"It didn’t have its spark. It didn’t have its distinctive definition in the lines, in the swirls. It just lost — it just lost its oomph...."

"You take the Twombly. I mean, to some people it just looks like fifth grade scribbles. To me it looks like a symphony orchestra."

Said Ronald Perelman, quoted in "Judge Rejects Ronald Perelman’s Claim That His Art Had Lost Its ‘Oomph’/The collector’s holding companies had sued his insurers for $400 million to cover paintings that they say had been damaged in a fire. The insurers said they had survived untouched" (NYT).

The OED traces "oomph" — "The quality of being exciting, energetic, or sexually attractive; energy, vigour" — back to 1937: "With actors, the 'it' quality has to do with their visual personality—sex appeal, magnetism, or whatever you care to call it. Back of the camera, we refer to the ingredient as 'umphh.'" The etymology is "An imitative or expressive formation." I presume what it is imitative of is sexual intercourse.

Meanwhile, you know Cy Twombly — pencil-scribbly things like this:

If the collector sensed oomph and the oomph is now gone — it's like the spark gone out of a love affair — how can he convey his anguish to the judge? His anguish, if any. Who's to believe it ever existed? How can you insure something so ineffable?

"Throughout most of the ’60s and ’70s, [Brigid Berlin] dragged her Polaroid 360 and a bulky cassette recorder everywhere, though she once said, 'No picture ever mattered, it was the clicking and pulling out that I loved.'"

"Running out of film, she insisted, was worse than running out of speed. Warhol became equally addicted to documentation and, though his pictures became more well known, hers are arguably as revelatory, often the product of double exposures and lighting both flat and vivid, and featuring such friends as Lou Reed, Roy Lichtenstein, Dennis Hopper and Cy Twombly.... Her recordings — there are more than 1,000 hours of tape... — range from the mundane (chatter about her near-constant doctors’ appointments) to the historic (Rauschenberg ranting at the Cedar Tavern). The original cassettes, with Berlin’s typed and handwritten labels affixed to each plastic case, are stored in a black flip-top handled case in her walk-in closet. 'Brigid wanted to melt them down and turn them into a sort of audio John Chamberlain piece.... but I convinced her that was insane.' It was her 1970 recording of the Velvet Underground, scratchy background noises and all, that was remastered into the band’s first live album, 'Live at Max’s Kansas City.'"

From "Brigid Berlin, Andy Warhol’s Most Enduring Friend/Berlin, who died last year, was a great artist in her own right, and her New York apartment, which is being sold, is a window into a bygone era in the city’s history" (NYT). Worth clicking for cool photographs of the idiosyncratic apartment.

Years ago, John Chamberlain was a reference everyone understood. He was a sculptor best known for welding together parts of banged up automobiles. In the 1960s, "modern art" was a hot topic and his name came up a lot. I doubt if younger people know or care about him.

As for "Live at Max’s Kansas City," I've still got my half-century old copy of the thing. How about you? From the 1972 Rolling Stone review: 

This album (in some ways the first authorized bootleg) exists only because scene-chronicler Brigid Polk wanted to make a tape of the band for herself. She took her Sony 124 down to the club a couple of times, and on August 23rd [1970] recorded an hour and a half cassette, which makes up the bulk of the album....

Brigid’s tape was played for lots of friends (she has extensive documentation of almost everything worth knowing about in New York), and eventually Atlantic heard about the tape and called her up....

The album opens with [Lou] Reed inviting the audience to dance, introducing a “tender folk ballad of love between man and subway,” then stomping into “Waiting For The Man.”...

Those were different times.  I'll have a double Pernod.

This is the kind of writing about painting that you used to see everywhere half a century ago.

I'm have twitchy twinges of nostalgia reading this from Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post:

Twombly’s restive, twitchy marks are cryptic, conjuring both the fog of battle and an atmosphere of human and creative fade-out. The “math” part of “aftermath” is old German for “mowing.” And there’s a sense in which Twombly’s work relates to the Old Masters as a field of stubble relates to a golden wheat field in high summer. 

Even the headline is a throwback to the distant past: "Yes, your kid could (probably) do this. But it might still be great art." That was the cartoon of the time: Ordinary people looking at "modern art" and saying "My kid could do that." It's kind of sad that the headline writer drew from that long-faded meme. 

Who has cared in the last quarter century about the shock of "modern art" in the form of paintings that have messy-looking drips and scrawls and blotches? There are things in art that can still shock people, but it would need to involve hurting a living creature or destroying something of value, not merely the chaotic application of paint to a canvas.

But I am touched by Smee's writerly efforts in an archaic style.

Cy Twombly "avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly..."

"... whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail – scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks – lost much of their power in reproduction."

The critical low point probably came after a 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that was widely panned. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning even so, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”

But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl...

In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.”

RIP, Cy Twombly.

"When I kissed it, I thought the artist would have understood."

Said Rindy Sam, who put a lipstick stain on an all-white Cy Twombly painting. Encouraging art vandals everywhere, the French judge let her off with a fine of 1,000 euros ($1,425) to the owner of the painting (who was an aggressive enough a litigator to demand the full $2.8 million value of the painting). The owner of the gallery got $713. And Twombly himself received 1 euro, which the judge called "symbolic."

So forget about deterrence. In the France that this judge believes in, if you're willing to fork over a couple thousand dollars, you can put your mark on a highly valuable work of art and get famous doing it. Of course, Sam is herself an artist, and now you know her name.

IN THE COMMENTS: Reacting to Drill SGT who said "put on your Artist hat and explain a market that values a blank canvas at $2.8 million?," Palladian writes:

I wondered how long it would be before we got some reactionary "it's a blank canvas!" comment. It's worth 2.8 million because that's what someone was willing to pay for it. That's how markets work. End of story.

As for this incident, Europeans, for some reason, love to vandalize artwork, and European judges love to dole out light, friendly, non-threatening judgments. Sometimes the vandal is a crazy person. Sometimes the vandal is a brainless twat like this one who does it for some political or "performance art" reason. This happens because the vulgar, nihilistic stew that bubbles at the bottom of the contemporary art world can soften the bones and render to jelly even the most stalwart and talented artists thrown into it. When you have the editor-in-chief of a well-known European art magazine writing things like this:

"In my opinion, the arrest of Brener [who spray painted a green dollar sign onto a Kasimir Malevich painting] is an offence to the artist’s freedom of expression and, as such, a repressive act. Brener is no hooligan, but a transgressive artist with a strong personality, just as much as Malevich was the same, in his own time."

...then it's not difficult to see why these acts of destruction continue to occur, and why an art world that has come to value fame above all other things makes destruction seem attractive to its weak-minded bottom feeders desperate to "transgress the boundaries".

The best part about this particular piece of vandalism is that it's not even original:

"[in 1977] Ruth van Herpen kisse[d] a white monochrome painting by artist Jo Baer in the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, smearing her lipstick across it. In her trial hearing, she explains, “[The work] looked so cold. I only kissed it to cheer it up.”

How lame are you when you can't even be original in your vandalism?

I think the willful destruction of artwork should be a capital offense, punishable by a public hanging. Call it performance art.

Inside the UW-Madison Physics Department.

After Fedjur class today, I packed up my laptop and walked over to the Physics Department where I was to be the guest speaker at the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. My role was to talk about blogging, and the audience's role was to ply me with questions that might draw out some useful material relevant to chaos and complex systems. Blogging, with all the attendant linking and Googling and ranking and so forth, is a complex system. I was to meet the professor, Clint Sprott, in his office, and as soon as I saw the place, I was getting out my digital camera. Of course, to me -- I've never studied physics -- the blackboard was a cool graphic display, reminiscent of a Cy Twombly painting:



But to Professor Sprott, these equations hold worlds of meaning that I cannot begin to think about. He is especially excited about this equation:



This explains so much about so many things. Ecology! The stock market! Friendship! It's the Lotka-Volterra equation:



If I only knew how to understand it, I would be quite profoundly amazed. Nevertheless, I love the way it looks and I can appreciate that it means a lot:



I go ahead and ask some dumb questions. Why write all the equations on a blackboard? I can understand a blackboard in a classroom, but it seems odd to me to have a big blackboard in your office covered with equations. Why wouldn't you sit at your desk and write the equations on a piece of paper?

Sprott explains that people get together in the office to talk about the equations and having them on a blackboard helps. It's the centerpiece of many lively debates.

I ask whether all physicists have a picture of Einstein in their office.



No, he says, some have Richard Feynman; some have Isaac Newton.

Time to head to the seminar, but first, let's stop in the tech room and get an adaptor for my iBook. The tech room is a glorious mess and the tech guys give me permission to photograph it for the blog: