Even more Olafur

Saturday I drove to Bard College for the opening of Olafur Eliasson’s first permanent outdoor installation in this country. Entitled The parliament of reality, the piece consists of a circular cement island in the center of a moat-like pond, accessed by a bridge enclosed by arches of steel latticework. The pond is ringed with plantings of wild grasses that will take 2-3 years to fill in, and 24 trees, whose branches, when they grow out in 5 years or so, will ultimately form a unified circle. The trees also produce blossoms which, hopefully, will coat the pond with yellow petals each May. With seating in the form of massive local rocks, the idea is that it will become a place for meeting, discussion, and performance. At the moment the constructed elements dominate, and it takes some imagination to picture what it will be like when the trees, for instance, are higher than the latticed roof of the walkway. Without the vegetation it seems like the bare bones of something yet to be realized, as did Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden when I saw it in its earliest stages.

Middle photo: Photo: Olafur Eliasson Studio

The latticework pattern mimics that of the ripples in the pond. Did he know it would do that?

The Eliasson installation is adjacent to the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a building I love for its quality of lightness and insubstantiality, heightened on this overcast day so that the roof of the building seemed to merge with the sky.

Sadly, this lyrical dance of wing-like curves and light ends abruptly with the rear of the building, which is as square and clunky as the back of any urban theater. Although I've been to the Fisher Center several times, I'm never prepared for the nasty slap of reality that awaits me as I walk around it to my parked car. I want to believe in the fairy tale.

Music Scrooge

I don’t believe in children’s music—which doesn’t mean I don’t believe in children engaging with music, just that I don’t know why children should be subjected to music that not only talks down to them, is irritating to the adults around them. “They like it,” you’ll hear parents say by way of justifying this annoying genre (they like TV and junk food, too, if you give them enough of it) but trust me, children like any and ALL music, even—and especially—your music, if you give them the chance. I wouldn’t read them books I didn’t enjoy with illustrations I didn’t like either.

I can also tell you that their father and I brought two sons into functioning adulthood without any of that crap—and it’s something they’ve continually thanked us for.

Although Matt's the music professional, my most vivid early memories of my children and music have to do with his younger brother, Adam, probably because of the dark winter when Adam was two and had pneumonia, which meant long weeks inside with just mom and the stereo. He spent hours dancing to the Beatles in front of the speakers, identifying which side of the album he wanted to hear by pointing to the cut or whole apple illustrated on the label. Among his other favorites were Bob Marley's “I shot the sheriff but I didn’t shoot the dead tree” and Paul McCartney’s “Man on the Rug." I remember trying to tear him away from Elton John’s "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" when we were late for a doctor appointment, by promising that we’d listen to the radio in the car. He was screaming “Yellow Brick Road! Yellow Brick Road!” as I carried him out and once in the car, insisted on hearing it there. I tried to explain that the radio played what it wanted, not what we wanted, but lost all credibility when I turned it on to find it playing—of course—“Yellow Brick Road.”

This all comes to mind as I’ve recently been spending much delightful time with various friends’ toddlers, loving the way 1-4 year olds are so trustingly imitative while remaining true to their emerging personalities—a combination that’s often hilarious. Then this morning Cary Smith sent me the link to this video of Thom Yorke singing the Radiohead classic “Weird Fishes” with orchestra (wait for the sound to start)…



…after which I found this, and it cracks me up:



Don't skip over the song links to the music videos above, each one better than the next, ending with Elton John accompanied by Muppets, the Sesame Street album being a big exception to my rule—because I enjoyed it. Happy parents, I always think, make for happy children. And why not give them something that enriches not only their present, but future life?

Style

I’m about to quote something from a magazine I never thought I’d quote from— Psychology Today—one of a number of liberal-ish, pseudo-intellectual (I haven’t used that term since high school) magazines that promise much and ultimately leave you feeling empty, of which The Utne Reader is a prime example. Among PT’s many annoying qualities is that it employs those byte-sized fillers with cutesy graphics that magazine people (including those at TIME and New York) seem to think are all our Internet-addled heads can handle. (Here one is “What do you do to prevent nodding off at the wheel? 54% Park and walk around, 52% turn on music, 5% Drive faster, etc.) When will magazines stop trying to compete with the Web and get that if we’re going to sit down and read, we want something to read. In-depth articles, analysis, criticism, investigative reporting, photojournalism—these are all things magazines do well that the Internet can’t. The New Yorker has had that formula down for years, and because of it is increasingly relevant. But I rant, when my intention was to point out something I liked. This from the October 2008 issue of PT (disclaimer: I found it in the acupuncturist’s office) by Hara Estroff Marano in an article about style in an issue about style (the Editor’s Note is entitled Clothes Encounters—pul-lease!—whoops, there I go again):

…style is optimism made visible. Style presumes you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, that life is worth making the effort for….

As the speed of all our transactions increases, we need fast ways of transmitting information about ourselves without losing authenticity; we have less and less time to make our mark in other, more leisurely ways of knowing. Style, like a perfectly-fitting book jacket, evokes the substance within by way of the surface. It makes an authentic visual impression in a world that otherwise strips people of identity. There was a time when style was a luxury. Today it is a necessity.

Yes, because finally, in the 21st century, it appears that “style” is becoming the new “fashion.” And hooray for that! Starting with the vogue for unusual children’s names (which make it easier to be found on the Internet), individuality is key—when everyone used to think that in the “future” (which we happen to be living in) we’d all be running around like so many Spocks in identical silver tights.

Anyway, just thinking about style being “optimism made visible” cheers me up, as do the new, soft, white organic cotton pajamas (with wooden buttons!) I’m wearing while stuck at home with the nasty cold I’ve had since Chicago. The interesting thing is that while I know I have style (although am less concerned about making an impression than pleasing myself—no one can see me in my pajamas), I want a different style. I want to be funky, like my friend, Jude, but over the years have had to come to terms with the fact that I’m simply not funky. Just the way I want to be an expressionist painter and must reconcile myself to being…me. Oh well.

More Olafur

Random shots below by artist Summer Zandrew, who accompanied me when I went to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to take pictures of the Olafur Eliasson survey. Again I stress the importance of being allowed to take photographs of art—Olafur’s especially because it’s created with interaction in mind, and in an age where every single person who enters a museum is carrying a camera, photography is one of the vital ways we interact with our environment.

Me, refracted

Summer, self-portrait

Report from Chicago

I’m loving Chicago! Having a home town guy in the White House seems to have caused it to shed its Second City inferiority complex (which always drove me crazy) and stand proud. The only negative is the hysteria over the swine flu “epidemic,” which has schools closing and gatherings being cancelled. I’ve always washed my hands before meals—as my mom taught me to—and carried a little bottle of Purell with me to make it easier, silently marveling at my New York friends who’d get out of a taxi or the subway and sit down to dinner (and sometimes prepare food—yuck!) without doing so. Maybe the good side of this is that it will make everyone more conscious of something they should have been doing all along. Meanwhile I use my Purell more surreptitiously, because I don’t want to add to the fear-mongering, and am frequenting Mexican restaurants (so good in Chicago!), because they probably can use the business.

I thought Art Chicago was pretty boring—only a handful of really good galleries represented—but, to my surprise, loved the Antiques Fair a few floors below. Meanwhile the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the MCA (through September 13th) has caused a lot of excitement—as I mentioned, so much better than at MoMA and PS 1—and the the pairing with the Buckminster Fuller show (through August 9th) is genius, because you can see the lineage. As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, Einar Thorsteinn, who works with Olafur (“helps me with models and helps me to think,” as Olafur said in his artist’s talk), was a protégé of Fuller, and so here you can look at Fuller’s models and then go downstairs and see how Olafur and Einar have taken off on them in their own models, made them more fanciful, and then elaborated on them in large works. There are also interpretations of Fuller’s work by sculptor Kenneth Snelson, which are gorgeous. I wish I had images to illustrate all of this, but I was only able to photograph Eliasson’s exhibition while accompanied by a representative of the MCA, and had not made an appointment to shoot the Fuller show.

Let me go off a little bit on this policy of no photography, which is shared by the Whitney (but not by MoMA), and the reason I didn’t write about Jenny Holzer’s show here, which I loved. Yes, I could have gotten images from the museum, but if they didn’t reflect my vision, I’d just be doing P.R. I could understand it in the old days, the concern that a lousy shot taken on someone’s Brownie could end up in a magazine as representative of the artist’s work, or that people would produce coffee mugs and T-shirts with a pirated image. But today, when the influence of print is lessening and word-of-mouth rules, why would you want to insist on stopping someone from taking a picture with her iPhone and emailing her excitement to all of her friends? As for artists, photography is a way of recording what is important to them—not some commercial photographer—ideas that they may want to incorporate into their own work. As we all know, major museum exhibitions have an influence on the art that comes after, and to limit that in any way seems counter-productive.

Museums seem to be catering more and more to the casual visitor while distancing themselves from artists. First there’s the entrance fee, which limits when you can see the work (in crowds on free night). I tried to get a friend who’s a professor of art in Iowa into MoMA on my press card with me, and was told she could come in for free if she had a group of students with her. But even if she were teaching in New York, doesn’t she have to see the show first, to decide if it’s something she wants to bring her students to? I know so many artists who choose to pass on major exhibitions because of the fee, and often if you find a good show, you want to see it more than once. In Chicago, no doubt, many artists can afford to join both the MCA and the Art Institute (or “INSTITVTE” as it reads on their Web site—yikes!), but in New York, with a plethora of major museums, cost becomes prohibitive. I propose that the New York museums get together on an “artist’s card” that would allow entrance to all the museums for a yearly fee of $125 or so. Verifying that someone is an artist is easier now than it was back in the day when I had to prove my professional status to the city in order to live in SoHo—it can be anyone who has a Web site featuring their work, or is featured on a gallery Web site. Such a policy would increase not only traffic but word-of-mouth.

That said, here are some random shots from the Eliasson exhibition:

Your eye activity field, 2009, oil on canvas (detail). Created for the MCA's lobby and atrium, this series of 300 canvases (approximately 6" x 14") represents the 300 nanometers of the color spectrum that can be seen by the human eye

Reimagine, 2002: spotlights cast shiftin, overlapping rectalinear patters across the gallery wall, creating an illusion of distance and depth.

Beauty, 1993: a spotlight shining obliquely through a curtain of fine mist.

From the model room

One-way colour tunnel, 2007 (detail)

One-way colour tunnel (detail) with view of Inverted Berlin sphere, 2005

Inverted Berlin sphere, 2005, with a detail of Multiple Grotto, 2004 (left), which incorporates elements of the model seen above.

Colour sphere embracer, 2005, colored glass rings suspended from the ceiling nestle inside one another while a motor simultaneously rotates each in a different direction.

Update

I’m in Chicago, watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan, from the guest room in my friend Barbara’s apartment. It’s been a great trip, except yesterday my ex-husband had a nasty fall that landed him in the Evanston Hospital emergency room, and his wife told me that treatment was delayed (total time in hospital: 12 hours, with 45 minute to one hour waits between procedures) because the place was overrun with people worried that they had swine flu. I know the tendency to hysteria over possible disaster isn’t new to the human race, but we seem to have a collective memory that doesn’t go back even as far as three years ago, when the avian flu was going to kill us all. I remember that well because I have a friend in Paris whose girl friend is an epidemiologist, and in every other email he was urging me to stock up on quantities of Tamiflu. I preferred to keep my immune system up with a steady consumption of chocolate bars and red wine, which worked just fine. I also read Dr. Mercola, whose assessment turned out to be correct. Here’s what he has to say about swine flu.

Wednesday evening I went to the opening of the newest version of Olafur Eliasson’s survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At one point a museum video crew, collecting short interviews to use in fund-raising, approached and asked me to talk about my connection to the museum. At first I didn’t think I had anything to say, but then realized that my intense interest in Eliasson’s work began with the MCA and the Robert Irwin exhibition in 1976 that changed forever how I think about art. Irwin was Eliasson’s biggest influence as well, although I think it’s unlikely that he ever saw an actual work until fairly recently. This version of the traveling Eliasson survey show (next stop: Dallas) is the best exhibition of the many I’ve seen (I didn’t see the survey in San Francisco, however, and the curator there, Madeleine Grynstein, is now the director at the MCA). At the MCA the work has room to breathe, and I think Eliasson is at his best in vast enclosed spaces—the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (below) being an example. I’m going back today to take pictures, which I’ll share.

Olafur Eliasson, weather project, Tate Modern, 2004.

The high cost of speeding

I had to pay a speeding ticket yesterday—the first in my life—$335 to the town of Hoosick, New York. It required a money order, which I bought at the post office. I love small town life in that I could count on commiseration from the clerk and P.O. regulars as I reluctantly counted out my twenties. Mary, the head clerk, a gray-haired dumpling who you’d never take for a speed demon, topped me, though, saying that she’d gotten a $1000 ticket in Cambridge, NY. for 75 in a 55. It was her third ticket in New York State. My friend Robby, knowing that I’d taken that same route back and forth to Bennington at 80 mph for years, suggested I simply look upon it as a retroactive toll, or the price I must pay to join the rest of the human race.

Kurt's house

Art Vent House Report #5: Easter, for the second year in a row, was celebrated at Kurt Andernach’s home, which he calls Somersault House, on the Athens/Catskill, NY border, so deep in the woods that it takes a high clearance vehicle, preferably with all-wheel drive, and a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to negotiate the seemingly endless narrow dirt roads that lead to it. Each time I go there (once, scarily, by myself, near midnight on a dark, snowy New Year’s Eve), I wonder if I’m really going to find it, and if not, how I’m going to get out.

Even if you didn’t know Kurt was German, the siting of his cottage in the forest would make you think of Hansel and Gretel, but then you go inside and the fairy tale feeling is complete. Both rustic and elegant, it could be Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house—provided Grandma had exquisite taste and a penchant for Biedermeier furniture.

But finding such a house in the middle of the Catskill woods isn’t the only incongruity. The other is that Kurt is an architect, a designer of chic store interiors (such as those for Diane von Furstenberg and my favorite department store, Bon Marche in Paris) and blindingly white loft-like spaces. Obviously he has range. How many modernist architects do you know who proudly display a cuckoo clock?


One of the many distinctive aspects of Kurt’s house is that there are no screens—“How European,” a friend said. Yeah, except northern Europe doesn’t have insects (a Swiss friend once told me it was because they wouldn’t allow them) and this is New York State, where mosquitoes rule. Kurt, however, is uniquely oblivious—or impervious—to mosquitoes, and one summer evening I ate in his dining room largely untouched—even though the room was buzzing with them—because his dog, sitting next to me on the bench, was incredibly efficient in snapping the insects out of the air with his mouth.

The massive, elaborate antique furniture is from his family, and when I asked Kurt how he got it into the house he said, “Oh, it was easy. It came from Europe in a container, which was left on the main road, and I rented a U-Haul…” Clearly what’s easy for Kurt would be challenging for a normal person—he's also moved hundreds of rocks from the woods to form patios and walkways around his house. I hope to do a summer update on the extensively gardened exterior which, when everything is in bloom, is as magical as the interior.

Living room:

Upstairs office:

A corner of the kitchen, set for Easter brunch:

A corner of the dining room:

And bunnies!

Kurt now splits his time between his architectural practice and a storefront in on Main Street in Catskill, where he makes indoor/outdoor furniture to be marketed under the name Somersaultwoods. Solidly handcrafted in rustic Bavarian style without glue or screws—all joints are made by hand—his focus is on green technology for the materials and finishes.

Happy spring!

How we all feel. This from artist Catherine Hamilton's Birdspot.

You are what you think

‘tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in ourwills.

(Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3)

Mind is the wielder of muscles. The force of a hammer blow depends on the energy applied; the power expressed by a man’s bodily instrument depends on his aggressive will and courage. The body is literally manufactured and sustained by the mind. Through pressure of instincts from past lives, strengths or weaknesses percolate gradually into human consciousness. They express as habits, which in turn manifest as a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has a mental origin; in a vicious cycle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. If the master allows himself to be commanded by a servant, the latter becomes autocratic; the mind is similarly enslaved by submitting to bodily dictation.

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946.

So reading about the brain and how thoughts and experience can change its physical configuration (neuroplasticity), I wonder why stop with the brain? If the brain can change, why not the rest of the body?

I have not forgotten a long article I read in The New York Times more than ten years ago (now finally available through the miracle of online archiving), which describes how a person diagnosed with multiple personality disorder may have actual physical characteristics that come and go, depending on which personality is dominant:

Excerpts:

For more than a century clinicians have occasionally reported isolated cases of dramatic biological changes in people with multiple personalities as they switched from one to another. These include the abrupt appearance and disappearance of rashes, welts, scars and other tissue wounds; switches in handwriting and handedness; epilepsy, allergies and color blindness that strike only when a given personality is in control of the body.

-

Today, using refined research techniques, scientists are bringing greater rigor to the study of multiple personalities and focusing on a search for the mechanisms that produce the varying physiological differences in each personality.

-

One of the problems for psychiatrists trying to treat patients with multiple personalities is that, depending which personality is in control, a patient can have drastically different reactions to a given psychiatric medication. For instance, it is almost always the case that one or several of the personalities of a given patient will be that of a child. And the differences in responses to drugs among the sub-personalities often parallel those ordinarily found when the same drug at the same dose is given to a child, rather than an adult.

-

[Also] …observation of vision differences…made by those treating multiple-personality cases. ''Many patients have told me they have a drawer full of eyeglasses at home, and they never are quite sure which to bring when they go out''….

-

Now what I need is to develop a personality that doesn't have spring allergies.

Reggie's house

Art Vent House Report #4--Last week I dropped in on Reggie Madison, a longtime friend and painter I admire, who has eked out a home and studios (plural) in a crumbling industrial complex smack on the edge of the Hudson River in the village of Athens, NY. This is one of several industrial spaces he's "Reggified" since I've known him, and patrons of Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, MA, where he designed the interior, will recognize the the style--humorous conglomerations of objects only Reggie would choose, more of which can be found in his shop on Warren Street in Hudson. The building is so close to the water that inside it feels like an ocean liner, especially the living room with its narrow windows:

Reggie can make even knotty pine look exotic:

The entry way:

The music room:

A corner of the bathroom:

The upstairs studio:

The downstairs studio:

And outside, the Hudson, still bleak in early April:

Rainbow over Lenox

Monday was all about lawyers, negotiations and decisions; not the kind of day you'd ever want to repeat. But this was at the end of it:

Some photos from England

Hever Castle, Kent, childhood home of Anne Boleyn, later owned by the Astors. With two moats, yet.

Where are the contemporary topiary artists? A medium yet to be explored...

And Nya, again, because I'm smitten.

At least we can get a laugh out of it

I'm not a Letterman fan, and thought I was waaay over being amused by GWB's gaffes, but I want to share anything that makes me laugh until I cry, and this, sent to me by Cary Smith is hilarious. That we now have a real president also helps.

As seen in the Tube:

Only in England would anyone think to use Iggy Pop to flog auto insurance. I'm still not sure what the connection is.

More on the brain

Along with enjoying the English spring and the company of 21-month-old Nya, formerly known as the Upholstery Eater, who says "Good morning, Carol!" when I come down for breakfast, "Bless you" when anyone sneezes, and occasionally "Blimey!" I'm reading another book about the brain, this time, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel G. Amen, M.D. So far I've learned that witzelsucht is "a term in the psychiatric literature that characterizes 'an addiction to making bad jokes'" and that my pathological aversion to paperwork could indicate an imbalance in my prefrontal cortex. Amen's prescription? Hire someone else to do it.

The Brain That Changes Itself

Yarek Wazul for The New York Times

I’m off to England again, and may or may not post until I come back the first week in April, so thought I’d leave you with something to read: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, MD, about how our thoughts and experiences form the actual physical structure of our brains. There are myriad new ideas to ponder in this book, including how to keep our brains functioning into old age. I always thought I was safe because I use my brain so much, but it turns out it isn’t how much you use your brain, but how much you use it in new ways that keeps it young (good news for polymaths, formerly known as dilettantes). The older we get and the better we get at what we do, the narrower we become. Doidge suggests learning a new language to keep the mind alert, but I’ll just relearn the old one—French—which I learned as an adult and found, the last time I tried to use it, that it had dissipated to the point that only the nouns were left. Inspired by the book I’ve also started playing the piano again, learning a new, difficult piece and memorizing it (my piano teacher used to say that a piece wasn’t “mine” until it was memorized, and I feel that way about poetry, too—just ask me, the next time you see me, to recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky).

Memorization, it turns out, exercises the brain in important ways. Doidge writes:

…for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and this not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain power unfamiliar to us now.

There’s much more in the book to challenge contemporary assumptions about how we use our brains—but for now I’m just happy to remember where I put my passport.

The greatest advantage to a blog is that I can write about a show I haven’t seen and don’t intend to see (I’ll use my broken foot, now mending nicely, thank you, as an excuse, although I’ve probably seen all the Lisa Yuskavage paintings I need to in one lifetime). But I will use it as an opportunity to rail against the idea that an artist’s gender, or his/her intention or surmised intention, political or otherwise, has anything to do with the aesthetic value of a work of art. What if we suddenly found out that all of Yuskavage’s paintings had been done by Russ Meyer? Or the seven dwarfs? What if they weren’t on exhibition at David Zwirner, but some of the “unique images” offered by Arcadia Fine Arts? What if Yuskavage had been trained, not at Yale, but by a Bob Ross certified instructor? What would that change, really?

I found a Washington Post interview from 2007 that delineates thought pro and con about Yuskavage, and then this, from Jerry Saltz’s latest piece in New York:

The same bogus arguments come up every time there’s a Lisa Yuskavage show. Is her work feminist? Is she, oy, “critiquing the male gaze?” At the opening of Yuskavage’s current solo outing, I was standing between two paintings: Figure in Interior, a picture of an anorexic nude on her knees with her legs akimbo, shaved vulva exposed, white cream/semen dripping from her face onto her breasts; and Reclining Nude, a picture of a recumbent girl in a glowing green glen, her breasts pointing in two directions, legs splayed to expose pink genitalia protruding from blonde pubic hair. A well-known museum curator sidled up and swooned, “Lisa’s paintings are as rich as Vermeer’s and Boucher’s. They’re as sumptuous as the background of the Mona Lisa.” I blinked silently until she mentioned Courbet. Then I bitchily snipped, “If you think these paintings have that kind of mojo, you’ve either never looked at those paintings or you know nothing about painting—which I’ve written about you.” We smiled at each other and parted. I love the art world.

While I don’t necessarily draw the same conclusions as Saltz about what is important now, we agree, that with the social and economic changes of the last few months, the era of forced cynicism, as evidenced by Murakami, Hirst, Koons, Prince and others, including Yuskavage (and perhaps Currin), may have come to a close. It’s not enough to make work that comments on art; we want the real thing.

What is a blog for, if not shameless self-promotion? I'll be on David Cohen's monthly Review Panel at the National Academy Museum Friday evening. It's a series I've been attending regularly and find enormously interesting--for the audience's comments as much as those of the panel members--and David does an excellent job of keeping things lively. So I've been preparing for that as well as getting my taxes done and trying to figure out how I'm going to get around New York with a stress-fractured foot (I can't tell you the number of people who've said, "Well it's good you didn't break it")--and smelling spring which, even though it's faithfully followed winter every year of my life, always feels like a miracle.

In our culture, outside of Carl Jung who coined the term, synchronicity hasn’t been given its due. It hardly ever shows up in literature—in fact a friend was once told in a writing workshop that, to be believable, “coincidences” should be strictly limited to one per novel. Go back another century, however, and we have Dickens, Trollope, and Austen peppering their books with unexplainable happenstances. Sometimes I think synchronicity is all over the place if you’re looking for it, but sometimes it shows up even when you’re not. I offer this story as an antidote to the tales of doom and gloom that saturate the media.

Last Tuesday night, a neighbor I’ve known since he was small, Oliver Antunes, was bummed. A 2008 graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Oliver left his job as poissonier at Wheatleigh, a posh Berkshire resort, and has been living with his mother, studying French, and catering private dinners, saving up to go live in Europe and pursue an apprenticeship with a top restaurant in Lyon. Through his Portuguese father, Oliver has a dual passport that allows him to live and work in the EU. He’d lined up his contacts and even an apartment in Lyon when, on Tuesday, a catering job that would’ve brought him close to his goal was cancelled at the last minute. Commiserating with her son, my friend Crane (a single mom who’s supported three children with her panoply of talents including cooking) asked how much more he needed. “$4,000” Oliver answered, before disappearing to the village market to buy a can of beer. The next morning Crane noticed that Oliver was up and out uncharacteristically early. It turns out that, along with his can of beer, Oliver bought a $1 lottery ticket, and not wanting to say anything until he had the check in hand, had gone off to the Lottery Commission in Springfield to redeem it. The amount? $4,000.

Bon voyage, Oliver!

Cookies

Photo: Scott Cole

Today Bernard Madoff went to jail. Today my friend Scott was upbraiding himself for eating too many chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are, in Scott’s case, an occupational hazard: he serves delightful breakfasts and lunches at his Caffé Pomo D’oro in West Stockbridge (MA), doing all of his own baking, so as part of his job he makes some of the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Of course he’s going to eat them.

In a conversation about the financial crisis, so much of it having been caused by Wall Street greed, my friend Arthur, art director at TIME, said: “You and I like to make money, it’s a benefit of doing the work we do, but it’s not why we do it. Our occupations have many satisfactions, of which making money is only one. One of the problems in the current situation is that we’ve created a segment of the population whose only purpose in life is to make money.” True, they’re supposed to be making it for other people as well, but what’s to keep them from dipping their hands in the cookie jar?

Press release of the week II

Why think? Adding to my collection of statements about art that say absolutely nothing, my new idea is to gather enough so that readers can string them together and make their own press releases and artist’s statements (students, listen up!), thereby avoiding unnecessary brain strain. Here’s an example from a current press release that could work for almost any kind of art. Just insert your name and medium in the blanks:

_______ is working within a familiar lexicon but the process of _______ pushes the imagery out of the realm of objectivity. _______sees this step toward abstraction as not necessarily in opposition to representation, rather as an abstraction of ideas. The iconography in these _______(s) relates sometimes directly and sometimes quite obliquely to the iconography of the world in which we live. By creating a parallel universe in which the artist investigates these themes, he/she is able to open the work to the viewer for further exploration.

The best and worst of times...

At the Armory: a Leo Villareal light sculpture reflected in a David Levinthal photograph, Gering & Lopez Gallery, March 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens famously warns us against thinking of our particular times as unique, however there have been few points in my lifetime (the sixties, for sure, except I was too young to have anything to compare it to) where the extremes of best and worst were as clearly drawn as they are now. It’s a time of depression and darkness, but also of awakening and light, and we all know it. Everything this year is different from the way it was last year, and the ten years before that, and the ten years before that. It’s an epoch that will get a name, be called something, however just as people didn’t know that they were living in the Renaissance or the Roaring Twenties, we don’t know how history will remember these extraordinary times.

In the art world, everything is up for reassessment, and whether it’s the worst and best of times depends on who you talk to. If you read the Armory Show wrap-up in the Times today, you’d think it was going down the tubes, yet the people I spoke with at a couple of galleries (Gering & Lopez, Sean Kelly) were more than pleased with their return at the Armory and others even suggested that the economic downturn could turn out to be a boon for art because the prices have been discounted and rich people have nowhere else to put their money.

One thing’s for sure: the era of second-guessing the art market and thinking that it can be controlled with any amount of hype is over. Remember Richard Prince? I didn’t come across a single piece of his in the Armory Show. Damien Hirst? Who?

In last month’s Art in America (February, p.33, not yet on the Web) Dave Hickey described the previous “period”—meaning up until last fall—as one where “ ‘fairness’ (read mediocrity) proliferated. Dealers diversified their offerings to disguise their personal taste, thus eroding their better judgment.” Or, as one dealer once told me blatantly, “I don’t show what I love.” The same was true for artists, who were coached by art schools to ape certain kinds of art.

Now all we have to fall back on is ourselves. How refreshing!

Why I'm going to England again in a month...