I'm listening to his podcast with Adam Curry (who invented podcasting). Scroll to 2:49:39 for this part, which comes after some discussion of the role of the CIA in the field of arts (Abstract Expressionism) and entertainment (the music of Laurel Canyon):
ROGAN: The real kooky people probably think you're my handler or something. Because you created podcasting. Because there's that thought that... there's a whole financed and backed right-wing ecosystem that's created these podcasts.... This is just stupidity. This is the problem where when you look at some conspiracies, you think, oh, well that applies to all things.... There's actually some things that are organic for some weird reason.
Notice that the use of "organic" is the same as we saw — in the first post of the day — from the Canada hockey coach. The fighting was, he claimed, "as organic as it gets."
Said Congressman Peter King, complaining about Tom Brady's application for a trademark on the name "Tom Terrific," BBC reports.
All honor and respect to Tom Seaver, but if you want to say there's only one Tom Terrific, it's this guy:
That was part of the "Captain Kangaroo" TV show in the late 50s and early 60s. Wikipedia:
Drawn in a simple black-and white style reminiscent of children's drawings, it featured a gee-whiz boy hero, Tom Terrific, who lived in a treehouse and could transform himself into anything he wanted thanks to his magic, funnel-shaped "thinking cap," which also enhanced his intelligence. He had a comic lazybones of a sidekick, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, and an arch-foe named Crabby Appleton, whose motto was, "I'm rotten to the core!" Other foes included Mr. Instant the Instant Thing King; Captain Kidney Bean; Sweet Tooth Sam the Candy Bandit; and Isotope Feeney the Meany....
"Terrific" is an old-fashioned word of praise. It felt old-fashioned when it was used for Tom Seaver half a century ago, and Brady doesn't really want to be called that. He says he doesn't like it, and I believe him. I presume he's simply trying to prevent other people from profiting off of his brand.
By the way, "terrific" originally meant causing terror. In "Paradise Lost," there's "The Serpent... with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific." "Terrific" became "an enthusiastic term of commendation" in the late 19th century. (I'm quoting the unlinkable OED.)
I almost never use the word. I associate it with FDR, whose last words were, "I have a terrific headache." I can't say I've never used the word. I once said a cartoonist had "a terrific drawing style," and I've blogged about other people using the word, notably: 1. the woman who was thrown clear of the car wreck that killed Jackson Pollock, who wrote that she and Andy Warhol had "a terrific crush on each other," and 2. the WaPo columnist who wrote in 2013, "Barack Obama has what it takes to be a terrific law student. It’s less clear those are the ingredients of a successful president."
"... and to the extent that cakes are used in ceremonies, their significance is inextricably tied to their being eaten, not to any message they visually convey," argue Dale Carpenter and Eugene Volokh in an amicus brief in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case (PDF):
To be sure, cakes often do convey messages in the writing or graphics on the cake itself. Cake-makers might indeed have a First Amendment right to decline to include such written or graphic messages on a cake. The cake itself, though intended for use in a ceremony, is not itself generally expressive of any message (other than perhaps the fact that 'this cake is intended for use in this ceremony'). Nor can wedding cakes be viewed as inherently expressive, or traditionally protected, simply by raising the level of generality and calling wedding-cake-making 'art.' Much in life is art in the sense that it is aimed at creating beauty, including beauty identifiably linked with some ceremony or some style. Cooking is often said to be an art.
At this point there's a footnote to 3 cookbooks with the word "art" in the title, one of which is by Anne Volokh ("The Art of Russian Cuisine").
Even setting the table to present food is an art, with a long historical pedigree. Subway calls its sandwich-makers 'sandwich artists.' But a restaurant may not refuse to cook or prepare a table for certain customers on the ground that would be a speech compulsion....
The relevant Free Speech Clause question is not whether a merchant customizes a product, but whether the customization communicates protected expression.... No one looks at a wedding cake and reflects, “the baker has blessed this union.”... Phillips may subjectively believe that making the cake would have communicated a message about his clients’ marriage, but there is not a substantial likelihood “that the message would be understood by those who viewed it.”...
Requiring bakers to design a cake using certain words, symbols, or other politically significant design elements, might... be an unconstitutional speech compulsion. Even if the choice to wear certain styles of clothing is not protected by the First Amendment, restrictions on wearing certain words on clothing are unconstitutional, see Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971); the same goes for cakes...
This case is about Phillips’ categorical refusal to provide a particular sort of product to customers based solely on their sexual orientation reflected in the event for which the product was to be provided, in violation of a state public accommodations law. It is not about any refusal on Phillips’ part to speak through his cake creations.
Carpenter and Volokh side with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against the cakeshop. You can compare their argument to the one in the Cake Artists amicus brief, which we discussed a little while ago here. The Cake Artists refrained from taking a side, but they want what they do to be given the status of "expressive art." They want "the same respect under the First Amendment as artists using any other medium."
The difference between these 2 briefs isn't about what is art, but what is expression. Carpenter and Volokh say you've got to draw the line somewhere, and they rely a lot on whether there's already a tradition of regarding something as form of expression protected by the First Amendment:
Jackson Pollock paintings are protected because they are special cases of a broad medium — painting — that has long been used to communicate expression.
Are paintings protected because we see them as encoding a message that reminds us of something that could have been put in words?
Why do courts protect that, really? Well, there's the tradition argument: Courts protect paintings because they've protected paintings in the past, and anything that's literally a painting — even if it's off the stretchers and the brush never touches the canvas — gets the traditional protection.
But let's look beyond tradition — even though opponents of gay marriage got deeply wedged into tradition-based arguments. Go back to the Carpenter/Volokh quote I put in the post title. I see some substance here: "Cakes do not convey the rich, complex expression that can be conveyed by words, music, images, and the like." We might say to extend the protection beyond what is traditional, courts should look at whether the supposed expression achieves complexity and richness.
The Cake Artists brief has material for putting together a complexity-and-richness argument for the protection of wedding-cake expression. But the complexity-and-richness standard smells of elitism and overeducation. The one case citation I left in, above, is Cohen v. California,where the protected speech was simple and cheap: "Fuck the draft."
And did Pollack really have anything complex or rich to say? I don't think there's a message to be decoded from the dried dribbles. He made an object, and the object is protected because it was made by an artist, and we've been reverential about the artists we consider real artists for a long time.
The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time....
Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design.... But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.
Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.
I saw this movie when it came out and wrote about it — using my random list blogging approach — on August 15, 2008. The movie is all about romantic love and sexual feeling, and when I saw if the first time, I hadn't been in love in a long while. So it was fun to see it again and to go back and read that old post about it. And it was really fun to dip into the comments and find my then-future-husband Meade, who said: "If only I had a nickel for every time someone has come up to me on the street and mistaken me for a lesbian Javier Barden..." Ha. Lord knows what I pictured back then, before Meade ever sent me his photograph. But did the movie affect me differently now that I have my dear Meade? I'd say it made a deeper impression when I was love-deprived, because it's about people trying to understand and get to the love they want.
Too much personal happiness may diminish one's appreciation of art!
In the movie, Javier Bardem — Meade typo'd his name — plays an artist who can't maintain a stable attachment to his wife. He passionately loves her, but it's all tempestuous and violent. And it makes his art fabulous, of course. He's splattering paint all over the canvas — as painters in movies usually do, because it's not sufficiently cinematic to be dabbing paint carefully. A great exception to the movie rule that every painter must fling paint like Jackson Pollock is the Catherine Keener character in "Synecdoche, New York." She paints pictures so extremely tiny they require magnifying glasses to view.
But painting in movies is always a metaphor for sex, is it not? It's different sex in Synecdoche and Barcelona. And that makes me wonder if, on rewatch today, "Synecdoche, New York" would make a deeper impression.
What are the works of art that become more profound when you are, in real life, experiencing great happiness?
The Oldsmobile 88 convertible threw Ruth Kligman clear of the death wreck and back into a long life, in which she was not only able to write that description of how her lover Pollack killed himself and her friend Edith Metzger, but she got to paint her own abstract expressionist paintings and to become — if I am to believe this NYT obituary — a great muse:
Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of her; Willem de Kooning, with whom she was romantically involved, titled a 1957 painting “Ruth’s Zowie,” supposedly after she made that exclamation upon seeing it...
"It" being the painting, right? Or are these buried sex jokes? "Ms. Kligman said that de Kooning had called her 'his sponge'" — supposedly because she absorbed so much learning about art from him. I'm thinking a man calling a woman "his sponge" — presumably the quote is "my sponge" — is thinking about spewing something other than information.
Andy Warhol mentions her in his diaries several times, and she wrote that they “had a terrific crush on each other” for many years; she was friendly with Jasper Johns, to whom she once proposed, and with Franz Kline, whose former studio on 14th Street became her home and the studio where she continued to paint almost to the end of her life.
The full text of Andy Warhol's diaries ought to be on line. That's what the internet is for. But you can go to Amazon and do a "search inside the book" for Kligman. So let's check out the substance of that terrific crush. Page 7:
I read the Ruth Kligman book Love Affair about her "love affair" with Jackson Pollock — and that's in quotes. It's so bad — how could you ever make a movie of it without making it a whole new story? Ruth told me she wants me to produce it and Jack Nicholson to star.
In the book she says something like, "I had to get away from Jackson and I ran as far as possible." So do you know where she went? (laughs) Sag Harbor. He lived in Springs. So that's — what? Six miles? And she was making it like she went to the other side of the world. And then she said, "The phone rang — how oh how did he ever find me?" I'm sure she called hundreds of people to give them the number in case he asked them.
Ha. Terrific crush. Page 17:
Read the Ruth Kligman book again, she was driving Jackson Pollock crazy in the car and that's when he ran into the pole.
Page 19:
Ruth Kligman had called me that afternoon and I told her I was seeing Jack Nicholson and I would talk to him about starring in the Jackson Pollock movie. She asked me if I would take her to meet Jack and I said no. (laughs) I wouldn't take her anywhere after reading her book. She killed Pollock, she was driving him so nuts.
Terrific crush. Terrific crash.
Page 35:
Ruth Kligman kissed me and I didn't know what she was doing, she started talking all about a love affair she and we had had together, apologizing for breaking it off, kissing me, and it was all a fantasy, so I thought if she could do that with me, then she probably never had a love affair with Pollock. She looked good. She was in a velvet Halston.
Terrific crush. Can I bitch about the accuracy of the journalism in the New York Times when it's the lady's obituary? She died at — not 88, like the Oldsmobile — 80.
She never got her book made into a movie, but they did eventually make a movie "Pollock" — and Kligman sued the filmmakers for ripping off her memoir. The obit doesn't say if she won, lost, or settled. (And I'm not seeing a reported case.) Jack Nicholson never played the role. It was Ed Harris. Kligman — who looked, it was written, like one of those "earthy, voluptuous movie stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren" — was played by Jennifer Connelly:
Yesterday's post marking the death of the popular painter lured the little insect — who's very popular around here — out of the woodwork and onto the keyboard:
you know i have this human soul and i can still remember last time before i was reborn as a cockroach i was a 12 tone composer and music professor at a 3rd rate state u but now i live near harvard u which is probably comeuppance for my last life anyway when i was in a human body and believe me i was in as many female grad students human bodies as i could be which may be one reason i m a cockroach now i remember that only abstract expressionism would do over at the art dept just like only 12 tone or serial music was if you were a composer and no matter what you had to like it if you were a serious modern person at all but i don t think that applied to cockroaches which is one benefit of my current status yes abstract expressionism and serial music went hand in hand at the college of arts and god help you if you had any other ideas i know i sure didn t so if you were a studio art student and painted an actual picture of something you might as well have composed a piece of music in g major oh the shame
abstract expressionism and 12 tone music also had a lot of trendy leftish ideas stuck to them like mold on an overripe fruit ready to drop into somebody s hands except if you were an old fashioned communist you had a problem cause stalin liked mickey mouse and minuet in g and zhadinov would send you to siberia for bourgeois formalist tendencies if you thought jackson pollock or anton webern were cool ah the rat maze of politics and art except most of the rats i know these days are smarter than that which is another problem
bourgeois was the catch all epithet used against art like andrew wyeth s i bet you thought i d never get to the point and i ve got to tell you i still get a little queasy at christina s world because it was part of the air i breathed that stuff like that was stupid and sentimental bourgeois illustration dark and humorless as it is i remember this visiting french art professor and several of us going to a wyeth exhibit in town for a good laugh except he was a little dark and humorless himself and used to puff his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger with his hand turned toward his face and say ah you amerwicains you are so bourgeois you theenk a fire burning in ze fireplace is expressif what is expressif is a fire burning ze house down i think he was a structuralist he would sit in his cafe on the rue de bac thinking and then amble over to the universite and teach for which the republique francais paid him enough to sit in a cafe on the rue de bac in paris thinking i was luckier because the state u where i taught paid me enough to not have to think at all
no tenure for poor wyeth and no cafe sitting either he had to paint pictures and gasp sell them so the non trendy ignorant bourgeoisie could gape at them not understanding the slightest thing about art except you can see the grass blades oh the shame
Back in the 1950s, when Jackson Pollock was painting (doing things with paint), you had to ask yourself: What is the next step? First, Brecht tried painting "using chance operations and materials like bed sheets, ink and marbles." But it's better -- is it not? -- to rid yourself of the paint altogether, and then rid yourself of the work itself: Just write a brief description on a card.
In those days, there were no blogs. But it was like blogging, no? A few words on a blank white rectangle are enough.
And yet, there are all those serious people in that video clip with their microphones and watering cans. Are they any less annoying than mimes? And if you're going to perform this minimal, quiet music, you've got to find a space that isn't horrifically overwhelmed with the mechanical noise of a forced air system that drowns out the dripping.
But the dripping goes on whether you hear it or not, and now the last drop has dribbled out for George Brecht, the Fluxus artist.
The liney/painterly dichotomy persists to this day, and in the century since [Winslow] Homer's last works it has taken many forms. The dry, burnished literalism of Grant Wood and Charles Sheeler followed the ebullient impressionism of Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase. Thomas Eakins is liney, John Singer Sargent is not; Andrew Wyeth is liney and Edward Hopper not. Among the Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock achieves his signature effects with a welter of lines, and Mark Rothko achieves his by blurring all edges. Among Pop artists, Roy Lichtenstein takes the comic-strip lines and Benday to a majestic scale, while Andy Warhol remains a colorist above all. All, it might be said, employ highly personal techniques to confront the viewer with something vitally actual, beyond illusion.
Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote, in introducing his long poem Paterson, that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principle study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
In fact, "external reality" is a construction of the brain. Our senses are confronted by a chaotic, constantly changing world that has no labels, and the brain must make sense of that chaos. It is the brain's correlations of sensory information that create the knowledge we have about our surroundings, such as the sounds of words and music, the images we see in paintings and photographs, the colors we perceive: "perception is not merely a reflection of immediate input," Edelman and Tononi write, "but involves a construction or a comparison by the brain."
"In the 1970's when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show," said Jeffrey Deitch, whose gallery, Deitch Projects, is helping to create an art-reality show called "Artstar." "It never would have happened."
Back in the 50s and 60s, ordinary people got excited about art and followed the celebrity artist like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. And Picasso was still around, with all his star quality. But ordinary people haven't followed art in recent decades. So art needs a reality show to make it relevant again. Artists lining up in SoHo to participate in the show is a nice follow up to the big Christo stunt in the park. Even if the art isn't all that great, it's good to make art popular again!
And maybe the show is good for the artists. Why assume the current system for selecting artists is better than a contest?
[M]any of the artists who were braving the icy wind on Wooster Street Monday morning said that if trying to break into the art world through television was a little silly, it was no sillier than many of the other ways that artists try to attract attention in the highly competitive New York art world.
"It's so much about luck," said Arnulfo Toro, 28, who recently quit a job working as a painter for Jeff Koons's studio, where he said he was dissatisfied by the pay. "You can be really bad and get the go-ahead and be really good and go nowhere. We all need a godfather to give us a start." But despite camping out in sleeping bags beginning at 6 in the morning to get a place in line, neither Mr. Arnulfo, a painter, nor his friend, Peter Knutson, 30, a sculptor, made the cut yesterday to a group of 32 semifinalists.
Finally, just as a matter of good TV: art gives us something to look at and TV is a visual medium. I note that the best episode ever of "The Apprentice" involved selecting and promoting an artist.
Volatile, acerbic, unfailingly blunt, widely read and singularly dedicated to the ideal of the painter's hard, solitary life, [Milton] Resnick was in many ways the popular stereotype of the bohemian angst-ridden artist.
Abstract expressionists were the people who made painting so godawful serious, and I want to give them credit for helping make Pop Art so very much fun. They are also the people who allow you to get more exercise in museums, because you can walk past their huge canvases so quickly. That's easy to do now, but there was a time when you went to the museum and felt you were supposed to have a religious experience with these rectangles. I can still remember how I felt seeing Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings in the 1960s. There were so many of them and they were so huge and presented with such reverence that I just felt manipulated and resentful of the self-importance and grandiosity and sheer, crashing humorlessness of it all. Here's a Motherwell quote:
Making an Elegy is like building a temple, an altar, a ritual place … Unlike the rest of my work, the Elegies are, for the most part, public statements. The Elegies reflect the internationalist in me, interested in the historical forces of the twentieth century, with strong feelings about the conflicting forces in it … The Elegies use a basic pictorial language, in which I seem to have hit on an 'archetypal' image. Even people who are actively hostile to abstract art are, on occasion, moved by them, but do not know 'why'. I think perhaps it is because the Elegies use an essential component of pictorial language…
See? You better be moved and have a deep experience or you're lumped together with every loser who's "actively hostile" to all abstract art, the laughable idiots who say their child could have painted it. Well, the Abstract Expressionists were humorless, but that made them a great source of humor. My personal favorite (to bring up Woody Allen a second time today), is this exchange in "Play It Again Sam":
WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.
WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?
GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
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