“The art of complaining is very hard to master. To complain about things in my experience is always lowering. Who wants to draw attention to the fact you have been slighted? Isn’t that in itself a form of failure? Complaining stylishly and with grace and/or flair seems virtually impossible. A good complaint requires both a lightness of tone and high-handedness, humour, collusion from the other party and a quiet tenacity. This is a lot to muster when you’ve just been disappointed.”
Month: June 2008
Looking For Meaning In Poetry
“So why does poetry matter? One reason is that many people still enjoy some sorts of poetry. The one sort they have never liked is the sort they are told to like.”
Germaine Greer Ponders The Muse
“A muse is anything but a paid model. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind. Painters don’t claim muses until painting begins to take itself as seriously as poetry.”
Museum Under The Gun – LACMA’s Transformative Move
“The armed presence of private rent-a-cops mostly transforms a public art museum into a mid-Wilshire branch of Van Cleef & Arpels. It’s hard to imagine almost any scenario in which an art museum guard might shoot someone, but that bizarre thought keeps bumping around in your brain at BCAM. Needless to say, it has a less than salutary effect on the art experience.”
Armed Guards Now Stand Watch Over LACMA Art
“On a recent day, at least three security officers with holstered guns and batons guarded the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art addition. One carries a 9-millimeter pistol. Another, armed with a .38-caliber pistol, is assigned to stand a few feet in front of an artwork with a dead lamb, embalmed in a tank filled with formaldehyde and water, created by British artist Damien Hirst.”
London To Be Open On Sunday (Finally)
To American theatregoers, it seems almost unbelievable that London’s world-famous theatres are dark every Sunday. That tradition is about to change, though, as the UK’s National Theatre is preparing to offer Sunday matinees, with other venues sure to follow. Many in London are wondering what took so long.
National Gallery Plans Blockbuster Renaissance Show
“If London’s National Gallery, under its new director Nicholas Penny, has hinted at the demise of the blockbuster, perhaps that death has been somewhat exaggerated. Its big autumn exhibition, announced yesterday, will be devoted to Renaissance portraits – a subject more or less guaranteed to attract visitors in droves.”
A Twombley Twibute
The name Banksy may be synonymous with graffiti art these days, but where’s the love for a true pioneer like Cy Twombly, asks Jonathan Jones? “He is a painter – and sculptor – who defies every category and transcends every cliché: a man who has never been pinned down and is still working, at 80, with tremendous gusto and creative generosity.”
Hemingway The Poet
Two short poems scribbled by Ernest Hemingway in the back of a first edition volume of short stories are making headlines “as one of the most eye-catching attractions of this weekend’s antiquarian book fair at Olympia.”
Columbus Creates Panel To Seek Arts Sustainability
The city of Columbus may be losing its professional orchestra, but city leaders are hoping to reinvigorate the arts scene as a whole with the creation of “a 21-member panel that will examine city policies and seek long-term funding solutions for local arts groups that often find themselves on shaky ground.”