[T]here is something unhealthy, of equal intensity, about the disproportionate adulation that Frida Kahlo has received over the last two or three decades. I think that what has happened is that people with no objective right to do so have equated her suffering with their own, and have appropriated her work as a symbolic representation of their own minor dissatisfactions and frustrations, victimhood being the present equivalent of beatitude.The critic likes the artist well enough. He's just repulsed by her fans. But are we not a little repulsed at how invasively he projects himself into the thoughts of the women in the museum whose looks he doesn't like?
They say, “I too have known a faithless or a worthless man; I too have suffered from persistent headaches, dymenorrhoea, or sciatica; therefore, Frida Kahlo has understood me, and I have understood Frida Kahlo. After all, I have suffered just like her. Moreover, like me, she was a moral person, which is to say that she had all the right attitudes; she was on the side of the oppressed, at least those who were not in the Gulag; she loved indigenes as a matter of principle; and she took part in the holy work of dissolving boundaries, the boundaries between sexes (or rather, genders) and between cultures.”
२५ सप्टेंबर, २००५
Frida Kahlo, whose female fans have the "washed-out, slightly embittered look of British women novelists."
Or so says Anthony Daniels, in The New Criterion (via A&L Daily):
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When did C3PO become an art critic?
Actually I dig the invasiveness. As art becomes more about the relationship between a work and a viewer, it becomes more necessary to critique viewers, right?
Plus this is like an answer to those who snobbishly dismiss Nascar etc. fans, so it brings some balance to the force.
The irony is that he seems like an embittered British novelist!
(Very well writter, actually.)
He has a fair point. It's not like Frida was the only person in the world to get screwed by one marxist after another. Russia made a whole career out of that...
Reading critics' work is like reading their diaries; there's as much insight into their own personalities and conflicts as there is into the art they critique.
In the home where I am a guest, there are seven books on Kahlo over the TV, and prints here and there in the house. I presume my hosts are fans. They are both plump, pink Southern women as at home at a Nascar event as an art opening.
I look at Frida's work and think 2 things: 1. Diego was a lot more talented. and 2. Where's Ernie?
If that makes me appear philistine the so be it, but I'm just being self-invasive.
James wrote: "her popularity was mainly a product of political correctness."
I'm no expert on Frida Kahlo, but in my experience "progressive" writers and artists and academics have a marked tendency to praise or denigrate or ignore based on ideology.
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