Archives for Art

Find the time to watch this until the end. It’s about eight and a half minutes long. You won’t feel the same about sand after you see it.

A very clever, short video on the Lost Generation. Check it out here.

(And listen to the whole thing.)

I usually do not get very far into stories about artists who work far outside traditional media. The sheep preserved in urine, the cloth-covered bridge, they just don’t work for me. Not a surprise given my magnetic pull to the Wyeths and John Singer Sargent.

But The New York Times Magazine piece on Tino Sehgal and his live sculpture kept me riveted right to the end. One of the most interesting things in Arthur Lubow’s article is the explanation of how Sehgal sells his work to museums, a tricky business given that the pieces involve people not paint or stone–making it tough to “own” or control viewing of them in the usual senses. Lubow does a fine job setting up this aspect of the story:

“He does not allow his pieces to be photographed. They are not explained by wall labels or accompanied by catalogs. No press releases herald the openings of his exhibitions; indeed, there are no official openings, just unceremonious start dates. All of this can engender skepticism, but the aspect of Sehgal’s work that his detractors find most irritating is the way the art is sold…”

Read this one, it is worth your time.

I’m guessing that most people hurried past this dumpster in Portland’s Old Town without seeing its message.

Fortunately, photographer Friderike Heuer was not one of them.

Check this out: Who wouldn’t opt for these stairs over an escalator? And, as long as we’re talking music…see this website. It is one of the few I’ve seen that offers a “SKIP INTRO” option that no one wants to use.

(Have the sound on for both of these links.)

I think of myself as a pacifist.

Yeah, sure. So, how to explain my reaction to “Inglorious Basterds,” director Quentin Tarantino’s intentionally misspelled film?

I didn’t break into applause at the end as many in the audience did, but I was silently cheering this ultimate revenge-fantasy film even as I winced at the extremely violent treatment of Nazis at the hands of the American G.I. killers.

Maybe I can blame my tolerance on the hilarious portrayal by Brad Pitt of the unit’s Tennessean commanding officer, who actually made the scalping and carving of Nazi soldiers seem, well, amusing. Or the fact that Tarantino’s work is so bloody that by the end one is pretty benumbed.

It is probably closer to the truth that the legendary director has tapped into that part of me (and that part in a lot of other people, apparently) that finds solace for some atrocities only in like atrocities. That Biblical “eye for an eye” business caught on–and has hung on–for a reason, I guess.

We saw “Julie & Julia” this past weekend, and it is a wonderful movie, well-acted, funny, transporting.

(This being film-crazy Portland, people applauded at the end and waited politely until the credits finished rolling before leaving.)

Along with the rave reviews, the movie has spawned some good features on Child, including this one in Vanity Fair.)

The movie and articles explain the culinary revolution Child fomented, but what interests me more (and what came across beautifully in the film) is the nature of the marriage of Julia McWilliams and Paul Child. It was, by all accounts, a very close partnership in all senses of that word.

They married when Julia was 32, an old maid by the standards of the day, and Paul a decade older, a dashing bachelor by standards of the day. They’d met while serving in the Office of Strategic Services.

Laura Shapiro’s book, “Julia Child,” published two years ago (and excerpted in Boston Magazine) characterized the later years of the Child marriage this way:

“Whenever she talked about her career, she said ‘we,’ not ‘I,’ and she meant it literally. Paul attended all business meetings and participated in all decisions… In the firmament of useful, devoted spouses who serve celebrity without a trace of malevolence, he was one of the few husbands. Every morning they liked to snuggle in bed together for a half hour after the alarm went off, and at the end of the day, Paul would read aloud from the New Yorker while Julia made dinner. ‘We are never not together,’ Paul said once, contentedly.”

Despite this feminism-infused marriage, like many women of her era who broke through gender fences, Julia Child did not like being associated with the “women’s lib” of her heyday. Also, as Shapiro reports, Child was more than a little homophobic, voicing particular disdain for effeminate men and bafflement about lesbian couples.

She was, however, also someone who never stopped learning and growing. When friends began dying of AIDS, she was shocked out of her old prejudices, and said so. She gave the $2.3 million proceeds from sale of her Cambridge, Mass., house to her alma mater, Smith College, by then a very militant Grrrl hothouse. She funded scholarships and plugged cookbooks for both women and men, putting her formidable influence where it counted.

She proved that cooking, and marriage, at their best, are joy-filled things.

I’m at that point in my life when almost any news story makes me think about my parents. (Especially any stories about people throwing stuff at each other.) When I read my buddy Andrew Schneider’s thoughts on the end of the Kodachrome era, even that triggered a memory.

My parents were not particularly talented photographers, but both liked cameras. My mother because she’d worked for Polaroid as a “demo girl” when she was in her early 30s. (That’s her in the photo.) And my father because he liked any image-preserving media, visual and audio. He favored Kodachrome, I think because it was Kodak’s signature product and they sponsored one of the TV news hours he anchored early on in his television career.

(Early in my childhood all our bread came from the Western Massachusetts bakery that sponsored him, called Dreikorn’s. Nutritionally this stuff probably made Wonder Bread look like whole grains.)

I never used the 35mm cameras we had lying around, but I was the anointed Polaroid assistant, standing by to apply that waxy fixative on the fresh black-and-white prints. I loved the weird smell of that stuff, which came in a small cylinder and was applied with the handy roller brush that fit inside. The fumes from that, along with the rubber cement in my mother’s newspaper office–and a daily dollop of secondhand parental cigarette smoke–surely combined to give me the sharp intellect I have today.

Now there are tools that allow you to make your regular photos look like vintage Polaroids.

When they can figure out a way to bring back the smell of that fixative, I’m in.