The National Gallery Has Been Invaded by Suspicious Unclothed Foreign Art

Art, News and Politics

This Washington Post story begins “Washington is a town filled with boobs.” This sentence refers to unclothed statuary. However, it is true in other ways. Authors Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts must have enjoyed writing it.

Robert Hurt, visited the National Gallery of Art ten years ago while in town for a Promise Keepers meeting. He was extremely surprised to find our nation’s gallery liberally stocked with naked statues. Nearly 20 percent of the art in America’s National Gallery–nekkid! Why, he’d never heard of such a thing.

Luckily Hurt is a delegate to the Texas GOP convention. He knew what to do: Give this suspicious foreign statuary a hard smackdown in the party platform. “You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” he argued. “You possibly don’t have nude art in your living rooms. So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?”

Good point. The National Gallery is the front porch of America. Why should that sacred place contain anything more than a porch swing, a welcome mat, and maybe a couple of potted plants? Note that I do say “maybe.” We must be careful about those plants. They should be familiar plants. It would be a terrible shame if the National Gallery of Art contained anything at all to shock or surprise the uneducated, who are the most purely American of us all.

Alas, Mr. Hurt’s proposal did not make it in. He was similarly unsuccessful with his suggestion that Presidential spouses should have term limits. I think this was a mistake. No one should be forced to be married to a President for more than eight years.

(Via Making Light.)

Harpies and Peanuts

Art, Books, Comics, History, , , , , ,

Wilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a biography of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo. So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “On William Beckford’s Vathek”

In the early 16th century, aspiring artist Bartolomeo Torri was thrown out of his teacher’s home after he got a little too absorbed in his anatomy lessons: “for he kept so many limbs and pieces of corpses under his bed and all over his rooms, that they poisoned the whole house,” wrote Giorgio Vasari. Cherubino Alberti fixated on medieval siege engines and filled his home with model catapults. Later, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt believed he was pinched and abused by a “Spirit of Proportion” who could be warded off by pulling grotesque contorted expressions, which Messerschmidt recorded in sculpture.

The cover of Born Under Saturn

Margot & Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn is a history of “the Character and Conduct of Artists,” as the subtitle puts it. And, yeah, a lot of these guys are characters. Others were normal, well-behaved types, but, honestly, you’re not going to read this book for Rubens or Bernini. But Born Under Saturn isn’t a freak show. The Wittkowers are analyzing popular ideas about artists, and although stories of eccentricities, feuds, and crimes make this book more readable than a straight academic treatise they also serve a purpose: the varied mass of biography breaks down cultural stereotypes about artists.

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Doorknob Maze

Art

It’s been a while since I posted any drawings. Actually, it’s been a while since I posted much of anything. I’ll try to fix that in the weeks ahead.

This is an idle sketch I drew a while back, probably while watching TV. Recently I’ve been inking some of these things to keep in practice.

In Which I Worry About My Attention Span

Books, Internet,

I started this blog—ages ago, in internet time—to get my brain working, force myself to react to what I read, and put my thoughts in order. But I’ve never kept it up for very long at a stretch, and longer essays—“longer” in blog terms, anyway—are rare.

I feel like my attention span has atrophied. I’ve noticed I’m not as good a reader as I used to be. Not that I don’t still read quite a lot compared to most people—I finished 83 books last year, more than one a week. And have no problem with reading comprehension. But I read in bits. I’ve always had more than one book going at any given time, but these days I have several, and I rarely sit down with them for sustained periods: I sit through ten or twenty pages and my brain is off on something else.

Mind you, that’s still healthier than the voracious-but-stupid way I read when I was 12 or 13. Often I’d get through a book in a day, but I didn’t retain much. There are books I know I read around that time that left no trace in my memory. I suspect there are others I no longer recall having read at all. These days I remember what I read. But I suspect I’d absorb it even better if I could get back to the middle path I took in my late teens and early twenties: more than a couple of days, less than a couple of weeks.

Continue reading In Which I Worry About My Attention Span →