"In 2011 the museum had problems with a 4-14m installation called Peanut Butter Platform by Wim T Schippers."

"Unsuspecting visitors stepped in the thick layer of peanut butter smeared on the gallery floor at least three times. They were given a clean-up bill."

From "Child damages €50m Rothko in ‘unguarded moment’ at museum/The abstract painting will undergo restoration works after it was scratched at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam" (London Times).

If the peanut butter people had to pay for peanut butter "clean-up," does that mean the parents will pay for the restoration needed after this "number of visible scratches in the unvarnished paint layer... caused by a child who scratched the underside of the work in an unguarded moment"?

"Scratched the underside"... I'm trying to picture that. I'm guessing the child did not scratch the front surface or the back of the painting, but the bottom edge of what was an unframed painting.

I ask Grok: "Did Rothko leave paintings unframed and paint the edges (the part 90° from the surface plane)?"

Answer: "Yes, Mark Rothko often left his paintings unframed and painted the edges of the canvas (the sides at 90° from the surface). He typically wrapped the paint around the edges to create a seamless, immersive experience, emphasizing the painting as an object rather than a framed window. This approach complemented his large-scale, abstract works, where the edges were integral to the viewer's encounter with the color fields. However, practices varied slightly depending on the piece and period, with some works later framed for exhibition or preservation purposes."

Perhaps the child was fascinated by the seamless, immersive experience and became a tad too immersed.

AND: Astoundingly, Rothko painted a peanut butter sandwich!

"As soon as I arrived in Crumb’s small village, I sat at his kitchen table as Aline his wife shoved some rabbit ragout in my plate..."

"... and Crumb sat next to me and started to critique my recent Julian Assange interview in minute, precise detail. Dude, two hours ago I was at the Tate with this delicious blonde Texan girl as she explained to me the fascinating restoration of this Rothko painting that a crazed performance artist had defaced a few years prior. I was sad that she had ditched me to fly back to rat-infested Austin, so disgusted she was that I made her stay at this mice-infested musicians’ drug pen near the subway stop for Turnpike Lane, where the fundamental Islamist terrorists live. 'Boy, you tore this guy a new asshole,' the uptight, pervy, demented cartoonist with the appalling face ravaged by millions of hours of onanism told me as I was putting to my mouth what looked like a tomato-covered rabbit’s anus. My editor at the Observer—yes, there is such a thing as editors, and just because something reads as though it wasn’t subjected to Hearst’s five rumens of copy digestion doesn’t mean it’s 'unedited'—was putting his career on the line sending me, after I had harassed him for weeks, in the land of the Sorrow and the Pity to talk to this has-been. Crumb, of course, like all cranky Primitivist old coots, doesn’t believe in computers so his assistant, a church mouse maid, had properly printed and stapled my piece on Assange for him...."

From "Robert Crumb Is Dead — to Me/Cage match pits legendary cartoonist against enfant terrible profiler" by Jacques Hyzagi, which I'm reading because it's in The New York Observer, where I got shunted from my usual launch point Memeorandum, which ranks news items by the attention they are getting and has as its top item right now the Observer's endorsement of Donald Trump for President. I clicked to see that but had a words-of-one-syllable reaction upon reading the first sentence: "Donald Trump is the father-in-law of the Observer’s publisher." I needed to get somewhere else quick... needed to consume something cleansing and that tomato-covered rabbit’s anus did the trick.

Camille Paglia on our "strange and contradictory culture" where our "primary aesthetic experiences" — iPhones and such — have "no spiritual dimension."

In the Wall Street Journal:

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.

"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...."

What is American about American art? John Updike says it's lininess.

Lininess!

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.

From the same issue of NYRB, the theme of perception, order, and chaos continues:

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."

Draw lines.

How Reagan and Clinton learned to think.

Edmund Morris spins a theory in this week's New Yorker about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did. It all started with nearsightedness:

As a boy, “Dutch” Reagan assumed that nature was a blur. Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy. He did not find it disorienting, as somebody who had been blind from birth might. Perhaps his later, Rothko-like preference for large, luminous policy blocks (as opposed to, say, Bill Clinton’s fly’s-eye view of government as a multifacetted montage, endlessly adjustable) derived from his unfocussed childhood.

Clinton didn't somehow have fly eyes to correspond to Reagan's myopia, and both men are described as suffering from a lack of focus as a child, but somehow their ways of thinking came out completely different because of something having to do with their eyesight. I don't even get it as a silly, fake theory. I note that Reagan solved his eyesight problem by putting on his mother's glasses. You'd think the boy would from that develop a belief in taking steps to improve vision and see intricacy, not prefer the fuzziness. Or are we not to think of Rothko's paintings as fuzzy-edged? (But they completely are.)

Speaking of Presidents learning thinking patterns from their mothers, I was struck by this passage in historian Paul Johnson's essay about Bill Clinton on Best of the Web today:

Clinton's family background was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and there is no more to be said about it other than to applaud his strength in rising above it. His mother, Virginia Kelley, provided a clue in explaining how she survived her rackety life: "I construct an airtight box. I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. . . . Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can't-doism, and any criticism of me and mine." Bill Clinton would not have been able to describe his defensive technique so clearly. But that is what he did, with great success. As a result, while never arrogant, he was always secure.

At least there, I can understand the theory. Whether any of this historian psychoanalyzing is true, I'm in no position to say. It can be pretty amusing to read.