"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

"It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand... of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact..."

"... that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists...."

Wrote Theodore Roosevelt, in 1913, in "A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition."

"The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another."

"When Beatrice Wood first met Marcel Duchamp at Edgard Varèse’s bedside, a fly flew into her mouth. Unsure of the proper etiquette in this kind of situation, she swallowed it."

"A man behind her, whose presence she had been unaware of, laughed. She turned and saw a 'delicate, chiseled face and penetrating blue eyes.' It was fate: 'At that moment,' she later wrote, 'we were lovers.'" 

So reads the screwy first paragraph of "Reimagining Art, One Threesome at a Time" by Lauren Elkin (reviewing "Spellbound by Marcel Duchamp, Love, and Art" by Ruth Brandon)(NYT).

I say screwy because the man with the chiseled face was Marcel Duchamp, so, contrary to impression given by the phrase that precedes "a fly flew into her mouth," Wood only met Duchamp after she'd swallowed the fly, and because, if Duchamp was "behind her," what was he laughing about? He doesn't seem to have been in any position to see the Varèse-honoring fly-swallowing.

There's also this: "It is questionable whether we really need the pages and pages devoted to ferreting out whether or not Wood actually had penetrative sex with her various lovers, or stray anecdotes like the one in which Roché asks Wood to describe her husband’s penis (referring hilariously, in his diary, to his own as 'God')."

Well, we don't really need any of this, but as unnecessary things go, why the hell not?

"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."

"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada’s countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei. 

As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.

ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me" and not "I didn’t own them and they didn’t own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.

"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

I'm reading "Are There Benefits to Intermittent Fasting?" in The New York Times.

Subtitle: "The best diet is the one where you are healthy, hydrated and living your best life. If you want to fast, it offers similar weight-loss benefits to just cutting calories." And I'm not at all impressed by the science — quotes from a couple nutrition professors who say that fasting is nothing more than another way to restrict total calories. But I do love this comment, from someone who adopts the old Marcel Duchamp pseudonym "R. Mutt"* and says he's in Timbuktu (aren't we all?):

Interesting article but as others have stated it focuses more on the weight loss benefits and not on the many other aspects of fasting. Our bodies and metabolisms have evolved to deal with a continuous cycle of feast or famine ... if it is all one or the other we will have problems. Living in an age where near unlimited access to an abundant supplies of food (both good and bad) encourages overeating and unfortunately if you live in a neighbourhood with limited access to a good grocery store you will be forced to eat mostly processed foods. The quality of what you are eating while doing an intermittent fast is a crucial component. I am lucky to have access to healthy food and have for most of my life incorporated different approaches to fasting into my day and have come to realize that as we age our metabolism slows and we must adjust our diet accordingly. I am only eating one nice healthy meal a day and feel great; have lost weight, more energy and clarity of mind, skin is feeling and looking better, senses mental clarity have been heightened, less aches and pains ... that's good medicine. I am also physically active which is another important component in the overall feeling of well-being. A fasting couch potato in my opinion would probably not reap the same benefits. It's not rocket science ... whether intermittent fasting or not, listen to your body and adjust your eating habits accordingly. And please remember to "stop eating all the time" guys ;-)

Hey! I'm writing about fasting on Thanksgiving! Why not fast for Thanksgiving? I see — also in The New York Times — "The Horrible History of Thanksgiving/Before you fill your plate, please remember why we mark this day," by Charles Blow, who says:

I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.

Well, hell, how can you feel that bad and have it just be step 1, before step 2, "fill your plate"? No plate for you! How can you be all "I can no longer abide" and proceed to the piles of turkey and high-carb side dishes? It reminds me of Lewis Carroll's walrus:

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

Whether we can expiate all of America's sins by fasting on the feasting day, I don't know. I doubt it.

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear...

The Walrus was weeping over the great quantities of sand on the beach. He cared! He mused, and he went about his way, doing everything he wanted. But he still cried all the while. Wasn't that good of him?

How about fasting for Thanksgiving? Will you join me? If R. Mutt is right, we may get some "clarity of mind" and an "overall feeling of well-being." Ah, that sounds to good for us! Better to cry and simultaneously stuff your face. That's the new American tradition.
_____________________

* It's the famous signature that made a urinal art:



Duchamp explained:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip "Mutt and Jeff" which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man... I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.

You remember "Mutt and Jeff":

"If there are three sculptures that would define sculpture in the 20th century, this has to be one of the three."

Said the dealer who brokered the sale of Marcel Duchamp's "Bottle Rack" to the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Art Institute was set to announce Tuesday that it beat out other top museums to purchase Bottle Rack, the first of Duchamp’s “readymades,” a series for which the artist would go on to beatify other ordinary objects including a snow shovel and a urinal. Bottle Rack, visitors Tuesday will be able to read on the museum’s newest wall card, “upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is.”

What are the other 2? I would have thought the urinal...



... but I'm thinking the bottle rack beats the urinal because it was the first of the readymades.

Then there's the question of how to display the bottle rack. Display is key, because the whole idea is that an ordinary object is presented as if it is art and, because of that, it really is art. But Duchamp isn't around to perform the magic. The museum must do it. A decision was made not to put it with the Dadaist and surrealist things because it seemed too "didactic" to make it another example of a genre. So it will appear in a Modern Wing gallery to express its "broader place in art history."

“The appearance of this work should be provocative,” said [deputy director and chair of the modern art department Ann] Goldstein. “To me, every inch means something.”

Shockingly, this much-vaunted item isn't even Duchamp's original bottle rack! It looked like junk and his sister threw it out. Many years later, in 1935, he bought another bottle rack that was exhibited and that one too got lost, and — for another show, in 1959 — he had to get a third one and asked Man Ray to go get him another one. This one, which was sold to Robert Rauschenberg, is the one in Chicago:

It is this lineage — from the original Bottle Rack, through a famous surrealist [Man Ray], to a renowned American modernist influenced by Duchamp [Robert Rauschenberg] — that makes the museum and the art dealer sure of the specialness of this particular version of the five surviving iterations of the sculpture that is interpreted as Duchamp’s original readymade. (He also later produced an edition of 10 bottle racks.)

Ha ha. So many bottle racks! But this is the one bought by Man Ray and sold to Robert Rauschenberg.

“Of the number of Bottle Racks that are out and about this is the most important,” said David White, senior curator of the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Salesmanship! The art of the deal.

“If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image,” Duchamp said in 1964, according to an essay on the artist from a 2003 exhibition on the readymade. “What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.”

The concept is free, but there is still something to sell.

"[T]wo students jokingly placed a store-bought pineapple on an empty table at an art exhibition this month at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen..."

"When they returned a few days later to the exhibition... they were shocked to discover their pineapple protected by a glass display case, instantly and mysteriously transformed into a work of art."

After one of the students, Lloyd Jack, 22, who studies business, put a photograph of the pineapple on Twitter, along with the words, “I made art,” the image was shared widely on social media, turning the fruit, fairly or not, into a cultural sensation....

Before long, the work, which the two students titled “Pineapple,” had been deconstructed on art blogs and social media worldwide; parsed in Paris, Texas and Tokyo; and even featured on Canadian television. Some on Twitter lauded its “genius,” while others ridiculed it as the latest example of conceptual art’s plodding banality....

There are so many stories like this. I feel as though I've read a hundred of them over the years, 200 if you include the cases of actual art that was regarded as not art and thrown away. Well, maybe that's how the glass case got there. Somebody thought it was part of the artwork and feared that some custodian would throw it out. The case is like a sign saying: "This is art."*

I'm not convinced the whole thing was not a PR stunt. I just need to say that so I'm not roped into being part of someone else's artwork. 
________________________

* Like Duchamp signing the urinal. 

Excerpt from the new Supreme Court opinion about the copyrightability of a cheerleader's uniforms.

Breyer dissented, if that helps.

Here's another excerpt:

... Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old shoes, though beautifully executed and copyrightable as a painting, would not qualify for a shoe design copyright... Courts have similarly denied copyright protection to obects that begin as three-dimensional designs, such as measuring spoons shaped like heart-tipped arrows, candleholders shaped like sailboats, and wire spokes on a wheel cover. None of these designs could qualify for copyright protection that would prevent others from selling spoons, candleholders, or wheel covers with the same design. Why not? Because in each case the design is not separable from the utilitarian aspects of the object to which it relates.... [S]poons, candleholders, and wheel covers are useful objects, as are the old shoes depicted in Van Gogh’s painting....

[A] copyright on Van Gogh’s painting would prevent others from reproducing that painting, but it would not prevent others from reproducing and selling the comfortable old shoes that the painting depicts...

Consider Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” series, the functional mass-produced objects he designated as art.... What design features could not be imaginatively reproduced on a painter’s canvas? Indeed, great industrial design may well include design that is inseparable from the useful article—where, as Frank Lloyd Wright put it, “form and function are one.”... Where they are one, the designer may be able to obtain 15 years of protection through a design patent.... But, if they are one, Congress did not intend a century or more of copyright protection....

Consider designs 074, 078, and 0815. They certainly look like cheerleader uniforms. That is to say, they look like pictures of cheerleader uniforms, just like Van Gogh’s old shoes look like shoes. I do not see how one could see them otherwise....

Were I to accept the majority’s invitation to “imaginatively remov[e]” the chevrons and stripes as they are arranged on the neckline, waistline, sleeves, and skirt of each uniform, and apply them on a “painter’s canvas,” that painting would be of a cheerleader’s dress....  Hence, each design is not physically separate, nor is it conceptually separate, from the useful article it depicts, namely, a cheerleader’s dress. They cannot be copyrighted.

"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

"Then we heard the sound of a pen, but by the time we turned around he was pretty much finished with his tag..."

"The pen ink then just dripped down the painting... They were really shocked when they came and saw what he had done."

A man wrote "a potential piece of yellowism" on Rothko's "Black on Maroon." I'm not going to dignify yellowism by linking to any manifestos.

ADDED: "A Russian artist who claims to have defaced a Mark Rothko mural in the Tate Modern gallery says he has engaged in a piece of art and improved the value of the multimillion-pound work...."

Have you seen what Michelangelo's "David" looks like after a 2-year loan to the United States?

Ha ha.

Sent to me by an emailer who bemoans his own lack of Photoshopping skills and says he's always wanted to concoct "Newt Descending a Staircase." Here's "Nude Descending a Staircase." Can anyone do the 'shopping for us?

ADDED: Chip Ahoy provides the Photoshop: