02.10.2008: LA, Part I

We attend a gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a massive new wing of the County Museum here. C has many, many pieces in this new wing, so they flew her out for this. (Eli Broad has amassed more of her work than any other collector.) The County Museum is situated on a massive park site off Wilshire Blvd, which is also the location of the famous tar pits. As you approach the museum complex from the east, one of the pits is plainly visible — a small black lake can be seen just off Wilshire Blvd.  A white statue of a struggling wooly mammoth sits within it. The animal is depicted lurching and crying out, so we can imagine the theoretical scenario.

When the rains fall, these bubbling ponds of tar and oil emanating from beneath the LA geology become covered in a thin layer of water. Long ago, prehistoric critters, seeing only the aqueous top layer, would wade in the pond thinking it was comprised of fresh water, inevitably becoming stuck in the black goo. Nearby, a covered pavilion houses a dig that has continued for decades, uncovering lots of bones and fragments. Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that.

Outside the museum entrance, valet parking attendants await newcomers, systematically arrayed so that no one has to wait too long to be relieved of their car. We have a rented Prius, and I overhear one of the parking guys asking another if he knows how to drive it. (They don’t start like regular cars.) Guests are immediately dumped onto the red carpet and I ask C if she wants to let the photographers get some snaps or just run for it. Too late — a young woman quickly attaches herself to us and makes us stop every few yards, allowing pack after pack of photographers to get their snaps. I’m kind of game, up to a point. At each stop, I urge us on after enduring a minute of flashing bulbs. C is taken aback, blinded by the barrage of flashes, which I suspect she must have also endured at the various NY fashion shows she has attended; but this is more drawn out and structured.

The actual entrance features a collection of vintage cast-iron lampposts from LA County, painted light gray by Chris Burden. I read about these somewhere. He bought them when he heard that these and other bits of civic detritus were being sold or auctioned, and then he stored them on his Topanga Canyon property. Now he has declared them a “piece” and I assume has sold them to the museum, or to Eli Broad, the developer who funded much of this wing.

The elevation of an individual’s personal collection of curios to the status of an artwork in it’s own right seems increasingly common these days. Recently, a NY gallery featured an artist’s collection of kitsch sculptures of a monkey holding Darwin’s skull. It seemed like an eBay collection to me — charming and wacky if I saw it at someone’s house, but presented as a stand-alone artwork?

The artist Francis Alÿs did a similar thing last year at a museum in NYC, where he presented his collection of found paintings of the same Mexican Saint. Some were refined, some crude, and they filled the whole place — again, a sort of eBay collection as an integral original work. Or not. My friend Ford has some wonderfully eccentric collections: grotesque clown dolls and paintings, a whole series of bottles made to look like logs, yardsticks.

Jim Shaw, the LA artist, did something vaguely similar years ago when he presented his collection of paintings he’d picked up in thrift stores as “his” show. (This was pre-eBay.) It was great, and the book of these paintings was and still is inspiring. He picked out the weirdest and most disturbing, the creepiest and most surreal artistic attempts I’d ever seen. In a sense, the show was really about his eye and sensibility — and the objects had obviously been diligently accrued over quite a few years. Together, these paintings suggest a mass of dark, twisted creativity lurking beneath the amateur Sunday painter — a deep strangeness informing some “unprofessional” art making.  The intimation is such that this unusual and powerful creativity also lurks beneath the country at large. It was a powerful show.

We wander around the throngs of black suited elderly men, and women dressed in unusual gowns. I comment that the age of the folks at this gathering made me feel young.

We aren’t yet allowed into the new museum wing — that prize would be saved for later. Instead, we are herded into a huge enclosed tent the size of the Parthenon, through a dark, covered passage, containing small, isolated pools of light.

The new wing is the pink and blue boxes seen below (shouldn’t those colors be reserved for Miami?) and the tent is the big gray thing behind them. The other wings of the museum are over to the right, and further over are the tar pits.

Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Inside the tent, huge white cubes the size of small houses hung from the ceiling, the BCAM acronym on their sides, and some abstract projections undulating  on their bottom surfaces. We found our seats and were served some food as various speeches congratulate Broad, Renzo Piano (the architect of this extension), and others, one after another.

Afterwards, Lionel Richie, Nicole’s “father”, takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms. Kind of shocking that a place purporting to support innovative and groundbreaking contemporary art plays such middle of the road music. Well, OK, if they’d asked me to perform while people finished dessert and networked, I’d have said no, so maybe it’s not that surprising. And maybe contemporary music requires an investment of time and a bit more focus and involvement — whether it’s academic, quasi-classical, post-rock or electronic — than the average work of contemporary art. So maybe that explains the disconnect as well.

Lionel and Co., leave the stage and a second smaller platform descends from the ceiling, hosting a piano player and a fiddle player — and maybe a third musician? — playing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir! Duh duh duh — duh duh duh — go the grand chords, while the violin (it sounds like there is more than one) does the Indo-Arabic fills and licks that lend that classic rock tune its exotic identity. It’s a great song, but not what I expect to hear right now. And this slightly lounge version of it — though still powerful — is less than thunderous. It’s been somewhat tamed, even though it’s still a nicely weird surprise.

It’s not long before the little stage ascends once more to prepare for the coup de théâtre — the wall of the tent separating us from the new wing suddenly drops (a trick I’d seen in quite a few Kabuki shows) to reveal a walkway leading to the huge, illuminated buildings. On either side of the walkway there are some fiddlers made up like the blue man group, only these ones have bald heads painted red (to avoid copyright infringement?) They’re situated on either side of the walkway, on a lower grassy area, on a grid of little plinths, sawing away as the Zeppelin tune continues.

The museum wing is enormous. There is more space inside than in two of the major NY museums put together, or so I hear. On the outside it’s nothing spectacular — it will never be an architectural destination or a landmark like some other recent museum structures. But the building does its job. The large rooms are easy to understand and to navigate; they don’t distract or try to upstage the art, which is a relief these days. Even the stairs have been moved outside (a possibility in LA). So other than a large elevator, the whole building appears to be display space. Many artists, including C, have gigantic rooms devoted to (mostly) Broads’ collection of their work over the years. He seems to have collected some artists’ works in depth, seemingly ignoring others all together. Maybe, as is rumored, this is only a small sampling of his holdings, and this is just what he has decided to put on view here now.

In other cities, like Miami, some major collectors have built their own independent museums – separate from any city institutions — to display their private collections and curated shows of newly acquired work. They don’t have to contend with other board members or museum directors. Here at the LACMA wing, things are fuzzier — it is clearly a Broad showcase, but it’s also a county institution. Yet, the works don’t belong to the museum, they’re on loan.

The evening’s elaborate spectacle was, I suspect, the work of the folks who usually do “industrials,” its lavish fanfare the type usually reserved for trade fairs and at corporate shareholder events. I’ve always wanted to attend one of those, as they often employ the most advanced spectacle technology and money is generally no object. These things are deigned to hype the product, produce oohs and ahhs, and entertain the armies of shareholders and board members who have traveled from far and wide to attend. It’s true industrial theater: auto-ballets, smells, massive screens, sound and light are typical, so I hear. The public is never invited, but I still think maybe one day I’ll get to see one. I guess I am seeing one. (I had storyboarded my version of one for possible inclusion in my mid-80s movie True Stories, but that scene didn’t happen.)

I suspect that a spectacle on this scale can be ordered up pretty easily from one of those outfits, though I’d like to think that someday, someone might say, “Hey, why don’t we have one of the artists, or a contemporary theater director do the spectacle?” Julie Taymor is a no brainer. Or Robert Wilson (though the dinner might then go on for five hours).  Or David Lynch. Or Peter Sellers or….

Same issue as with the music, I surmise. Why not make it as contemporary and groundbreaking as the art on display? Funny how things can be compartmentalized that way.

01.06.2008: Culture Club

A recent issue of New Scientist magazine (8 December 2007) included an article in which two scientists, Tony Martin and Vera da Silva, claim that behaviors they identified in Amazon River dolphins are clear examples of dolphins having culture. What kind of behavior is it? Square dancing? Art exhibits? Pottery?

It seems some males in a few populations of dolphins carry objects — bits of weed, a stick, a lump of clay. The carriers turn out to be among the guys most successful in mating and in prompting aggression within their group. So, the “wearing” of these cool accessories must make you somewhat sexier than the other less dressed up guys. Or they are offered as “gifts" to the gals. Females and the kids don’t carry this stuff, which they claim rules out the rationale that the carrying is simply a form of play — if that were the case everyone would join in.

Lest we think that it’s only the boys who have culture, Geoffrey Miller proposes that this kind of sexually selective behavior requires that the object of affection — the females mostly — be culturally literate in order to determine whose weeds are the coolest, most sophisticated, and the sexiest. No good getting all dressed up if no one notices. I would assume that some fine distinctions have evolved as well — that a clump of weeds say, carried a certain way identifies the dolphin as one of the cutting edge weedies as distinct from the tired stick clique.

The phenomenon has been spotted amongst geographically separate groups of dolphins. And they’re not sure if the behavior is ancestral (taught by elders or by the previous generation), or if it has evolved independently over and over in different areas, the way humans scattered across the globe sometimes develop similar buildings, rituals and behaviors. Either way, these guys claim it can be considered culture. Previously, scientists had only allowed chimps and humans into that club, but now maybe the rabble will be storming the velvet ropes.

What is culture? In the NS article it’s described as a complex skill (or behavior) that is spread and maintained by social learning rather than being a genetically fostered behavior, or one that the local environment might simply encourage. This description defines by exclusion: culture isn’t the making of things or a certain set of behaviors, but depends on how those behaviors are learned and transmitted. You could have the best table manners in the world, but if they’re merely instinctual, then you’re not cultured. Others define culture as using things or behaviors symbolically — and by that definition these dolphins seem to qualify too. When applied to people, this umbrella definition of symbolic behavior includes codes and prescribed manners of dress, language, religion, rituals, etiquette, morality, cuisine, and on and on. Inevitably, some of those products of culture in dolphins will be invisible to us; we won’t be able to know their religion, if they have one — not now anyway.

Using the definition put forth in NS — the one that excludes genetic environmentally prompted behaviors — would be, I think, to claim that to a large extent people don’t have culture either. I would say this is the case because our culture is maybe less learned than we’d like to think. I tend to agree with Miller and some others that what we call culture is essentially a very complicated and elaborate form of sexual display, some of which is learned and some of which is emergent, that is, strongly encouraged through genetic selection. This is different than a peacock’s tail display, which is sexual, but not a behavior — the peacock is born with his fancy outfit, whereas the dolphins, like people, have to do a little work to look their best.

I suspect these cultural and symbolic behaviors are mostly emergent in both people as well as dolphins and chimps. Maybe there aren’t specific genes that specify witty raconteur, financial dealmaker or rock star (though maybe there are?), but instead genes that encourage those types of display to evolve and emerge during one’s lifetime. Propensities for behavior are passed on genetically in people, just as they are in animals. These behaviors are not as clear-cut as instinctual behaviors — there’s more learning and skill mastering involved.  But DNA might play a larger role than we would like to think, and our distance and segregation from our animal pals might not be as great as we presume. Moreover, our cultural manifestations might be parallel from society to society, with more similarities across geographically disparate peoples than we’d like to think too.

So, if this is true, then people don’t have nearly as much of what they define as culture as is commonly held. We have truckloads of what we call cultural behaviors, but if we only count the ones that are exclusively and entirely learned, there might not be too many left. If we subtracted all the parallel behaviors across human cultures on the basis of genetic influence then what are we left with?

In the past, another way of excluding members from the culture club was tool use — for a long time it was assumed that only humans used or fashioned tools. Then chimps were seen carefully choosing thin sticks and fashioning them into tools for extracting delicious honey ants. After that, more and more examples of animal tool use were spotted and acknowledged. Even in dolphins, it turns out. In an inlet called Useless Loop (Useless Loop!!), dolphins pluck specifically shaped sea sponges and use them as protective gear when probing the ocean floor. Some of the scientists who have spotted the sponging behaviors claim it is learned socially — the dolphins teach their kids how to sponge — which qualifies this kind of tool use as a form of culture.

PNAS/Photos by Janet Mann

Liz Hawkins, a scientist in New South Whales, Australia, also claims to have identified two hundred distinct dolphin whistles so far, all of which are contextual, qualifying them as comprising a language. The scientists don’t know what they all mean yet. “Bob’s got a nice wad of weeds there” might be one sentence.

If we broaden the definition a little bit we can still call ourselves and our societies cultured, but we might have to admit some new members.

11.20.2007: Caetano Veloso, Tall and/or Wide News

Caetano Veloso

Saw Caetano’s show last night. It was his version of a rock show. He had the audience singing along in Portuguese, “I hate you, I hate you”. Caetano mixed in some older songs with songs from his last record, Cê, which is lyrically angry and sad, and takes a minimal rock approach quite unlike anything else. There’s lots of space in the sound — sometimes the chords and harmonies, often pretty sophisticated in Caetano songs, are here barely hinted at. I wasn’t sure how this band — all young musicians centered around the amazing guitar player Pedro Sa — would handle the older stuff more familiar to the audience. They changed some of the older songs, giving them spikier and more fractured textures, but it worked. Lyrically, the differences may be more radical; the older stuff is generally sweeter than this new batch of songs, more often filled with turmoil and testiness. But this initial feeling of disquiet leads inevitably to captivation — even the cries of “I hate you” were somehow beautiful.  They weren’t snarled as a punk or Emo band would do, but sung almost sweetly, and with a bewildered sadness that somehow those heavily charged words and feelings are bursting forth — the sadness of watching yourself say you hate someone.

It was my first time in the Nokia Theater, a weird underground corporate space. I ran into Stokes, who remembered that it was a big Times Square movie theater years ago. He said this was where he saw Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. For this show the “orchestra” area was standing, with some VIP balcony tables and then rows of theater seating further back. The sound was so good I didn’t even notice how clear it was until after the show. I don’t know if the theater’s remodeling should be credited for the sound clarity or Caetano’s sound mixer.

Tall and/or Wide News

On the way up to Times Square I passed the new NY Times building, whose lobby was all lit up. Beyond the atrium I could see masses of black-suited people at the far end. They must have been there for a grand opening — this new building, designed by Renzo Piano, has been under construction in my neighborhood for years. The Grey Lady gets a punk haircut is how I would categorize it. I’m sure there are some lovely spaces inside, and it will be a great relief for the employees to have more light, but the building seems unremarkable outside, and pretty big, imposing and tall too. Rather than being sequestered in a mere 14-story block of rabbit warrens, now the news media can gaze down on their former haunt and on the rest of us, as befits the US national newspaper (not counting USA Today and The Onion.)  There is a new auditorium space adjacent to the tower, so it will be interesting to see if the Times begins to present music, speakers, symposiums and other events in that new space. That would be a welcome addition.

I can’t help but look at this new skyscraper and think, “They sure are optimistic ‘bout print journalism”. Or maybe they have plans, and are diversifying in ways I am unaware of. I myself read the NY Times and about three other newspapers online most mornings. I also look at a few blogs and other sites fairly regularly. I paid to be member of Times Select for a while, until they decided to make all that material available again without charge. I also pick up newsstand copies once or twice a week. I don’t know if I am typical, but if I am I suspect not too many people will be buying print journalism for much longer — most people will become accustomed to getting the news for free, as many folk already feel that they do when they turn on a TV in the morning as they get ready for work, or as they listen to the car radio on their commute.

Of course, much TV and radio is paid for by commercials, so the “free” part is a bit of an illusion. “Television Delivers People” as Richard Serra (yes, that Richard Serra, the iron man sculptor) wrote in a video piece he did decades ago. Television “delivers” the viewers, the audience, to the advertisers. The content, whether news or American Idol, is generally just sufficiently interesting to hold your attention through to the next commercial. Federal laws mandated that TV networks give a certain amount of time to news and “public affairs,” the latter usually relegated to dead time on Sunday mornings. Legislators in the past realized that an informed populace is essential for a democracy, or some semblance of one. Without those mandates I wonder how much less the populace would know. In other countries it’s easy to see that when one controls the news media one controls what people think. When it works best, the populace barely knows the news their getting is filtered and skewed.

In print, ads are massive and expensive. I admit, I occasionally glance at them and sometimes I read the ad copy. I suspect that the print newspaper costs a little more that its newsstand price of $1.25 to write, print and distribute, and those ads cover the losses. In glossy fashion and art magazines there are more pages of ads than there are of copy; the copy seems more like interruptions among the pages of gallery ads or pictures of petulant models. It’s fairly easy to see how these pages might pay for the rest of the newspaper or magazine.

Google has tiny ads on the sides and tops of their search pages. They’re fairly unobtrusive, which means they load quickly, don’t take up much room and can give the appearance of not being ads, but instead more unbiased, useful information. If I’m looking for something — tent poles maybe — and an ad at the side of my search names a retailer that sells them, I have been known to click there. These ads are generally filtered to be relevant to your searches; they prey on (or cater to) your interest at that moment. Online versions of newspapers and magazines have slightly larger, more intrusive ads than Google, though nothing like the full-page movie or fashion ads in the print media. There are often just a few per page. Here are some from a page in the Arts section of the NY Times. Two movie ads are paired with a (fascinating and hilarious) review of a Polish metal band.

I assume, without any justification, that to some extent these ads pay for the “newspaper”, or whatever one calls an online news source. They allow me to go to these sites for free. Once in a great while I do indeed click on those movie ads in order to see the trailer. I wish there was also a link to the Behemoth (the Polish band) website, or a streaming version of some of their songs, or a video clip of the concert.  Sometimes there is. Whether a review can remain objective and link to the bands website or to their record company is an unanswered question. I think it’s risky, but it seems obvious and easy, UNLESS that record company pays for the link.

Anyways…this is a long round about way of asking if these teeny little ads pay for that big skyscraper and all the news trolls working in it? Is that really possible? Economically how does that work? It boggles my mind. It doesn’t seem feasible, but maybe I don’t know how much these little banner ads cost.

I also ask myself, if it is as unfeasible as I imagine, what will happen to print, or any form of journalism, as everything migrates online? The writers’ strike accurately points out that, at least for many of us, our computers are now our TVs. We watch streaming programs, from either a network site or You Tube or wherever, anytime we please. Some of these have adjacent ads and some have ads before the “show” starts. One doesn’t, to be honest, feel quite as captive to the ads as one did on traditional network TV, but that could be an illusion. 

I wonder if a wiki online newspaper could work? Wikinews already exists, and its articles consist of both original and hybrid (i.e. cobbled together from other sources) pieces. If eventually it becomes impossible to have investigative reporters, foreign correspondents and writers spend time performing extensive research — as is the case more and more — then does the news media necessarily have to turn into a version of a White House press office handout, as it sometimes seems these days? Maybe not. Much reporting from various parts of the world already originates from bloggers and other “amateurs”. Admittedly, much of it is celebrity sightings and gossip, or tales of personal woe or prurient interest, but sometimes major stories and opinions missed by the official media erupt from blogs and other outside sources. And sometimes the truth emerges, as opposed to official lies. Danielle says that Wikinews was way ahead of the traditional media reporting for Katrina. If all the folks in every far flung town who have local knowledge, digital cameras, and an ability to write clearly (and accurately?) contributed a wikinews site, or to the Wikinews site, then wouldn’t that save the cost of correspondents, some investigative research (lots of folks adopt digging up info as a personal obsession), office space (that skyscraper), etc., etc.?

Well, I can’t imagine how that obsessive network of lunatic amateur reporters could be filtered to yield an approachable, readable, and vaguely trustworthy experience, but somehow dispersing and widening the net that catches news seems to have already happened, whether it’s in Wikinews or not.  It merely awaits a structure, an (self-) organizing principle of which there may be some examples we can borrow from nature, from our neurons, from the various biological and ecological systems that surround us. (Lots of poop jokes based on intestinal based algorithms here, but anyway…) I can’t figure out why Wikinews isn’t filled with gossip, or news according to a retired Czech schoolteacher (which might pass their criteria test as well as anything) or hundreds of thousands of articles of purely local interest.

Someone, some group, or something is, I suspect, make selections and acting as a filter. There’s an aggregate of wikieditors out there making what amounts to a (partially comprehensive) news source. Would the wiki world be using some algorithm to sort through contributions? Surely news shouldn’t be featured according to what is the most popular — if it were we’d be seeing mainly to gossip, gadgets, sport, videogames and porn in a minute.  As it is, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as comprehensive as, well, the NY Times, but time will tell. By policy the wiki world excludes reviews and such: there are no movie reviews, concert or CD reviews, or theater reviews. It might be opening Pandora's box to make the people’s choice available, but it might be all the more interesting. To some extent a critic’s job is to help us see (or hear) something we might otherwise pass over, or not take the time to investigate, and I doubt the herd will likely fulfill that function. But who knows?

11.03.2007: Social "Hateworking", IKEA

Social "Hateworking"

The Financial Times reports on the dark side of social networking sites:

Enemybook:
An adjunct to Facebook, with page additions so you can list enemies as well as friends.

Snubster:
Select Facebook contacts will be sent a snub that says they are now “on notice” or “dead to me”.

Hatebook:
A standalone site. Identical to Facebook except you befriend other haters. And you can build an “Evil Map” that tells you the location of your hater pals.

It seems to me that this was inevitable. Once you have the existence of social networking sites you have to take the bad with the good. While it might be nice to think that they are a place to meet “friends” and like minded folks, it is just as likely to be a place to make enemies, engage in gossip, spread rumors, scratch and claw. These are a big part of social life in the real world, and to think that the online world would just be about nice stuff and making friends, well…

Walk-in Videogame

My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.

There are free measuring tapes available to help you, dotted lines are painted on the floors (to help determine square footage), and personnel hover at computers waiting to guide you through the whole mix and match system — game spoilers, one might say.

Once one gets some of this figured out — scratch pads might help — moving on to the next level of game play is a possibility. One goes through the restaurant wormhole (the food was good) and emerges at the next universe: picking out the flat-packed cabinet and furniture bits stacked in a world of endless towering shelves. As far as the eye can see there are shelves, tall shelves, much, much higher than a person can reach. The weird language is used here too.

Of course, the tables don’t look like tables any more in this world, thus some conceptual skills are needed here. Memorizing some of those strange words helps a lot too, I would imagine. Players drift about here, aimlessly, haphazardly, but soon they begin to put the clues together and the young couples — there are a lot of young couples — pull what will become their dream home off the shelves and head for the checkout counters. Only when they get home will they know if they have truly exited the game, or if they need to return for another round.

**Where IKEA gets the names (from Wikipedia)

IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are either Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Norwegian in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)

Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names

Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names

Bookcase ranges: Occupations

Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays

Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names

Chairs, desks: men's names

Materials, curtains: women's names

Garden furniture: Swedish islands

Carpets: Danish place names

Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms

Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling

Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives

Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms

Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions

Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

10.24.2007: Long Live Jean-François Bizot

Jean-François Bizot passed away recently. He was a friend though I didn’t see him often. In the late 70s or early 80s, when Talking Heads first played in France, I picked up a copy of his magazine Actuel. While its format was similar to Paris Match (an earlier incarnation was funkier and more psychedelic), it seemed to convey an alternative view of the whole world.  Even with my limited French I could suss that this mag was something special. It was a glossy that reported on global culture — Fela Kuti, China, science, local oddballs, politics, art — and exhibited a curiosity and enthusiasm that I both shared and envied. Then and now, nothing like it exists in the US — its lack of specialization renders it unique.

I wrote to the magazine out of the blue saying I loved what they were doing. I was not a well-known musician at the time, but Bizot got back in touch. Eventually he put Brian Eno, Jon Hassell and myself on the cover when the Bush of Ghosts record came out, with the affectionate but ironic headline, “The Whites Think Too Much.”

We became friends. In the 80s, as my interest in music outside the rock mainstream deepened, he encouraged my curiosity. When I was in Paris we went to see Orchestra Aragon, the classic Cuban charanga band, at New Morning (I think) and I was transported.  They would never play in the US due to the embargo, so this was a rare, funky, yet lyrical experience. He passed me tapes of African and old Cuban music — stuff I still listen to that has yet to be released in the US — and we would have late night talks that ranged widely. It was exactly what one hoped life could be for those curious about all manner of things going on out there.

Later, in the 80s, he and some others started Radio Nova. At various periods, it might have been the best radio station in the world. No joke. They played alt-rock before there was such a thing, Raï, African pop music, Chanson, Latin American music, hip hop, and experimental music. We all wanted to hear it, and this was where we could. Finally.

The radio station was followed by Nova Magazine, which focused more on culture and listings. In the late 80s, partly due to his enthusiasms, Talking Heads recorded their last studio LP in Paris, a record that included at lot of African musicians as collaborators. The Naked record doesn’t sound very African, but the influence is there, subtly, in the grooves and in some of the filigree. While we were recording, Bizot invited Chris and Tina of Talking Heads to stay at what I believe was his ex-wife’s place, which helped defray our expenses. I remember a framed family picture of him chasing his ex with an axe. That gives you a clue. For us foreigners he might be seen as the Serge Gainsbourg of magazine and radio — a bit of a louche, but with impeccable radar.

I’m sure I don’t know half of what he did, but I know that France will sorely miss him, as will many of the rest of us.

Read his obituary in The Independent.

09.08.2007: The Blow Up

Went to some art openings on Thursday and Friday. Thursday night in Chelsea was unbelievable — the increase in the number of people in the streets had me stunned. I recognized some of the “regulars” and some actual artists amongst the throngs, but where did all the rest come from? The crowds were bordering on street fair San Gennaro festival levels — but here they are all hipsters. From Williamsburg and LES some of them? I made a joke that someone will soon be selling tube socks and Italian sausages from tables.

My first thought as I rounded the corner of 25th St. and saw the crowds was “that’s it, it’s over, art is just TOO popular now!” This is a quantum leap in attendance, and the change in scale isn’t insignificant. It is the end of something, and the beginning of something else.

Went to see a show by Tucker Nichols, and his gallerist was thrilled by the crowds.  He viewed it as “isn’t it great that everyone is interested in art now!” Cindy was more skeptical — she suggested they might not all be here primarily to view art. I could see both sides: there were indeed, as she implied, a lot of people, young men and women, just hanging out, mostly on the sidewalks, hoping to “make some new friends.”  It’s a social scene as much as anything. Art has become a thing, a life accessory, which one must become knowledgeable about. In that sense it is a lifestyle and status marker — being aware of art implies that you are refined, interesting, and possibly… rich. The comment by the gallerist also seems to imply or infer that art appreciation is somehow good for you. In fact, it might even make you a better person. The increased interest in art is not just good for his business, but for the minds and souls of the public.

I don’t believe that. I don’t think viewing art makes you more moral or better in any way shape or form. I believe that this idea might be a holdover from the past, when art collecting and appreciating was the preserve of the landed classes. Since — subtly now, but more obviously in the past — the upper classes let everyone know that they are more refined than everyone else, then by inference, liking what they like might make you better and more refined too. Right? Some of it might rub off. At least it would get you closer to money and power, and that couldn’t hurt. Imagine if someone said that stamp collecting made you a better person.

I think it’s not surprising that the values and public behaviors of the upper classes became considered more moral, refined, stimulating and well, high class — being the upper class, or wealthy or powerful you would want to give that impression — except for fox hunting? Fox hunting too. We know that hunting fox, peacock and small game became something the nouveau riche adopted too. The morals of the upper classes are probably no better or worse than your average double wide inhabitant, but somehow most people believe that attending the opera and drinking fine wines makes you a better person. It does not. Living in a double wide does not make you a lesser person either, though financial pressures would be more acute.

I think there are reasons for the existence of popular myths of the noble poor person, the immoral poor person, the decadent rich and the high-minded philanthropist. We’ve seen them in a million movies.

So, if the arty world becomes too popular, there will probably be a strong desire by certain parties to form a new, gated community — otherwise, where is the status in liking what everyone else likes? All the collectors hate when their field becomes popular — there’s a built in snobbism that is the same whether it’s a MoMA board member or a stylish skateboarder.

The next night was not quite as crowded, but at Pace 22nd St. there was a line to get in to Keith Tyson's show. I was told later that there were over 100 assistants and fabricators working on this “piece” (it is actually over 230 individual pieces) for 2 years. The sheer amount of fabrication boggles the mind — there were realistic sculptors of people and animals, odd biomorphic shapes and what looked like a titanium hip hop artist.

Inside I was chatting with Andrea, wife of gallerist Mark Glimcher, and up walks Alan Yentob, the (to me) famous BBC Creative Director. We all chatted briefly about the blow up, the explosion in attendance, and the interest in art — if indeed it is interest at all.

Yentob is making a doc, for the BBC I guess, on “How To Get On In The Art World” — that's how he put it. I saw two camera operators elsewhere in the gallery. Yentob casually asked more questions and then I noticed he was wired — he had a mic clipped onto his jacket collar. I could see one of the distant cameras pointing at us. I began to feel a little uncomfortable. I commented on the fact that some UK artists get covered in the daily tabloid press over there — it would be like a Mike Kelly show here for example, getting big coverage in the news pages of the Post, which is not going to happen. But, I offered, the interest by the British tabloids in what Tracy and Damien are up to is not, in my opinion, a sign of arty interest on the behalf of the UK workingman.  Instead, it is an effort by the Murdoch owned papers to reinforce the idea that artists are nothing but fucking nutters and crafty conmen to boot. It sells more papers if you can work up some class outrage at the shenanigans of the art world. Yentob remarked that Damien and Tracy earn so much they are crying about the press slagging them off all the way to the bank. I excused myself.

From MediaGuardian.co.uk:
“A senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr. Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine, even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.”

The British refer to this as the “ nodding” scandal. Well, he was conducting this one himself, though he didn’t tell us.

If the crowds and interest in art explodes further, then simply managing the crowds will become part of the scene: there will be door people everywhere, with lists and velvet ropes and bouncers. Galleries will have VIP sections. Hip Hop stars will want to hang with Koons and Serra.

Gallerists used to bemoan the smallness of the art world, the same people and players every year. So this recent blow up will be a welcome change. (I can imagine in the former, smaller world if you couldn’t sell something, well, that was it, you didn’t have somewhere else to turn. Now you have crowds waiting in line.)

Despite my criticism of some of these antics, I won’t take the tabloid view that all artists and their dealers are scammers out to fleece the wealthy and the great museums of the world — and the public too, who pay for those museums, at least a little bit. I think a few are indeed corrupted by their own success, or are partly coerced into making “salable objects,” but most are just doing what moves them. As I noticed on last year’s trip to Miami-Basel, despite the focus on money, status, fame, power and class, there is still work that inspires and has heart. In that sense, it’s a lot more interesting and moving than stamp collecting.

JT show on HBO

I cooked Mexican food (sort of) — fajitas with chicken and nopales (cactus) — and a group of us joined Malu watching an HBO broadcast of Justin Timberlake’s MSG concert. He’s confident without being too overly obnoxious about it, and the amount and variety of dancing and stage business was mind-boggling. The action never stopped; of course, this was a video edit, so maybe it was tightened a little. For an all out pop extravaganza, it was remarkably tasteful, even chaste.

The stage appeared to be a large Maltese cross shape in the middle of the arena, with the live band tucked into some eye-shaped pits, though it was hard to see with all the dark lighting. Many sections rose and fell; sometimes the band seemed to be at stage level and other times, sunken. Sometimes, massive semi-translucent curtain screens descended with projected images.

While performing “in the round” makes sense in some ways, in these arenas at least one third of the audience will always be left out no matter what the performer does.  One can only play to all quadrants so much, and when those screens come down, I imagine half the crowd is wondering what they’re missing — well, I’m sure it’s all on the screens. But on the whole, I was super impressed.

9-11

So, Bush and Cheney's General plays Westmoreland and says, "There's light at the end of the tunnel." What did anyone think he was going to say? Get the hell out? He's as full of shit as Westmoreland was about Vietnam, and so is Bush for claiming that if we leave there will be havoc like in Cambodia.  The US brought the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields into existence with Kissinger's illegal bombing raids. They didn't simply erupt because the US was no longer "keeping the peace." Somebody needs to be called for this bullshit.

Here's my argument. Nothing much could be worse for Iraq than the US presence. Their superstructure has been destroyed,  and left unrepaired. There is civil war. Their own oil isn’t bringing in money for them. So how could it be worse if we leave? It can't, really. Some folks are saying we broke it we should fix it.  Tell that to someone who comes into your house and smashes all the furniture. That’s not the repairperson I would call. You might want to sue them, or kill them, or have them thrown in jail, but you don’t want them in your house ever again.

It's time to shamefully get the hell out before the incompetents in the Bush government make it even worse. These guys can’t fix or manage anything.  I believe they will make it worse, given the chance.  And the US media is giving them one by taking this General even a little bit seriously. He's a sock puppet and a liar; everything he says is bullshit.

8.7.07 Never Mind

An article on Williams syndrome in the Times magazine detours into a larger discussion on a theory of mind — essentially that our brains became bigger to handle the amount of social information and decision making we evolved to need as we came to live in larger groups. No doubt we are social animals and the perception of our relationship to the rest of the group and to potential mates is what consumes us much of the time. It was the need to navigate the waters of social dynamics more than the pragmatic hunt for food that drove the development of our skills — according to this theory. However — there are many other social animals under similar pressures — birds, for example — who tend to have puny brains. According to this theory it was also sociability that drove the creation of language.

We spend about a 5th of our time grooming (and being groomed). Add that to the fact that it’s a small step from talking about social dynamics within a group to gossip and the popularity of US, People and a whole bunch of other supermarket magazines seem less a perversion of human interaction than an accurate expression of it. Gossip is a big part of what we are and how we know what we are and where we stand. Likewise, if grooming is such an natural obsession, then fashion is a obvious outgrowth of that — and as fashion keeps morphing season by season it functions as a natural challenge for the groomer and the groomed to keep up. Within niche communities and demographics the same is true — whether it be skate kids, jocks or businessmen — they’re all extremely aware of nuances of dress and grooming and what they mean.

Do men often try and find workarounds for this? Not too many men engage in obvious small talk — but they bundle their inferences about who, where, how, when and what in conversations about sports, cars and tech. Their gossip is disguised — they’re in denial that they are gossiping.

Part of these social skills involves learning how to deceive others. How much deception you can get away with, how to do it and when you should do it. The ultimate form of deception is, in my opinion, self deception — if you can do that then the other person will more than likely really believe what you are saying or claiming.

I remember toilet paper

I remember parking lots

I remember air conditioning

I remember newspapers

I remember the smell of jet fuel at airports

I remember high-rise buildings

Oh wait, I already wrote a song about this.

6.9.07: Graduation, Ethics, Spaceships

At breakfast my mother was eating off one of my commemorative plates — and she apologized quietly to the Queen Mum for putting bread on her face.

Over breakfast mom began to reminisce about a woman’s place in Scotland when she was growing up.

It was pre-war. There was (maybe still is) a test called the 11-plus that you would take when you were 11, and if you passed you were allowed to got to a high school that prepped you for college, and if you didn’t they taught you home ec and typing. There was no choice in the matter. Anyway, Glasgow didn’t have enough universities even if more folks were available to go. My mom passed, the only one in her class of 30, so she went to the high school, but eventually she was pressured by her family to drop out and get a job as they figured she’d only get married anyway, so why finish? Besides, they sort of claimed higher education might have been getting above her station, as her dad was a sign painter. Most women weren’t allowed into universities at that time anyway. So she was expressing some exasperation and regret — though later, when I was in high school, she went to night school at the local university in Baltimore and earned a teaching degree. She got a job teaching special ed kids and felt pretty fulfilled and stimulated for a while, even though fighting the school administration was always an uphill battle.

Then there was some talk of the war. Her younger sister was sent to the country, as were all children under 15 — to live with relatives if they had any or strangers if they didn’t. Air raids and getting up in the middle of the night with a pre-packed suitcase and hiding in a shelter or a sister-in-law’s basement.

At Malu's graduation dinner I sat next to Michael Daube, who has been building small clinics and hospitals in India and elsewhere. (He said the best place to have a suit made is now Nepal). [Link to Citta, Michael's organization.]

We were talking about fundamentalist Christians, I think — someone at the table had mentioned how the right made abortion the pivotal decisive issue in many elections. I mentioned the talk I’d heard by Jonathan Haidt at the New Yorker conference in which he attempted to briefly delineate the 2 kinds of morality at work in the world. (There’s a good interview with him in The Believer as well.)

Anyway, Haidt says something like this: in a cosmopolitan society like New York, San Francisco, London or many other contemporary cities in which various people and cultures must coexist, personal morality adjusts itself to accommodate the multiple moral codes of the surrounding people. The tendency is for people in multicultural places to adopt a live-and-let-live moral philosophy — what others do is OK as long as it does harm anyone else. This, however, is vastly different than the traditional set of moral codes that most societies live by. In most societies, where most people are more or less culturally the same, there exists a network of moral codes based on family, loyalty, respect for authority, justice, fairness and purity. Haidt claims that “liberal” societies have abandoned many of these moral codes — purity, for example — as being a personal matter for each individual and not something to be imposed by society. You can have religious laws inside your temple or house, the liberals would say, but don’t try to impose them on the whole society. In traditional societies — and, one might argue, also according to our genetic predisposition — the larger network of values holds sway. The two moralities, by nature, are mutually exclusive.

To me it seems that the ideas of the enlightenment have resonated out and are now tearing the world apart as they come into contact with traditional cultures, whether in Colorado or Lahore.

Here’s a paragraph from Haidt and his collaborators:

Moral foundations theory proposes that five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs its particular morality as a set of virtues, values, and ideas based on or related to these five foundations (as well as to many other non-moral aspects of the evolved mind). The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including In-group/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. The theory is an extension of Richard Shweder's theory of the "three ethics" commonly used around the world when people talk about morality: the ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity.

So…apropos all of this, Michael mentioned he’d recently been to a town in Pakistan near the Afghan border where they practice a rather extreme form of self-punishment. Even little kids whip themselves with blades imbedded in the whips leaving steams of blood running down their backs. Some Western journalists were on hand to view the spectacle, and along with Michael they were rounded up and taken to a “safe” viewing area. I’d seen a similar spectacle in Malaysia, a Hindu ceremony called Taipusam, in which the adepts stick metal rods through their cheeks and hang limes from hooks stuck into their chests. Significantly, no blood gushes forth during the Taipusam ceremonies — there’s a mind-over-body control at work.

[Source]

Michael got to talking with some Pashtun lads who were asking him questions about the United States. At some point he could tell they had more burning questions but were hesitant in asking. He said they could ask him anything, no problem, anything they wanted to ask they could ask.

So they asked him, “Why do Americans have sex with animals?” This was, it seemed, not a question about some freakish subculture of zoophiles; the assumption was that it’s quite common in America. This is what Americans do. These boys have limited access to TV or any media — they may have seen some Hollywood movies — and apparently at sometime or other they viewed an American porno featuring animal sex. (My guess is those pornos are paraded and distributed as examples of the decadence of the West. Michael confirms this — “The lads were shown the film by the Wahabi religious leaders in the area! Its a direct way of controlling and rallying the culture against the west.”) These boys also made no distinction between what they saw in movies and what might be reality….movies which would include the decedent sexy behavior of the parade of tarts and slutty women featured in most Western films.

To these lads, whose morality is of the first, traditional, type, there is no question this is ungodly satanic behavior — which should be stamped out for the good of mankind. By any means necessary. And it is proof that the West, whose representatives are surrounding them in increasing numbers, is certainly Satan’s republic.

For members of the Christian Right I suspect the same viewpoint holds sway, at least amongst the churchgoers. I suspect a good number of the ministers, like Ted Haggart, Jimmy Swaggart and the others, are natural-born hypocrites who have become addicted to the power they have over their flocks. But for the congregation an issue like abortion, as Haidt implies, is not an isolated issue — it is a sign that the godless hoards are at the gates and must be stopped before the moral chains that hold us together as human beings are torn asunder.

It all seems pretty hopeless. Reconciliation, I mean. The worlds and viewpoints are mutually exclusive. There is no middle ground. Maybe understanding and empathy is possible, and that is a start, but from across a great divide.

I seem to remember Haidt might have quoted a study that claimed believers are, in general, happier — which makes intuitive sense to me. If a system of believe answers your most profound questions and supports your moral network then you will feel pretty secure and content. But another study (see previous posting) says exactly the opposite — that believers are less happy than one might expect. In fact that study says they’re less happy than atheists!

Yale (Luaka Bop) and I had a related talk the other day. He spoke about Tim Maia, the Brazilian RnB singer and how Maia had joined a religious cult in Brazil that believes that the righteous will be taken aboard a spaceship when the time comes. (The spaceship will take them to a better place; this is not about aliens engaged in sexual probes.) He cited Sun Ra and Elijah Mohammed of the Chicago Black Muslims as believers in alien saviors and wondered if there was a reason African-American millennials seem to have a tendency to incorporate spaceships into their beliefs. I said I didn’t know, but the spaceship image seems simply, as Jung would put it, an update of the Christian rapture concept. It’s something millions of fundamentalist Christians, Mormons and others believe in: that when the end days come, when the signs appear, then the baptized, the righteous and the saved will be “lifted up” to heaven and the rest of us will be destroyed along with the decadent earth we inhabited. It’s a really common Christian concept, so, to me, adding a spaceship to facilitate the “lifting up” part is no big deal.

But once again there is a separation between the chosen people, i.e. those to be rescued, and the rest of us infidels. George Bush believes this — that this lifting up will take place — which to me implies a mythical confirmation of what will happen if one breaks the traditional moral chains. Not only are certain behaviors morally wrong, but if George can’t stop the behavior with guns and ammo, then God will deal with it come the apocalypse. So, one way or another, the righteous will prevail. Both George and the Pashtun boys believe the same things…they’ll meet on the same spaceship. It should be an interesting flight.

5.20.07: London

CS and I biked around town all day. Started off at the Tate Modern where there were some giant themed shows, which were not what we came to see. One of them was about minimalism — we gave that a pass — and the other was called States of Flux — a headline that seemed in this case to encompass just about everything in no particular order. It was the weirdest mish-mash of a show either of us had ever seen. One room was filled with lovely Matisse paintings, but then on one wall of the same room protruded 4 Maurizio Catalan manikin arms giving Hitler salutes. Huh? Maybe there was some intellectual or academic construct at work here, some thread tying this disparate work together, but it remained invisible to us.

I’d read that somewhere in the museum there was a show of contemporary art from Kinshasa, and that was what drew me there. That show was not listed anywhere on the walls or listings — but there it was, tucked in a room inside the States of Flux show. Huh again? Here’s one of the Kinshasa paintings:

The most well known of this group is the painter Cheri Samba, whose paintings are funny, political and inventive. Many of the paintings impart advice, or offer lessons or allegories of the crazy times we live in.

Next to this was a room devoted to the artist Dieter Roth, who lived part of the time in an extremely remote village in Iceland. He had some great images made from postcards which were then painted or silk-screened over. Here’s one based on a postcard of Piccadilly Circus:

And then (wall texts said these were all part of the same large States of Flux show) there was a room of spreads from a Russian magazine published in the 30s and designed by Rodchenko and other fairly radical artists of the time. The layouts were beautiful — obviously propaganda (printed in a few languages), and sometimes corny as hell, but gorgeous.

At the time, if one didn’t know other things, one might look at these beautiful and radically innovative layouts and think, “Wow, what a cool place, what a hip scene it must be and what an enlightened government they must have to produce such a cool magazine.” Here is a layout featuring images of a tractor factory that featured “illuminations” for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers. Google, the current hip place to work, has some catching up to do.

Other spreads were elaborate foldouts, duotones of smiling peasants next to Stalin and one incredible spread of a paratrooper in which the top of the page unfolded to become a duotone of the round parachute sail.

On to the Whitechapel gallery (in renovation), a delicious lunch on Brick Lane (very busy as it’s market day — but good for people-watching), St Paul’s cathedral (very spooky organ music playing — big ominous chords). The revolving entrance door had these words on it:

That’s quite a claim for a revolving door!

On to the ICA, which was closed for installation, then lastly a Paul Chan show at the Serpentine. Lovely animated projections onto the floor, mostly of semi-recognizable objects and people floating up or down, as if gravity had lost its grip and things had become unmoored. The one below featured a kind of pageant along the bottom, with mainly just the flags and banners visible.

That evening we had dinner with C’s former gallerist here, an American woman and her Italian husband, who both now have galleries across the river near the Imperial War Museum. Christine Amanpour, the CNN talking head, came in with some swanky-looking folks. The restaurant (Scott’s, a renovated traditional fish place) was a mish-mosh of styles, too: there were blobby sculptural objects holding beds of crustaceans, shiny mid-century lighting fixtures and dark woody walls on which hung contemporary art given in trade for meals. Down near the toilets was a Tracy Emin that said something like, “I WILL eat my fish sticks”. Mostly, though, the artwork disappeared, blending into the décor and the dark walls. It made me realize how ubiquitous the typical white walls have become for displaying art, as anything else swallows it whole. Contemporary art seems to be all the rage — every joint and everyone has got to have some, even if it gets a bit lost.

The next day CS hung her show while I went off to the Design Museum for a meeting — the director had visited my studio in NY, saw the chairs and drawings of chairs, and had offered a show. The museum, if fairly off the beaten track (there are no tube stations nearby) has done nice shows over the years, so I was pretty excited. I’d seen a Peter Saville show and a Helen Jongerus show and the former director even did one of the Queen’s flower arranger.

One of the current shows was of an Italian designer, Luigi Colani, who was mainly active in the 60s and 70s doing incredibly prescient blobby biomorphic streamlined objects, most of which were never built. The show, therefore, was mainly of his self-financed prototypes: futuristic flying machines that looked like sea creatures and aerodynamic cars.

CS and I have lunch with two youngish guys who run CS’s gallery here while the owners are otherwise disposed or are out of town. A thin German man who has moved here a few months ago and an Englishman transplanted from another local gallery. The gallery is in Mayfair, the zone of gilt-framed stodgy landscape paintings, antiques and antiquities, luxe designer boutiques and shops that seem peculiarly British — one is called the Cufflink Connoisseur, while another displays polo gear and riding crops in the windows.

The gallerists ask me what I’m up to. It’s always a little weird when people obviously think you haven’t done much since the hit records they remember from their childhood. The subject turns to live music we’ve seen lately and the German man says he’s only been to about 5 live shows in his entire life; he grew up on techno and electronic dance music and that’s pretty much all he listens to — DJs. I ask what time those “shows” begin and he says the name DJs usually don’t go on before 1. I feel a little old fashioned — I’m usually in bed by then.

The Englishman mentions that techno is a very German obsession, which gets a slightly puzzled and possibly annoyed look.

I think to myself how very different our concepts and uses of music are, how varied they can be. I assume that for him music is a sort of machine, a tool, that facilitates dancing and some kind of release. It’s simple, clear-cut, and it either does its job or it doesn’t. I imagine it’s pretty context-dependent, too — not too many offices have booming techno bouncing off the walls. Music, in this case, is pretty much something that is confined to certain spaces at certain times of day. Maybe there is some social interaction at the dance clubs as well, so the music helps that happen, too. Music, in this case, is definitely not about the words, that is obvious.

What then is music for in my case? Well, I like dancing to music, too, though I suspect I find that more syncopated rhythms — funk, Latin, hip-hop, etc. — get me moving more often than the repetitive thump of house or techno. But if it’s well done the genre doesn’t really seem to matter. More often I listen to music with singing, and I find the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. Sometimes the words help, too. So that’s two “uses” I have for music. Lastly, I sometimes listen to soundtracks, contemporary classical and vaguely experimental music as a background, a mood enhancer or facilitator. We get doses of music this way in films and on TV all the time. I forgot to mention to the gallerist my recent collaboration with Paul Van Dyk, the techno master — I would have scored some points and cred if I had.

I mentioned that the waiter seemed to be wearing eyeliner and the subject turned to the local Abercrombie and Fitch store where I was told all the shop assistants must be models to be hired. This former bastion of wasp outdoor wear — which used to be about as unsexy as the boxy Brooks Brothers look — has remade itself as a kind of homoerotic fascist-chic outpost. Talk about a makeover! Is there a Tom of Finland lurking behind every buttoned-down square? Two male models stand at the entrance of the shop in hot pants and the walls inside are plastered with photos and paintings (paintings!) of shirtless male models. The ploy has paid off handsomely; youths of all types fill the place daily. It sounds like a wonderful kitsch theme park, like a Leni Riefenstahl film come to life. But what does it mean that gay kitsch sells to straight youth? Calvin Klein has been doing it for decades. Surely using this sales tool is intentional. Do the straight kids who shop there think, “Oh, they’re just cute guys”?

Later we have drinks with Verity M from the Roundhouse, a local venue that might be perfect for HLL, and Matthew Byam Shaw, the producer of the theater production Nixon/Frost, amongst others. We meet at a private club in Covent Garden called Hospital, apparently thrown up recently by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics). Almost all the patrons have their laptops out — they’re socializing, e-mailing (I guess) and drinking, all at the same time. There’s a laptop open on almost every table! Maybe they’re all trying to figure out what to do later in the evening? Or maybe interaction with live people just isn’t quite enough stimulus. The folks here love their private clubs, and they’ve only admitted women to some of them since the 80s, so I was told. It must be a legacy or spin-off from the class system, which lingers obstinately in many forms. One must separate oneself from the hoi polloi if possible — in speech, in dress and where one drinks. Even if you’re not upper class you need to wall yourself off from those slightly beneath you. Another remnant of class and caste is the notion that everyone has their place and station — to get involved in areas and jobs and even (or especially) ideas beyond your station is bad form, frowned upon — it is viewed as pretentious (if you’re going from low to high) and inauthentic (if you’re going from high to low). A film on the life of the late Joe Strummer brings out his diplomatic and vaguely upper-class upbringing, and how he did a perfect job of hiding it — or at least of keeping it quiet — as it would not have sat well with the image of the anarchic justice-seeking punk hero he was to become. I always found that pure rogue pose a little suspect regardless of anyone’s upbringing, but in later years Strummer and his collaborators ventured into other musical areas that didn’t require carrying the burden of that image of a working-class hero. What difference does it make anyway where you come from? Can’t you be judged by what you do, make and say and not by what caste you come from?

Anyway — the meeting is about Here Lies Love and I do a very short pitch and various ideas and opinions are tossed about, some of which are illuminating. Matthew confirms what Scott E. in NY said, that any video or film image of the historical person portrayed by the actress on stage would steal from the actress, which would be bad.

Matthew has to deal with a reluctant actor, so CS and I have dinner by ourselves at a hip restaurant where she is spotted by another former gallerist who later says he was dying to introduce her to Lucien Freud, who was also dining there. We are sitting next to a largish couple from Northern Ireland who, to be honest, don’t seem to belong in such a groovy temple. (Here I go applying my own class evaluation.) He’s an IT functionary in town for business meetings and she’s riding on the expense account tab, or so I would guess. They look like northerners on holiday in the big city, but they mention that they’re staying next door at the Ritz, which is more than an ordinary branch manager could afford. They explain some of the local dishes — Jersey Royals are a miniscule type of potato only available at select times of year. Either from a glass of wine or something medical the woman has turned bright red — all over, face, neck, arms — but they’re so unassuming and easygoing and lacking all pretense that her redness doesn’t register after a minute or two.

The restaurant has doormen, dressed in traditional English tails, as does our hotel. I love the juxtaposition here between the two opposing poles of dress and manner: the reserved, polite, perfect and solicitous staff contrasted with the world of theatrical shock and gross-out represented by Chapman bros., Damien Hirst, chavs and football hooligans. It all has to come out, I guess — the bigger the front the bigger the back. I’m reminded of the ads that plaster the phone booths offering spankings and humiliation. One assumes that, for a Lord, keeping it all in and maintaining that reserve can get to be a bit much sometimes so one needs to be put in one’s place to redress the balance. I’m jumping to national stereotypes, here.

The next day is gorgeous and sunny so we’re off on the bikes again. The Queen’s Gallery (the royal collection of renaissance Italian painting and drawing — Titian, Caravaggio, etc. — hung on bright crimson red walls!) and the Imperial War Museum (a great show of camouflage that includes two of the outfits used in True Stories!) Here’s a ship in full “dazzle” camouflage:

…as C said, “where would THAT be camouflage? In a circus?”

A visit to CS’s gallery chums on the South Bank, Sadie Cole’s and Simon Lee’s galleries in Mayfair, and we’re done in….almost…we quickly ride to the Tate Britain to check out the Chapman brothers show. Bronzed casts of imaginary Rube Goldberg-like torture machines. Frozen contraptions that drive nails into brains — dildos, hammers and gears. None of it functions, and it’s all bronzed so these pieces must weigh a ton. I mention that I’d seen a series of toy soldier dioramas they’d done at the former Saatchi collection on the South Bank a few years ago, large vitrines with meticulous scenes of imaginary prison and death camps, scenes of hellish horror and depravity but done with little boys’ toys. I liked those better — to me they said more about “playing” war and the roots of depravity.

We head back. The winding side streets are pleasant to ride on, especially in sunny weather. The city is fairly human scale and cottage-like, as C calls it. It has sprawled beyond reason, but the scale of each neighborhood and the architectural details tell a story about how people see themselves as a people and as a nation. “We might be sophisticated, upper class or creative titans, world-conquerors and explorers, but at bottom we are all country cottage folks.” Not a literal story — I’m not talking about inscriptions on the walls — but metaphorical. A story told in lintels and windowsills. The Queen with her dowdy clothes and the royals’ country hunting attire. The windows everywhere with lots of little panes, which are more enclosing, comforting.

The big thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly are pretty hairy to ride on with those giant red buses and no bike lanes, but overall we’ve been lucky with the weather and riding. It’s glorious when the sun shines.

We meet Michael Morris of Artangel at a gallery opening. There are security people at the door and maybe a guest list — Michael e-mailed me earlier that he’d “put us on the list”. For an art gallery opening? Well, lots of NY galleries now have hired guards so I guess guest lists and velvet ropes are next.

It is a pretty spectacular place, floor after floor of exhibition spaces in an industrial zone, topped by a large room with one glass wall leading to a balcony that looks out over the skyline. Girls with trays offer glasses of champagne. The show is of paintings by Alice Neel, the late portrait painter who worked in NY for many decades — there is now a documentary film out about her. Until almost the end of her life she was scorned as working in a dead old-fashioned style, and then, near the end of her life, she experienced a short burst of appreciation, and now there is a new appreciation. Maybe the work looks prescient?

I am introduced to Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner prize a few years ago. “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” he said when he won. I have one of his pots — he covers them with images and often with rude texts. Here’s one called “Boring Cool People”:

He was in full baby doll little girl drag tonight — like Alice In Wonderland when she got big. A blonde wig, a floral pinafore frock, bare legs ending in little pink socks with ruffles and white patent leather Mary Janes. (Where does he get this stuff in his size? Someone must make them by hand.)

He knew that I had one of his pieces and he was thrilled when he heard that news years ago. I was thrilled to meet him. He is married and has a daughter — I saved a family picture that was in the UK papers when he won the prize of him in his dress alongside his perfectly nice and ordinary wife, the daughter in front of them, beaming a huge smile, obviously happy that dad had won.

We chatted casually for a bit and then C suddenly unleashed a volley of what I thought to be pretty probing questions. “Do you do a bunch of different characters?” “When did you first start dressing up?” (A: He was 13 and he tried on his sister’s ballet outfit.)

4.13.07: There are No Rules

Last night at a dinner the subject was Don Imus the radio talk show host who recently let loose some racist slurs regarding a women’s sports team. (He called the girls “nappy-headed hos”.) There has been a hubbub in the media and the station’s advertisers pulled out and now he’s been fired and his career is probably over. The story has a happy, or at least just, ending. One dinner guest suggested that all such incendiary shock jocks should be canned, as they attract listenership principally by spewing hate. Hate drives ratings up. (And therefore advertising dollars.) But initiating a reign of terror against talk show hosts and other loose canons is heading for a slippery slope, as we all agreed.

More interesting was the suggestion that the market had been the deciding factor — and that somehow the market could be a way, a device, a lever, to eject poison from the social system from time to time. That it was the advertisers pulling out, because they didn’t want to be seen as supporting a pariah, that helped to keep the social body healthy. Another guest said that it was Al Sharpton who brought this racist remark to greater attention, and that Imus has said similar things before but they’ve slipped by — that the advertisers didn’t distance themselves until Sharpton and the media made everyone aware of Imus’s remark. And isn’t it the advertisers who support and benefit from the vitriolic and incendiary attitudes fostered by these shows? Even if the hosts are sometimes careful not to cross certain lines they make it clear that they would like to.

I asked if the publishers and artists of the Danish cartoons should, in a just world, likewise be canned. Someone said, “but those were not attacks on people they were attacks on a religion.” I responded that they were in fact veiled attacks on people — on the tiny minority of Muslims in Denmark. They were a way of saying to these “foreigners” in their midst, “Your religion is stupid and you are stupid for believing in such nonsense”. Note that the cartoons did not make light of Christian imagery or mythology, nor did they accuse pious Danish churchgoers of brainless stupidity. My position is that most religions are equally based on insupportable myths and if you attack one you should attack them all. (That said, the myths and imagery are beautiful, moving and powerful.) Religions do a pretty good job of attacking one another as it is — by nature only one can be true, so all the rest must therefore be infidels. To its credit, North America is more mixed and therefore tolerant than many European and Asian countries. Those places have ingrained ideas about what is means to be German or Danish or French and the idea that Turks or Algerians might be considered German or French is slow to be accepted. The “foreigners” in those countries are usually ghettoized, so interaction with people different than oneself is rare.

There is a banner of free speech that gets waved in these discussions. The idea that anyone should be free to say anything, however hurtful, anytime, anywhere. And the question of whether the ACLU should be defending neo-Nazis who march in Skokie, Illinois is an example often quoted. I asked if one could shout fire in a crowded theater and was told that, no, there is in fact a law against that. I had hoped to make the point that we voluntarily limit our free speech in order to get along, but I picked a completely wrong example. I’ve come back to this topic more than once. I think we’re left with our social sense — a sense of getting along and living together — and not a set of absolute rules. This possibly innate social sense should govern our behavior. It’s more work than falling back on rules and it isn’t fixed like rules, either. We are social animals, and if one member of the group decides to be anti-social — which is their prerogative — they will, as in any social group, soon be ejected. (Unless they have loads of money or weapons or some other leverage that would outweigh their harmfulness.) Of course the group has to disagree with them, find their behavior disruptive and harmful to the future well-being of the group as a whole in the first place. Many times we tolerate the existence of anti-social individuals; they might be good at something else, for example, or we are not sure it is worth the necessary effort to scour out the filth. We can live with a bit of filth, but if others begin to notice it and point it out then it’s time for housecleaning.

Someone at the dinner pointed out the coincidence that as Imus was being vilified the North Carolina lacrosse players — all white — were being declared innocent of rape. They are considering suing the woman who accused them, the prosecutor and Duke university. The woman had been “hired to dance at a party”. She is poor and black, the lacrosse players are wealthy and white. There is a lot of money and popularity involved in university sports. The incentive for the “marketplace” would be to look the other way. I don’t think we can leave the oiling of the social gears to the marketplace, but economic pressure sure has an effect. Globally, though, it seems complicated. It doesn’t always work as planned. The U.S. embargo has made the lives of Cubans worse, and has possibly achieved exactly what it sought to prevent — it has provided Castro with an excuse for everything and an obvious and clear enemy. The embargo unites the Cuban people — well, sometimes — rather than spurring them to rise up against Castro. Likewise the Israeli blockage of Lebanon simply reinforces the idea of Israel as an enemy of the Arab world. It makes Hamas stronger, not weaker.

In South Africa the embargo eventually imposed against the apartheid regime seemed to have had a different effect. From over here it did seem to weaken the regime and remove their economic foundation…which eventually led to a relatively peaceful change.

Why did that one work while the others did not?

I would suggest that on a smaller scale the same thing happens. Giving people convenient scapegoats and adversaries is sometimes an unintended consequence of trying to punish or enforce “correct” behavior. The victim and the persecutor become weirdly co-dependant. We need our enemies — and they love us too, in a sick kind of way.

2.25.07: Marina Abramovic

Went to an event at the Guggenheim with Cindy last night, after spending much of the afternoon together hitting 2 of the many art fair shows in town — The Art Show (a little stodgy, that one) and Scope, which was crowded and fun. The Guggenheim was hosting a film screening and party for Marina Abramovic’s 60th birthday. The film was a documentary about her performances a year or 2 ago of seven classic performance art pieces. It’s a somewhat radical idea in that arena to resurrect a “performance” as one would a play, a work of choreography or a piece of music. Up until recently those performance art pieces tended to survive solely via documentation — photos or videos, mostly — and were never physically “revived” even by their creators. They were thought of as relics of their era, only relevant in the context of a particular place and time and therefore distinct from other types of performance. They were also thought of as intimately linked to their creators — as if only I could sing my songs and no one else was ever allowed to. It sounds weird when you put it that way, but in the art world it was just accepted that that’s the way it would be. Even Beckett’s estate, notoriously finicky, allows performances and even limited interpretation — but very limited — every stage direction must be adhered to, or the lawyers come out as they have quite a few times. Between Abramovic and RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa festival this ingrained attitude has been challenged. The most well known pieces she revived were Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” in which he masturbates under the floor (while talking) and a Beuys piece in which he mimics giving instruction to a dead hare.

This kind of performance is different from what I do, though there are overlaps. More and more, as time goes by, I acknowledge the audience when I perform; I either speak to them or gesture to them. In general the performance is offered to them, given — and desirous of their approval, at least to some extent. Here much of that is not even considered. That’s not necessarily meant as a criticism, but it does seem to be a fact. In this genre of performance the direction is inward — it is as if the audience were anthropologists watching a scarification or a puberty ritual in the outback or in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. There is no tacit acknowledgement of the audience by the performer — except at the end, when Marina would finish and there would be applause and she would smile and once she even bowed. But those moments seemed to be exceptions.

Most of the time it is a private personal ritual that is being enacted. A personal rite of passage — which might be why some are loath to view them as performances — that smacks of “show” and, God forbid, entertainment. These are rituals in which it may be important to have witnesses, and maybe that is exactly the right word for the audience relationship in this case. The audience is not expected to interact. In some cases the audience heckled her — but she didn’t react. The ritual must be completed as prescribed for the magic to take effect. Reportedly one crazed audience member rushed the “stage” during one piece (Marina was posed like Patty Hearst as Tanya, only in this case her leather trousers below the machine gun she cradled were completely crotchless.) The guy was stopped before he could reach her. During another piece where she was completely naked and incising a five-pointed star into her belly someone called the fire department reporting a woman mutilating herself. The firemen came and when one saw her (she was lying on a bed of ice at that point) he declared she was “totally hot” and went to get the other guys so they could see, too. They came back the next day again, but it was another piece and she had clothes on.

Anyway. Most of the time there is no visible obvious emotional expression by the performer in this genre: everything is stoic, and ritually done with a straight face. I sensed intense emotion inside, but it is kept under wraps, tightly held, which in some ways makes it even more powerful. The “mutilation” piece included a recording of a song about a Slavic people, lyrics wailing how “no-one understands us and we are doomed to endless wars”. Marina is from Montenegro, bordering on Serbia, so one can feel the anguish of recent history — history still playing itself out. Wounded communal pride and suffering penetrating into even little villages and deeply ingrained among friends and relatives. The piece seemed to be expressing a need to do penance but pissed off about it, too. Penance needs a witness to be effective, even if that witness is only God, so that age-old religious impulse sure seems to have some weird link to this performance style — people are constantly mutilating themselves in these pieces, nailing themselves to cars or grotesquely stretching and distorting their bodies and features. Heal us, heal me, they seem to say. Or, Christ-like, let me atone for all the shit in the world.

Sometimes these pieces verge close to David Blaine’s stunts or those of Houdini and others popular entertainers, but usually this work maintains a crucial distance from those stunts and it stays closer to the endurance feats of shamans than those of vaudeville magicians. With the latter, there may, in some cases, be a trick, a sleight of hand, some clever skill that deceives the viewer — but here what you see is absolutely real.

In an age where the common religious rituals are irrelevant, forgotten or discounted these are maybe attempts at some cathartic replacements. We as spectators and audience members benefit, too — it may seem that we’re not “included”, but merely having witnessed the event, we are. Many of these pieces seem to come from Middle Europe, where religion, wars, waves of nasty regimes and outsider status from the rest of Europe combined with hard economic circumstances to make one’s body the most available and likely art material. Chinese contemporary art a decade or more ago was similar.

There are elements of ritual in pop and contemporary theater performances — sometimes obviously, as in De La Guarda, Meridith Monk, Pina Bausch and other folks — but also in pop music too. Sonic Youth and Boredoms, The Stooges, Cat Power, of course they are all enacting cathartic rituals for our benefit, but even more traditional shows contain some element, often invisible, of a cathartic ritual enacted for the joint benefit of viewer and viewed.

1.16.07: American Refugees

Went to K McK’s curated show of art by a group of artists associated with Wallace Berman’s Semina project. It was a limited edition publication in the early to mid 60s in LA that was pocket-sized and filled with poems, drawings, typings and collages. The show documents the project and a short-lived community that made experimental films and other work and lived on next to nothing — as K says, they didn’t care about money. Berman’s photos of his friends are interspersed with their work. Some of the Semina contributors went on to other things, some even becoming successful in some areas — as actors, filmmakers, choreographers or in the movie business. I say “even” because to judge by the photos they were not a hugely ambitious lot. Others hit bottom via drugs, inertia or poverty. They had a wide and secret influence, but many of the artists themselves sank into oblivion. There are parallels with the East Village scene in the mid to late seventies, but with the Semina crowd there was less press attention and scant documentation. The glare of publicity passed this crowd by. The show is combo of paintings, drawings, photos of the artists and some video projections of films. Some of the work is powerful, remarkable, and some isn’t. More important than the art though, the show documents a scene, a social utopia, and maybe a dystopia too — it’s more a social document than a collection of major works. A walk-in book. This is not a show designed for collectors. The photos that are interspersed with the work are of bohemians — bearded men and beautiful women living on the fringes of LA, cheaply, when such a thing was possible. They all seem to be living in a refugee camp — by choice. Post-war American alienation — the ubiquitous TV images of happy homemakers didn’t jive with this bunch. They wanted no part of it. They wanted real love, sex, passion, fear and danger. The media world seemed phony, as one famous fictional juvenile said. (That book was banned at the time.) Occasionally they would make things, but it seems most often their lives were their primary creative work.

[Link to New York Times review.]

12.26.06: Trees and tree shapes

In an interview in Seed with E. O. Wilson:

From Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge — E. O. Wilson draws upon the early work of Mondrian: brain functioning indicates that the spacing of tree trunks and canopy lacework in Mondrian’s art are in the arrangement that is most arousing and pleasing to the brain. “It stays true to the ancient hereditary ground rules that define the human aesthetic.”

A&M researcher Robert Ulrich found that patients who could see trees from their windows healed faster and required lower doses of painkillers than those who could only see a brick wall.

Movie ads

Went to see Stranger Than Fiction, which I thought was good. I laughed, I cried. There were a series of ads shown in the theater before the movie previews.

Verizon, LG, chocolate. A phone/music player that looks stylish, like an iPod. No information provided. Does it hold much music? Does it synch to your computer? It looks nice.

An SUV. A CG landscape in bright yellows and greens. All flat layers of color swelling and looming all over the screen. Vaguely Ryan McGinness style graphic of swirls and a baroque colorform landscape. A graphic road appears, zipping into the center of the frame, and on it is a photographic image (not flat) of an SUV. The impression is given that with this car your world will be bright, cheerful and colorful. No other “information” is provided.

Zune Player. Images of hipsters grooving together to this Microsoft MP3 player. The impression is given that it is the music player that is bringing these attractive people together — people of all races, and all attractive — and therefore we too can meet these sexy women if we have this gizmo. Tag line — “welcome to the social” (sic). (Is that English? Did Borat write this ad?) No other “information” provided, though I know that the “social” and sharing part is only partly true — “shared” music “goes away” on this player relatively quickly….as will your new friends.

The National Guard. The National Guard is portrayed as an organization that mainly helps people in trouble (primarily due to natural disasters) and specializes in daring rescues. Cut to various testimonials (are these real Guardsmen or actors?) of guardsmen talking about how proud they are, how selfless and how all walks of life are represented. Uh huh. Lots of stockbrokers out there. There’s a brief mention that one might even get posted “overseas”, which I guess is a code word for Iraq. Would anyone be stupid enough to voluntarily serve over there now? The Guard uniforms look exactly like U.S. Army camos, and they say U.S. Army on them. The Army is shorthanded these days, and since there is no chance of the draft being reinstated — can you imagine how fast the Iraq occupation would be shut down if boys you actually knew were dying? — they’ve upped the ante on their ads. I seem to remember the National Guard presence in New Orleans post-Katrina. They appeared to be doing more guarding than rescuing, as I recall.

An ad for a cell phone with speakers that slide out. A crowded city street. Everyone is wearing white iPod headphones and clear fishbowls on their heads. They are all isolated in a world of their own, is the clear implication. One couple tries to smooch through their glass prisons — but everyone knows you can’t kiss with a fishbowl on your head. One guy, clearly frustrated, takes off his space helmet/fishbowl and smashes it into a million pieces on the street. He rips out his headphones and begins listening to music from a small object he proudly holds aloft. A cell phone with tiny speakers that slip out. (I can imagine the sound quality! Freedom! A 1962 transistor radio!) Immediately all the other young hipsters take off their helmets and rip off their iPod headphones and are grooving to this guy’s tunes! The world, it is implied, has been liberated by a new gizmo and an early adopter. Bring back boom boxes on the subways!

There’s a CG cartoon ad for Coke in which a polar bear family overhears a large group of penguins romping to a Beach Boys Xmas tune — the natural enemies meet and become friends over a Coke. Coke, not bombs.

The last ad that I remember: an SUV falls off a crane on a loading dock and continues falling through the Earth in CG animation until it erupts out of the center of a Chinese courtyard — and somehow manages to flip itself right side up. No information given about the car. But, if it can do this….

Do we purchase a car because the ad agency made a cute video? Is that how we make decisions? Maybe we do. Maybe the cleverness and technical virtuosity exhibited here imply to us that those same values carry over to the SUV. This would be a natural assumption to have about a person — if a person were clever, entertaining and executed something perfectly one would probably assume they had other good qualities. And the odds might be pretty high that you’d be right. In the case of ads the cleverness and the object being promoted are separate entities — rationally we should therefore love the ad agency and the director, not the car company that simply chose them to make the ad.

12.7-10.06: Miami Basel Art Fair

Dec 7, Part I: Art as a form of sexual selection

Appropriately enough, just as I head to Miami for the Miami/Basel art fair extravaganza I finish the chapter in Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind on art. It’s sure to be controversial with this art fair crowd, as he posits that art evolved as a kind of display useful for sexual selection. One immediately thinks of the peacock’s tail when one hears display, but the peacock doesn’t make his tail — he’s born with it. Art is a display outside the body, made by the skill of the hand and mind. Miller posits that the ability of our minds to charm, seduce, captivate and enrapture — via artistic work, conversation, language, dance, sport — gives proof to potential mates that not only are we physically appealing, which can be assessed relatively quickly, but that we might have deeper levels of genetic fitness beneath the visible surface. Art, amongst other pursuits, is, according to this idea, one of a number of gauges of deeper fitness, creativity and skill. The maker may have genetic fitness not immediately apparent, especially given the fact that the typical creative person’s uniform is not a power suit. If he or she can afford to expend mucho time and energy on aesthetic pursuits, for example, the person must be doing O.K. in order to be able to “waste” such time and effort. That is, they have time and energy left over from basic survival. (I simplify.)

Of course other displays of status — gift giving, charity, charm and of course money and security — do much the same thing, but what’s interesting about his proposal is how he applies it to the arts, which in no way can be viewed as simple pragmatic survival qualities. One might easily reason that a rich person is often attractive because of the financial security offered — but why do princesses sometimes go for the humble but kind shoemaker rather than the sure bet of the wealthy and self-involved prince? I simplify — there is no reason a shoemaker should be kinder than a Prince, but it’s not an unknown situation.

Furthermore, Miller proposes that our natural instinct in judging artistic production is to value skill and craftsmanship — to value work that is well executed, time consuming to make and maybe even fabricated with rare and valuable materials. However, in the last century or so these criteria have been turned upside down by industrial manufacturing processes and by the rise of photography over painting as a tool for reproducing the world. Miller quotes Thorstein Veblen who says it used to be that the better made a spoon was, for example — the smoother, more symmetrical it was — the more highly regarded the artist and his work would be. But now machines can easily, quickly and cheaply make spoons that are more perfect that anything any artist can make by hand. Quality, in the traditional sense, has been devalued, as now anyone can afford the perfect spoon, free of imperfections, as good