Last night at the American Players Theater.

A play from the 90s about a man who spends $200,000 on a painting that's just basically all white and another man who takes umbrage at that and a third man who won't take a position but would dearly like it if they all could just be friends. Could be viewed as a political allegory. Many imprecations to "Read Seneca."

Look what they've done to the Virgin of the Macarena.

Here's the article, in the London Times.

Comments from the Brotherhood of the Macarena: “This isn’t her; this isn’t the Virgin of Seville. It’s sad. My heart is about to burst out... They should have left her as she was.” And: “I came to see her because everyone in my family has been crying all day about it.”

I know, you're thinking about that dance, the Macarena. Or are you thinking about the "Monkey Christ"?

"The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump slams 2019 portrait of himself in Colorado State Capitol as ‘purposely distorted,’ wants ‘radical’ gov to pull it" (NY Post).

ADDED: "Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before."

I don't think the artist painted that badly on purpose, though perhaps she felt freer to exhibit her limitations. It reminds me of all the many portraits of 18th century Americans you see strewn about the walls of lesser museums. Use AI to redo the clothing and he'll look like a random Framer, rendered by a semi-primitive artisan in the days before photography.

AND: I love Trump's "even I, perhaps, have never seen before." What's up with the "even I"? Is he saying that he's seen more bad art than maybe anybody else ever? That's how it sounds. 

"Finding a studio that made her 'feel comfortable enough to be creative' took time, she said, and eventually, she found Pot, a studio in Los Angeles that seeks to empower people of color in ceramics."

"'In that studio, I met a lot of people that help me feel safe and feel able to create whatever I want without thinking: Am I going to sell this or is this going to be something that people are going to want in their stores?' said Ms. Muñoz, who now lives in El Paso and has a studio in Guadalajara, Mexico."

From "That Art Piece on Your Coffee Table? It’ll Get You High. Cannabis paraphernalia is joining the world of home décor. Here are some of the most interesting new designs and designers" (NYT)(free-access link).

I'm expending one of my 10 gift links on this one because I want you to see some of the godawful pottery the NYT is promoting for artists and empowerers of people of color. I found this article at the top of the NYT home page, right next to "Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike." No pun intended, I'm sure.

I'm old enough to remember the kind of gigantic atrocious ashtray that was regarded as an "art piece on your coffee table," back in the heyday of tobacco smoking. 

Smoking paraphernalia "joined the world of home decor" a long time ago.  

By the way, did you ever look and look and finally find a place where people helped you feel safe and feel able to create whatever you want without thinking and then you relocated to Mexico?

Now, get out there and be creative. Creative for the people. Of color. Perhaps orange. Or avocado....

Eschewing an irritatingly newsy story, I looked back into my archive to confirm that I had eschewed it the first time around.

Chew on this, from 2019:

December 8, 2019

Part of blogging is choosing what not to blog.

There's one thing in the last few days that so many people seemed to think needed to be blogged (or tweeted or Facebooked) about, and I knew not to be part of the virality. It's nothing that involved anyone dying or anything evil, just something where I could see people were accepting a cultural con and doing free PR for somebody. There's an additional development that makes it more obvious that it was that sort of thing, but many people are doing another post about that. I'm pleased with myself for passing on this story, which I won't identify because that's my point. I didn't let myself be used in someone else's promotion. Didn't do it before, and won't do it now.

ADDED: I said "I won't do it now," when "now" was 4:57 a.m., but I will do it now, at 2:58 p.m., because the post did get people guessing, and I want to recognize the winner, who posted at 8:11 a.m.  The winner is dustbunny, who said: "The duct-taped banana art scam."

"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."

I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)

"Allison Zuckerman was 27 and working in her cramped apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when the mega-collectors Donald and Mera Rubell discovered her..."

"... buying more than 20 pieces. (She stashed dirty clothes under the bed before their visit.) Since 2021, her work has sold at auction 59 times, a remarkably high volume for a young artist. 'It feels very out of body,' Zuckerman said of watching auctions. 'Everything that went into that painting — the discoveries, resolving that one corner, that brushstroke that really brought the whole thing together — isn’t what’s being talked about.' While Zuckerman said most of her paintings sold at a solo exhibition in June for $35,000 to $65,000, she couldn’t ignore the auction debacle for 'Woman With Her Pet' that same month: Someone tagged her in an Instagram post about the 91 percent price drop while she was on her honeymoon.... Today, she’s making a new body of work about losing control of her paintings in the market. 'Reclaiming it is the only way I can have a sense of agency,' she said."

From "Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust. Artists saw six-figure sales and heard promises of stardom. But with the calamitous downturn in the art market, many collectors bolted — and prices plummeted" (NYT).

"Woman With Her Pet" sold for $212,500, then, 3 years later, brought only $20,160. 

You can see a lot of Allison Zuckerman paintings — including "Woman With Her Pet" — here.

I thought it would be funny if — instead of embedding an image of Zuckerman's "Woman With Her Pet" — I got Grok to produce something like that. Grok was TERRIBLE at this task. Here are my prompts, each of which produced — as you can tell from my tone — a frustratingly bad image:

1. "Make a painting in a crazy colorful style based on Picasso that shows a view of a woman seated with a little dog on her lap."

2. "The woman should be facing forward, her face and hair and clothes should be broken up in a chaotic way, and the dog should not be cute or realistic at all."

3. "No no no. This is far too realistic. I want cubism, and I want absolutely no conventional or cute beauty in the woman or the dog. Think Picasso!"

4. "The woman and the dog should be ugly in a disturbing and chaotic way that challenges the viewer and does not bring any serenity or calm or interest in having a sexual relationship."

5. "No. You are still relying on conventional beauty but just making the woman seem to have a challenging demeanor. I need the painting to be challenging and you must make the painting painterly, not suggestive of realistic 3D space."

6. "Eradicate everything photographic and destroy all interest in feminine and canine beauty. Make it look forthrightly like a painting, something that has the thickness of a layer of paint."

Scroll down for the responses to prompts 1 through 5. The response to 6 was: "Something went wrong while responding to your request."

"He’d been to Rome and seen the Sistine Chapel, and that was his inspiration for the 9,000-square-foot shrine he built..."

"... which he covered with 84 murals, along with bronze panels and stained-glass windows. It took four years to build; Mr. Butcher often worked, as Michelangelo had, flat on his back, suspended on scaffolding, painting the stories of the Bible from the creation to the resurrection. But unlike Michelangelo, who was known for his muscular figures, Mr. Butcher peopled his chapel with his signature sprites. And he allowed himself some creative leeway. For his depiction of the first day of creation, from the Book of Genesis — the part where God said, 'Let there be light' — Mr. Butcher painted three angels armed with flashlights. For Day Four, when God made the heavens, Mr. Butcher painted an angelic basketball team he called the Shooting Stars...."

From "Sam Butcher, Who Gave the World Precious Moments, Dies at 85/His childlike porcelain characters thrilled and inspired generations of collectors. They also made him a millionaire" (NYT).

Consider "D.C.’s 'first activist hotel,' the Eaton, which features a 'Radical Library' in its lobby and has hosted protest song performances in its rooftop bar."

"And the city’s feminist-inflected Hotel Zena, where you will encounter a huge portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg made of tampons."

I'm reading "The world’s coolest hotels want to tell you a story/The latest design-driven hotels aim to immerse guests in a story or social movement, or transport them to another time" (WaPo).

That link on "feminist-inflected" goes to a 2020 Architectural Digest article about the hotel, where it says, "The larger-than-life homage to Justice Ginsburg has been constructed using 20,000 hand-painted tampons, arranged on a pegboard to create a pointillist portrait (complete with the justice’s signature lace collar and her 'Notorious' moniker). A 20-foot-long curving wall in the hotel’s restaurant evokes a glittering gown, adorned with 12,000 protest buttons from decades of feminist marches and events.... And a hanging installation of painted folding chairs honors Chisholm’s famous advice: 'If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.'"

I looked at Hotel Zena's website. It costs about $400 a night to stay there. I was sad to see that some of the rooms had a "king" bed. That's so wrong. I want to be drenched in activism when battling insomnia at the feminist hotel. They need to curate every detail or it's insufficiently immersive. Also what's with bringing your own folding chair? I thought we were kicking the fucking door down?

"[I]f you’re not completely sympathetic to its pro forma progressivism, you may come away... alienated by its relentlessly right-on wall labels."

"These seem to have been generated from a dutiful checklist of issues that includes Indigenous rights, race, abortion, disabilities, ecological destruction, gentrification and gender fluidity. The issues are important.... But their articulation in the work is, in most cases, feeble, perfunctory and completely illegible without the accompaniment of convoluted, brain-draining texts. Some of these veer into self-parody. Carolyn Lazard’s medicine cabinets filled with Vaseline, we’re told, are the products of an 'artistic practice [that] traces everyday encounters of Blackness, disability, and opacity, focusing on the daily acts of maintenance we hold in common, in and against the privatization of life itself.'..."

Writes Sebastian Smee, in "A superb Whitney Biennial, marred by flimsy politics/The 81st edition of this closely watched survey of contemporary art is the best in a decade" (WaPo)(free access link).

"[E. Jean] Carroll was also in the courtroom on Tuesday. She is eighty years old. She made her name as a sassy, knowing, charming advice columnist..."

"... for Elle in the heyday of women’s magazines. All Tuesday morning, she calmly sat a few feet from the man who’d attacked her, who has promised to take revenge on his enemies if he is reëlected President this November. [Her lawyer] said that Carroll now sleeps with a loaded gun next to her bed."

From "The Donald Trump Doom Loop/Sitting in a courtroom, feet away from the woman he sexually assaulted, the ex-President keeps trying to outrun the consequences of his own bad acts" (The New Yorker).

***

Yesterday, someone sent me the video I'm embedding below. I can see that people on X have been sharing it and saying it shows E. Jean Carroll is "a nut job."

I disagree. Judge for yourself:

Donald Trump is not allowed to call his accuser E Jean Carroll a nut job. So we can do it for him. pic.twitter.com/X6kPqOsHdY

— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) January 17, 2024

I see a woman with a cute/cutesy, quirky self-presentation who is leaning into an arty, hippie vibe.

I have no idea what really happened between her and Trump, but I do think that once the first trial ended, and she won (to some extent), he needed to accept the outcome of the legal process. It was a defamation case, brought on by his accusing her of lying. To go back to the assertion that she lied about their encounter is a new defamation, and now he needs to pay for that.

Even if you were trying anew to prove that she lied about the encounter, her literary shed, Annie Hall clothing, and painting rocks and trees blue have precious little probative value.

"I don’t think it’s an accurate representation of what breaking is. Breaking is a lot more organic, and the way that we do it in the Olympics..."

"... is, like, 'Do a round. Stop, look at what your score is. Now do another round.' It doesn’t feel real because when someone goes into the circle and they finish your round, you want to go right after to respond."

 
Said Odylle Beder, "a B-girl from Brooklyn known as Mantis," quoted in "Breakers Grapple With Hip-Hop’s Big Olympic Moment/Largely left out of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, breaking will get its stage at the Paris Olympics. Its pioneers wonder if their art will translate into sport" (NYT).

"In my mind, they have already joined a roll call of shame that includes The Meeting Place at St Pancras station, Paul Day’s irredeemably saccharine sculpture of a couple embracing..."

"... The Kelpies in Falkirk, a pair of gargantuan horse heads by Andy Scott that could only be any worse if they actually neighed; and, most terrible of all, Maggi Hambling’s unfeasibly awful memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, north London, a silver Barbie doll (with full pubic hair) I have to pass at least once a week, and never without grimacing.... There is an awful lot of bad public art around, and the pity of it is that, once it has landed, it hangs about like some alien spaceship on a hostile planet."

Writes Rachel Cooke in "Gimme sculpture: new statues of Jagger and Richards are a dud.... Bronze statues of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, unveiled last week in Dartford, are not a high point" (The Guardian).

"which piece of public art in Madison disturbs you most?"

A topic of discussion at r/madisonwi.

There are so many to choose from, but the biggest rivalry is between "Flayed Bucky by the Best Western on Highland by UW Hospital" and "The sculpture of the parents reaching out to their dead child in the cemetery on Speedway Road."

About that dead child sculpture, someone says:

I actually like that sculpture, although I'm probably not in the majority. If you ask me "how can I feel more alive?" I'd parrot Martin Heidegger, "spend more time in graveyards."

EDIT: Now that I know it's a "memorial" against abortion I don't like it anymore.

There's also "The turd on top of a pyramid on Regent Street" and the "crowning woman" and "The pale yellow man resting on the bike bridge at Jenifer Street." And "The plaques along Picnic Point that showcase monetary donations and ego over nature and historically sacred land." 

Way too many people bring up the "footballs penis" and need to be told that was excised.

It's pretty hilarious that there was such a wealth of bad public art around here to choose from. 

"Ryan Malone, 37, a chemist who has lived on and off in Somerville for six years, said that he knows hundreds of people who identify as polyamorous..."

"... through his extended social circles. Mr. Malone, who has been nonmonogamous since he was in college, currently has a nesting partner, a long-term partner, two long-distance partners and a kink-based relationship with another person. Mr. Malone said he has never felt weird about going on dates with two or more people at the same time in Somerville. 'No one seems to bat an eye,' he said, so he sees the new protections as very subtle. Ashley Kirsner, 33, who has lived in Somerville for seven years, is the founder of Skip the Small Talk, an organization that offers speed-friending and speed-dating events.... Events like these, the support of the community and the city ordinances have helped Mx. Hall feel more seen. 'Every time a new book comes out, or a new protection comes into place, it feels like it’s validating your identity,' they said."

 
From "Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places/Laws granting rights to people in polyamorous relationships are being recognized in more cities" (NYT).

I googled "nesting partner." It's a standard term. I found this creepily illustrated Wikihow article on the subject. Creepily illustrated? I'm judging. The art.

How about "validating your identity"? Is that a standard term? Googling, I'm bombarded with material about ID cards, that kind of identity — are you really the person with the name, age, and address you're claiming? But what about the idea of validating your identity that is wanting your community to make outward gestures that approve of your cluster of personal relationships? 

Standard term or not, what do we make of this need to have the more complex aspects of your identity "validated"? It's funny that's going on at the same time that some people are getting invalidated — cancelled.

"You see adverts on television with models who are very thin, but the mermaid is like a tribute to the great majority of women..."

"... who are curvy, especially in our country. It would have been very bad if we had represented a woman who was extremely skinny."

Said the headteacher, defending his students, who were asked to make a sea-themed statue for their town. The teacher is quoted in "'Too provocative' mermaid statue causes stir in southern Italy/Art school headteacher hails ‘tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy’ amid social media uproar" (The Guardian).

Go to the link to see the statue, which has huge globular breasts and a giant ass. I'd never even thought of a mermaid's ass before, and now I'm trying to think of how the human ass converges with the fish tail in the mermaid anatomy. 

Is the teacher trying to say that because one alternative — "extremely skinny" — is bad, anything else must be good? That's a logical fallacy.

Anyway, what is a mermaid but a sexual fantasy? They asked students for a mermaid, and they got exactly what they asked for. 

"[A] former assistant who said she had to pick up clothes from Chanel for Mr. Sachs’s wife... and prepare meals for her French bulldog..."

"... consisting of wild rabbit, spinach, aloe water and coconut oil.... [A] studio spokesman told Artnet that assistants were in fact dispatched to make Napoleon’s 'veterinarian-prescribed meals.'... On Tuesday, Mr. Sachs... said that he sincerely regretted having referred to a particular room in the studio housing an air compressor as the 'rape room.'... For all the recent show that the art and fashion worlds have made of their progressive politics — their efforts to market their alignment with inclusive causes — they remain tied to caricatures of intemperate genius — even when the genius itself is hard to locate. A brilliant artist reads beneath the culture, identifying the undercurrents the rest of us cannot easily recognize. What should we make of one who has managed to miss what is happening right on top, who has been blind to a tidal wave of shifting social norms?"

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Who Is the Bad Art Boss? Tom Sachs made an art career on casual shock value and relationships with luxury brands. Now he’s under attack for what employees say was an abusive studio environment" (NYT).

This gets my tag "geniuses." 

"It was only later in the 19th century, with the Romantic cult of the author and the rise of academic textual scholarship, that the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision began to take hold."

"But even then, such standards tended to apply only to established authors. The most common English editions of many 19th-century French novels were still heavily bowdlerized.... In comparison with the familiar sanitized versions, Dumas’s original ['Three Musketeers'] is an obscure, slightly seedy French romance...  The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether it is ever reasonable [to make changes] but who should be able to do so — and in what spirit and with what purpose.... In the Dahl case... it was a company treating Dahl’s beloved creations as if they were merely its assets....  I, for one, do not believe that philistines should be allowed to buy up authors’ estates and convert their works into 'Star Wars'-style franchises, as Netflix now seems to be doing, having purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company...."

 
Writes Matthew Walther, the editor of a Catholic literary journal, in "The Truth About the ‘Censorship’ of Roald Dahl" (NYT).

"For our £120, we got 45 minutes of brightly coloured splats [David] Hockney has done on his iPad..."

"... blasted around the four walls while the old ham belted out his... platitudes in quadraphonic stereo all around us ('I love life,' 'the world is beautiful when you look, but most people don’t'). There were all the old banalities about the 'quality of the light' in Los Angeles, lots of film of him 'being inspired' while driving round the California mountains in a convertible while listening to Wagner (even duller than your best mate’s hourly Instagram posts from holiday) and then endless minutes of his opera sets, complete with cringey faux-naif animations that reminded me of when it said 'cartoon' in the TV schedule in the late 1970s and you switched on hoping for Tom and Jerry but got some depressing shadow puppet thing from 1950s Czechoslovakia.... [W]e were laughing so much we had to leave, through a shop in the foyer where they had attempted to find interesting things he has said over the years to put on their brightly coloured 'quote totes' (£20 a pop, if you please) but clearly couldn’t find anything better than 'If you’re not playful, you’re not alive,' 'I’m greedy for an exciting life,' and, from the militant old smoker, 'Health is wealth'...."

Writes Giles Coren in "Don’t splash out on Hockney’s splats and platitudes" (London Times).

"I’m still not free of this anger... If I’d been a woman and the critic a man, this would be seen differently."

Said Marco Goecke, quoted in "He Smeared Feces on a Critic, and Lost a Job. Now, He Wants to Be Heard. Marco Goecke on Thursday lost his position as ballet director at Hanover’s main opera house. The reaction has 'been a bit blown up,' he says" (NYT). 

Newspaper coverage of the incident, though, had focused only on the dog feces, he said, whereas he wanted to start a debate about what should be allowed in arts criticism. 

Well, he failed at that. You do something attention-getting and people will focus on what you yourself are responsible for drawing their attention to.  If dog-shit-smearing was your idea of how to start a debate about anything other than dog-shit-smearing, you are a fool.