite New Yorker, living or dead.

Now: how much is too much to pay for a haircut?

---

Ironic America

---

Partner and I take turns in the bathroom getting ready for work every morning.  If anything scandalous happens on TV while I’m in the bathroom, Partner says “OH MY GOD!” in a loud voice, and I come running out to see what it is.

Yesterday morning it was the new series of All-American Chia Pets.  Washington, the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln – hmm – Obama.

“I notice they didn’t do a George W. Bush,” Partner said snappily.

“I think George W. Bush already has stuff growing out of his head,” I said, quick as a flash.

The wit fairly flies around here.

I pondered this new product all day.  On the one hand, I bet President Obama might think this is pretty funny.  It goes without saying that he has the perfect head for a Chia Pet; only Elmer Fudd has a more symmetrical cranium.  Obama might take it as sort of an ironic tribute.

Or someone could buy one as a mean gag gift for the entrenched Republican on his gift list.

Either way, whether you buy the thing ironically or sincerely, the company makes out like a bandit.

We are drowning in irony these days.  One of the NBC junior executives on “30 Rock” referenced his “ironic kickball league” last week.  New York Magazine wrote an article on the death of hipster culture, which brought out lots of bitter (and deeply ironic) commentary from both pro-hipster and anti-hipster partisans.  New York Magazine also keeps track of trends with the “Undulating Curve of Shifting Expectations,” charting “pre-buzz” trends, “saturation-point” trends, “backlash” trends, and – here we go – “backlash to the backlash” trends.   Apparently these last are things that are so tired, so ridiculous, so overplayed, that they’re worthwhile again.  


Or maybe they really were worthwhile in the first place, and we just got tired of them because we hipsters are so jaded.


Real-life examples:

• Designers are sending handbags to Jersey Shore's Snooki. Not their own handbags, though. They want Snooki to be seen with their competitors' handbags, since Snooki is Ms. Bad Taste. Snooki is probably completely unaware of this; she only knows that she gets a lot of free handbags. (What do you suppose she likes best about a handbag? Separate pockets for pickles, lip gloss, and bronzer?)

• There was a snarky little article in the New York Times dissing the pretentiousness of the foodie movement. This was followed by a snarky little New York Magazine article dissing the pretentiousness of the New York Times article.

• And one last local example of unconscious irony: the night before Halloween, I heard a student talking on her cellphone.  “MU-thaw!” she bellowed.  (I’m trying to give you an impression of how completely unbearable her voice was.)  “I’m GOING? To a PARTY?  And I need something – like, some Seventies dress – something REALLY AW-ful and UGLY – you know, like you probably still HAVE, like in your CLO-set?”

Imagine you're that girl’s mother.  What would you have said to her?


And keep it unironic, please.

---

I'll take the low art, and you'll take the high art

 

---

 

The Bravo Network had a new show this season called “Work of Art.” Its format is the same as that of “Top Chef,” and “Project Runway,” and “RuPaul's Drag Race,” for that matter: get a bunch of aspiring cooks / designers / drag queens / artists, throw them in a room, give them a box of crayons and a Taiwanese newspaper, tell them to create something interesting, and then allow a group of “experts” to evaluate the results. (Don't worry if you haven't heard of these “experts” before; you're just asked to assume that they're well-known in their fields. I grew up in the era when Marcus Welby was thought to be a real doctor, so I can go along with the gag.)

 

Jerry Saltz, one of the “Work of Art” judges, recently wrote an interesting piece in New York about his participation in the show. This evoked a blizzard of commentary from the readership – much of it revolving around two issues:

 

• Art is much too important to be the subject of a competition.

• Anything created in the context of a reality TV show can't be good art anyway.

 

(Some readers also thought that, as an art critic, Saltz was also somehow subverting the creative process. Well, subversion of the creative process is just what critics do. I should know.)

 

Let's take those two big points one at a time.

 

Competition. This is sort of a condition of life, I think. Artists, like the rest of us, compete all the time – for attention, for an audience, for money. Most artists make little secret of it. Beethoven wrote amazingly awful dreck because he needed money. Philip Dick wrote novel after novel at top speed, also for cash. Andy Warhol did magazine illustrations. The Italian Renaissance painters were intensely aware (and envious) of one another's work and success. Bach and his contemporaries challenged one another to, ahem, organ competitions, and fought and begged for patronage. Picasso said smugly to Gertrude Stein: “I will paint you one apple and it will be as fine as all of Cezanne's apples.”

 

Sounds like competition to me.

 

So much for that.

 

“Low art” isn't “art” at all. This is the root of pretty much every bit of snobbery in the Art World, even back when I was a schoolchild back in Ur of the Chaldees. In “The Red Shoes,” the dictatorial impresario Lermontov famously declares of ballet that “For me, it is a religion.”

 

Hats off to Monsieur Lermontov, but not everyone subscribes to his religion. Sometimes, dancing is just dancing.

 

This “low art = no art” fallacy takes many forms. When the Harry Potter books were coming out, people were alternately praising J. K. Rowling for getting kids to read, and worrying loudly that kids weren't reading “the right thing.” What is the right thing to read? “The Joy of Cooking”? “Crime and Punishment”? “Guns & Ammo”?

 

Another fallacy, more central to this discussion: you can't really produce anything memorable using a “low” medium like comic books, or TV, or graffiti, or reality TV. This is the main point of many of the critics of “Work of Art.” It's a reality show, and nothing good - nothing worthwhile - can come from a reality show.

 

Nonsense, nonsense. There's beauty and meaning to be found everywhere, loads and loads of it. And artists and cooks and drag queens and designers are working like gangbusters to create something new and worthwhile and unique.

 

And if it makes money and makes some poor zhlub on a cable show successful for a few minutes: fab-u-lous.

 

Those who disagree can go read “Crime and Punishment” or “Guns & Ammo,” or build a plinth in the backyard, or do a watercolor of the First Cuckoo of Spring, or whatever it is they consider to be a serious use of their valuable time.

 

I, in the meantime, will be watching RuPaul.

 

Because, as Ru says so pithily: Girlfriend, if you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

 

---