Why college is expensive

Cartoon: John Fewings

Nothing I’d heard about the spiraling cost of higher education (127% from 1980 to 2000) made sense until a friend, whose daughter is in journalism school, told me she was studying statistics at American colleges and universities and found an enormous increase in administrative jobs with salaries much higher than those of faculty, whose numbers are declining—including the small, private liberal arts college where I used to teach (administrative salaries over $100,000, faculty salaries considerably less). Then today, when I was catching up on old New Yorkers—print version, in the bathtub, the biggest downside of digital readers being that they’re not yet waterproof—I found this letter to the editor (December 19 & 26, 2011):

James Surowiecki, in his commentary on student-loan debt, does not identify an important source of growth in college costs (The Financial Page, November 21^st). Coincident with only a modest increase in enrollment in the past decade is the meteoric rise of a professional university administrative class. One study found that between 1993 and 2007, while enrollment at universities increased by fifteen per cent, the number of administrators per hundred students grew by thirty-nine per cent. This vast layer of university administrators has changed the composition and culture of the American university. Increasingly, they are private-sector outsiders who are more willing to undermine the missions of research and teaching in order to preserve the bottom line. A notably egregious case is the recent shuttering of the theatre department and several language programs at cash-strapped SUNY Albany under the leadership of its president, George Philip, a former investment-fund manager. Bubble or no, universities are building an expensive management structure around an academic core that’s becoming more and more hollow. Any effort to reduce college costs must restore leaner administrations, representative of the faculty and staff who carry out the institutions mission.

Ryan Walker

Lexington, Ky.

Walker’s source is no doubt the Aol News/HuffPost article, by Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute, which provided this graphic:

This article about Obama’s plan to control college debt states that student debt now exceeds credit card debt. Very little I’ve read, however, mentions administrative “bloat” as a contributing factor. Student debt reduces the opportunities for entrepreneurship and hobbles the economy, while the narrowing of college choices makes for stunted cultural, scientific and intellectual growth. How this can be controlled, I have no idea, but it’s time we got on it.  

What's youth got to do with it?

Louise Bourgeois, Fugue, 2003
Screenprint, 30 cm x 42 cm

On a Facebook friend’s wall the other day:

I have erased a black cloud eating my stomach with an unknown weight. I am young, 34, but I am not young within the context of New York. The black cloud is from the perception of myself I feel from others. There is this, what I would, call "petit bourgeois" view of success that runs through the art world. A false belief art is a career that can be measured by degrees of success that correspond to age. I have been around art long enough to know in reality most artists do nothing until their thirties or later. But I face day to day the idea I am too old.

My comment: “If this even crosses your mind, it indicates that you're looking outside yourself for validation. The best art is made by people who don't care what others think.”

Even though he’s part of the OWS movement that’s causing such great change so quickly, he’s stuck in the assumption that the art world and its values are always going to stay the same. Again, we can’t predict! The only thing we know for sure about the future is that it will be different. And isn’t that fun? Wouldn’t it be boring if it stayed the same, if we knew exactly what was going to happen? Therefore, since the art world has been predicated for two or three decades on the coming of The Next Big Thing, a concept that has everything to do with money and speculation, perhaps once we get off our current financial merry-go-round, it will come to reflect more meaningful values.

I recently saw the first one-person show in NY of another artist, who happens to be around the same age. He is tense with ambition; his desire and extreme need are palpable, evident in his every word and gesture—and it would seem that he’s done everything right. A deft marriage of painting and sculpture, the work is competently executed around a concept that comes off as smart and cool when described in a press release. Not too big, not too small, perfect for people who want contemporary art on their walls that’s not threatening, it lacks only one ingredient: soul. 

I know people in the art world who, while not particularly talented, attractive, smart, or even nice, have “made it” through sheer persistence. I could also point out some who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, whose ideas merged with those of an important exhibition or Whitney Biennial, which set them on a path for life. Unfortunately, it is not a meritocracy. But then there are those, like Louise Bourgeois, whose work was of such value that it couldn’t be ignored, regardless of her age, gender, and prickly personality.

For true success to happen, an artist has to make art that’s not only exceptional, but is a reflection of the needs and desires of his time. The first is more or less in our control; the second, as adroitly described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, is not. The reason you can’t pay heed to what others are thinking, doing, or making, is that they’re stuck in the present, while you’re creating art for the future.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 20 years, when our FB friend has reached the ripe old age of 54, everyone will be wanting art that enhances their lives, takes them to a higher place, the kind of work that, in most cases, only a mature artist can do. And he’ll be the right person for the right moment, glad he didn’t burn out at 34.

Emerson and enthusiasm

Turnsole
Kenneth Noland, 1961.
Synthetic polymer paint on unprimed canvas.
Museum of Modern Art, New York

After talking about people becoming curmudgeons and losing their edge, my intention today was to write a post about how to keep one’s edge—that is, if we knew what that term really meant. For me, it’s about keeping one foot ahead of myself, keeping my life and work alive and growing, staying excited about everything I’m doing. In the manner of self-help books, I started a list of things one could do toward that end. But first I went to the gym (for me, staying in good physical condition is number one) where, on the white board, was a quote:

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm –Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great way to start things off, I thought, and being enthusiastic about Emerson, I wanted to read more. The Internet, however, is awash with unattributed quotes: we know so-and-so said something, or is said to have said something, but where? It’s as if all we’re interested in is finding some cute quote with which to kick off a commencement address (or a blog post). Although it was posted thousands of times, only one site, Wikiquote, listed the source, the essay, Circles (full text here), which I double-checked by opening up the complete Essays on my iPad (a free download, BTW) and typing “enthusiasm” into the search function.

But enough of my research methods. Really what we’re talking about is personal progress, and in our culture we tend to see all progress, personal or otherwise as linear—the idea of doing better and better, of topping our last effort.  Emerson’s idea is more gentle and expansive, i.e. circular. Some excerpts:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning: that there is always another dawn risen….there are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.

The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet…New arts destroy the old…. 

Every thing looks permanent until it’s secret is known.…
(Hopefully this is true of the corporate regime, which hasn't changed--it's the same as it was last year--but since September is now seen in an entirely new light.)

There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit?  Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.

Whew! So much for Damien Hirst and his silly spot paintings: may they represent the flaming-out of art world materialism.  Sometimes things have to reach their nadir before being reborn. As Peter Schjeldahl put it so beautifully, “Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.”

So when we go into the studio, or wherever, we can take comfort in this :

Our moods do not believe in each other. Today I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thoughts, the same power of expression tomorrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall

Emerson was famous in his lifetime, but while he was writing it, did he know that his words would still have resonance 200 years later? In a blog post?

And as far as keeping your edge:

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better goals.

The lesson in all of this is, go for whatever turns you on because you can’t second-guess the culture. Notice that predictions no longer work—not that they ever did, but we believed in the illusion. Probably the biggest change in the last ten years is that everyone knows that we know nothing about the future. Under these circumstances, all we can do is do whatever it is we do with the greatest enthusiasm—and hope for the best.

* * *

Another Emerson quote about enthusiasm, often mistakenly linked with the other, from a source I was unable to track down:

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your mind. Put your whole soul to it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic,
 be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object.


2012 continued...

In the catalogue in my previous post of the changing fashions of the last ten years, I forgot a major trend that’s now also happily receded: massive handbags decorated with straps, buckles, chains and other assorted hardware that made women look like lopsided pack animals. See? Things are getting better!

Apropos of that post, I just watched Woody Allen’s charming “Midnight in Paris” in which Gauguin (clearly suffering from what I shall dub Curmudgeon Syndrome), complains that the younger generation is boring, has no imagination, and everyone wants to live in an earlier and more exciting era. Where have we heard that before?

[The idea of being able to visit an earlier time period is appealing only until you realize that everyone is SMOKING. Blech!]

The Curmudgeon Syndrome is given the treatment it deserves in this genius song by what is arguably the greatest band to come out of the supposed cultural wasteland of the ‘00s: “I’m Losing my Edge” by LCD Soundsystem (take that, Kurt Anderson!). If you don’t already know it by heart, listen to it here. It’s required.

2012: Out with the .....? and in with the .....?

Okay, I’m back, after a couple of weeks of luxuriating in unprecedented SoCal warmth, house-sitting at friends’ Spanish villa in Altadena, commuting to kundalini yoga classes every day at Golden Bridge in Hollywood, hanging out with family—and taking a necessary break from thinking.

But then my friend, Larry, and I got to talking about music, as we have over the years, and I was surprised to hear him say that music is in a lull, and there’s been nothing new since Radiohead. Really? Meanwhile I’m finding that there are so many new and interesting sounds out there I can hardly keep track of them.  I love that I can stream KCRW’s Eclectic 24 all day long and enjoy almost everything (except Tom Waits; what do people see in him?). I’m always writing down the names of bands I’m going to explore in more depth on Spotify, but I never get around to it because the next day there’s a whole new list.

Larry put forth his theory “that the generation associated with 9/11 are a little traumatized and didn't invent very much (now they are 28 to 36-year-olds)” and hopes the "occupy generation will come up with something provocative and new.”

Sigur Ros and Arcade Fire are pretty exciting to my ears, but Larry doesn’t like them. MGMT? He says they sound like the Stones, ca. 1979. Huh? They may have written a tribute to the Stones, but they also wrote one (their only annoying song) to Brian Eno. Far from being “stunned” their music is celebratory to the point that their last album is entitled, “Congratulations!” And what about Lady Gaga? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Larry referred to an article in the current Vanity Fair, “You Say You Want a Devolution” by Kurt Anderson, whose thesis is that, “as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”  To Kurt, cars look the same, clothes look the same, and music sounds the same as it did in 1992. (A similar argument is put forth in Simon Reynolds’ book, Retromania).

As far as cars go, it’s unfair to expect innovation from an industry that’s been simply struggling to stay alive. In fashion, even if the disappearance of showy designer labels were the only change, the world is better for it. I, for one, am delighted that leggings finally returned. We still wear jeans, but they’re tighter—a lot tighter. Along with being squished like sausages into their “jeggings,” women are teetering around on cartoon-like high heels (no one said we have to like what the younger generation is wearing, remember?) Oh, and how about this? More facial hair for men and less pubic hair for women (is there a connection? I’ll try not to make something of it). Then there’s the plaid fad, come and (hopefully) gone, and in footwear a proliferation of boots—high, higher, short, and (except for Uggs), pointy and pointier—flip-flops and (eek!) Crocs. In the past ten years waistbands dropped to the point of exposing the tops of thongs and worse, but have mercifully inched upward. We have global warming to thank for the fact that there’s a lot less clothing in general, and with so much more exposed skin, tattoos and piercing are now mainstream.

Regarding music, I put the question to son Matt, a culture critic by profession, who commented that just as it’s hard to buy a bad bottle of wine these days, music in general is of such high quality that the A bands might not stand out as much from the B bands as they once did. He reminded me of the junk music that proliferated on the airwaves in the 70’s—an entire genre of “soft rock” that is, thank God, pretty much done for. Larry is complaining about Bon Iver and The National, not Rod Stewart and Tom Jones—and even he will no doubt admit that teen throbs Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift are more listenable than the Osmonds and the Carpenters ever were.

Lady Gaga is hardly “stunned,” nor is she simply a clone of Madonna (Anderson calls it an “Immaterial Difference,” which is cute but not accurate). In fact the very same issue of Vanity Fair has a cover story on Gaga with a pull quote that states, “As ‘Jo Calderone’ at the V.M.A.s, she instantly made every female star who had pink hair or wore a contraption on her head look dated.” Stuck in their need to make disparaging pronouncements about the younger generation (just like our parents!—it’s a stage of  human development that, while undocumented, is as predictable as the Terrible Twos) it’s possible that Boomers simply can’t see the distinctions. While the “provocative and new” characterized the revolutionary times we grew up in, they may not be the qualities this revolution requires. My theory (I’m at that age; we have to have them!) is that there’s a time for innovation and a time for development, and we’re in the latter stage—it’s just that our hunger for the new has kept us from exploring it.

Further, how actually “new” was our beloved rock ‘n roll? Someone old and hip in the 50s could have easily dismissed Elvis’s music as a fusion of existing music: rockabilly and R & B. What made it “provocative” was the fact that he was white. And the Stones and the Beatles would have been nowhere without Elvis—they could have been seen as clones in the beginning, when their provocativeness had more to do with being British with funny haircuts.

“Newness” in 50s and 60s may have been more about a culture gap, which is now closed.

In making his case for stasis, Anderson also notes that Frank Gehry was the major architectural influence in 2002 and still is in 2012. So what? We had Frank Lloyd Wright from 1895 to 1959 and we’re not finished with him yet.

Therefore, it may be that Occupy Wall Street, rather than copying, is building on the peace movements of the 60s, Gaga is building on the Madonna precedent as MGMT is building on a synthesis of the Stones, Eno, the Beatles, Bowie and Pink Floyd (to whom I think they owe the most) without sounding like any one of them….

Which brings us to contemporary art, which truly sucks (at least that in most museums and commercial galleries). Unlike architecture and music, it really is devolving. Instead of building on the old ideas, current art is getting watered down to the point that it has little pulse left, with artists reinventing the wheel left and right. I believe, however, that the cause is situational rather than generational. Where Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden of MGMT could sit in their Wesleyan University dorm rooms in the mid-00s, sharing the music they liked, listening to it over and over, picking it apart, their BFA counterparts were relegated to looking at projected images or reproductions in books or on the Web. How many had actually seen a Rauschenberg combine? And even if they did, what about the ones that came before and after it? How many art students now know that Eleanor Antin preceded Cindy Sherman, or that Lucas Samaras has already done everything they (the students) are trying to do? How many have experienced an actual installation by Olafur Eliasson or attended Marina Abramovic’s piece at MoMA or have seen Christian Marclay’s The Clock? That’s why museum retrospectives, like MoMA’s de Kooning show (closing 1/9) are so important, but becoming fewer and fewer as belts are being tightened; it’s so much less expensive to clear the Guggenheim for Tino Sehgal than it is to borrow, insure and ship invaluable works.

Former art movements evolved out of direct contact: social situations that built on other social situations, younger artists reacting—in person—to the artists and art of previous generations. Now they're responding to information rather than the immediate visual experience a true understanding of art requires. Also galleries and museums, by their very nature, cannot react to the times because they’re planning at least a year, if not years, in advance.

That’s why we shouldn’t be looking to galleries and museums for the new but to the streets. Street Art is currently the most exciting and relevant visual art because it’s generated in a social situation and must survive in the moment, which is unique to NOW. One example:

Meanwhile, if you want true inspiration in fashion, look to the kindergarten crowd, set free because liberal parents no longer feel the need to pick out their children's clothes—and unlike earlier generations, kids so far seem to have no desire to conform to any but their own sensibilities. I wish you could've seen the little girl at the airport in high, polka-dot rubber boots, shocking pink tutu, and long-sleeved striped T-shirt, her curly hair topped by a giant bow. And here’s my little friend, Lucinda, who, every time I see her, is wearing yet another imaginative combo. All is not lost.

*Thanks to Roberto Juarez and Nikolas Freberg for their input. 

Merry Christmas!

Events and non-events

By now everyone knows that TIME’s Person of the Year for 2011 is “The Protester” and that Shepard Fairey created the cover. Those who’ve followed this blog for a while know that I worked as a consultant for TIME on the covers for over 20 years, and introduced Fairey to TIME in 2007, when he created an image of Putin that ran on the inside (see post here).  While the Person of the Year, along with the magazine itself, no longer has much cachet, I’m still glad TIME made a good call (over, say, Kate Middleton for getting married or Steve Jobs for dying) as it represents formal recognition that this is a massive, worldwide movement—unlike the New York Times, which is still waiting for Occupy to go away so no one will notice that they haven’t been covering it.

I admire Shepard Fairey and feel his success is deserved; I have absolutely no patience with the kneejerk reaction that commercial success = sellout (Coldplay remains a favorite, and I’m glad Radiohead left their major label so they, too, don’t have to be a guilty pleasure). However, if I still worked for TIME, I wouldn’t have recommended Fairey for this cover simply because the protests represent the new and unknown, where his now-ubiquitous style is associated with the known, the past, and is simply too sleek and realized (again, nothing wrong with that per se) to represent the nascent, unformed and gritty surge that is this movement. If they’d asked, I would have looked for the street artist who is now what Fairey was in 2007. It's no one I could name off the top of my head. Because a TIME cover has very specific requirements, that would require the research that was once my job. I might, however, start here:

Although it’s had the Internet on fire for weeks and was a headline today in Britain’s Guardian, another event the New York Times (along with the rest of the mainstream media) hasn’t covered is the hasty passing—ironically on 220^th anniversary of the Bill of Rights—of the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, which many feel compromises our most basic American rights to due process. But you can learn about it on the Huffington Post, and if you need a laugh to mitigate the fright, on The Daily Show.

Meanwhile, in the art world, I received a press release today announcing that Gagosian will be showing ALL of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings (they call them “spot” paintings) in ALL of the eleven Gagosian Galleries throughout the world—Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Rome and New York. Now there’s an event to stay home for. My opinion as a critic is, if you’ve seen one dot painting, you’ve seen them all. You can quote me.

Banksy's take on Hirst's dot paintings.

Weeds and Weed

When I went to the Yucatan a few weeks ago, I was reminded of a trip I made there with my friend, Jeff, in the late eighties, when the “Mayan Riviera,” as it’s now called, was still wild. Tulum is one of the few places I’ve been that’s actually been improved by development (the coast at Folkestone, England is another). Back then, a walk along the beach meant navigating piles of seaweed and plastic garbage thrown overboard by boats. Now the numerous but modest eco-lodges that line the beach (“eco-lodge” is short for “electricity and water that goes randomly on and off”) keep the white sand sparkling clean.  Jeff and I stayed near Playa del Carmen at a resort called El Capitan Lafitte, now Petite Lafitte but, I hear, much the same (a good thing).  One day as we were going out for a walk, our neighbors in the next cabana told us that the Federales were out looking for marijuana smugglers and we might find some bales washed up on the beach. Oh sure, I thought, they tell that to all the tourists, but then a mile or so down the beach we came across, in all its majestic glory, the biggest, most water-logged bale of weed you’d ever hope to see—which, if we’d been of a more enterprising bent, could have supported us for a good long time.  Did we smoke any? I’ll never tell.

Jeff wrote today that he’s been back to Playa del Carmen about four times since, and once took a trip all the way down the coast to Xcalak, almost to Belize. He said he didn’t find any weed washed up, but did see this Federale helicopter flying overhead at dawn, looking for some.

 Photo: Jeffrey Rubin

Satyagraha, Act IV

It had to happen. Following the final performance of Satyagraha at the Met Thursday night, opera-goers found the story continuing in real life as police tried to shoo them away from the OWS gathering outside—which included the composer Philip Glass, who used OWS’s “human mic” technique to recite a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita. In true “minimalist” tradition (which means, counter-intuitively, that you say things more than once), Glass repeated it three times:

When righteousness

Withers away

And evil

Rules the Land

We come into being

Age after age

And take visible shape

And Move

A man among men

For the protection

Of good

Thrusting back evil

And setting virtue

On her seat again

I think we could make something of the fact that, along with Naomi Wolf’s arrest at OWS downtown, this story never made it to the New York Times, where both Glass and Wolf’s cultural contributions have been more than amply covered (including Wolf’s delightful dissertation on little girls’ obsession with princesses, published this weekend). I first learned about the Lincoln Center protest on the LA Times website (via Facebook, of course), and recommend this thoughtful coverage by Seth Colter Walls at The Awl. 

THANK YOU CREATIVE CAPITAL/ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION

Today it was announced that Art Vent was awarded a major grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation:

Designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

In its 2011 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $565,000 to twenty-three writers representing twenty projects. Ranging from $8,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to self-published blogs.

As you know, Art Vent has been a labor of love since 2007, and would not have continued without your consistent support and feedback. This generous grant will enable me to improve the site and keep going! 
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Satyagraha, more...

There’s just one more production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the Met, although it’s being shown in HD practically everywhere. I loved the opera, but can’t imagine that sitting through a simulcast would be anything but tedious. I believe in live music and live opera, especially since reading (in an article I can no longer find) that smaller city opera companies are closing and one of the reasons is the availability of simulcasts. Because opera houses insist on playing the same 18^th and 19^th century chestnuts over and over (enough with the Marriage of Figaro already!), opera often deserves its stuffy reputation. However no other genre has the possibility of fulfilling all the senses the way opera can, which makes it the ultimate art form. However I believe its possibilities—the synergy of visual art, music, dance and theater—haven’t even begun to be fully explored.

I also have an inside track through my friend, Timothy Breese, a bass-baritone who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus since 1999. In Satyagraha he’s front and center—tall and handsome, with a brimmed red hat and purple mustache. Through my friendship with Tim I’ve learned what it takes to maintain an operatic voice—mostly relentless daily practice and private coaching—and about the seemingly impossible feat of memorization. To me, the job of the chorus appears in some ways more challenging than that of soloists, as they’re not singing pieces from beginning to end, but continually starting and stopping at various points throughout. This season Tim sang in 23 operas, of which seven were new. When he began working with the chorus, in order to catch up he had to immediately master several at once, on his own, spending 100 hours on Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron alone (one of the most gorgeous productions, both visually and musically, I’ve seen), which he says is probably the most difficult opera for chorus ever written. Tim also ranks Satyagraha among the most challenging.

Photo: Metropolitan Opera, Satyagraha

And Jim Hodges hangs a disco ball over a hole filled with water in a gallery floor and we’re supposed to be impressed…. Whoops! I‘m getting off-topic….

What I was going to say before I so rudely interrupted myself, is that another thing I learned from Tim is the value of persistence.

Three days before Tim first sang in what turned out to be a grueling round of auditions for the Met, he also tried out for what I’ll call the Podunk Dinner Theater. At the Met, he was one of six or seven ultimately selected from a pool of more than 600 hopefuls.

He did not make the Podunk Dinner Theater.

This story, which I relate to students whenever I have the opportunity, was key in the development of my Malcolm Gladwell-esque ITOTKO (It Takes One To Know One) theory, the premise of which is that only excellence recognizes excellence. To elaborate: only someone as smart or accomplished as you is going to recognize how smart and/or accomplished you are. Forget working your way up, because the people you encounter in the low or mid-ranks are not capable of appreciating your gifts. Yet most people, thinking conventionally, would say to themselves,  “Wow, I didn’t make the Podunk Dinner Theater, so I can’t possibly audition for the Met.”

This is why it’s important to KEEP GOING NO MATTER WHAT.  

It was much more fun, however, when I thought I could make excuses.

***

Note: This is what Tim said when I asked him what makes Moses und Aron so especially difficult:

"Moses und Aron is completely atonal. The notes were sometimes literally thrown down a stair and then used in the pattern they fell in, backwards, upside down, and in every possible rhythm combination and meter. Heard enough? It's a terrific opera though."

Happy Thanksgiving!

I realize most everyone (at least 9 million people) have seen this, but it cannot be played too many times:

Occupy, Satyagraha and...

Moonset, Tulum, Mexico 11-12-11

I spent last week in the Yucatan, getting up before 4:00 a.m. practicing yoga, meditating and chanting in Sanskrit on the beach facing the rising sun—with the setting full moon behind us.

My return to New York felt like a continuation when, Tuesday evening, I saw Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha, at the Met, a meditative experience sung in Sanskrit. Instead of a story line, the opera consists of series of tableaus representing the movement Gandhi led in South Africa up until 1914—where, as Glass says in his notes, “Almost all the techniques of social and political protest that are now the common currency of contemporary life were invented and perfected.” The opera is an anti-drama: instead of building to a climax, the final act is gentle and quiet. featuring a transcendent solo by Richard Croft as Gandhi (this is the best example of his “Evening Song” I could find on the Web; I don’t know who’s singing it).

The irony was not lost on me that while non-violent protest was being celebrated in as august and mainstream an institution as the Metropolitan Opera, Mayor Bloomberg was preparing a vicious, military-style crackdown on the sleeping denizens of Occupy Wall Street. Interesting, too, that the opera’s staging made abundant use of projected text throughout, as the Occupy protestors did yesterday, on the Verizon monolith near their mammoth march on the Brooklyn Bridge (interview with the creator of the projections here).

Well the good news is that we can no longer continue to wage war against other countries since, in recent times, our excuse has been that we were liberating the masses from regimes that suppress human rights and free speech. If this were happening anywhere else, the righteous U.S. would be intervening. The question now: who’s going to step in and liberate us? Canada, perhaps?

***

Another OWS hero: retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Shaw, arrested in uniform. If you missed it, read the story here.

Bliss

Sunrise, Tulum, Mexico, 11-11-11

Occupy, the police and....

After only skimming the headlines for the last few years—everything was just too depressing—Occupy Wall Street has turned me into a news junkie, combing Facebook for links and breaking news and  posting them to my page. I’m inspired by the people who are willing to put themselves on the line for what they believe, and fascinated by how the news is handled, something that wasn't easy to evaluate before the internet.  So far, England’s Guardian (to which I subscribe online) has had the most timely, complete, and balanced coverage. For instance, last night a Guardian reporter on the scene broke the story that yet another Iraq veteran had been critically injured by Oakland police, this time wielding batons.  As of this afternoon, although it was in the Daily News, there was no mention of the incident in the New York Times, and Fox News quoted only police sources, which, as one can imagine, yielded sparse information. I’m also intrigued by the police actions and their possible motivations. While both Oakland raids (one to shut down the camp, the other to remove a crowd that had taken over an unused building) were clearly calculated in advance, many of the arrests and much of the brutality that’s occurred there and in other cities, including New York, seems to be spontaneous and personal in nature.

  

With this kind of police action I’ve had my own bizarre experience, in a situation that was neither ideologically nor racially motivated, and certainly never hit the news. The scene was a small art gallery (now it might be called a “pop-up”) on the Lower East Side circa 1988, where my friends, Karen and Julius, had an exhibition in a space their friend (I can’t remember his name, so will call him “Jim”) had rented. Recently Jim had broken up with his girl friend (I’ll call her “Kelly”), because of her drug use, but she kept hanging around. Unbeknownst to Jim, our softhearted friends had allowed her to spend the night in the storefront while they were installing the show.

Kelly was present at the opening, and by the end was out of control, screaming and banging on the floor with a beer bottle. Jim tried to get her to leave, but she didn’t seem to have any place to go on that frigid night when the temperature was below zero. In desperation Jim called the police twice, but no one came. Finally he called and said (in what everyone will agree was a stupid move, and in hindsight a REALLY stupid move) that a robbery was in progress.

Immediately two or three cop cars arrive, everyone is out the street, and Kelly is suddenly composed, quiet-spoken and polite. Jim tries to explain but no one’s listening. Finally Julius, eager to make things clear, gently taps a cop’s arm to get his attention—and all hell breaks loose as the cops grab and handcuff Julius, Jim and anyone else within reach, throw them roughly into their vehicles, and drive off.

[Shoved in with them was a lovely, young visiting artist from Germany who barely spoke English. I never learned what happened to her. Or Kelly.]

Left on the sidewalk, Karen is surprisingly calm but shortly realizes that Julius has their house keys, so my boy friend, Jeff, and I drive her to the police station and wait outside.  When, after a long while, she doesn’t appear, Jeff goes in to investigate. Coming back to the car, he tells me she’s been arrested.

Karen's story was that she went to the magistrate to ask for the keys, and was ordered to leave. She thought he didn’t understand so went back (obviously we were all operating from an impression of the police derived from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood). That’s when she was tackled by cops who dragged her by her feet (she was wearing a short skirt) to a cell. In the scuffle she reached out and grabbed a pay phone receiver, breaking her arm, and also had a hank of hair pulled from her head. At the time Karen was 30-ish, tall and slender; I’d be surprised if she weighed more than 108 pounds.

For the next two days we sat vigil in the court, waiting for our friends’ cases to come up, listening to cops and criminals make their pleas, and becoming marginalized. Before we would have been rooting for the cops, but now our sympathies were with the other side. (Kid knocks over old lady and steals her purse? Woo-hoo!).

Today someone who’s been apprehended must be brought before a judge within 72 hours or released, but back then, apparently, stays could be infinite. Fortunately Jim’s mother finally had the sense (and the means) to hire a lawyer from the many who were hanging around the court, and immediately our friends were brought up, charged, and released. Karen had been kept in a single cell with other women, many of them prostitutes who turned their fur coats inside out and slept on the floor. There was an exposed toilet, but Karen thinks no one had to use it because the baloney sandwiches on white bread they got three times a day stopped them up. While in jail Karen was told that if she were sent to a hospital it would delay everyone else’s chances of release, so her arm didn’t get treatment until afterward. I’m not sure if it ever healed properly, but I do know that for a long time it hampered her work as a seamstress.

Even though they were released, Julius and Karen wanted the charges against them dropped. I somehow was able to find them pro bono legal counsel and after many months, including a visit to our home by the police’s rigorous internal affairs investigator (who told Jeff and me he wrote detective novels on the side), we all met in police court. My testimony at that trial was the hardest bit of public speaking I’ve ever had to do. Ultimately the charges against both Julius and Karen were dropped, the cops were disciplined (the one who'd pulled out her hair was a woman), and Karen was awarded $30,000.

I don’t know about Karen, but for many years after that, whenever I saw a cop, I’d cross to the other side of the street.

 ***

For a surprising (or, sadly, not surprising) addendum, I found these recent “reviews” on Google Maps for the Avenue C police station:

WRITE A REVIEW

SinthiaV ‎- Aug 14, 2011:

According to a judge in a recent arraignment, these cops frequently arrest people on trumped up charges, which are later dropped for lack of evidence! The disposition says it never happened, but try telling that to your boss or family. This precinct treats the people they exist to protect and serve like irritating garbage. Can anyone out there relate a positive experience they have had trying to get help from the ninth? Once I was arrested trying to get them to enforce an order of protection, which the offender violated in front of several witnesses! All I did was ask them to write an incident report!! They also punched me in the face for trying to write down an officer's badge number. Be very careful dealing with this precinct, as they have a long history of mistreating people and abusing their power. To be honest, I am a bit frightened to be writing this, but they seem to dislike me already, so it seems worth the risk to warn a potential unsuspecting newbie who might expect a certain type of behavior from the police. Don't expect the norm. It seems a little like Wonderland sometimes in this precinct. The ninth plays by it's own rules and it's up to you to figure them out. Good luck.

dawn - Dec 11, 2010:

No one ever answers the phone in this precinct. Doesn't anyone work here?

One day, four works of art

A few nights ago, I had a dream where I was floating and diving underwater like a dolphin and—as when swimming in real life—I never wanted to stop.

Yesterday I had an art day like that: long, solitary experiences with four very different kinds of work that invited endless immersion.  Whenever, as happens all too frequently, I start to wonder why I’m in this field, I can look back on this day and remember why.

Photo: courtesy MoMA.

Willem de Kooning, Pirate (Untitled II), 1981

Oil on canvas
7' 4" x 6' 4 3/4" (223.4 x 194.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund, 1982
© 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I got to MoMA early to see the de Kooning exhibition again, this time on my own, and went straight to the back in advance of the hoards with their walkie-talkies. Except for the guard, I was alone in front of de Kooning’s Pirate (Untitled II), and the longer I stood there, the more it revealed to me. The experience was so animated it was like watching TV, only better. After about twenty minutes the guard, an older black man, came up and said, quietly, “Looks as if you like that painting.” I asked him how he felt about it, seeing it day after day—did it hold up?—and he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I told him how much I love the wispy late work, as opposed to the ones with looping closed lines, which feel static and tight. The guard pointed out that they were the very last ones de Kooning painted, and suggested that perhaps by then the artist’s mind really was gone. He showed me the area he liked best, a wall of somewhat earlier large abstractions that reminded him of Lee Krasner, and told me, proudly, that he’d worked at MoMA for more than twenty years.

Photo: Carol Diehl, 2011

JANET CARDIFF (Canadian, b. 1957)

The Forty Part Motet (2001)

Reworking of “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui”(1575), by

Thomas Tallis

40-track sound recording (14:00 minutes), 40 speakers

Dimensions variable

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and

Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Rolf Hoffmann, 2002

I could have stopped there, completely fulfilled, but instead I took the E out to PS 1 (only two stops from MoMA). While I’ll do almost anything to avoid 9/11 nostalgia, Sasha Frere-Jones, in a recent New Yorker article, mentioned the Janet Cardiff sound installation from 2001, The Forty-Part Motet, which is part of PS 1's September 11 exhibition, and I was eager to experience it. Frere-Jones wrote:

Cardiff re-created the performance of a forty-member choir, each singer emerging through a separate speaker, performing the 1573 Thomas Tallis piece “Spem in alium.” In eleven minutes, it uses a stunning variety of overlapping, interlocking parts, as deft in its repetition as anything Steve Reich has done. The interplay of the voices is also moving—I have rarely visited the work and not seen people crying within minutes.

I’ve been a fan of Cardiff's ever since the percussive piece she and George Bures Miller installed in 2006 at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which gets my all-time favorite award for site-specific art (read my review here). Happily The Forty-Part Motet lived up to my expectations—was exalted and exhalting. I could have just as easily been in Canterbury Cathedral during Evensong, but there’s also something about the anonymity of the experience that makes it surprisingly personal. While I was there, two young women were inspired to dance, but attempting to photograph them (with their permission), I was sharply remonstrated by the guard—an action that was jarring and surprisingly upsetting in the way it pierced a euphoric moment. Something like that would never have happened in Europe, I thought, especially in England where museum attendants can be sensitive to the point of being apologetic. So I left the room and came back again later when—with the exception of a different guard who lurked quietly in the corner, absorbed in his cell phone—I was able to listen to the whole thing again, this time completely alone.

Photo: Carol Diehl, 2011.

JAMES TURRELL (American, b. 1943)

Meeting (1986)

Interior fluorescent light and open sky

Room: 259 x 279 ½ inches (657.9 x 709.3 cm);

portal: 157 x 177 inches (398.8 x 449.6 cm)

Long-term installation, MoMA PS1, Long Island City,

New York

Where I went to recuperate was James Turrell’s Meeting (1986), unexpectedly open in the early afternoon where, for more than a half hour, I was alone in one of my favorite places in the world. At one point a man opened the door, stuck his head in, and immediately left, having had his fill—but that was all. The sky “ceiling” was picturesquely blue and wisped with clouds on that sunny day, while soft, cool breezes wafted about the room. Perfect.

Photo: courtesy MoMA, PS 1

BARBARA KRUGER (American, b. 1945)

Untitled (Questions) (1991)

Photographic silkscreen on vinyl

66 3/16 x 92 5/8 x 2 1/2 inches (168.1 x 235.3 x 6.4 cm)

Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for

Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New

York.

On my way out of the September 11 exhibition I passed this piece from 1991 by Barbara Kruger. While I didn’t spend half an hour communing with it, it’s stayed with me, as it seems particularly relevant to the present time. If I haven’t posted lately, it’s because I’ve been caught up in the issues around Occupy Wall Street, without quite knowing how to process them as far as my blog was concerned. With the mainstream press reporting so little in the beginning, Facebook became my news source. Suddenly I was grateful that I’d accepted as “friends” over 1,000 people I don’t know, and their links to video footage, news reports from outside the country, and on-the-spot commentary, was riveting, inspiring, and disturbing.  The actions of the police, in one scary videotaped scene after another—especially in Oakland—are unconscionable. If this were China, we’d be appalled. Why do we accept it as business-as-usual in a country that gives lip service to free speech and human rights? Now that it’s turned on us in a big way, we can see what the black community has known all along, that police forces are often made up of people who are excited by violence, who can’t wait to use their authority against such dire threats as Citibank customers endeavoring to close their accounts, or Naomi Wolf in her evening dress (an event that made the headlines in The Guardian, which I subscribe to online, but was significantly left out of the New York Times). Not to speak of the group that's most armed and dangerous: nurses.

I’m just enough of a Quaker, an idealist—and an American—to believe, like Marine veteran Sergeant Shamar Thomas in the now-famous video where he successfully talks down a bunch of cops, that the police should be protecting our Constitutional right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  Is that really so far-fetched?

On de Kooning, Orozco, and Twombly…

I could not agree more with Roberta Smith’s strongly worded review of Gabriel Orozco’s show at Marian Goodman, which ended Saturday (note: the images look better online than they did in person). My thoughts exactly: a case of an artist who can do wonderful things (his drawings on money and tickets being some of my favorite artworks ever), churning out stuff for the marketplace to the point that I wonder if he even knows who he is anymore. But then you have to feel sorry for anyone who shows while de Kooning is on at MoMA, and has to stand up to the inevitable comparisons.

Willem de Kooning. Pink Angels. c. 1945. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 52 x 40" (132.1 x 101.6 cm). Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I didn’t see how the de Kooning retrospective could live up to the hype but it did—it was energizing and inspiring, even though some of the selected pieces (especially from the artist’s late period) weren’t the best examples, not to to speak of the pedestrian installation. Is it really necessary to group all of the “woman” paintings together in a row? At MoMA, chronology wins out over aesthetics, as if we’re all art historians for whom it’s important to compare similar paintings side-by-side. Big square rooms, white walls, everything lined up in order…hey, it’s the 21^st century! How about a little originality? And also is it necessary to show SO MUCH work at one time? I know that’s a silly question since the whole idea of a blockbuster is to cram in as much as possible—and to hell with selection. Why show three black –and-white paintings when you can get ten? The result, no matter how great the artist, can be overwhelm and overkill, and it’s to de Kooning’s credit that he survives it here.

I remember approaching the gigantic 2005 Cy Twombly works on paper show at the Whitney with high anticipation, and coming out thinking…eh? Fortunately my love for Twombly has since been restored, especially this summer when I went to a beautiful small show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, where his work was paired with that of Poussin—to Twombly’s advantage. Often you can learn more about an artist by looking at a few well-chosen paintings than being distracted and suffocated with more.

I went to the MoMA show with someone who knew de Kooning and his work well, and who once took me to visit him in his vast Hampton’s studio, where I admired the artist’s hydraulic easel that not only raised and lowered into a well in the studio floor, but could turn and tilt to any angle.  At MoMA, as we were looking at Woman I, my friend told me that after working on it ceaselessly and not feeling resolved, de Kooning put the canvas under his bed and didn’t paint anything for nine months, causing much consternation in the then-small art world. He pulled it out for a visit by Meyer Shapiro, telling the art historian that he didn’t know if it was finished or not.

“It’s finished,” Shapiro said.

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6' 3 7/8" x 58" (192.7 x 147.3 cm). MoMA Purchase. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

[Can we imagine Orozco choosing not to work for nine months?  Caring enough not to work for nine months?]

It’s impossible to look at de Kooning and not think of all the other artists (Pollock, Gorky, Kline, etc.) he was bouncing off of, who were working in similar ways, and to recognize how—when a group is working on the same idea, if separately—they push each other to outdo each other and develop it collectively. The downside is that the pressure to adhere to a movement or style can be very confining (I know this from personal experience, having been an abstract artist in Chicago where the Imagists held such sway that the only option was to move to New York)—however it made me think that the complete freedom we have today may be the one of the reasons so little truly great art is being produced.

Leaving the exhibition we walked down the stairs to the first floor where a massive Twombly was hung over the information desk, edge-to-edge scrawls of white crayon on a uniform gray ground. My friend and I had once shared an experience at the Clark Institute with one of Monet’s cathedral paintings, which started out appearing to be almost entirely abstract—but as we looked, the sun seemed to come out and illuminate the façade until we could see its sculptural detail clearly. Similarly here, gazing at the Twombly, the fairly regular, overall pattern of loops began to form themselves into clouds, and the painting took on the unexpected illusion of movement and depth. Gorgeous.

I’ve been back to the Clark since, wanting to see the Monet in the same way again, but it resisted. By now you’d think I would have learned the folly of trying to recreate peak experiences.

Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas. 13' 3 3/8" x 21' 1/8" (405 x 640.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection (both by exchange). (C) 2011 Cy Twombly