Olds would establish ‘social responsibility’ in place of the profit motive. That is conclusive proof that he does not believe in our form of government. Hugh Roy Cullen, in a letter to then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, trying to get Johnson to not reconfirm Leland Olds as head of the Rural Electrification Administration.
I’ve just started listening to All the Wrong Moves by Anthony Scaramucci. If the name sounds familiar but you can’t place it, he was the White House Communications Director for ten days, from July 21, 2017, to July 31, 2017. At the time, he was painted by most of the press as a sort of duffus. Maybe that’s why he got fired, but from his podcast with Katty Kay, Special US correspondent for the BBC, he doesn’t seem like a good fit with Trump; he seems a little too goody-two-shoes to be an insider in the Trump crowd.
Although, as an aside, before that official role, he did work on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, joining the Trump Finance Committee and later serving on the Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee after the 2016 election. End aside.
In All the Wrong Moves– subtitled How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Shitshow Politics Lead To Trump. And How We Find A Way Out – Scaramucci puts forth the case that the United States was founded on making money and that this is our national religion. So far, about twenty percent into the book, he makes an excellent case. Of course, he wasn’t the first observer of American values to say that. Alexis de Tocqueville pretty much said the same thing in 1830 when he wrote, I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men… And, from the quote at the top of this post, I would say that Hugh Roy Cullen agrees, too. Still, I’ve never looked at our history that way, and it is sort of shocking and a little disturbing.
Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way. Eli Broad, who, along with Donald Kaufman, perfected the art of building repetative Tract Housing.
I met a guy who plays the same game I played. Yoko Ono, after John Lennon offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail in her painting, Painting To Hammer A Nail.
Life is beautiful’ isn’t such an opulent assumption when seen through Ono’s keen and kind lens, Darren Bader who the New York Times Style Magazine describes As playful as he is provocative, interrogates the meaning of art itself.
The second day we were in LA, we went to The Broad to see Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. I’m not sure what to make of the show; the LA Times says it is more mind than music. Which I completely agree with, but then they go on to say, She opens your mind; you make the music. which wasn’t my experience. Although I think it was Michele’s.
From the street, The Broad looks much more radical than LACMA, but inside it is a conventional museum, a very nice conventional museum, built around the private collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum was designed by a team led by Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, based in New York City. DS + R, as the architectural firm is called, has two of its most famous projects in its hometown of New York City, and both are conceptually innovative: the design of The High Line Park* and the recent transformation of MOMA. BTW, Elizabeth Diller is an architectural superstar: she was on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellow awarded in architecture. End Aside.
Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist, which makes it hard to show much. Visibly shown, that is. Her typed or written ideas can be shown, but they are ideas, not images. As an aside, I was listening to an interview – I don’t remember with whom or the interviewer – with a Trump expert. One thing she, the Trump expert, said – in a derogatory way – was that Trump is very visual and, like a child, is best persuaded by pictures; charts showing information do not persuade him. I thought, Shit! That sounds just like me, how embarrassing. End aside.
Still, embarrassing as it may be, there was not much “art” that I resonated with at the show; a lot of ideas, several walls to mark up, and a handful of interesting vintage pictures.
Outside the Yoko Ono show, The Broad continued on its mission of collecting and showing – for free – contemporary art. Good contemporary art; Important Contemporary Art.
Red Block (2010), constructed from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire. By El Anatsui2009 Hustle’n’Punch By Kaikai And Kiki (2009). Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas. By Takashi MurakamiMichael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) by Jeff Koons.Balloon Dog (Blue)) by Jeff Koons and the legs of future art patrons.
Looking at the large Jeff Koons sculpture, Balloon Dog, one of which sold for $58.4 million, got me thinking about Steven Soderbergh’s movie, The Christophers. It is about a family hiring a reformed art forger to finish some of their father’s unfinished paintings. He is a famous artist whose work sells for obscene amounts, and the family will get more money if the unfinished art is finished. At the time, the movie got me thinking – obsessing, may be more accurate – about art and what makes one artist important, famous, and expensive, and another artist an also-ran.
My mother used to say, “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, usually when she disagreed with somebody’s choice, but I don’t think she really believed it. And I’m not sure I do either. But what I do believe is that, to a great extent, the sales price of a piece of art is a result of secondary market forces like luck, timing, and dealer hype. And, as time goes on, how famous an artist is becomes the most important factor of all. People like name brands they recognize.
I went through that reconizing known brands, or the smug joy of knowing a artist’s name when we we saw the second huge El Anatsui sculpture – blanket? – made from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire in two days. This blanket was just like the one we had seen at LACMA the day before (no, no, not just like, but easily close enough so I could reconize the artist). In both cases the tapastries are huge and I think that is a big factor in what makes art. Size and complexity can make something a work of art even when it wouldn’t be if it were smaller.
I think that’s what makes Nolan’s Odasy a serious art picture; it’s size and complexity. We saw it in 70MM one night when we were in LA and, although it wasn’t a super huge screen, it was immersive in its detal. It was totally different from seeing a movie on TV.
*The High Line is a 1.45-mile public park and walkway built on an elevated, disused section of the former New York Central Railroad line along the West Side of Manhattan. It is regarded as a great example of transforming an abandoned industrial relic into a model of urban adaptive reuse.
We drove down to Greater Los Angeles last weekend. The nominal reason was to see the new Geffen wing of LACMA (I’m not sure “wing” is the right word; it is really a whole new museum, and, by the way, LACMA is short for Los Angeles COUNTY Museum of Art ). But, I suspect, the real reason for both of us was just to go to one of our very favorite cities and get away from our daily routine. We took the Coast Route to get there, and it was hotter than we expected; Paso Robles was 104 degrees, although it got cooler as we dropped down to San Luis Obispo and we got closer to the coast.
The drive down took longer than we planned because there was heavy traffic most of the way, so we ended up having lunch in San Luis Obispo later than we had planned. San Luis Obispo is an interesting town – partially because it is a college town – for lack of a better descriptor – and partially because almost all the towns and cities along 101 between Paso Robles and Ventura are interesting.
As an aside, we took our electric Kona, and working around charging it took more mental space than we expected. It wasn’t the only thing we talked about while driving; still, we talked about it a lot. We quickly realized there were more Tesla chargers than any other brand, which led us to think about Elon Musk and his successes. He didn’t start Tesla, but when he went in, he went all in. He realized that electric cars wouldn’t sell without convenient charging, so he built chargers. Lots of them. The chargers became another way of making money rather than a problem. Because charging takes time, Tesla is now building Tesla Cafes to go with their charging stations. No other car company has done that; most companies are treating their electric cars as something they have to do. End aside.
Once in LA, well Beverly Hills actually, we checked into our hotel, grabbed a bite to eat that was fine, if not very memorable. The next morning, we went to see the new LACMA. Our LACMA experience started by driving down into the biggest, nicest, emptiest garage I’ve ever been in. Along one wall was a long line of free chargers, which were the slowest we’ve ever plugged into except at home before we upgraded the line (but, hey, they are free although the garage wasn’t).
The architect of the new LACMA wing is Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Before going to Google, I didn’t know anything about Zumthor except that he fit the need for the apparently required out-of-town architect, but I do know Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and I am a big fan of their work, especially their early work during the 50s and 60s . SOM, as they are affectionately called, designed the first International Style building in San Francisco in 1959, the Crown Zellerbach Building, which is one of my favorite buildings anywhere.
Peter Zumthor has become well-known in the architectural world for designs that prioritize the atmosphere – the light and texture, primarily – of how a space feels inside rather than looking great on the outside. Zumthor hasn’t designed many major buildings, but each has become famous (maybe not to you and me, but to other architects, and readers of architectural magazines, anyway). I think the new LACMA is his largest building and it fits his MO perfectly. From the outside, it is not very impressive, but inside, the experience is powerful.
We start by taking an elevator from the garage up to a large concrete open space where a building used to be, and if I remember correctly, a casual outdoor restaurant. The main decoration is composed of a series of bronze Chinese zodiac figures by Ai Weiwei. I think they are great, but they’re leftovers from the previous museum.
I was unimpressed by the new museum when we first saw it, but as we stopped and really paid attention, the building grew on me. It is one floor, about 220,000 square feet, sitting on seven massive concrete support pavilions/pylons/rooms? 30 feet off the ground. You can’t see it in the picture above, but as the building gracefully bends to the right, it goes over Wilshire Boulevard and ends in what was once an employee parking lot (presumably they were given parking rights in the patron’s garage).
The 30-foot space to the gallery floor, along with the 8 – foot thickness of the edge of that visual – first? second? only? – floor warps the building’s scale. The new museum looks smallish, but it is huge. At 220,000 square feet, it is twice as large as the average single-building data center everybody is currently complaining about being so big. The gallery area alone is roughly the size of two football fields, and yet it looks and feels much smaller. That is, until you realize that the windows on the ground floor, in the support structure, are 30 feet high.
Tlali by Mexican contemporary artist Pedro Reyes.
To get to the gallery on what I guess is really the second floor, we have to either climb a long outside stair or take an elevator; we took the elevator, and it was a little weird. There is no lobby, just an elevator door in the side of one of the support pylons. A ticket checker stood next to the elevator door, which is on an outside wall ( although protected – sort of – from the elements by the cantilevered floor above). When the elevator door opens, we are in the gallery with no warm-up.
Reclining sphinx by South Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey.
The entire gallery area of LACMA is on this second floor, and this is the major philosophical difference between Peter Zumthor’s new LACMA and traditional museums. This museum ignores the spatial and cultural hierarchies that almost every museum uses to organize art with European traditions in prime real estate and non-European art in distinct, secondary sections, often treating non-European art as cultural artifacts rather than True Art. Here, all the art is treated equally, although inner sanctums are spread around the gallery space for art that is more light-sensitive.
The shots above and below illustrate how the galleries mix up the art. The sphinx is a modern piece and isn’t kept separate in a contemporary wing; it is positioned in the light-filled Mediterranean gallery alongside ancient Egyptian, Nubian, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Without any additional commentary, here are a couple more photos.
Romano-Egyptian funerary plaster mummy portraits and masks: and MicheleFading Scroll (2007) by El Anatsui For LACMA byJohn Baldessari Stone urns displayed silhouetted against the window overlooking Wilshire Boulevard by unknown Greek and Roman stone carvers.Pond Lily Table Lamp (Model No. 344) by Louis Tiffany (and partial Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child by Mary Cassatt)(On the left) Our Lady of Guadalupe by Sebastián López de Arteaga (1610–1652) and (on the right) The Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos by an anonymous 18th-century Mexican Colonial painter.Split-Rocker by Jeff Koons (37 feet high and weighing over 150 tons, the hollow steel framework holds an internal irrigation system supporting roughly 45,000 living flowering plants and greenery).Dangerous Liaisons(1935) and Stimulation Objective No. 3 (1939) by René Magritte.
We ended the LACMA part of our trip to meet one of Michele’s step-cousins for dinner in Manhattan Beach. It is only a 19-mile drive, but in commuter traffic, it took more than an hour. We had tickets to the museum for 11 AM and left around 4:30 with about an hour and a half for lunch and a walk around the LeBrea Tar Pits. That was not enough time. BTW, the museum was almost empty at 11 and packed after lunch. To be continued…
A couple of weeks or so ago, we saw a basket show by Jeremy Freyan. It was terrific! Both as Art and in its presentation. Freyan is an Indigenous American, and the baskets are in the Passamaquoddy tradition. It takes at least several months to make a basket, starting with searching for and then cutting down just the right Brown Ash tree; this alone can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks of wandering through the forest.
Next, he uses a heavy tool to beat the shit out of the log, causing the wood to separate, naturally along its growth rings. Then he separates these thin layers into small strips of wood, dyeing some and leaving some natural. Only then does Freyan weave the basket from the strips of wood, keeping them wet to keep them pliable. The results are stunning.
But I want to add that they are stunning because we take our time looking at them. We did this for two reasons. Before we walked into the show, we watched a movie detailing the construction of a basket, from felling a tree to making strips of wood and then weaving them into a basket. (Weaving is not very accurate, but it’s the best I can do.)
As an aside, the basket is burned at the end of the film. First, we see a wisp of smoke rising from inside; it could almost be our imagination. Then more smoke, then flames, until the basket is consumed by fire. All that remains of that basket is the image on the film. End aside.
The second reason we took our time and looked at each basket is because of the way they were displayed. They are art, and they are displayed like art. In every other basket show I have seen, or ceramic bowl show, for that matter, the art is displayed as a collection of artifacts, not as a piece of art. The difference was refreshing.
About a month before we saw the Jeremy Freyan show at Stanford, we went to the Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild Show. It was not at a museum but at a local Elementary School in Los Altos. I was shocked at how good many of the quilts were. I was also dismayed that they were not displayed very well – in my humble opinion -making it easier to just mindlessly stroll through, which would have been a mistake because there were quite a few quilts that I thought were superb.
I have been a fan of quilts – especially Amish quilts – ever since I saw a show at the Whitney Museum in the early 1970s, and this show had some of the most interesting quilts I can remember seeing. Seeing the basket show and the quilt show side by side drove home the importance of curation. Still, both shows were worth seeing.
