Somehow I missed the 16,400 internet posts reporting that the ill-fated luxury liner, Costa Concordia — presumably still on its side in the waters off Tuscany’s Isola del Giglio — was the setting for the first act of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest feature, Film Socialisme (2010).
What does it mean to be “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings”?
Early this week, The New York Times published an article under that title by longtime Philadelphia Inquirer film critic (and former Village Voice art critic) Carrie Rickey. It told the story of an independent film producer named Lindsay Doran, whom Rickey describes in the third paragraph as “a missionary for mood-elevating films.”
It seems as if Doran became enamored of a book by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, and “began rewatching films through the lens of what Dr. Seligman identifies as the five essential elements of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. (He refers to these elements collectively as perma.)”
What do we see when we look at art? What do we want to see? Answers come readily and are various: we seek beauty; enlightenment; pleasure; escape from ourselves; insight into those same selves.
When Katherine Kuh asked Edwin Dickinson about his painting, “Self-Portrait in Uniform” (1942), where the artist depicts himself in a mirror dressed as a Union soldier, he answered, “I’ve had a number of hobbies; one was the Civil War. For about nine years I was particularly interested in that subject and the portrait comes from that time.”
Any year that begins with the caucusing of Republicans in Iowa and the sacking of Jim Hoberman at the Voice can come to no good. Yet here we are embarking on a new venture, Hyperallergic Weekend, to see what we can make of it.
The death of Kim Jong Il has reinforced the feeling that North Korea may just be one of the most remote places on earth, yet it is a distance not based on geography but psychology. Looking at the retro-seeming images from this faraway land makes me think its population of 24 million has been trapped in amber for decades.
On December 19th of last year, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe gave a “walk-in performance” in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet — poet, playwright, novelist, radical leftist, hustler and thief.
It was also the final day of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, which started three days earlier when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire and burned to death to protest the confiscation of his merchandize by the police. The timing of the performance and the Tunisia riots were, of course, purely a coincidence.
On December 19th of this year, alone with her guitar, Patti Smith returned to the same place — now occupied by an enormous obelisk holding aloft Sanja Iveković’s golden, hugely pregnant “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” — to mark Genet’s 101st birthday.
I’m almost embarrassed to confess I’ve only just recently made the acquaintance of Wayne Thiebaud’s work. The man’s been painting upwards of 70 years and spent much of his time in California. I, despite my accumulation of years in New York, also consider California my home. There’s really no excuse.
Perhaps from embarrassment or hitting a deep seated pain. A sensitive nerve that doesn’t like to be touched or exposed. Whatever the particular cause, its effect is a shutter that runs down the spine. A quivering sensation starting at the nape of the neck and rolling like a barbed ball of wire down each vertebrate, prickling until it strikes the tailbone and exits the body. The shoulders shift a bit at the beginning to reorient their position, and the back wiggles at the release of each tingle. There is an old adage that instructs ‘shake it off’ when something upsetting occurs. This advice incited our inquiry.
MÉRIDA, MEXICO — Over the past two years planet art has born witness to a drastic metamorphosis. The mental apparition of “Asian Art,” inhabiting its blanket concept, was once as innocuous as Casper the friendly ghost. Westerners were at leisure to muse and amuse themselves with its mysteries and exoticisms, with the fleeting attentions of a visitor into another lord’s cabinet of curiosities.
Today our imaginations and anticipations have fed it to megalithic proportions. And the economic boom of contemporary art in the 21st Century continues to relentlessly close the gap between the world’s cultures of expression, to the point where the bedsheets of West and East have begun to rub up against one another — sometimes roughly. There is even talk of the voracious appetite of the Yellow Peril of Asian Art, positioning its markets and state-ordained “cultural industries” to consume planet art altogether.
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