"What is the insecurity, the anxiety, the deficit in our culture today that makes us worship figures like Leonardo?..."

"Leonardo sometimes seems like humanity’s miraculous pet unicorn, a pure and perfect, one-off instantiation of grace, intelligence, superhuman talent and bewildering wisdom. We feed and cosset his memory as if he is the spiritual father of all humanism, art and science, which he wasn’t. If Leonardo invented our world, how bad can that world be?... Near the end of the film, there is brief mention of 19th century rhapsodists... who helped launch Leonardo into the stratosphere of genius, 'lavishing Leonardo’s masterpieces with lyrical praise.' That’s what the film has also been doing for almost four hours. You can never say enough good about Leonardo, which is why it is an entirely uncontroversial cultural exercise to praise him. The work will continue until we actually understand the man, or no longer need his tacit benediction for the civilization we have inherited."

Philip Kennicott in "Ken Burns takes 4 hours to canonize Leonardo da Vinci. He needed only two.The celebrated documentarian turns his lens on the great Renaissance polymath, with mixed results" (WaPo).

Ken Burns things are always extra long. Why complain about this particular lengthiness? It's Burns's style to drag it way out. But Kennicott has a special problem here. It seems to have something to do with the idea that "our world" isn't so great, that "the civilization we have inherited" does not deserve reverence. I don't know if that's what Kennicott thinks or if he's just looking down on the people who feel "anxiety" and "insecurity" and want to be indulged with a vision of human glory. 

"It’s also possible that the ancients were simply wrong about using color, and that these statues improved as the colors faded or abraded away."

"Certainly, we are under no obligation to view these statues in color, so long as we honestly acknowledge their longer history and original appearance as essential facts. And ideas of authenticity are always tricky. The one thing we can never know is whether our ideas of color have any relation to how color was perceived when these works were new. Indeed, when the ancients wrote about color, from Homer and Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, their terminology often seems decidedly foreign. Was the wine-dark sea really the color of a fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or did that refer to something about luster or sheen or some other visual quality? Nietzsche was convinced that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue or green and lived in a world of black, white, red and yellow. It’s also possible that the original figures were meant to be shocking, and our own sense of shock is an analogue to how they were perceived thousands of years ago.... The ancient sense of surprise may have been no less vigorous...."

Writes Philip Kennicott in "What if the ancient Greeks and Romans actually had terrible taste? Antiquities reproduced in vivid color, now on view in ‘Chroma’ exhibition at the Met, may look garish to modern eyes" (WaPo)(reviewing the "Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color," which will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 26).

ADDED: Here's the museum's video:

"The greatest loss [in 'hardening' the infrastructure] is to the ideal of public space as a meeting place free of authoritarian intrusion or oversight..."

"... a locus for the free flow of ideas and a leveling ground where some distant memory of 'all men are created equal' is felt and enjoyed by citizens of an increasingly unequal polity.... No matter how robust the fortification, mass murderers will find the gaps, reducing the entire public realm to an ungovernable Hobbesian hellscape of perpetual violence. Individual buildings will no longer be stitched together in an urban unity but isolated in a sea of mayhem. This is how ancient empires collapsed — with myriad small-scale efforts to fortify and defend public spaces that were no longer governable by larger entities.... Good buildings, especially schools, libraries, houses of worship and places of entertainment, used to greet us with a promise.... Now, they will greet us just as we greet our fellow citizens, with wariness and suspicion."

Writes architecture critic Philip Kennicott, in "When we reimagine American public space as a fortress, we lose/‘Hardening’ the built environment won’t defeat mass murderers anyway" (WaPo).

Have you noticed all the anti-4th-of-July articles?

Here's one I'm just catching up on: "Maybe it’s time to admit that the Statue of Liberty has never quite measured up" (WaPo).

It's time! Why is it time? Is there a "Time's Up" movement that's sweeping up all the manifestations of love for America? No more enjoyment of the comfortable attributes of everyday patriotism!

Here's an excerpt from the column, which is by WaPo's art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott. 

The ironies and blind spots pile up. Liberty was depicted as a woman, at a time when women didn’t have the right to vote. In 1882, the United States passed the nakedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act; a year later, construction of the base of the statue began with Chinese laborers among the workforce. The idea of the statue was associated with the 100th anniversary of the revolution that brought American independence. But Bartholdi created a sedate, classicizing and mostly sexless figure, not the radical revolutionary icon of liberty known in France as Marianne (the bare-chested woman seen in Delacroix’s 1830 painting, “Liberty Leading the People).”

Like breasts slipping out of a bodice, that quotation mark has slipped outside of the parenthesis. Here's the Delacroix:

Lots of guns in that picture. Kennicott implies that this woman (Marianne) is not "mostly sexless," but it's a call to arms, not a call to sex. Does Kennicott think the pantsless man in the foreground is sexy? 

Speaking of sex:

"The 'Mona Lisa' moment is a sense of despair at the impossibly crowded... room devoted to the Mona Lisa... a scene of pure chaos..."

"... as tour groups jostle and throng and sometimes shove one another in hopes of getting close enough to snap a cellphone picture of the world’s most famous painting.... The Mona Lisa moment can be had in the galleries of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which has become so crowded that serious art lovers now avoid it...  The problem isn’t just crowds, or noise or distraction; it is the annihilation of one of the essential components for viewing art, which is extended individual contemplation... In the late 19th- and throughout much of the 20th century, museums stood as temples of art, delivering lessons about the 'civilizing' value of culture. In the middle of the last century, new generations of museum leadership began to stress more populist ideas of openness and equality in the gallery experience. That second age of American museums — the Age of Access — has bred the seeds of its own destruction, generating a cultural experience that attracts enormous crowds, but without giving them any substantial engagement with the materiality or cultural complexity of the art itself.... Are contemporary art museums, in fact, providing something of value to the public?"

From "This new museum doesn’t want Instagram or crowds. Does that make it elitist?" by Philip Kennicott, the art and architecture critic at WaPo. Kennicott isn't suggesting excluding the riffraff to make way for the thoughtful, nuanced people. That would be plainly elitist. His answer, befitting an architecture critic, is architecture — things like narrowing hallways to choke the flow of crowds.

This subject connects to something we were talking about 2 days ago, "‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There?" by Farhad Majoo (NYT).

The Farhad Majoo article clearly fit with my longterm interest in the problems of travel. I almost want to say the impossibility of travel. Museums are a subcategory of travel, since travelers often see the museums of the places they travel to, and in my personal experience, museums are at the top of what I've wanted to do when traveling. I see that Kennicott called museums "impossibly crowded," and maybe that was just hyperbole, but I think he's seeing what I'm seeing. The presence of other people changes the environment from the place you want to see, so the place you want to go no longer exists. Traveling there is literally impossible.

Is that elitist? I'd say, no. It's just aesthetically sensitive and aware. It's only elitist if you think your sensibilities justify excluding the people who don't mind the problems as they continue to crowd the places that you'd go to if they were virtually empty. If you cede these places to the other people, you're the opposite of an elitist. You're a populist.

And that reminds me of how I felt when Donald Trump won the election.

ADDED: When I went to Paris in the 90s, I didn't bring a camera. I had a sketchbook, and the comments to this post — exploring the idea of seeing the parts of the museum where the crowds don't  — made me remember this page:



AND: Here's something I wrote in my Paris notebook that's quite relevant to this post. Transcribed verbatim: "I spent so much time today at the museum — walking all over the Louvre — there is so much here that you get numb, you don't care. If you had to travel from church to church to see each piece, it would mean much more. But as it is, you get to the point where you traipse along, casting your eyes about to see if anything really grabs you (oh, yeah, they're about to deliver a second axe chop to the neck of a saint who's not dead yet! That's cool — heh, heh. I saw some kids pointing this out — & aren't they on the same wave-length perhaps as the artist — in his time). One américain says, 'Let's skip this shit' & I don't think 'What a crass/ignorant little man!' I think 'I know exactly how you feel.' But much is good. I don't mean to slight it. It's just that one really doesn't prefer culture in one humongous globule! And yet in our modern world, great art has been globbed up in large Louvrish hunks, so this is the only way you can see it. For a normal look, you must look at the art of your own time, as the medievals viewed crosses and chalices in their own churches, localized and, not unimportantly, imbued with meaning: the beliefs that they shared with the art & artists themselves."

"What did the men with Donald Trump do when he spoke of ‘shithole countries’?"

Asks Philip Kennicott, the "culture critic" at The Washington Post.

Trump has denied making the remark, it's worth mentioning (even as I feel I should check Twitter to see if he's reframed that denial since I looked last (no, he's just blaming the Democrats for missing the opportunity to fix DACA)).

But I like Kennicott's refocussing of the question. (It's like in the #MeToo discussions when we shift from looking at the accused offender to wondering what the other people who saw what was happening did about it.)

Kennicott says:

What I want to know is how the men in the room with him reacted. This is the dinner table test: When you are sitting and socializing with a bigot, what do you do when he reveals his bigotry? I’ve seen it happen, once, when I was a young man, and I learned an invaluable lesson. An older guest at a formal dinner said something blatantly anti-Semitic. I was shocked and laughed nervously. Another friend stared at his plate silently. Another excused himself and fled to the bathroom. And then there was the professor, an accomplished and erudite man, who paused for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table and said, “I will never listen to that kind of language, so either you will leave, or I will leave.” The offender looked around the table, found no allies and left the gathering. I don’t know if he felt any shame upon expulsion.

Did Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) threaten to leave the Oval Office? Did Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) speak sharply to the president, saying no one should speak like that, not in the White House, not in the United States, not in decent society? (He did, at least the next morning when speaking to the media.) Did anyone suggest that perhaps the president should wash his mouth out with soap and take a time out to think about what he just did?

I would like to see more in-person confrontation. It's kind of weaselly to sit there and listen and then afterwards talk to the press and let them — who didn't experience the context or have the ability to shape and propel the conversation — do your chiding and shaming for you.

When I think about this subject, the name that comes to mind is Eartha Kitt: