It’s a unique combination of art and social activism, which will, I hope, cause you to reflect on the beauty and the fragility of both our endangered birds and our imperiled neighborhoods.
Read MoreTwo hundred years ago 17-year-old Thomas Cole emigrated from England to the United States, where he would revolutionize painting in his new country by creating “wild landscapes that were unmistakably American.” Born at the onset of the industrial revolution, Cole discovered in the American wilderness an antidote to the polluted rivers, poisoned air, and exploited working people that he had witnessed in the land of his birth.
Read More"If at first you don't succeed - call an airstrike."
Read MoreIt’s worth thinking about these days, especially today, which honors a man who dedicated his life to protesting laws – of segregation and Jim Crow, of intimidation and all-white juries – that brutally contradicted the principles on which this country was supposedly founded.
Read MoreI'd never heard of the “Wisconsin Idea” – “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom” – until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker set out to dismantle it. Born in the Progressive era, the idea was to make the state education system a “laboratory of democracy.” Walker has backed away from his earlier language to rewrite the university’s mission by removing, "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” and deleting the phrases to "extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus,” "serve and stimulate society,” and “educate people and improve the human condition." Instead, he would have the university’s mission be "to meet the state's work-force needs."
The creepily Stalinist language is gone, dismissed as “a drafting error.” But the utilitarian message lingers.
And then I received this from a friend: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ramped-up horrors abroad in the world, almost feeling like a descent into another Dark Age, and keep coming back to the notion that the only defense and antidote is beauty of whatever kind – it helps to balance the hideous dark stuff and thank God for it all!”
I think of Galway Kinnell, the late Irish poet who wrote, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up . . . and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
We need educated workers. We also need poets.
The scenic beauty and technical sophistication are chilling. The camera looks down from above – the classic angle of cinematic omnipotence – as 21 pairs of men walk along a beach on the southern Mediterranean, waves breaking on the shore, the sea stretching to the flat horizon. Twenty-one men in orange jump suits, each accompanied by another dressed in black, masked and carrying a machete. Those in orange are Coptic Christians. The others are their ISIS executioners. The film, writes The New York Times, features “slow motion, aerial footage and the quick cuts of a music video. The only sound in much of the background is the lapping of waves.” I cannot bring myself to watch this film – which seems intended as a propaganda piece for ISIS’ power and a recruiting tool for fanatic killers – but the still photos have a concern with artistry and technical virtuosity that give them the aura of a horrific ballet.
The mixture of art and propaganda did not begin with ISIS. Critics called the pathologically dishonest Nazi filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, “an artist of unparalleled gifts” who made “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” And D.W. Griffith, whom Charlie Chaplin called “the teacher of us all,” was lionized for The Birth of a Nation, which became a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan during a time of widespread lynching in the South. But what "artist" could have made this slick documentary that celebrates the beheading of 21 innocent men in orange jump suits?
In memory of Judge John H. Mason (1945-2004), who loved the King
Here’s something to make us feel a little older: Elvis Presley would have turned 80 tomorrow. (Former English students, note the use of the future perfect subjunctive.) I remember, in the fall of 1956, watching his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan had said only three months earlier that he’d never have Elvis on his show, calling him “unfit for family viewing” and suggesting he wore “a Coke bottle” inside his pants. But 60 million viewers changed his mind. Among them were my sister and I. She was 13, I was 11. Elvis had barely warmed up when my sister emitted a little squeal. I think she even startled herself. Then she lost complete control. “I can’t help it,” she said apologetically, as she screamed at our small black-and-white TV. I was just disgusted.
Not for the last time did I find myself on the wrong side of history.
Elvis went on to sell 600 million records before he died, a prescription-drug-addicted zombie His last years were enormously sad. He made terrible movies and shallow songs, becoming a bloated, bespangled caricature of a star. He seemed so old. He was 42. But his early music lives, not just in the songs he recorded, but in all the diverse influences he absorbed into it and then sent out in completely new forms. Some resented him for usurping and profiting from black rhythms; others for mongrelizing white country. But he embodied both in a respectful but revolutionary way, one that empowered his music to transcend his biography.
A long time ago a young man set out to make his mark in the commercial art world. He went to work for a major New York gallery, which we’ll call Wildenstein. A few years later the dejected man resigned, saying the world of international art had much to do with moving great sums of money across borders and almost nothing to do with beauty. Art and money: last month an anonymous buyer bought Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” for $142.4 million. Last week the monetization of art was again in the news with Detroit’s Dilemma: should the city tap into its Arts Institute’s extraordinary collection to help pay down its mind-bending debt? You bet, say its creditors, art is not “essential” to Detroit.
I mean, people sell art all the time. It’s why Wildenstein exists. It’s the primary “business” of Christie’s, which Detroit hired to appraise its collection. It’s how the museum got some of its finest pieces in the first place. Why not unload a few and give this reeling, impoverished city a lift? Wouldn’t Van Gogh want to sell his “Portrait of Postman Roulin” to help the city’s workers? Wouldn’t Diego Rivera, whose room of murals celebrates working people, want art to benefit the masses instead of the privileged few?
This dilemma is the unhappy legacy of big money and art, of Wildenstein and Christie’s. But go into the museum. Lose yourself in its beauty. Sell the collection? It would be like selling the city’s soul.
My right-leaning friends insist that the market is the fairest and most efficient arbiter of value. From this I deduce that Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, which sold this week for $142.4 million, is the finest picture ever painted. Its price, Roberta Smith noted, exceeds the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Clearly, art is less in the beholder’s eye than the investor’s pocket. My own modest foray into the art world, however, might contain a gram of caution. Many years ago I bought at Christie’s a very large painting for $1,800. When it arrived at our door, my wife took one look and decreed it would not hang in our apartment. That seemed no way to treat a serious collector, especially one with a formula: I had observed that big paintings generally sold for more than small ones – and mine had the highest square-inch value in the entire auction. Plus, the artist was dead. This was a slam dunk.
Because the painting wouldn’t fit in a taxi, I had to haul it back uptown on the subway. It sold at the next auction for $850.
The value of art also made news in Detroit, where the city-owned Institute of Art teems daily with schoolchildren, staring wondrously at Diego Rivera’s epic mural celebrating the common man. Creditors are pushing the city to sell some of its “priceless” art to pay down some of its $18-billion debt. I wonder what the children think. I wonder what Rivera thinks.
When the curtain rose on Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Apollo Theater in 1957, the cheering audience was stunned into silence. The African Americans who filled Harlem's most famous theater had expected the band to be black. Years later, according to the documentary, Muscle Shoals, Paul Simon called Al Bell at Stax records and said, "Hey man, I want those same black players that played on 'I'll Take You There'."
"That can happen," Bell replied, "but these guys are mighty pale."
"These guys" were the Swampers, a group of north Alabama country boys.
"We didn't expect them to be as funky or as greasy as they were," Aretha Franklin remembered.
American music has been one of the most unifying forces in our history, transcending differences that have polarized the country. In a recent lecture on "Gershwin, Ellington and the Search for an American Sound", Georgetown professor Anna Celenza described a music, anchored in folk, blues and gospel, that has sprung from the lives of Americans, both black and white, and mostly poor. It influenced not only Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue") and Ellington ("Symphony in Black"), but such classical composers as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Antonin Dvorak, the Czech native whose use of folk melodies had a huge impact on American music.
"They saw music as a way of creating community," said Celenza, and I like to think of the American Sound as the bedrock of our sprawling culture, creating harmonies in a land that seems elsewhere discordant and fragmenting.
The tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law school graduate, has brought into focus a host of clichés about big time sports, the rise and fall of heroes, the link between domestic violence and the proliferation of guns, and the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as one of the world’s most violent countries. Steenkamp was shot by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, the sprinter who was born with no fibula and became the first double amputee in Olympic history. His inspiring story of rising above adversity to become a hero to millions has become the all-too-familiar sports story of those we lionize turning into clay. But this story has an extra dimension: the level of violent crime in South Africa and the image of white people barricaded in their houses at night, armed to the teeth. It is an image that sits uncomfortably with that of a country that overcame the most oppressive colonialism and racial apartheid to itself become an inspiration for a continent. Is this too in question?
No. Last month 27-year-old Pretty Yende made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera. That a young black woman could come from a South African township to one of the world’s largest stages would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Her triumph, though, is not only personal because her voice really is a gift to the world. Perhaps we look in the wrong places for hope and inspiration. It is in art that we find the beauty that expresses our common humanity.
On Monday I wrote about language and yesterday I mentioned Ireland. Today I combine the two. I read somewhere recently that in ancient Ireland it was a greater crime to kill a poet than a king. I can’t find a citation and, although it seems apocryphal, I suspect it’s true, because in ancient Ireland poets had equal status with bishops and kings. At any rate, it helps explain the history of a people who have been far better served by their poets than their rulers and have, as a consequence, developed a rich culture and a strong identity that have enabled them to survive centuries of oppression. Perhaps it’s just his Irish-sounding surname, but I believe that Barack Obama’s appeal in 2008 was to the poetry in us. In his rhetoric, in his persona and in a biography that brought together so many disparate strands of America’s heritage, he appealed across conventional political lines in a way that contrasted with the deeply unpoetic presidency of George Bush. It is ironic that the result has been polarization to the point of gridlock and a Republican opponent for 2012 who is nothing if not prosaic.
Not everyone is enamored of the idea of poet as president. In fact, this election is increasingly focused on management styles and problem-solving techniques. But right now, I think what we need above all is a new vision of ourselves as a people . . . such as Havel gave the Czechs, Churchill gave the British, and Lincoln once gave us.
Doc Watson died on Tuesday. Yesterday I listened to some of the recordings he made over his long career and, while I have little musical knowledge and less talent, as Justice Stewart famously said of pornography, I know beauty when I see it . . . or in this case, hear it. Years ago I used to ask myself: who has made a greater difference to the world, Mozart or Napoleon? Winston Churchill or Paul Cezanne? This was not an idle question because I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, and one of my aspirations was to leave behind some small legacy. I thought bigger in those days, but the question was really: who has a more lasting influence on the world – those who seek to create something beautiful, often by withdrawing into a private world, or those who are driven to immerse themselves in public affairs?
I was brought up firmly in the latter camp, taught that leadership meant service to others and being fully engaged in public life, not in the self-absorbed worlds of artists and dreamers. My history books told of the lives of “doers” – generals, statesmen, titans of industry, even, in the modern versions, rebels and labor leaders. Artists were relegated to sidebars in catchall chapters on culture.
But art endures, as empires don’t. And artists have borne witness in ways history texts don’t capture. And beauty seems a greater legacy than conquest.
And Doc Watson, blind since infancy, sure could play.