North Coast Online

Another Crime By Committee

Have you seen the new logo for the 2012 London Olympics?  It's caused quite an uproar over there, but Perry DeHaviland of Samizdata thinks it's perfect.

What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable.

Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money... and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole 'Olympic Experience' for London taxpayers.

"Art"

Why is the art world a disaster?  The New Criterion hazards a guess.

The “arts” at Bard [College] are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary. Leon Botstein described Marieluise Hessel as a “risk giver.” An essay in the Bardian, the college magazine, elaborates on this theme:

She was drawn to work that challenged and subverted the status quo, work that flaunted [the author means “flouted,” but, hey, this is Bard] and struggled with urgent, utopian notions of gender and identity, feminism, and the politics of AIDS, among other issues.

Mr. Botstein and the Bardian have it exactly wrong. When it comes to art, Ms. Hessel is neither a risk taker nor a risk giver. Like Bard itself, she simply mirrors the established taste of the moment. Far from “challenging” or “subverting” the status quo, the 1,700 objects she has accumulated are the status quo. And far from “struggling” with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world. “Academic,” in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of “scholarly,” but rather in the sense that we speak of “academic art,” stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory. A wall full of photographs of two girls does nothing to “interrogate” (a favorite term of art- and lit-crit-speak) identity any more than a mutilated doll forces us to reconsider our usual notions of whatever-it-is those odious objects are supposed to make us reconsider. Really, the only thing exhibitions like “Wrestle,” or institutions like the Hessel Museum, challenge is the viewer’s patience.

When art no longer required any particular skill, I lost interest.  I know, I know -- how bourgeois.

When I Get Older . . .

Oh.my.God. 

It's the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Why it seems like only yesterday.

Today the Beatles catalogue is loved cross-culturally -- the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.

Well, maybe not yesterday.  But definitely only a couple weeks ago -- no, last year.  OK, it was eons ago, a simpler time many light years away.  Dinosaurs still roamed the earth, El Caminos were cool and the Great Society was just a campaign slogan that hadn't spent $6 trillion on nothing.  I remember wondering at the time what Paul McCartney's life would really be like when he was 64, though I never believed for a moment that he'd actually name his kids Vera, Chuck and Dave.

 

If They Won't Spend Money On The Arts, Then We Must Force Them

If there's one thing that artists know, it's that artists love government subsidies support.  In fact, they're quite convinced that society can't survive without it. Nathan Whitlock documents the personal anguish of a Canadian artist witnessing the budget-making process in Ottawa.

...and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty [hang on: forty-nine, plus Martel... yup, still works out] artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit.

Please, read the whole thing.  I will give him credit for artistic expression, though.  In Buffalo, they don't even bother with that, they just claim arts subsidies will make the economy improve. Of course, you can get money for anything here with that line.

[UPDATE:] Sometimes I suspect that the arts community demands subsidies to make up for the fact that so much of what it presents us is of no interest and often of no value.  I mean, here's one example of an artist who certainly doesn't need a government grant.

Kurt Vonnegut

I was never a huge Vonnegut fan.  I just didn't get the Slaughterhouse 5 soldier ending up in a human zoo on an alien planet.  But there was one work of his which did strike me a long time ago.  I'd forgotten about it, and Don Boudreaux reminded me.  Harrison Bergeron, the tale of a future where everyone is equal.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

Read the rest here.  Please, do.

More On '300'

Victor Davis Hanson reviews 300 and draws an analogy to current events.

There is a great yearning among the public for just a small, rare chance to see some issue presented in terms other than moral ambiguity. 300 provided that in a way other costume dramas like Alexander or Troy either could not or did not. The 300 and those beside them were better than the alternative, had the moral high ground, and were willing to match deed with word. That proved more receptive than Oliver Stone's fantasizing for a public weary of sorta, kinda judgements (the latest being the Iranian hostage taking where the West is engaged in moral anguish over GPS data, possible provocations, a prior lapse in "engaging" the Iranians, conspiracy theorizing over the Bush role in all this, etc. rather than just a simple: "The Brits appeared vulnerable and would not act, and so for the Iranian thugocracy it was too good a chance to pass up—given its prior success with the serial kidnapping of Westerners.

There's a lot more to it -- read the whole thing.  This was, as Andrew Sullivan once was wont to write, only the "money graf."  Does he still say that?  I wouldn't know -- can't be bothered to read him since he decided that panties on the head of an Iraqi prisoner constitutes torture.  The guys in 300 would have gotten a good laugh out of that one come to think of it.

When One Art Museum Isn't Enough

I've written a few times this week about JetBlue's attempt to stanch its bleeding reputation and refocus on its customers.  Should the Albright-Knox do the same? 

The whole affair does raise a few questions.  Does an art museum have an obligation to consider its customers' tastes, or does its educational mission outweigh that?  Are we so provincial here that we can't appreciate modern art, or is there an unfulfilled market for a classical art museum in Buffalo? Are people expecting the Albright to be everything to everybody?

I suspect the answer to the last question would be yes.

But Consider The Opposing Planes

The Buffalo News featured an article on a piece of sculpture that the Albright-Knox will now share with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.  The sculptress, British contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread, is evidently quite famous and her works much sought-after these days.

Whiteread is a highly acclaimed artist who often makes casts of common household items such as chairs, bathtubs and table. The Carnegie already owns her "Untitled (Yellow Bath)," a rubber and polystyrene sculpture cast from 1996, and exhibited her "Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)" in the 1995 Carnegie Internati

Ah, yes -- casts of common household items -- how very clever.  Though, considering how much they go for, I suppose she is.  The local piece is instantly reminiscent of nothing so much as a giant penis and I guess that's part of its cleverness.  But of course, I know nothing about modern art (though I can certainly recognize it when I see it) and Freud probably could have written an entire chapter about me.

Shades Of 'Office Space'

Studio Arena has probably made a wise financial decision by scaling back, but it sure sounds as if it was handled oddly.

"The way it happened was very barbaric. It was so cold," said Dianne Giliforte, corporate sales manager and a 14-year employee, who said she was given the news by "a consultant who never had a conversation with me."

I guess even this cold-hearted conservative would have expected theater people to have been a bit more sensitive.  I wish Studio Arena good luck in reorganizing its finances, though cutting the heart out of the marketing staff seems an odd way to go about it -- unless of course they weren't producing (just a little theater lingo there.)

In My Mind's Eye

I happened on Kevin Nealon's TBS show last night highlighting the years "funniest" TV ads.  Most of them were very good, though the audience ranking stunk.  Nonetheless, this one's a classic, you've got to check it out.  In France, that very popular film, March of the Penguins, was advertised as March of the Emperor.