Sunday links: Art garden and a wild and crazy quote
A quick Sunday scatter of good stuff in other places:
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FEED THE BODY, FEED THE MIND: Under the headline Philbrook Museum of Art Trades Tulips for Tomatoes, artdaily.org reports that Tulsa’s Philbrook — the museum that Brian Ferriso left to become executive director of the Portland Art Museum — is replacing its 3,600-square-foot south formal garden with a vegetable garden and will give the veggies to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma to help Oklahomans get through the economic crisis. Now, there’s a conceptual art project we can get behind. Bravo. Too often when times get tough, culture and shelter (and schools, for that matter) get tossed into an either/or funding game, turning natural allies into competing animals at a shrinking watering hole. As this project reveals, it doesn’t have to be that way.
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STEVE MARTIN UNLEASHED: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has a good report in Sunday’s O! section on how things turned out when students from the local high school finally got to put on their production of Steve Martin’s stage comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. They performed it at Eastern Oregon University instead of at the high school because the school board, after receiving parental complaints about the play’s purported immorality, called the thing off.
Martin then stepped in and paid for the production himself, and in a letter to the local paper he came up with this gem, which Hughley quotes:
“I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as ‘people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.’ With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle.”
Yes, Xenophobia, there is an Oregon. But the good news to take from Marty’s story is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
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IN SWITZERLAND, A SWING TO THE RIGHT: A few art insiders complained when Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ chief art critic, decamped to Europe for a year instead of paying attention to what was happening on the art scene stateside. Not me. I’ve enjoyed his Abroad reports. They’ve helped an already top-notch critic broaden his knowledge even further, and they’ve given readers a lot of good stories they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
One of the best is last week’s report from Zurich, In Quiet Switzerland, Outspoken Rapper Takes on the Far Right, about an Estonian-born Swiss rapper stage-named Stress who’s stirred up some welcome controversy by tackling directly in his lyrics chemicals tycoon Christoph Blocher, powerful head of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, who is one scary dude. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Blocher uses his own sanitized vision of cultural purity in the arts to push his ideal of the perfect, and perfectly xenophobic, homeland. Kimmelman writes:
Mr. Blocher used his own collection of works by 19th-century painters like Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler in shows he organized to illustrate what he has said represent wholesome Swiss ideals: women in the home, farmers milking cows, a nation historically separated from outsiders by more than just mountains.
Steve Martin, the good people of Switzerland need you. Now.
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A CREATIVE WAKE-UP CALL IN PORTLAND?: Also in Sunday’s O! section of The Oregonian, visual arts critic D.K. Row files this intriguing report on how the flap over City Hall’s recent push to bulldoze Portland’s Memorial Coliseum has lit an activist fire under at least a slice of the city’s creative class. D.K. quotes architect/activist Stuart Emmons:
“We’ve just said, ‘Enough.’ We need to speak out for what we believe in and quit allowing politics to keep us from what’s right. This goes way beyond Memorial Coliseum.”
This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the art of politics.” Stay tuned. Let’s see where this thing heads.
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ON ART AND THE CRITICS: A recent Art Scatter post about Rocco Landesman’s appointment to run the National Endowment for the Arts sparked a heady and rambunctious round of comments that went off in all sorts of directions. I hope to get back to some of those issues, notably the meaning of “local” in the arts and the role of failure in creativity: Is it a necessary element of discovery, or a cult of self-absorption that ignore the needs and rights of the audience? Then there was this note from playwright, filmmaker, novelist and teacher Charles Deemer:
“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”
Can’t argue with that. But if you’d like to, hit that comment button.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Art Scatter is on my daily blog patrol; still, I overlooked that your post on Rocco Landesman and the NEA had blossomed with over two dozen comments — and heady ones at that. To other readers: Follow the link and read up, there are some interesting ideas therein.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Thanks, MTC. One of the things I’ve learned in my year-plus of doing this strange thing we call blogging is that anarchy can take over in surprising and joyous ways. One idea leads to another, and before you know it, it doesn’t matter a fig where you actually started — all sorts of other things have opened up, and they can be terrifically interesting. As in this case.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I like Charles Deemer’s definition of a critic, as well as his caveat about us. I’d like some comments about this question: arts institutions are in deep doodoo in this town, particularly Oregon Ballet Theatre. This critic wants desperately for them to survive. I don’t anticipate at all that this weekend’s concert series is going to be bad, but what if it is? First instinct is to say so, but then there is the knowledge that we have too much damn power at times like these, and what if some idiot who would otherwise come up with big bucks for the ballet were to say they’re not worth saving? I invite some anarchy here…
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:56 am
Martha, I sympathize with you. Years ago I spent a year as WW’s theater critic when Bob Sitton was away and I hated it! I hated writing negative things — finally, I embrace what Ken Kesey says on the matter of art, “Take what you can use and let the rest go by.” But critics, esp regular ones for periodicals, do have a responsibility to be informative. Most art we encounter is already familiar, I think, so the critic seldom has to play the role of unique interpreter. Let’s face it, mind-boggling break-through art is rare. If you don’t like something, I think negative commentary works best, and most honestly, when it is personalized, “this didn’t work for me because…” (Barry J did this very well recently in talking about a musical that seemed to him aimed at NY sensibilities, not his), rather than making profound universal judgments, which some critics still do. Also, when exposed to a series of things, emphasize the positive. I like critics who use the negative subtext of silence well. I think “regular” critics become most useful when familiar — hey, so and so hates this, I’ll probably like it! There’s a film critic in town I do that with ha ha. Portland has been blessed with good, fair, serious-minded critics over the years, and you are one of them. I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
Oh, the eternal question of the role of the critic. Of course we remember the witty ones, the Dorothy Parkers and Alexander Woollcotts. But while their lines could be hilarious, they were so fixated on being clever that they were often lousy critics in the sense of being honest brokers of experience and thought. I suppose, like most people, that’s what a critic ought to be — an honest broker — and as Charles suggests, part of that honesty is admitting that the viewpoint is personal. The Internet has helped tremendously in that regard.
When I got into the racket in the 1970s one (it was “one,” not “you”) was supposed to speak with institutional authority: One spoke for one’s newspaper, proffering that institution’s considered and official position. I, and most of the newspaper reviewers I knew, fought against that, and partly successfully, but the institutional identification inevitably seeped into our styles and viewpoints. We tried different things: Once David Stabler, as classical reviewer, and I, as theater reviewer, did a tit-for -tat, point-counterpoint review of Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang’s opera “A Thousand Airplanes on the Roof.” We had fun. Readers liked it. The authorities were not amused. We did not do such a thing again.
I think Charles is also right that criticism and reviewing are reflections of a specific personality, and so each critic is offering, in a sense, a piece of himself or herself. That means that each critic has to be read on his or her own terms. I’ve told writing groups many times that there are a thousand possible ways to begin any review, and the beginning you choose guides where you go. But there are also a thousand possible reviewers, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses. And you hope the ones who are getting paid and getting the ink also know a fair amount about their subject, and can write entertainingly about it. It’s personal, and if it’s not quite an art, it sure ain’t a science.
Speaking only for myself, the thing I was maybe least interested in was the thumbs-up, thumbs-down part of the job, although I considered it a duty to deliver at least an inkling of that sort of judgment. Wish I’d made it more clear more often that I was speaking of a personal response, not as a delivery boy for the God of Truth.
To Martha’s question of whether and when you pull your punches: In fact, I think most newspaper reviewers pull punches all the time. They can be small ones: Why crucify the young performer in the minor role when he was clearly in over his head but it made little difference to the overall impact of the play? Why mention that the trumpeter flubbed a note the night you were there when you know her work and know this was an aberration? And often it’s a matter of politeness: There are ways to make it clear that certain performances are less than stellar without rubbing the performers’ faces in the dirt.
On the question of overpraising a specific production because of outside issues — you know the company in question is valuable, and you know it’s having financial problems — I’ll bet every newspaper critic alive (especially those in regional cities, where the actual existence and maintenance of a cultural scene is the most important arts issue in town)has done that at least once, and the good ones then feel guilty about it: They realize they’ve compromised their beliefs and used up a little bit of their credibility. It becomes a self-correcting thing. Daily reviewers, who see so much and pump out so much copy, make mistakes against their own judgment all the time: That’s what the rush of the business does to you. But over time, you correct it. It’s possible to say, “Geez, Company A is extremely important to this city’s cultural life, and even though I don’t think it always hits the mark I support it, and it’s in severe financial squat right now and I really wish I loved its current production but unfortunately I don’t. And that’s OK, because if I loved everything the company did it would mean either that the company never takes chances or that I’m just a cheerleader.” I think most readers would understand that.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Thank you Charles Deemer, you pay me a high compliment for which I am grateful. And Bob has given me nothing whatever to take issue with, darn. When I write a review I am ever mindful of two assessments of arts critics from artists I knew well. From my father: in the evolutionary scale, there are men, there are apes, and below them there are critics. He was a painter and sculptor whose style was impossible to pigeonhole and therefore critics ignored him. From the late Todd Bolender, the dancer, choreographer, artistic director I’m writing about, in a letter to a friend: “Critics are aphids.” We need to take the work seriously but not ourselves, and bring to the task judgement based on knowledge as well as our inevitably subjective responses.