800 Words: An Apology Post for Visual Art

I am, without a doubt, one of the least visual people I know. My mother has more than once wondered aloud whether I’m colorblind. And she has ample reason to suspect so: my paternal grandfather was colorblind, but then again, he was also tonedeaf, and I have absolute pitch about as perfect as as a person can have. But I have a particularly odd reason to wonder about my lack of visual sense - my experience of music is synesthetic; meaning that I see colors that correspond to notes, but my mind is synesthetic in the most pedestrian way possible. Whereas other people see different colors with regard to any note they hear, I see only two colors - white if the note is above middle C, and black if the note is under, with a greyish hue in the low notes if I catch any overtones. Rather than colors corresponding to the notes or keys, I see shapes corresponding to the tone color of the timbre. A sharp rhythmic attack will produce shapes or lines in my head with lots of jagged angles, whereas a rounded, soft sound will produce shapes or lines that are almost completely rounded. It is, frankly, nowhere near as interesting an experience as your run of the mill synesthetic, who can produce a technicolor light show in his head with the barest three chord pattern.

My experience with “art” is like the straight-A middle-school student who realizes in high school that she’ll never be able to master calculus. I can write hundreds of thousands of words, I’ve been able to play the violin since I was three and have dabbled in nearly a dozen other instruments - some more seriously than others; I can sing and act well, I’ve directed plays and short movies (not well), I can tell stories and jokes and I’m a good cook; but I have many pieces of paper from doctors assuring me that my spatial reasoning is not much better than a small child’s. I nearly failed 11th-grade ceramics, and to this day, my attempts to draw are roughly as successful as the ones on this website (oh my god he’s still posting new entries!!!). Though I forget when I dreamed it, I’ll never forget the dream I once had that I drew the entire skyline of Jerusalem on my childhood bedroom wall in a gold magic marker.  

The truth is, I was probably much too hard on the art scene yesterday. I have no business commenting on an artform which everybody does better than I, and have still less business commenting on an artform that I have so little experience or knowledge with. I know what I like, but I certainly should not insist on imposing my own tastes on anyone else. There was one line I was unsure about including in the post, which, of course, was the line that another musician friend decided to scrawl around my facebook wall for everybody to see. Furthermore, like so many people claim with hearing classical music live vs. hearing a recording, I have no great affection for abstract art until I’m actually in the museum and seeing the piece upfront. Once you see the piece in person, it can in fact make sense and give pleasure in a way it never could on a 2-dimensional page or screen. I even (god help me) once had a good experience with Rothko at the National Gallery in DC, and for a few minutes I managed to convince myself that a two-tone blot of color could be genuinely affecting.

But what makes me uncomfortable about the experience is precisely what makes the concert hall so deeply discomforting for others, and it would probably be discomforting for me had I not grown up in it. What’s troubling is the sense that we’re all there as passive watchers, and that the experience is operating independently of our feedback - it really doesn’t matter what we think or how we look at it so long as we do. What a dispiriting thought that is, that we’re supposed to care so little that it doesn’t even matter what value we attach to anything. To be endlessly discussed is not a virtue within itself if the viewer doesn’t find the piece rewarding. This is the laissez-faire approach which is the same as in so many scenes in Baltimore and so many other cities in so many artforms, in which people go from show to show and you’re there to appreciate the… well just take what you want out of it. Within every scene, there are wonderful people and bad people, extremely smart people and idiots. The smart people will always find something meaningful in a meaningful artist, perhaps the idiots who make superficial comments are there for a good reason, but I don’t want to find out.

(Collecting videos of Robert Hughes when he’s grumpy has been a long ongoing activity of this blog)

But even so, I’ve been enormously curious about art since moving back to Baltimore. To my surprise, I’ve somewhat fallen in with a crowd of MICA graduates, and as such am looking at and discussing more modern art than I have since college. With some help from Robert Hughes’s trusty history of American Art (“American Visions”) and an enormously talented artist friend of mine, I’m beginning to try to get to wrap my head around this thing called ‘American Art’, and understand what it really is. I should have made a much longer list of painters I like yesterday, because all that list did was display how woefully illiterate I am about art, and American art in particular. There are all sorts of painters I’m curious of knowing more about: from Stuart Davis to Rockwell Kent to John Sloan to Max Weber to Alfred H. Maurer to Jacob Lawrence to John Steuart Curry to Thomas Hart Benton to Jack Levine to David Smith to Larry Rivers to Romare Beardon to Tom Wesselmann to Edward Keinholz to George Segal to Mark Tansey to Richard Diebenkorn (How’d I forget him?) to Philip Pearlstein to Walter de Maria to Philip Guston to Leon Golub to Kiki Smith to Louise Bourgois to Allison Schulnik to Mark Tobey to Edmund Teske to Lou Dorfsman to Lucas Samaras to Will Burtin to Robert Arneson to Jess Collins to Ken Knowlton to Charles Csuri. But I can’t claim any great familiarity with any of them, and certainly not much familiarity as I have with many American artists I don’t like.

And then there are the famous American artists that I’m sort of neutral on - Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Naumann (Naumann was my first introduction to modern art when I was roughly twelve… anybody who can put the word ‘fuck’ in neon lights to a twelve year old has captured a part of his heart forever) - but I can’t claim I really love what they do either. Even Rauschenberg can be enjoyable, I just think it’s absurd to call him a kind of genius as it’s often claimed.

The art world is something I feel like I know very well even if I don’t know it at all, because it’s so similar to the classical music world. Visual art is clearly less diseased than classical music (everything is). I was at a few art shows this weekend with a perfectly engaged audience and a community which rallies behind one another when the artists have talent, and when I compare them to concert at Shriver Hall I went to Sunday evening to watch Mischa Maisky give a truly awful performance of a Schubert sonata, only to hear dozens of old ladies wax poetically about what they heard during intermission, I know that the art world is going to be in much better shape than classical music will ever be in my lifetime.

But even if the art world is a lot (leagues) cooler than classical music, there is the same dispiriting lack of enthusiasm. I suppose that’s part of the ‘cool’ aesthetic, but if there isn’t at least one or two people who look like they want to bat down the hatch to get into a show, what’s the point of staging it?

Abstraction is a perfectly legitimate medium so long as the abstraction expresses something coherent. From artists like Frank Stella or Anselm Kiefer, I get a genuine sense of something being expressed behind the painting - as though the patterns and the colors express some sort of emotion. But obfuscation for its own sake is as much technical exercise in art as it is in classical music. In both cultures, there is a huge distrust of American ‘superficiality’ and ‘vulgarity,’ as though to take the smallest part in representing any America which we’d recognize is to somehow be contaminated by it. I don’t think it’s ever occurred to many abstract artists (or musicians) that embracing the superficiality around them for exactly what it is is the best way to elevate one’s surroundings into something more palatable. When Jackson Pollock splatters paint on a canvas, I don’t see the emptiness of existence or any particular playfulness or dream-like ecstasy, I just see a shitload of paint. Nor do I see anything different when Rothko does the same in his particular way.

But even so, popular art has got to be as absurd an overreaction to abstract art as is possible. I can certainly think of many painters I prefer to abstract artists; and obviously, there are many ways to bend the rules of the genre, and some artists like Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann can be pretty brilliant at it; but the simplicity of it is completely limiting. Who needs art you can just as easily see on the street? I’m entertained by the idea of a 40-foot clothespin, but I don’t, as Robert Hughes does, see Brancusi’s The Kiss in it, nor do I think there’s any deeper meaning to Oldenberg’s piece than a giant fucking clothespin. I get that Andy Warhol did something different than any artist did from his era, but was it an improvement?

To me, the goals for painting and sculpture, just like the goals for symphonies and operas, are necessarily less ambitious than they once were. Even here in America, the kick which one derives from a piece like Winslow Homer’s The Life Line is probably impossible in any later painting. Because in an era of photography and particularly motion picture, it would never occur to most artists in ‘old forms’ to dare to compete with more realistic genres in the realm of action. And if few people are trying, there’s still less chance that someone will succeed so brilliantly.

When you see early photographs by pioneers like Jacob Riis and Matthew Brady, you see a level of veracity which it’s doubtful that any American painter ever reached - and frankly, a level of veracity which later photographers like Man Ray or Ansel Adams, for all the beauty of their shots, never cared to reach. Painting was a proper, ‘old school’ hobby for talented children of privilege. But it would never occur to such painters to look at tenement housing or fresh Civil War battlefields. With a snap of a camera and a little bit of dark room work, a photograph could expose the more horrific and dangerous parts of life which no amount of brush strokes had since Goya and Turner. Or compare the paintings of Thomas Eakins to Eakins’s photography. All that painting technique must have taken years to acquire, yet I’m not sure that a single painting by him feels anywhere near as exciting as any of his photographs, which are clearly more visceral, more erotic, and less generic. His painting nudes feel like academic portrayals of flesh, but in photography, those same nudes are shocking and dangerous. Furthermore, for all the horrific racism of Birth of a Nation, the movies of D. W. Griffith was a further example of how exciting the new technology was. If you look at Birth of a Nation today, it seems both both incredibly silly and incredibly disturbing. We watch as the heroes of the Ku Klux Klan charge to the rescue against barbarian hordes of white people dressed in black face who lust after white women and drink copious amounts of liquor. But even now, there is a visceral charge to it which only a great movie can provide. Only greatness could make people care this much, and Birth of a Nation both caused black people to riot outside theaters and caused white people, millions of them, to join the Klan (to say nothing of the lynchings these people instigated). Such are the dangers of art when used irresponsibly, but even so, it’s only possible when greatness exists in the first place. What film today could possibly make people care so much that the entire world becomes a different place after it’s released?

The silent era of movies was an age for visual artists. There were no writers to give interest with dialogue, so virtually everything one saw on the screen had to be done through the language of visual art. It should be no surprise that the Silent Cinema came at the same time as the Golden Age of Ballet. After a century when painters like Goya and Delacroix and Turner gave us whole new ways to view the earth, the most revolutionary idea was to put their poetry into motion. For all the excitement of visual art in the age of Picasso and Matisse, the work which truly excited the public was done in the movies. Even going into the early sound era, you look at Chaplin features like Modern Times, or Busby Berkeley musicals, or horror movies like Frankenstein and Freaks, and you see the kind of creativity that changes the world  At the time, no country saw more potential for the possibilities of cinema than Germany, and there was hardly any visual technique to be found in the art of the 1920’s for which an equivalent techniques couldn’t be found in the work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and Robert Wiene,  When things got particularly dicey in Germany, directors like Lang and Joseph von Sternberg made their way to America, and their influence upon American cinema was enormous. There’s no Orson Welles without the German example, and even Alfred Hitchcock, that eternal beacon of Britishness, went first to Berlin to break into the film industry, and the influences of German expressionism are everywhere in his work.  

Perhaps classical music is now entering its ‘pop art’ phase in which people decide that they are going to reproduce the musical content of the world around them with not much difference between pop products and classical (more on that in a few days I hope). Contrary to popular belief, classical composers are not yet in a phase where 'anything goes.' We are now getting a second, populist/minimalist dogma growing around the atonal dogma as yet another pole through which young composers can be trapped. The result is just another dogma which artists have to break in order to create anything of value. Perhaps that’s inevitable that dogma will arise, maybe many artists need those limitations in order to thrive. But for those who don't, such a box makes it that much harder for artists to think outside of it.

800 Words: How to Prove John Adams Wrong - Part 1 - Visual Art

I wasn’t there for Baltimore’s World Premiere of John Adams’s Saxophone Concerto. I had my own pitifully small musical career to attend to. But it seems that the music itself did not draw a tenth so much attention as an interview he gave with the New York Times shortly before in which he had some none-too-nice things to say about composers of my generation:

“We seem to have gone from the era of fearsome dissonance and complexity — from the period of high modernism and Babbitt and Carter — and gone to suddenly these just extremely simplistic, user-friendly, lightweight, sort of music lite,” he said. “People are winning Pulitzer Prizes writing this stuff now.”

Acknowledging with a laugh that he might sound like a curmudgeon, he added, “If you read a lot of history, which I do, you see that civilizations produce periods of high culture, and then they can fall into periods of absolute mediocrity that can go on for generation after generation.”

On the subject of commercialism and marketing in new music, Mr. Adams said, “What I’m concerned with is people that are 20, 30 years younger than me are sort of writing down to a cultural level that’s very, very vacuous and very superficial.”

This has got to be one of the oddest moments in recent music history. John Adams, John Adams (!!!), the composer who was accused every day for a quarter of a century of selling his musical soul to easy access tonality, is now the undisputed summit of his profession, and is using his soapbox to accuse his successors of dumbing down with precisely the same invective that was used against him. It’s still only five years ago that Pierre Boulez called one of his operas “bad film music.”

But the truth is that John Adams’s complaint isn’t wrong, it’s just completely ridiculous. Adams is right that there are plenty of composers who pander to crowds. But it’s as true of every generation as it is for mine. In Adams’s generation, composers pandered to the American Modern Art crowd. For so many composers of the Boomer and pre-Boomer generation, the goal was to create an aural equivalent to abstract artists who paint in a manner pleasing to the eye without concessions to representational artwork. Fifty years after composers began making inroads to the modern art community - it still hasn’t occurred to many of these composers that the vast majority of modern art’s audience is made of pseudo-sophisticates who don’t know what they like unless it’s told to them, and even now don’t seem to like any equivalent music with the same passion they reserve for art which few people enjoy outside their ghetto. I’m certainly no expert on the Art World, just an enthusiastic outsider to it who has far too few problems calling a spade a spade, even if I too often realize later that the spade is actually a club.

America has produced a number of indisputably great artists in the 20th century whose work either is or should be universally beloved, from George Bellows to Joseph Stella to John Marin to Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth to Robert Colescott to James Rosenquist to Ernie Barnes to Eric Fischl to Kerry James Marshall - and that list doesn’t even begin to cover the much more relevant and dynamic world of graphic art. But within the difference between graphic art and the old plastic arts lies the fundamental problem of the Art World - for generations whose conception of art begins with comics, and animation, and photography, and cinematography,and video games, what spiritual purpose is there to painting or drawing or sculpture or printmaking that can’t be derived more relevantly from art forms with far less history and definition?

Like classical music, the traditional visual arts never came to terms with the fact that they no longer holds a prime position in Art’s ‘Temple.’ The worlds of painting and sculpture come to us like vestiges from another age - a series of painstaking techniques that have no greater guarantee of a quality product than visual genres whose production is far more expedient. And since the slow processes of painting and sculpture can’t possibly keep up with the high-speed vitality of electronic media, the world of the old plastic arts retreated into irrelevance decades ago, with its practitioners ignoring the wider world instead of embracing it, and best rewarding those artists who confirm most readily the prejudices of its decadent naval-gazing.

Neither talent nor genius is any guarantor of fame, and still less in the Art World. None of the aforementioned artists, not even Hopper, inspires people’s passions the way duller artists do - artists like Warhol and Rothko and Basquiat and Schnabel and Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons. None within the former group is spoken of as often as just one within the latter, and certainly none of them have generated as much ink. The contemporary art world has been so blinded by its dogmas, so paralyzed by its attempt to answer the question ‘What is Art’, that its members seem more concerned with finding art which justifies the continued production of art itself than in celebrating any artist that demonstrates true vitality. Within the art world’s basic polarities, art has been made to either forswear the world and everything in it - a la Rothko and Pollock, or blandly reproduce the contents of the world as though a profound statement is being made by doing so - a la Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. And from those two polarities emerged an obvious third. Since visual art was more preoccupied with the questions of art than questions of the world, it was only a matter of time before some clearly incompetent artists would be lauded. Neo-expressionists like Basquiat and Julian Schnabel and Damian Hirst were not honored in spite of the fact that they clearly didn’t possess the most basic technical knowhow. Many artists of striking vision have all manner of terrible technical weaknesses which they can turn into strengths. But it’s difficult to escape the thought that many artists from the ‘postmodern’ era are lauded not in spite of their technical difficulty, but because of it.

The Art World’s problem was that it’s been a world unto itself, cut off from the wider one to the very best of its ability. So when an American artist appeared who took the world upon himself and created work that reflected the world in all its extraordinary energy, nobody cared. The modern Art World has starved America of images. Because they continually asked the question ‘what is art’, the question ‘how good is it?’ never really occurred to many people. The result was a lot of overrated art which is endlessly discussed only because people have been told to like it so often, yet can’t.

800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 22 & 21

22. Nixon in China at The Met


(News....News....News....)

I’ve probably gone up to New York for the Metropolitan Opera as many times as a would be musician in his 20’s who tries and fails to be a cheapskate could permit. But until this trip, I wouldn’t dare take the step I’ve taken hundreds of times in Baltimore and Washington. At the Meyerhoff or Kennedy Center, I routinely make it a point of honor to buy the cheapest ticket, then sneak into the front rows while dragging friends kicking and screaming for their lives with me. But the Met is far more intimidating - not because it’s such a legendary opera house, only because the front rows are so expensive that I have fiery visions of getting assaulted violently by ushers for even trying.
But necessity dictated what followed. I could barely hear the singers from my top-tier back-row perch during Act I. So after intermission, Il Giovine and I moved up to coveted (by me at least) mid row seats of the orchestra. There I was, finally, at the very nexus of American opera - witnessing a show dismissed by many as the ‘CNN opera’ finally accepted as the classic of the American Stage which it deserves to be called.
Adams has gotten all sorts of derogatory commentary for the perceived leftist slant of his operas, particularly for The Death of Klinghoffer - his opera about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But the sniping was already present in the reception of Nixon in China. Many people alleged that the creative team of Nixon in China was drawing a kind of false moral equivalence between market capitalism which kills thousands and exploits millions of workers for lower wages and the dictatorial communism that murders hundreds of millions of its own people. Obviously, if this were the case, there would be a problem. But it’s not. The point of Alice Goodman’s (rather abstract) libretto is to get inside the heads of the people portrayed in this work, what makes Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Mao and the Madame, think as they do. And in order to do that, she had to take it as a given that each of these players felt they were justified in believing everything they do. In almost every case - the sole exception of Henry Kissinger - Goodman accomplished that rather brilliantly.


(I am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung)

And therein we come to the opera’s biggest problem, which is also it’s greatest strength: The Chinese Ballet in the 2nd act, which contains an evil capitalist landlord that is portrayed by...Henry Kissinger!...or is he Henry Kissinger? We suddenly find ourselves in a thoroughly strange hall of mirrors. Is it Kissinger playing the landlord in the Chinese ballet, or is it an actor meant to resemble Henry Kissinger in voice, mannerism and oafish behavior (in the opera that is), or is it just a coincidence? But it’s precisely this hall of mirrors which makes the work so compelling, Pat Nixon watches the whipping of an innocent girl and thinks it’s so real that she rushes onstage to help her. Madame Mao watches the same incident and sees a vengeful vindication of everything about the Cultural Revolution. The opera takes no side, it merely asks us to consider two virtually opposite views of the world, and to ask if an attempt at understanding between them is possible.
Once again, nothing about the libretto would matter if this were not tied to an absolutely brilliant score - exciting and gorgeous in equal measure - composing music fundamentally in the Philip Glass idiom that goes well past what Glass does within it. The minimalism itself is just a clay which Adams can mould into different patterns, here a little Glenn Miller to represent Richard Nixon’s thoughts, there a little Aaron Copland for Pat’s, here a little Wagner for Madame Mao, there a little Mussorgsky for the Chinese Crowds.
The end result is a myth for the 21st century, asking us to deeply think about the chances for understanding between cultures which still understand very little about one another.


22. The Barber of Seville


(Thomas Hampson singing Rossini the way it should be)

OK. Time for another confession. In over a quarter century of obsession with classical music, I‘ve barely listened to any Rossini. For me, he was fundamentally that guy with the cool overtures which the classical radio stations would put on as filler in between a Beethoven Symphony and some snoozer of a Baroque concerto from the Corelli/Tartini/Tortellini epoch which could make even me extremely happy to change the station to 98Rock.
I never had much prejudice against Rossini. The thought of really sitting down with the output of the other big Bel Canto composers like Bellini and Donizetti never filled me with excitement. But Rossini is another matter: Rossini knows exactly how absurd his operas (all operas?)are, and so he plays up all the ridiculousness - the incessant patter songs, the constant vocal runs that sound like machine gun fire, the obsessive rhythmic figures, the almost cocaine-binge level of propulsion, all sold to us at such a manic pitch that we don’t have the mental space to remember how ridiculous it is.

But with regard to Rossini’s most famous opera, there’s one other reason: Bugs Bunny.



Thanks to Bugs, I will never be able to listen to the opening melody to the Overture to the Barber of Seville without thinking “Welcome to my shop/let me cut your mop/let me shave your crop.” And it’s all over from there. It’s amazing that I’ve gotten this far in my life and until last month I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to The Barber of Seville all the way through It’s partially due to Bugs, a larger part was intellectual laziness. The fact that The Marriage of Figaro (which Mozart based on the play that was a sequel to the play this opera was based on) is probably my all time favorite opera/piece of music/experience in life makes this omission all the more humiliating. But the largest part was due to the fact that lots of recordings of Rossini bored me. Rossini is one of the ultimate singer vehicles: in Bel Canto repertoire, conductors let singers who are famous for their heavy voices get away with all sorts of unimaginative phrasing, monodynamic singing, and too-comfortable tempos which would enrage them if they were working on Verdi. The result was that Rossini sounded like a half-way rest area between Mozart and Verdi: lacking the beauty of the former and the drama of the latter.


(The amazing Act I finale courtesy of James Levine. As good as you could get in 1975.)

So this fall, I finally resolved to do one thing that I probably should have done years ago. I skipped the overture and searched for a recording that
might change my point of view. It took two minutes of searching through Napster’s excellent $15-a-month music service (RIP) to find a recording that looked interesting - one that starred Placido Domingo, not in the tenor role but in the principal Baritone role of Figaro himself (made long before he switched to Baritone repertoire). I looked at the rest of the cast-list, Kathleen Battle, Ruggero Raimondi, Frank Lopardo - almost every one of them singing half a fach (voicetype...roughly) heavier than the roles they usually play. And all of this with Claudio Abbado and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, whom years of radio experience taught me made easily the best of all Rossini overture recordings. Lo and behold, this opera really is as good as people say it is.
It’s still fairly common to view Rossini as a sort of layover in the journey of opera between Mozart and Verdi who wrote mostly comedies because he wasn’t great enough to write profundity. But Rossini is far too unlike either Mozart or Verdi to be compared to either. If there is anyone he could be compared to, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan - not for the incessant patter but for what the patter serves. In both cases, the high spirits are part of a greater desire to entertain. It simply does not take bad feeling for an answer.

An Interview With John Adams

FORA puts up an hour-long conversation with America's great composer John Adams. Touches on fascinating subjects, including which books on tape he listens to.

If there is ever such a thing as the Great American Composer (though I don't like to believe it's true), it very well might be Adams by the time he's through.