Brandeis University is looking to raise cash. Its endowment fund reportedly lost 20% of its value from the Madoff scandal. Looking for a disposable asset, it has focused on art. The Cornell Daily Sun worries about the precedent:
The Rose was founded in 1961 to display contemporary and modern art in step with Brandeis’ commitment to promoting the arts in higher education. It remains one of the premier institutions of its kind, containing works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Many of its 7,000-plus works were purchased at the onset of the artists’ careers, and have increased exponentially in value since. The Rose’s collection was valued at about $350 million in 2007.
And Brandeis can put that money to work doing . . . what? Buying more beakers for the chemistry lab? That would at least have the saving attribute of simply favoring one kind of intellectual activity over another. More likely it will be applied to administrative costs, promotional campaigns touting its gender and ethnic sensitivity, newly painted stripes in the parking lot, and other expenditures with no educational benefit.
We should not be surprised since universities have moved purposefully over the past 40 years from being a repository of knowledge to being a repository of grievances.
The decision to close the museum exemplifies the university’s outlook on the value of art: that it is only worth as much as it fetches in the marketplace. Yet, art and museums are invaluable on university campuses because of their intellectual, cultural and scholarly worth both in and out of the classroom.
Selling the great works of the Rose would not only compromise the integrity of Brandeis as an institution of higher education, but would violate the trust of university students, faculty and donors.
All true, but unfortunately curators of knowledge are in short supply. The typical university today is one in which the faculty has conspired in its own marginalization, the donors have favored bricks and mortar or sports trophies over educational substance, and the students have only recently migrated from the wasteland of secondary education with little or no exposure to the arts.
In today’s educational environment where value judgments are condemned and personal whims are glorified, who can complain? Academia has been steadily cashing in its intellectual assets for quite some time.
February 7th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Visual Arts |
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These photos were taken this morning.
January 24th, 2009
Posted by
The Strafer |
Visual Arts |
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From the Los Angeles Times comes a story about an exhibit of communist art set to open “in the middle of the country’s largest Vietnamese population.” How’s this for a subtitle?
The show opening in Santa Ana purposely includes communist symbols, a bold step that curators hope will provoke discussion and tolerance of different political viewpoints.
Boldness lies, I suppose, in advancing the farcical notion that communism has any history of provoking discussion and tolerance. The Vietnamese refugees living in Orange County’s Little Saigon know this first hand. Communism for them is not the utopia imagined by the pacifist, latte-sipping campus oligarchy.
Sponsored by the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Assn., the exhibit includes paintings, photographs, multimedia displays and performances on topics including politics, war, sexuality and youth culture. Called “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks,” the name is a play on the pejorative moniker “fresh off the boat,” a term given to immigrants who came to the United States by boat, including hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who escaped after the war ended.
Yes, pejoratives often invite a discussion of tolerance. A previous effort to reach out to the Vietnamese community through art involved painting a foot bath to resemble the flag of South Vietnam. Who knew that would not be a welcome symbol? But artists of the left are an intrepid lot. Tram Le, one of the curators, said, “I felt the community was on this slippery slope, that we were not progressing toward having open dialogue and being more tolerant of different political viewpoints.”
So if a foot bath won’t make those right-wing rowdies more tolerant, we’ll give them a whole exhibit to overload their senses.
“I think that we were trying to confront that fear head on,” said Mariam Lam, a UC Riverside assistant professor of literature and cultural studies, and board member of the art group. “We are trying to say that the community should be a safe space for people, even protesters.”
In all of this, we see no mention of the viewpoint of the South Vietnamese being represented in this exhibit. What a funny way to build bridges and open a dialogue. A bold way, perhaps! You don’t actually have a dialogue or show tolerance yourself. You simply present your own views and insist on tolerance from the other side.
They call it bold, but this approach evinces the same banality that always characterizes communism – the kind of banality that excites the academic class.
The exhibit will test the Vietnamese American community, said Linda Vo, chair of UC Irvine’s Asian American Studies department.
And there you have it.
January 13th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Visual Arts |
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Is it “just art” when you hang someone in effigy? Leaving aside the question of whether it is art at all, it certainly is not just art. According to the news report:
A Halloween decoration showing a mannequin dressed as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin hanging by a noose from the roof of a West Hollywood home is drawing giggles from some passers-by and gasps of outrage from others.
Chad Michael Morisette is responsible for the display and says “it should be seen as art, and as within the month of October. It’s Halloween, it’s time to be scary it’s time to be spooky.”
Morisette acknowledges that hanging Obama in effigy would be a very different kind of thing. But hey, it’s October, it’s a Republican, it’s a woman . . .
October 27th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Politics, Visual Arts |
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Art and dying. I’m getting a new angle on it, while keeping vigil for a dying relative in a facility called Hospice Atlanta. The facility is beautiful—like leafing through pages of Southern Living or House and Garden. On every table and beautifully lathed shelf stand porcelain vases, artistic boxes of every imaginable shape, and marble, glass, and bronze statues.
Image by freeparking (Creative Commons)
The walls in each room and hallway are covered in art, some original painting, some reproductions. The full gamut is here: seascapes, landscapes, still life, graphics from the Atlanta Historical Society, and even some abstract canvases, all elegantly framed.
As we wait, taking our turns by the bedside, we prowl the halls, styrofoam cups in hand (coffee generously provided by Starbucks). We gather in hushed dialogues along the halls, the paintings serving as a benevolent stage set.
One administrator explained that placing such vivid art and artifacts ranked high in their aesthetic plan for this center. People, she reminded me, need to be uplifted when everything else is bleak.
In a culture that has forgotten the ability of art to empower, encourage, and restore, it’s refreshing to find this standard expressed so clearly, particularly in a place where everyone is looking into the eyes of death.
The pseudo art of our time that purports to reflect the world as it really is reflects the world only as imagined by small minds, as through a glass darkly. The art here, however, is a reminder of beauty and of things that endure. There are some sentimental pieces, to be sure, just as sentimentalism plays its part in the real world. And there is the reassurance of images classical and timeless. Boughs of flowers, ocean crests, dusky mountains, a silver goblet and pear, a stately building of times gone by, the face of a finely bred hunting spaniels, portrait of mother and child, these are the elements of life and art too often ridiculed. And yet precisely these elements reach out to us here, today, offering solace in the midst of pain and hopelessness.
October 10th, 2008
Posted by
Professor Carol |
Visual Arts |
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Bruce Elliot hung a nude portrait of his daughter in his Chicago bar. To cover his actions, he painted the face of Sarah Palin on the nude and added some Alaskan props. Surveying the completed work, which has all the aethestic qualities of a cheap paint-by-the-numbers set, he declared it “bizarrely fascinating.”
Despite their political differences, Elliott admits to a bit of a crush on the Alaska governor. He began painting her smile and trademark glasses, he said, before filling in the details: a gun, red high heels, polar bear rug, rugged Alaska landscape and a scared moose. His daughter, who looks a little like Palin and does a great impression of her, served as model for the governor’s body.
No doubt this will boost his beer sales, perhaps earn a few extra votes for McCain, and probably increase the number of people asking Elliot’s daughter for a date.
The online poll that accompanies the news report indicates that 35% of readers do not find Elliot’s actions offensive, which proves that feminism is an abject failure and calling something art can excuse any moral depravity. Tastelessness, of course, endures all things.
September 30th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Politics, Visual Arts |
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I remembered it in a dream last night. It was an oblong board on the wall above my bed that pictured a midnight sky with big stars. Mounted on some sort of pressboard, it had some sort of 1950’s-surface sticky enough to hold up cardboard 
figures of Peter Pan, Wendy, Michael, and John. I can’t remember whether these figures flew over the rooftops of London, or the islands of Never Land, but they were mine to arrange and play with, which I did endlessly (especially when I was supposed to be sleeping).
How startling to recall it after so many decades! Even while I dreamed, I was struck by how enchanting it had been. Gosh, I had played with those figures until they tattered and fell apart sometime in my pre-teen years.
Can children today, surrounded by blazing images of everything, enjoy the same creative stimulus from objects in their rooms? Specifically, I thought about the constantly changing screen-savers on computers and cell-phones. None of the images lingers long enough to mean anything.
For that matter, how does a child’s imagination respond to the stimulus of constantly changing digital photo-frames? While on the surface these gadgets seem like a wonderful invention, I suspect that the human mind responds far more creatively, if given a limited visual frame of reference. Isn’t that where the imagination begins?
Photo by pineapplebun (Creative Commons)
September 29th, 2008
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Professor Carol |
Education, Visual Arts |
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Pia Lindman has been rehired by Yale. Lindman gained notoriety earlier this year as the faculty advisor who authorized and presumably encouraged Aliza Shvarts to concoct a senior art project supposedly comprised of her own self-induced miscarriage. On that subject, see an earlier post: “Arts, Shvarts!”
Candace de Russy notes the prevalence of this aesthestic trend in academia (more accurately a rejection of aethestics) and provides some background on “body art” in which the artist uses his own body as the subject and object of art. She concludes:
This is the lineage of Shvarts’s sanguinary project — original only in that she, unlike most other female body artists, planned to use pregnancy and miscarriage as her principal medium. In her 1995 book, Lucy Lippard found this aspect of women’s performance art “curious,” opining that maybe “procreativity [would be] the next taboo to be tackled.”
Shvarts did not disappoint, tackling the procreativity taboo with a vengeance. To what extent did Lindman and other members of Yale’s art department tutor and encourage her in this repellent plan? Neither Shvarts nor Yale is telling. But one thing is certain: Yale’s failure to prevent Lindman and her kind from influencing impressionable undergraduates is testament to the university’s slavish cowardice in the face of a decadent and destructive ideological fashion.
But of course Lindman was rehired. Imagine the outraged faculty if Yale had turned instead to someone with more traditional views, someone who aspires to beauty, someone who rejects political banality as the artistic ideal. A professor holding such views would be a rarity. Would Yale dare to look outside the clubby confines of academia? Could such an outsider survive in the art department of a modern university, or even want to try?
September 13th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Education, Visual Arts |
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“Why the slow, angsty movie-music at the end? I thought someone in the Politburo had died.” Mickey Kaus on the spectacle at Mile High.
Nothing To Do with Religion? Now on exhibit in Italy is Martin Kippenberger’s “Zuerst die Fuesse,” a sculpture that depicts a frog being crucified.
The 1990 wooden sculpture shows the crucified frog nailed through the feet and hands like Jesus Christ. The frog, eyes popping and tongue sticking out, wears a loincloth and holds a mug of beer and an egg in its hands.
The Pope has called it blasphemous. But . . .
The museum said the 3-foot (1-meter) -tall sculpture has nothing to do with religion, but is an ironic self-portrait of the artist and an expression of his angst.
That’s rich. In an age when art historians and critics can find gender and racial themes lurking in most every work of art (see, e.g., Roger Kimball’s Rape of the Masters), they can no longer find a religious theme in a crucifixion.
The RNC Welcoming Committee. Authorities in the Twin Cities seized weapons and other devices of mayhem from anarchists who describe themselves as the “welcoming committee” for the RNC convention. They have enlisted the support of other anarchists groups across the country for the purpose of committing criminal acts to disrupt the convention. Someone commented on the story:
Anarchists sure have lots of committees.
Rooting for the Hurricane. The wind has been blowing in the Democrats direction ever since Katrina, when the incompetence of state and local officials was trumped by the incompetence of the White House communications director, Scott McClellan. Some, like former DNC chairman Don Fowler and propagandist Michael Moore, are now expressing giddiness over the prospect of another hurricane hitting New Orleans at the start of the Republican Convention.
August 31st, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Religion, Visual Arts |
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The Friday martini posts continue this week with a photo from Ken Johnson’s photographic series “Ode to the Martini.” Concerning this one, “Friday After Work,” Ken rightly notes:
It is important for the drink to be cold. Not cool, cold.
Sounds right to me. If this doesn’t inspire you to knock off early, then you are way too diligent.
Photo © Ken Johnson. Used by permission.
June 13th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure, Visual Arts |
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