Tag Archives: art

May 21, 2013 · 9:55 am

The Non-Luxury of Architectural Preservation

Of late I have been thinking a great deal about the topic of historic preservation in architecture, thanks to a number of news reports which I believe the reader will find interesting.  While spread across centuries, continents, and cultures, all of these stories bring home to us two key points.  The first and perhaps most obvious is that we lose pieces of human history all the time, often without realizing what has happened until they are gone.  Yet the second and perhaps more contentious is whether the question of historic preservation is something which only matters to those with the luxury to pursue it.

You may have read, gentle reader, of the destruction of a Mayan pyramid in Belize, which was bulldozed to be turned into road fill.  This took place despite the fact that the archaeological site, and the structure itself, have been known and marked for well over a century now, as part of a far larger complex which has yet to be scientifically excavated.  Even today, with all of our technology, the jungles of Central and South America still have many secrets yet to reveal to us.  There are many more things to be discovered in these areas, and which continue to occur on a regular basis, such as was announced recently in the discovery of a large statue from a pre-Columbian ball game court in Mexico.

In Egypt, scholars are alarmed at the increasing rate of destruction at the site of the ancient Roman city of Antinopolis, built by the Emperor Hadrian to honor his boy toy Antinous, who accidentally drowned – or was murdered, depending on whom you believe – in the Nile near this spot in 130 A.D.  Here, the nearly intact Roman hippodrome has been swallowed up both by the desert sands and an encroaching modern cemetery.  In addition the area of the ancient necropolis, or “city of the dead”, which has yielded numerous superb mummy portraits, is being converted into farmland for the burgeoning population of actual living people in the area to work.

Even in the United States, we can see the shocking destruction of buildings which are, if not as ancient as the aforementioned, not only old, but beautiful.  Take the demolition of old St. Patrick’s Church in suburban Albany. New York, a Neo-Gothic building from around the turn of the previous century.  Due to various factors including declining mass attendance, many of these old churches now serve shrinking populations.  Often this leaves the diocese or religious community which maintains these structures no choice but to put them up for sale.  In this case, the church is being replaced with a supermarket, which is perhaps rather too-telling

The story of architectural loss in the Americas, Egypt, and elsewhere is one not only based on values, but on resources.  It is all very well to pass a law saying that historic buildings must be preserved.  However if there is no enforcement mechanism in place to impose that law, nor the budget to fund it, then all the good intentions in the world will not halt demolition or decay.

There is also a kind of absolutist tendency among some in the historical preservation world to argue that anything more than a few years old is “historic”, and worth preserving.  We saw this in the battle over the hideous Third Church of Christ Scientist by “starchitect” I.M.Pei here in D.C., which unfortunately has yet to be demolished.  And indeed similar arguments are being made to preserve the even more egregiously awful and failing FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.  How anyone with an advanced degree could argue that, ”I think if it can be saved, it should be,” with a straight face is beyond me.

As in everything in life, the key here is to strike a balance.  For many poorer countries, preservation of architectural monuments and important buildings or ruins is simply not possible.  There are organizations like UNESCO to help them, but as we saw in the destruction of ancient structures in Mali during the Islamist uprisings, even international organizations can only coordinate restoration efforts up to a point.  These are often viewed as a luxury which wealthy, first-world countries alone have the means to play with.  For all of us, the loss of these pieces of the past, however they come about, are tragic, and call for our attention and, yes, our financial support, if we care about history, or architecture, or art.

Yet even at home, we can do our part in our own communities.  Rather than worrying so much over whether it is historically appropriate for our neighbor to paint his front door fire engine red, as is so often the kind of in-fighting that goes on in well-to-do historic neighborhoods, perhaps we ought to be looking with a more keen eye to see what is actually worth our time and effort to preserve.  Nothing built by the hands of man will last forever, after all, and by tailoring our preservation efforts to those structures which are not simply old, but exemplary of the best that human beings can do when they push themselves, we will all be better-served.

Watervliet

Demolition underway at St. Patrick’s Church
Watervliet, New York

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May 13, 2013 · 9:35 am

Is Tate Britain Rediscovering Its Purpose?

“Gloriously, satisfyingly reactionary,” is the assessment of the Torygraph’s art critic, Richard Dorment, on the renovations to Tate Britain, the London museum dedicated to British art from the 16th-21st centuries.  The museum’s Director, Penelope Curtis, has presided not only over the renovation of the galleries themselves, but in re-hanging the paintings contained within it in chronological order.  In so doing she is bucking an unfortunate trend which hit public museums like the Tate, and the Hirshhorn here in Washington among others, in which their sense of purpose was forgotten in the fight to re-brand themselves as beacons of hipster nonsense.

Beginning around a decade ago a number of public art institutions, inspired by the example of Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate conglomerate began to rearrange the collections of painting and sculpture in their care.  The exercise lead to the works being displayed, not chronologically or in “schools”, as one would study them in art history, but in whatever bizarre arrangement the management felt would draw in the curiosity-seeking public, and get them more press.  Curators would decide that a group of completely unrelated works evoked thoughts – for them, anyway – about sex, the environment, a cause du jour, and so on, and group them together, often in a highly discordant fashion.

At the time, the art press went into raptures over the idea that this idea was something bold, new, and fresh – which of course it wasn’t.  If you have ever been to a private museum, such as The Wallace Collection in London, you know that oftentimes private collectors and their families hung pictures of different centuries and styles together in their homes.  They did so because they liked the way the pieces looked together, as well as matching the colors of the drapes, furniture, or carpets.  Some pieces then occupied the space they did because they were thematically suited to the purpose of a room, or conversely were banned from a particular room because they were ill-suited to it.  One would not like to see a painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist hanging over the sideboard in the dining room, for example, even if it was by Sassetta.

However when more public institutions began to make similar idiosyncratic arrangements of their collections copying Serota’s lead, there was quite correctly a vociferously negative reaction from those of us who love good art, but who thought that museums  were losing their way.  There is a time and a place for creating what are popularly called “mash-ups” of seemingly conflicting elements in exhibition spaces:  it has always been the purview of the temporary exhibition to juxtapose works which might not otherwise be displayed nearby each other, so as to encourage the visitor see the connections between them.  Artists always influence each other, sometimes centuries apart, and so for these traveling shows the mixture of styles and centuries can work rather well.  The highly-regarded Manet/Velázquez show at The Metropolitan in 2003 was a good example of this.

The point of the public museum is not to indulge the personal whims, bad taste, and general ignorance of its leadership.  Serota for example once argued that the great High Renaissance master Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” should be allowed to be sold and leave the country, since British public institutions needed to collect more “foreign” art – apparently forgetting the fact that Raphael was from Urbino in present-dy Italy, and never set foot in Britain in his lifetime.  Unfortunately this is the sort of person leading most major public art collections these days, and we all suffer as a result.

Rather museums are meant to be institutions which both preserve art for future generations, and educate us as to its history and meaning.  Having been established for the public good, they are provided with certain legal protections and exemptions, as well as taxpayer funding.  As a result, they are not meant to be a rich man’s plaything, nor a venue for proving to others in your field that you are a bigger hipster than they are.  Thus it is a very good thing indeed to see that Director Curtis has taken the time to examine the role of the art museum in public life, and to try to recapture a sense of purpose from which all may benefit.

TateInterior Loggia at Tate Britain, London

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April 30, 2013 · 10:49 am

Rags, Riches, and the Contemporary Art Trade

Why is it that when one sees articles like this, describing how the halls and salons of The Louvre are being filled with contemporary art, that the sensation is one of anger arising from a deep sense of injustice? We all know instinctively that much of the headline-making contemporary art we see is garbage, and sometimes quite literally so as shown in the photograph which accompanies this post.  Unfortunately, few people have the courage to actually stand up and say so, and there are several possible reasons as to why.

One reason might be that many in contemporary Western society are brought up to believe that anyone can make good art, which is simply not true.  It is one thing to encourage little Tracy to make a nice picture for Aunt Hilda with her fingerpaints. It is another to convince adult Tracy that she is a great artist, and can in fact teach other people how to be artists, when she cannot even draw properly.

I cannot speak to the European experience, but the rather poor state of art education in this country is something I suspect most of my American readers know first-hand.  One learns very little beyond a smattering of Attic sculpture, the Italian Renaissance, a bit of Dutch genre painting, and the French Impressionists,  followed by an over-concentration on Modern Art.  Then one spends the rest of the course making bad pots, or poor sketches of one of the girls in the class seated on a wobbly stool.  In fact, far more time is spent in the American education system teaching students how to boil an egg, parallel park, or avoid getting Suzy pregnant, than is on educating them about the great artistic legacies of Western civilization.

Increasingly it is the persona of the artist, feigned or otherwise, and not the art itself, which is valued and praised.  The art becomes secondary to the story, i.e. the mythos created around the artist: this one is a political dissident, or that one is a public drunk, or that one sleeps with anything he can get his hands on, and aren’t they fascinating people?  In the end, seeing someone put thousands of porcelain sunflower seeds in a room may be amusing, but no one dares to ask whether it is actually good art. [N.B.: It isn't.]  

The contemporary art world does not genuinely want to ask itself this question, nor does it want you to question their judgment on this point, because in reality much of that segment of the art market is nefarious, at best.  When you read about someone paying astronomical prices for what looks like – and in fact, is – a pile of poo with a title placard, the story is not really the art.  Rather, it is about the amount of money changing hands, based on how well the art dealers and press have managed to create a marketable brand value for the artist whose work is being sold.

What most people do not realize is that the majority of this art which makes you scratch your head or roll your eyes is not actually being brought home for people to display.  Instead, it is going into places like bank vaults or gigantic tax-free storage facilities, where it is kept as an investment  readily convertible to cash by financiers, spendthrift entertainers, and arms/narcotics merchants.  This story which broke yesterday, about private AND institutional collectors pulling out of Christie’s art storage warehouses in Brooklyn, should give you some idea of the vast amount of art created and sold over the past 30-40 years which is sitting crated up somewhere, unseen.

If it were all released onto the market at once, the value of such art would collapse, since frankly no one would actually want it.  There is already so much of it available that it has lost that one quality which collecting objects like Old Master paintings or fine porcelain has always had, which is scarcity.  We all know from economics that once the market becomes aware that something is not actually rare or difficult to obtain, it begins to lose value, and sometimes precipitously.  The contemporary art market keeps pushing along, making new art stars out of delusional half-wits to keep the flow of goods coming, but looking less like an intelligentsia and more like the purveyors of tulip bulbs.

As someone who has collected in some very niche areas of art for the last couple of decades, I regularly encourage my readers to go out and collect what you love.  Owning art is not only an ongoing means of self-education, it is simply a joy.  I would based on the forgoing advise you to avoid the temptation of buying art which requires you to install a dedicated video monitor, or put down a layer of plastic on the living room floor, in order for you to be able to display it.

Instead, look for those contemporary artists who know how to do things like actually paint – like this guy – and have made a career of careful and attentive craftmanship.  These people develop their natural talents into something striking and accomplished, whatever style they happen to work in, because they know that great art takes time and patience to create.  These artists are the men and women who inspire and encourage us to feel that link of continuity with the history of our culture, and not that we are simply cattle to be manipulated by the contemporary art world for the purposes of commerce.  And when the contemporary art market finally does burst, these will be the artists left standing.

Louvre

“The Venus of Rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto (2013)
from an temporary installation at The Louvre, Paris

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April 22, 2013 · 10:27 am

Raising the Art Alarm in Turkey

Recent legal news from Turkey has provoked concern among a number of commentators in both the art world and the Christian world.  As reported in several news outlets, such as in this article which appeared in The Art Newspaper, Turkish courts have decided that a historic former church in the city of Trabzon can now be turned into a mosque.  It is part of a slowly increasing seepage of more strictly Islamic thought and practice into secular Turkish law and politics, which has been underway for some time now.

The beautifully decorated Byzantine building dates from the 12th century; it was turned into a mosque in the 15th century, subsequently abandoned and used for various secular purposes, then restored and turned into a museum in the early 20th century.  Many art historians and legal watchers believe that this is simply a legal test case, and a prelude to the great Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul, which itself is currently operated as a museum rather than a house of worship, being turned back into a mosque.  Yet we should keep in mind of course this sort of thing has happened throughout human history, as a result of some very basic human tendencies and motivations.

One of the key points to realize in the study of history is that the victors get to write the story in a very visible way, i.e. in the form of art and architecture.  They build monuments to themselves, naturally enough, since that is what men do, whether on a grand scale like a public memorial, or in a small way when the founder of a business has a portrait of himself commissioned for the board room.  Yet we should also remember that the victors try to remove those things which call to mind those whom they have replaced.

In Ancient Egypt for example, when a pharaoh died and was succeeded by another from a different family, the carved or painted name of the deceased monarch would often be eradicated from any structures built during his reign.  In Tudor England, Catholic churches such as Canterbury Cathedral were confiscated and made over to the use of the Anglican Church, as a result of which many works of art were destroyed in the frenzy of early Protestantism.  These sorts of things are done, as Yuri Zhivago observes in “Doctor Zhivago” when the family learns of the death of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, in order to show the populace that there is no going back.  Even if occasionally there are attempts to bring back what was lost, such as the Bourbon Restorations in France, they are usually short-lived.

What is particularly interesting about the article linked to above is that it brings together two very different groups of people.  This building has not been used as a church for a very long time, of course, so the question of whether it would return to its intended use is not even on the table.  On one hand we have art lovers, who do not want to see the beautiful and historic decoration of this building lost.  And on the other we have Christians, who do not want to see images of Christ, His Apostles, and Our Lady destroyed as a result of Islamic aniconism.

These two groups are so often completely at odds with one another at present, that their having a common interest will make it interesting to see whether they can act in concert on what will no doubt be a growing number of cases such as this, not just in Turkey but in Europe itself.  For of course with the demographic shift toward Islam taking place throughout much of Europe as a result of immigration, falling Christian birth rates, etc., more and more European churches with dwindling numbers of congregants will almost certainly be converted into mosques over time.  If indeed politics makes strange bedfellows, as Charles Dudley Warner once noted, we will see how the art world establishment and the various Christian churches concerned about what will happen in Trabzon and elsewhere, will do in trying to get along with one another.

Trabzon

Dome fresco in the  former Church of Hagia Sophia (12th-13th centuries)
Trabzon, Turkey

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March 26, 2013 · 9:36 am

Contemporary Art Has Lost Her Bloom

Recently a thought-provoking article in The Art Newspaper asked the very pertinent question: “Is the cult of contemporary painting banishing older art to the Dark Ages?”  Satish Padiyar, a lecturer at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, no doubt could write an entire book on the subject, as indeed could this scrivener.  Naturally, in the space of a brief newspaper article – or indeed, a blog post – one can only touch on a few of the factors which have brought about this cultural malaise.  Indeed, if one needs further proof of the existence of such a malady, Padiyar rather shockingly shares the news that his institution no longer has a chair in the art of classical antiquity.

In his article Padiyar explores many of the social, technological, and economic factors which have led to the embrace of the contemporary over the appreciation of the past.  ”The cult of contemporaneity rises out of the felt social experience of new lives that are predicated on change, instantaneity and novelty, while many of the fundamental older forms of social binding and human togetherness are no longer operative or well functioning. If church attendance, family structure, social and political stability are eroded, or drastically experienced as “other”, then the older forms of art that picture these lost worlds and once rendered them enduring, daily lose their meaning.”

Before we get too precious about the “good old days”, we need to remember that at one time, all Western artists were of course contemporary, because they were painting or sculpting likeliness of people who were actually living, or illustrating scenes from the Bible, history, and so on using contemporary people as models.  What united them across many centuries was the desire to constantly improve their skills.  The study of science, experimentation with materials and methods, and the support of patrons allowed these contemporary artists to change over time.

Today when talent, craft, and technique are not even necessary for one to become a famous artist – e.g. Tracey Emin – reasonable people can observe that there is nothing left to shock us with.  An actress such as Tilda Swindon can seal herself in a glass box at MoMA, as she did yesterday, and the only people who will care are the press, who need to write about something kooky in the contemporary art world in order to justify the expense of their shiny new iPads.  No doubt, gentle reader, the news that this monumental artistic event took place yesterday has caused you great consternation, as we think about how women are trapped in a patriarchal box which they are unable to shatter due to the depletion of ozone and the crisis of global warming, thus preventing them from obtaining free abortions and medical marijuana?  I thought not.

For getting back to the article in question, while Padiyar is correct in pointing out that the weakening and collapse of old bonds and values is reflected in the contemporary art world, I would reject his characterization that contemporary art is always in search of novelty.  There is nothing novel about contemporary art, since it is all merely variations upon a single theme: Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” of 1917.  This is not innovation, it is senility.  Viewing much of contemporary art is a bit like watching someone try to tell a story while wearing an ill-fitting set of dentures.  It can be done, but more often than not one is more amused in trying to guess when the upper plate will be accidentally shot across the room.

Thus, the contemporary art world promises to constantly titillate and surprise us, bringing philosophical challenges and exciting pleasures.  Yet if everything is relative, and no one believes in anything any more, it seems difficult to understand exactly what it is challenging us about.  In point of fact most of contemporary art is really just the same seedy old thing over and over again, like an ageing courtesan putting on more makeup to hide her crow’s feet and vericose veins.  What was once tempting and dangerously seductive, is now just a bloated old tart, riddled with disease.

So thanks, contemporary art world, but no thanks – I’ll stick with my Raphaels.

Toulouse

Detail of “Salon of the Rue des Moulins” by Toulouse-Lautrec (1894)
Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi

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