Gavinson on Tár, in the New Yorker.

I grew up worshipping artists and the exchanges they have with their audiences. My dad is a high-school English teacher who shares and interprets canonical works; my mom is an artist who weaves tapestries inspired by sacred Jewish texts and traditions. When I started writing, I saw myself in part as a professional fan. Through a fashion blog that I started when I was eleven years old, and then through an online magazine that I created for teen-agers, I was able to interview artists I admired, siphoning their wisdom, believing that creative ability and strength of character went hand in hand. The magazine, Rookie, celebrated fandom in all its forms. Our writers wrote of artists as queens, kings, gods, goddesses, dream B.F.F.s. Our readers sent in photos of homemade shrines to their heroes. In regular columns, famous artists gave our readers life advice. I delivered talks at universities and lecture halls arguing that the fan’s capacity for enthusiasm was as holy as the works of art we lived by. I would quote a passage from Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” comparing a performer’s audience to “Christ Himself,” a righteous entity worthy of serving. I found similar comfort in a scene from “Manhattan” in which Woody Allen’s character asks what makes life worth living, then rattles off a mix of cultural touchstones (before landing, of course, on “Tracy’s face”). At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power. 

The first time I saw Chloe Sevigny, sometime before or after, she was a lower east side street urchin, huddled in a corner on the floor with her boyfriend, head down. We were in the same, extended, circle, though I was in and out by choice. The last time I saw her she cruised me like a movie star, and that was still years before this pic. 

Watching smart people who grew up with no knowledge of the past find their way. And I'm one of them. The "New York intellectuals" were petty bourgeois snobs, the bookish children of immigrants, reinventing the past. But I was left to figure that out for myself, and I'm an heir, literally of that "tradition". My parents' book collection was called the best private library in Philadelphia, and still they knew nothing. Their world began with them. And this is the future. Humanism is reduced to an an appreciation of ambiguity in a world ruled by greed and pedantry. Or maybe that's what it always was. But more and more history is lost. I want to give Gevinson credit, but then I don't. I haven't seen Tar. I have a bet with myself that it's just kitsch; like Todd Haynes, a fantasy of art and women, voyeurism and in this case, overt misogyny, putting a woman on a pedestal to watch her fall.

At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” 

I would've been embarrassed to write that at 19 or admit it at 26. And the Woody Allen reference. To Allen's credit I've always thought he married his step-daughter because she was more of a critic than a fan. It was the best of both worlds: he met his mother before she met his father. 

Gevinson

One of the few characters to challenge Lydia directly—a “bipoc pangender”-identifying Juilliard student who struggles to connect with Bach because of his “misogynistic life”—is not given the time to make a full or coherent argument for a more inclusive canon.   

Richard Brody

Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

Brody has always annoyed me, but the disconnect is wild. My mother described Mahler as a writer of art songs who never understood symphonic form. I'm sure she got that from somebody but she agreed, and so do I. Frère Jacques played slowly in a minor key is just a cover.  Tár reeks of kitsch, and the moralizing about Nazis seals it. But Gevinson is very smart, and Brody's pretension annoys me more.

Gaitskill, Gevinson and Didion: Holly Golightly, and Louise Brooks

I have two connections to Leacock, through one of his daughters and one of his girlfriends in the mid 80s. He told her she reminded him of Brooks, an ex lover. Brooks in old age reminds me of my mother.

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I've watched as much of Tár as I could take. It's a moralizing parody. Field is cribbing from Ruben Östlund. That no one gets the joke—including Field?—is sort of amazing. 

YEARS AGO, WHEN I was just starting in this business, I had the privilege to meet a well-known muckraker and columnist. I asked him the secret of his success.

“Two things,” he said. “One: when you’re hammered after a night out, drink an entire liter of water before you go to bed. An entire liter, do you understand? Otherwise the whole next work day is shot.”

“An entire liter,” I said. “Got it.”

“Second, never write about Israel. It just pisses people off. No matter what you say, you lose half your Rolodex.”

I frowned. How he could ignore such an important topic? Didn’t he care?

“Son,” he said, “we’re prostitutes. We don’t enjoy the sex.”

Mainly by accident, I sort of ended up following that advice,... 

Taibbi is a moralizing centrist, more nostalgic for Huntley and Brinkley than Lenny Bruce. He has a fantasy of the past, like the fantasists behind Jacobin, N+1 and the Proud Boys, or like Todd Haynes. And good journalism is hackwork, not prostitution. It's as important to democracy as garbage collection; it's not art.

Jäger's aestheticized passivity. But he's discovered the Americanization of the world. 

The American experiment has just begun

For better and for worse, America’s politics are our politics, and the only way out is always through, as Baudrillard already concluded in 1982.

Baudrillard! Reliving the 80s is a trip. And this after writing about "bowling alone".  Tying himself in knots of conflicted superiority.

 etc., etc.

Whatever Greenwich Village may once have been or may now be supposed to have been, anyone who has recently strayed down MacDougal Street on a Saturday night knows that now it is a playground. What Coney Island was once to the honest workingman, Greenwich Village is now to the unmarried or ex-married young professional. The Village streets, pads, coffee houses, and bars are jammed with people who look a million times more sensitive, artistic, and "interesting" than William Faulkner or Igor Stravinsky, but who live by teaching economics, analyzing public opinion, writing advertising copy, practicing psychoanalysis, or "doing research" for political candidates. They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. That is their secret ambition. Meanwhile, being young and frisky, they are not yet the "managers" in our highly organized technical society. But they have the skills someday to become managers. Just now they don't want power any more than they want marriage. They want a good time, and a good time is what they go to the Village for, and a good time in the Village is what they get. [i]

“The Village Today: or The Music the Money Makes” Alfred Kazin, in 1960 reviewing a book of Village Voice columns by Bill Manville.  Kazin like MacDonald, a writer from the older tradition, not an academic, a reader of literature not strictly newspapers and social science, a friend of Arendt, still a humanist, a reader for subtext, of the words on the page and not only the arguments they’re claimed to make. “They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. That is their secret ambition.”.  My mother divorced her first husband, she said, because he didn’t understand the tragedy of life. He was an optimist.  He went on work in the White House flacking the Great Society and the Vietnam war. And now almost 60 years later a college graduate with the same optimism can designate himself a “public intellectual” and people will take him at his word. 

Mad Men is a flat screen Disney World for people who grew up on reruns, made by suburban infants of the 60s for an audience of the suburban infants in the 70s and 80s. It’s dirty and sterile. Todd Haynes’ films, the older highbrow version of this are a mashup of Douglas Sirk and Ozzie and Harriet, second hand history and fetishist misogyny. The real subject of course is always the present, but the present is embalmed too, and that specifically is not the subject. There’s so much art, meaning artifice, there’s no room to breathe, and darkness is twisted through technical mastery that the end is not less observation than projection. Haynes' films are worse than a bad Coen brothers film, crueler, because no strained attempt at comedy, just Americans finding ways to avoid responsibility while watching other people fuck up. But there are also good Coen brothers films, and The Wire and Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, and like Warhol, those are black as pitch.   

“Mailer was a left conservative.”[ii]Didion was a Goldwater Girl. MacDonald mocked his own past as a Trotskyite. Liebling, Herr and Page lived through extremes, You can indulge as a craftsman and admit that you’re indulging; you can fight so much to deny something that it shows up in everything you do, but art doesn’t work as symptom. It needs to be made so that someone without the fixations can feel their pull. Works can be  popular when they’re made because the tastes, desires and fears, are common. That doesn’t mean the work will last.  Haynes and Matthew Weiner are like Talese and Wolfe. The perversity is as clear as the desperation to avoid the subject. The problem isn’t the kink; it’s the dishonesty. Didion indulges journalistic sleaze. She’s a voyeur, passive, condescending, but she’s cruel to herself too. That’s enough to keep your sympathy. Art is conservative, or it’s reactionary.

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[i]Alfred Kazin, “The Village Today: or The Music the Money Makes”, in Contemporaries, Atlantic-Little Brown, 1962

[ii]  Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, Penguin, 1995 

Had not fully appreciated until now how much the relentless American drive for optimism resembles abject denial.

— jelani cobb (@jelani9) November 12, 2016

I'd put in a new post, but it's a perfect introduction to the post below. Even American historians have no sense of history. It's pathetic. "The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny"
Tocqueville was an adult, writing about children. And the children of those children produced more children.

Some images from The Vulgarians, by Robert Osborn, published in 1960. Full text and images available here.  I still have my parents' copy. It's moralizing, so childish too.








A paragraph from 2013 on Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Mad Men: Mendelsohn reminded me of graduates of Wellesley who were pissed off by Mona Lisa Smile (since Alfred Barr taught the first academic course on Modern Art at Wellesley in 1926), and my mother's contempt for Todd Haynes for Far From Heaven. Haynes doing his best to undermine the world of Ozzie and Harriet that only 6 year olds at the time confused with reality. Homosexuality and interracial sex? Of course.

Harriet Nelson started smoking at 13, and hung out at the Cotton Club

Mendelsohn

Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness.

His exchange with Molly Haskel is fun. Interesting to remember that Mendelsohn is a famously a fan of historical fiction. He must have written about his argument with James.

To the Editor:

Re "Young Ladies on the Verge of a Breakthrough" by Katha Pollitt [Dec. 21]:

I was a student at Wellesley during the period of "Mona Lisa Smile," studying art history and later becoming a professor of art. The film presents art classes at Wellesley in the 1950's as needing shaking up; in one scene the president of the college warns the Julia Roberts character, "A little less modern art, Miss Watson."

Quite ludicrous. Wellesley pioneered the study of modern art. Alfred H. Barr Jr., a professor of art at Wellesley in the 1920's, later became the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He introduced the Bauhaus to the public in a landmark exhibition at the Modern in 1938 — years after Wellesley women studied it. When I began to teach art history, I unearthed my Wellesley notebooks as a resource, and I have them here now. I am happy (but not surprised) to see that an entry for Jan. 27 — the year would have been 1953 or 1954 — shows Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Tobey. Earlier sections on Picasso, Cézanne and van Gogh note assigned reading in Barr, Greenberg and The Partisan Review. We did not paint by the numbers, one of many unfortunate misrepresentations of Wellesley by this film.
VIRGINIA SMITH
Manhattan

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related 11/20 Alfred Kazin in 1960: "Whatever Greenwich Village may once have been or may now be supposed to have been,..."

another repeat. continuing
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Cindy Sherman is the most openly, explicitly, misogynist female artist since Alice Neel.

Untitled #229, 1994/ Nancy and Olivia, 1967


I'd forgotten about Lisa Yuskavage.
Neel also was contemptuous of women, but not of herself. There's a tragic element to Sherman's work, which at its worst, recently, reaches down to Yuskavage's level of merely pathetic.


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6/24
The above is less unfair than unclear. And it was written in response to Sherman's MoMA retrospective but before the show at Metro. I was also probably in a bad mood at the time.



Sherman's newest work is both cinematic and static, less aping filmic imagery -the film stills always annoyed me- than returning as it were for the first time to late narrative painting, the cinematic Goya of the Black Paintings, and from there to Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Lars von Trier, or maybe the reverse, from von Trier to Goya. The questions haven't changed since Goya's time: how or whether to make a "high" art in a democratic or even nascent democratic culture, and how it can be any more than high design and refined pleasure, an art that leaves complex moral questions to film (now) and literature. I've written elsewhere that the best and much of the worst of Modernism was representational, the street-grid neo-Platonism of Mondrian's last paintings and Barnett Newman's mannerism being less included than exemplary.



von Trier begins Melancholia with an operatic fashion video -crap a la Ellen von Unwerth- like a filmmaker who tells everyone anytime he can that he always wanted to be a painter; in the context of the rest of the movie it's a brilliant bad joke. Sherman and other artists over the past 30 years have faced the same problem from the other side. If serious filmmakers have to negotiate the desires of a sizable segment of the majority, fine artists have to negotiate the fads and foibles of the oligarchy. Both Sherman and von Trier could be said to have done a good job of managing their various contradictions and allegiances.

Mendelsohn's piece was a relentless attack on the nostalgia of adults for their childhood fantasies. Corey Robin  a wannabe leftist, is capable of nothing else. That and Mendelsohn reminded me of graduates of Wellesley who were pissed off by Mona Lisa Smile (since Alfred Barr taught the first academic course on Modern Art at Wellesley in 1926) and my mother's contempt for Todd Haynes for Far From Heaven. Haynes doing his best to undermine the world of Ozzie and Harriet that only 6 year olds at the time confused with reality.

From a couple of months ago. Expanded.

Cindy Sherman is the most openly, explicitly, misogynist female artist since Alice Neel.

Untitled #229, 1994/ Nancy and Olivia, 1967


I'd forgotten about Lisa Yuskavage.
Neel also was contemptuous of women, but not of herself. There's a tragic element to Sherman's work, which at its worst, recently, reaches down to Yuskavage's level of merely pathetic.


---
6/24
The above is less unfair than unclear. And it was written in response to Sherman's MoMA retrospective but before the show at Metro. I was also probably in a bad mood at the time.



Sherman's newest work is both cinematic and static, less aping filmic imagery -the film stills always annoyed me- than returning as it were for the first time to late narrative painting, the cinematic Goya of the Black Paintings, and from there to Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Lars von Trier, or maybe the reverse, from von Trier to Goya. The questions haven't changed since Goya's time: how or whether to make a "high" art in a democratic or even nascent democratic culture, and how it can be any more than high design and refined pleasure, an art that leaves complex moral questions to film (now) and literature. I've written elsewhere that the best and much of the worst of Modernism was representational, the street-grid neo-Platonism of Mondrian's last paintings and Barnett Newman's mannerism being less included than exemplary.



von Trier begins Melancholia with an operatic fashion video -crap a la Ellen von Unwerth- like a filmmaker who tells everyone anytime he can that he always wanted to be a painter; in the context of the rest of the movie it's a brilliant bad joke. Sherman and other artists over the past 30 years have faced the same problem from the other side. If serious filmmakers have to negotiate the desires of a sizable segment of the majority, fine artists have to negotiate the fads and foibles of the oligarchy. Both Sherman and von Trier could be said to have done a good job of managing their various contradictions and allegiances.

Cindy Sherman is the most openly, explicitly, misogynist female artist since Alice Neel.

Untitled #229, 1994/ Nancy and Olivia, 1967


I'd forgotten about Lisa Yuskavage.
Neel also was contemptuous of women, but not of herself. There's a tragic element to Sherman's work, which at its worst, recently, reaches down to Yuskavage's level of merely pathetic.


---
6/24
The above is less unfair than unclear. And it was written in response to Sherman's MoMA retrospective but before the show at Metro. I was also probably in a bad mood at the time.



Sherman's newest work is both cinematic and static, less aping filmic imagery -the film stills always annoyed me- than returning as it were for the first time to late narrative painting, the cinematic Goya of the Black Paintings, and from there to Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Lars von Trier, or maybe the reverse, from von Trier to Goya. The questions haven't changed since Goya's time: how or whether to make a "high" art in a democratic or even nascent democratic culture, and how it can be any more than high design and refined pleasure, an art that leaves complex moral questions to film (now) and literature. I've written elsewhere that the best and much of the worst of Modernism was representational, the street-grid neo-Platonism of Mondrian's last paintings and Barnett Newman's mannerism being less included than exemplary.



von Trier begins Melancholia with an operatic fashion video -crap a la Ellen von Unwerth- like a filmmaker who tells everyone anytime he can that he always wanted to be a painter; in the context of the rest of the movie it's a brilliant bad joke. Sherman and other artists over the past 30 years have faced the same problem from the other side. If serious filmmakers have to negotiate the desires of a sizable segment of the majority, fine artists have to negotiate the fads and foibles of the oligarchy. Both Sherman and von Trier could be said to have done a good job of managing their various contradictions and allegiances.

There's a history is of gay men parroting the behavior of a certain type of unhappy woman: ugly ducklings who dream of being swans. The Stonewall riot was on the day of Judy Garland's death. But contemporary culture is full of images of women parroting the behavior of gay men, and female ugly ducklings are modeling themselves as drag queens. Usually this comes off as sad. But someone was very smart. Julianne Moore has a history of playing to gay male images of woman, in Todd Haynes' Safe and recently A Single Man. She's beautiful but no longer young. And the recent ads for Bulgari are the most striking images of sexual ambiguity I've seen recently in popular culture: the beautiful woman, of a certain age, as hermaphrodite.




For more on women and parrots in western art see this discussion of Manet's Woman with a Parrot (also JSTOR)

The subtle masculinity in the face in the first photograph is what first caught my attention. The sculpture is the most famous example of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite; at the Louvre.