A Sense of Time

This Monday, so many art writers writing about each other instead of about art. Noah Becker sums it up, and says it's maybe just too hard to write about the art itself. Yes it is, and I'm going to take a stab at some art that is hugely complex. Hard to put words to what I feel about it, but here goes.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite thing to do is to wander through to the medieval section. I love those polychrome statues of saints and important persons, love them because they reveal the essence of the real people they once were. I like to imagine what their lives must have been like, birth to death and and the discomforts in between.

At the Brooklyn Museum, I found correspondences between Kiki Smith's cast aluminum figures in the exhibition Sojourn, installed in a series of rooms on the fourth floor, and the Egyptian figures that are part of the exhibition To Live Forever. In both exhibitions, each figure imparts a sense of time transcended, of a permanent present that is rooted in the life of the person depicted. In an eerie way, the viewer senses a vision that emanates not from the artist's skill but from the statue itself. Each figure creates a tangible space around it. As I stood beside Smith's Annunciation (shown above), not knowing exactly what its blank eyes had seen or were seeing now, I knew that I too was experiencing the numinous. It came as no surprise to read that Smith has a deep knowledge of medieval art, or that her figures installed in the 18th century period rooms at the museum were right at home. I learned too that the ancient Egyptians believed that funerary statues contained the spirit of the deceased, and that a possible reason for the broken noses of so many of them was to prevent the spirit from coming back to life.

Sojourn is a new iteration of Smith's exhibition Her Home, installed in 2008 at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld and the Kunsthalle Nuernberg. In the accompanying catalog, Krefeld Director Martin Hentschel describes Her Home as "a scenario of life face to face with transience." Her work "links spirit, human and animal worlds," and in this way, I think, is very much like the art of ancient Egypt. Yet the title of the Egyptian exhibit, To Live Forever implies a different outcome to transience. At the Brooklyn Museum, transient time and eternity seem somehow the same.

Sojourn continues through September 12. To Live Forever is on view through May 2. The statuary at the Met is forever.

More on Kiki Smith
slide show
Brooklyn Museum
Flickr Source

A Kuniyoshi Tour-de-Force

Toward the latter part of 2009, this blog kind of got away from me, or I from it, but I am back and planning to make it a weekly post again. Rainy Monday seems like a good time to begin. I'm in New York, focused on Japanese woodblock and my own beginning efforts in that direction, and I am looking, looking, looking. More than 100 of Utagawa Kuniyoshi's prints from the first half of the 19th century are on exhibit at the Japan Society. I spent several hours there yesterday, and then, it being a perfect Sunday afternoon for walking, continued on to the Asia Society where two exhibitions, Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art and The Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: from River Plain to Open Sea, are on view.

The title Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters barely begins to describe the richness of imagery in Kuniyoshi's prints. There are warlords, Kabuki actors, feuding clans, beautiful women, exemplary women, landscape elements derived from the Dutch, and indeed, monsters, demons and ghosts, along with oversized toads, cat spirits, and politicians rendered as turtles. Equally fascinating for me were the patterned depictions of nature: floating leaves on shimmering river water, pouring rain (described as a tour-de-force on the part of the block carver) and subtle color fades in skies and sunsets. For the aspiring student, most valuable of all, examples of Kuniyoshi's sketchbooks and a few of the key block drawings that provide the line elements for the prints. A related exhibition, The 36 Views of Fuji by Hiroshige is at Ronin Gallery through March 31. I will see that later this week.

Now that I've gotten started there is much I could say about what I notice as obvious contrasts between the exciting line and vigorous color of the Kuniyoshi images that have had such an influence on manga, and the quiet presence of Vietnamese objects and Chinese scroll painting. My work as viewer is different depending on what I'm seeing. Entering into the space of the scroll painting, or even standing quietly before the dun tones of a large ceremonial vessel, I am making a journey into myself. But Kuniyoshi takes me out into other worlds that mirror faces and forms of his own time and also reflect the issues and mores of the 21st century.

Image credit: Kuniyoshi Samurai Print
Japan Society
Asia Society

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Stuck in the middle

Coming home from Austin TX I had a 3 1/2 hour layover in Atlanta. Post-Christmas Day 2009 that seems like not such a big deal. Restaurant opportunities in airports have improved greatly since 9/11, and we expect that in the future, as we arrive 4 hours in advance of flights, we’ll have time for 10 course French dining. But to return to my layover, as I finally settled down at the gate, the expanse of windows on the opposite wall gave onto the most spectacular sunset I have ever seen. The entire sky glowed red-orange, and silhouetted in the foreground, prehistoric shapes moved, the blackened tails of Delta’s jetliners.

On the Atlanta-Portland leg of my journey, travelers were reading books. Not Kindles, but bonafide tree-derived books. As a portable means of entertainment, books still have cachet. You can hold them, you can write in them, you can loan them to friends. They are so much more portable than the stone tablets that were once in vogue. As someone who has been plagued by eyestrain since college, I have avoided small electronic screens, and yet, the fun of Bakugan and manga lead me to believe that VOOKS may be the now big thing. If you’re not familiar with VOOKS you can learn more by clicking on VOOKS. Download them for your iPhone or the web, get fit in 90 seconds, cook Japanese and reinvent beauty, in multisensory experiences that work in the same way dreams do, leading you from one strange landscape to another.

Back to that strange landscape out the airport window – among all the waiting travellers, there was only one (besides me) who paid any attention to the sunset at all, and even the fact that he went to the window and photographed it was not enough to cause the people around him to look up.

To Plant a Tree

To plant a tree in rocky soil, every day dig the hole a little wider, a little deeper. For a small person with just a spade and a limited amount of time to spend each day, there’s no way to do it all at once. What kind of tree should it be? A big branchy tree like an oak or an elm, a tree for the ages. The metaphors for art and life are obvious.

Come inside, look at the books and magazines on the table and floor, and write down the titles of those on the tops of the piles. The Wild Braid, The Lightning Field, L’Homme nu, The Language Instinct, Modern Painters, Bulgaria, Art on Paper, Manzoni (with an image of himself thumbing his nose at the world), The Immense Journey, The Doctrine of Recognition. Pretty representative: a naked human standing in a field of lightning rods trying to communicate with other humans, hopeful but with an attitude.

Now pull out one of these books, Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid and open it to a random quote. “I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live – to grow, to bear fruit.”

Oak tree courtesy of the website it's nature.

View of Mount Katahdin

I’ve been traveling around to the Bowery, Chelsea, Soho, Japan, China, Afghanistan, Brooklyn and Italy, the top of Mount Katahdin, and also Winnipeg. Not to mention a Grand Tour through Europe. As you can imagine this has meant a lot of walking. I’ve also vegged in my apartment for hours at a time, thinking only about sediments, the mechanics of plate tectonics, and wthether Neanderthals spoke as we do. It seems they did not, and that what defines us as human is the ability to express thought through complex language structures.

In the tradition of Shingon, or Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, the ineffable is beyond language and can only be expressed through mandalas, mantras, and mudras. We are brought to point of contact with other worlds through meditating on paintings and through phsyical position, and this is how I came to the foot of Mount Katahdin while standing on Manhattan ground. Sam Cady’s constructed paintings, on view at Mary Ryan, combine the precision of Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints with the spatial perspective of Chinese landscapes, while at the same time being firmly part of the Western landscape tradition. In the view of Mount Katahdin for instance, the shape of the canvas is an inverted trapezoid in which the rhythm of color runs from the slightly inflected dark blue of Chimney Pond at the painting’s base to the profusion of detail and light on the Knife Edge at the top. The perspective is precise, the observation of detail so uncanny that as viewer, I seemed to stand exactly at the bottom of the mountain. (You can see the painting if you follow the link below.) In another canvas that is a narrow horizontal strip of island and water, I was further down in the water, as if swimming or in a boat. A very small canvas captures the distance, the temperature and the great size of the iceberg that is its subject. To experience these landscapes as Cady has done and intends for us to do, we stand with him and with them, and the satisfaction of this communication is that as artist Cady allows us the opportunity to do equal work.

The show at Mary Ryan is up through October 17. Japanese mandalas are at the Met through November 29 in the Sackler Wing. Katahdin image courtesy of Wikepedia.

Art Tours

If the Artist is Tour Guide where are we going? Into the past, into the future, into an altered present? Art is the craft of aesthetics, a Sunday kind of love, a discipline that requires total commitment. Last night I went down to the Lower East Side to an opening where the artist purported to give us a look into the past of Romantic landscape painting. He’d made an installation out of lots and lots of candy colored striping variously suspended from the ceiling and applied to the walls, and also fuzzy digitized images, and it was so fun to hear the popgun pops of taped down mounds of bubble wrap on the floor as we walked across them. The artist here was tour guide through the accumulations of his studio, advertising a look at Caspar David Friedrich-land, where once real hunters in Austrian get-ups might have been shooting boar. But the tour was a flop. The emperor’s new clothes had more going for them.

Thence to Soho to an exhibition that was nothing but paintings, and this one a lesson in why painting second-hand Romanticism is an irrelevant practice. Here the tour bus loaded with artisans never even left the station. It makes no sense to paint what’s already been painted, and it’s equally true that not every experiment with installations is of interest. What’s lacking in both cases is discipline and rigorous editing so that the end result has something to tell us. All dedicated artists seek an audience, all serious viewers want to come away with something more than entertainment. But it’s failure of imagination that allows us as viewers and artists to believe that either the viewer or the artist should do all the work. Just as a profusion of tweets is not a novel, neither does an unedited stream of video nor the detritus of the studio constitute art. Some sort of intelligent shape has to be imposed on it by the artist in order to convey a message to the viewer. Let us not venture further into whether the results are Vermeer or Shakespeare or not, but only remark that while everyone has a nugget of creative instinct, only some have what it takes to pan for gold.

As I finished this blog, into my inbox popped an invitation to what I guarantee will be a tour through some serious art and first-rate painting by Katherine Bradford,Meghan Brady, Cassie Jones, Don Voisine, Mark Wethli and others. Be sure to check out Chunky Monkey at Red Flagg in Chelsea next Thursday night, September 17, 6-8 P.M. and through October 17. Money will be refunded if you're not absolutely satisfied.

Ekphrasis at UMF

“Reading drawings is like leafing through a book for answers, or turning a kaleidoscope until the bits fall into place.” So I wrote for my installation reading the landscape at the University of Maine/Farmington eleven years ago. I still believe that the landscape can be read, that it organizes itself in signs and equivalences, that every branch and every evening primrose is doing something that has meaning for each of us.

During a period of years from 2001 through 2005, I did some 250 gestural drawings of periwinkle shells and flowers. Those drawings have existed as discrete images until now, when in grouping them for the ekphrasis exhibition at Farmington I have been mindful of making connections between the purely visual and the literary. Sometimes the drawings tell their own stories. Other groupings are inspired by poems, as Buson’s haiku: “peony scattering/have piled up/two-three petals.” For the second time in my installation work, I have found inspiration in John Ashbery’s poetry. This time, I borrowed a title from “Some Trees” which begins “These are amazing: each/joining a neighbor, as though speech were a still performance.”

The methodology of each drawing was also simple performance. I laid down an ink or watercolor wash, dropped an ink line or periwinkle shells into it, and recorded the movement of its happening. The gestures are a calligraphy that has correspondences in Asian art, so the exhibition will include a Chinese scholar’s desk that the Curator, Sarah Maline, has very kindly offered include. I am also indebted to Sarah for the opportunity to bring a new dimension and new vocabulary to my work about the landscape.
And next week, possibly, I'll have images from the show.

Exhibition dates: September 3-24, with a reception on September 10.

Ekphrasis: Nature’s Spreadsheet

Ekphrasis: a lucid self-contained explanation or description; the word made visible; words that describe something visual; by extension, visual art that is poetic or deals in words. . . . . The University of Maine at Farmington will explore the concept in a September show that includes my work along with that of five other artists and poets. In 1998, I mounted an installation at UMF entitled “Reading the Landscape.” My paper articulations were overwritten with text, which added content to the gestural imagery that in turn formed an intermediate layer on paper recycled from previous installations. This time I’m foregoing the text. Instead I am using gestural drawings to make storyboards whose narratives will depend on subtle variations – the bend of stems, the dispersion of periwinkle shells on ink wash.

I still believe that landscape is best understood as a written phenomenon, but I have become more attuned, to paraphrase something I read years ago, to the way nature reveals itself in multitudes and multiplicities. Repeats of a single gesture, rows of periwinkles and daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace, multiples of drawings in columns and grids, are another way to invent an installation.

The Holy Shoe

Missed posting last Monday - it's too summer in Maine - but I did have a thought resulting from having heard an excellent "fireside chat" between the Farnsworth Art Museum's Roger Dell and Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a while the discussion centered around "the whole issue of curatorial independence" which can be something of a headache for directors. When the phrase was uttered, I must have been in some sort of synesthetic mode because what I heard was "the holy shoe of curatorial independence." Or was that "holey shoe?" I think of saints and beggars. Curators may be either or both. Can't go very far with that thought, but I can report on my ducks. Last week the mother ended up dead in the ditch, and of the eight now teenage offspring, only five remained. I suspect a run-in with a truck. And today it appears that one of the five lies flattened in the road. No one's going to make way for ducklings on Route One.

image courtesy of Flickr

Frog Pond

Walking around the rim of the pond tonight I counted 9 frogs. Now and then I heard a vrump and a ribbit that gave away the presence of other frogs under the rocks.

Is there a Maine aesthetic that can be sussed out, even in the work of artists who live far away? Were they born here? Did they spend time at Skowhegan, or simply dip a toe in the waters of some summer camp at Pemadumcook Lake? I think the experience of place is indelibly imprinted in an artist’s work no matter how far she may roam. And I don’t believe you have to be born here to be inoculated with the germ.

The giveaway in an artist’s work could be the green-orange matrix operative in his paintings. It could be the love of water, because you’ll never die of thirst in Maine. It could be the certain light that inhabits Alex Katz’s paintings. It could be that it’s always landscape bound. We have more landscape here than anything else, and so even abstraction, for instance the complexity of line in Fred Lynch and Anna Hepler’s drawings, is derived from the confusion of natural phenomena that we see around us every day. If you’ve read this far, I’d really like to know your thoughts on the subject, and whether there are other operative motivations than landscape.

Landscape art is not a zzzzzzzzz

Landscape remains one of the great subjects of art even though it’s no longer thought relevant to paint a scene of what’s seen. The artist for whom landscape is inspiration has to actively enter the dialogue with other forms of contemporary art than painting. Hamish Fulton takes long walks. Christo and Jeanne Claude stage installations in significant places like Central Park and Berlin. Environmental interventions (eco-ventions)are the preferred way of calling attention to the abuses contributing to global warming.

Yet it remains true that for us as visual artists, the only way to give lasting expression to our feelings about the landscape is through the visual formalities of drawing and painting. So now instead of painting scenes, we paint paintings based on what we’ve done. Process is product. Nancy Manter is a case in point. Her process is to make marks not on paper or on canvas but in the landscape itself, and then to photograph the marks. Andy Goldsworthy has done this for many years, but Manter does not stop at photo-documentation. She uses the photographs as a matrix for some very sophisticated imagery developed with distemper and collage on dibond aluminum panels. Ice, mud and water are the canvases in which she incises gestural abstractions; the collaged and painted extrapolations appear to be as un-programmed as the natural world itself, but the visual choices she has made are calculated to make us notice that world afresh.

Out on Moody Mountain this weekend I was momentarily mesmerized by the sough of the wind in the trees. It had some of the effect of looking at a Manter painting, with the difference that wind is up there in the air, whereas a Manter painting is like feeling the rush and slip of water over mud.

The exhibition remains on view at Waterfall Arts in Belfast through August 28.

Some Portland Elements

A man calls to the sea and the sea answers. A man’s voice sends out messages and the sea responds. The sea responds with a force all out of proportion to the songs of the man. The sea is an uncontrollable force, with a song of its own that would drown any human voice, except that the man’s voice has doubled and tripled over on itself and can still be heard in the troughs of the waves. I thought of Shackleton and his men on the South Georgia Sea. I thought of the voice of God sounding over the darkness of the deep. I thought of the Hindu concept of vac, akin to the Greek concept of logos, and I thought, “in the beginning was the Word.” The next day I went to the Portland Observatory, heard the story of the great Portland conflagration of 1866 and looked out from the observatory deck toward the sea hidden by a fog that moved across the landscape as though it were smoke from a dying fire.

The man who daily calls forth the sea is Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. His video The Same Problem is currently on view at MECA. The Portland Observatory is located on Congress Street on Munjoy Hill and offers tours to the very top.

Photo from the observatory deck by Sean Flaim.

Geanticlines and Slumps

Deduction from facebook posts: It’s hot in Texas and California. Not here though. We are getting ready to build an ark. It has surely rained for forty days now, and no signs of stopping. Was Noah’s flood a tsunami, or an expansion of the Black Sea? Geological evidence provides clues but no answers. Reading about geology, I’ve learned about regoliths, orogenies, geanticlines and slumps. I’m trying to work out a new group of installations based on sedimentary rock, and until I do it’s slow blogging. Thoughts like stones sliding along on a thin lubricant of salt, piling up at the base of the slope, in gravitational tectonics of the mind.

We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that their stories are one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.
-Hugh McDiarmid

Oh Ye of Little Faith

The phoebes have three very hungry, very orange mouths to feed. The duck and her seven ducklings are taking the path up from the pond. And to think that I, for weeks now, have doubted even the existence of the mother duck, so well had she hidden herself, though her nest must be close by the creek.

In his book Earth: an Intimate History, Richard Fortey writes about tectonics and the fault line where Africa and Europe meet. All the alps of Europe were squeezed out of a seam in the earth no more the twenty kilometers wide, and extruded northward like pasta or spaetzle, in layers and layers of metamorphic rock. It’s a similar fascination to me that a sweater can be made from a long piece of string, or that babies arrive from tiny blobs of genetic material.

As I hope to breach the current impasse in my studio practice, perhaps it’s not too much to wish that something be building below the surface of my thinking to come forth in a rush of inspiration, or hatch like ducklings in seven permutations of a single mother concept. What power keeps the baby phoebe stock-still on the edge of the nest til it’s ready to fly?

On Route One-A

I feel obligated by my own sense of duty not to skip another week of blogging, but it is after all, as of next week, summer, and instead of racking up shows that I’ve seen, I give you this: three moose, various ducks one of whom is utterly comfortable begging for a handout, tadpoles and frogs a go go, just tonight a deer in the driveway, and 4:30 A.M. wake-up calls by a very loud robin. Such is the life of the Maine artist on Route One. It’s a wonder I ever get to the studio.

But I do, and I also made it up Route One-A to Bangor today to the University of Maine Museum of Art to catch Vessels Absent, Aaron Stephan’s exhibit of humanoids cum packing crates, arranged like spectators at an art exhibit. Aaron’s work is born at the intersection of art criticism and craft. What is art, anyway? Is it the ability to make objects, or the gift of allowing those objects to comment on themselves and on art in general?


The packing crates reminded me of Mark Tansey’s “The Innocent Eye,” but I wondered too about the spillage of shredded paper at the base of each crate. Are one’s thoughts about art always so transparently “out there” for other spectators to see? As I pondered the question, I found myself standing contraposto just like one of the packing crates. And I can't leave without noting that the ink drawings in multiples of 64 comment not only on their old master sources and on Andy Warhol, but also on every artist's struggle to get it right.

Participatory Art

According to Dave Hickey in The Invisible Dragon, a book of essays on beauty I’m currently reading, all art up until the seventeenth century was participatory. The people who looked at paintings back then believed in the sacredness of the subject depicted, or had a window into another world of which they felt a part. These days, we look on painting's subjects with dispassion. To follow Hickey’s thread, artists have come up with other ways to get us involved in their art, performance and installations being two such methods.

Aesthetics are inherent in work where the artist is not out to create beauty, but to demonstrate an abstract principle. Take for instance the principle of modulation. Installation artist Amy Stacey Curtis theorizes modulation by putting a rainbow-colored piece of paper inside a tin can, setting the can on the floor, and having her audience walk around it so that the color inside the can is seen to change from red to yellow to green to blue to red. But just as one human does not make a race, so one tin can cannot not give the full effect of color modulation, and the completed installation, exhibited in Brunswick, Maine in 2004, consisted of a circle of 2,304 cans, around which viewers were asked to walk slowly and meditatively. A later version was over 8,000 cans big.

The larger principle supporting Curtis’ work is that everything we humans do affects everything and everyone else. The installation pieces in Curtis’ solo biennials are participatory, as for instance a floor maze where persons entering and leaving in orderly progression emit random sounds, so that the result is something like a flattened tower of babble. In another, viewers walking a line next to a series of pendulums cause the pendulums to sway. No man is an island, but that he ripples the air where he goes. In yet another, photo overlays of many faces make one believable androgynous face.

Curtis examines chaos, not the blow-em-up variety, but a more subtle dis-order that is orderly in its affect. Think of chaos not as a cataclysmic disruption but as gentle revolution: order>chaos>order>chaos>order. As participants in her installations, we combine and uncombine elements, from pattern to random and back again. Installations are made and unmade, labor intensive, maximal in numbers of components, zen-minimal in concept, the actions deceptively simple to perform.

And where the biennials happen is also important. The unused mills Curtis chooses for her installations carry vestigial reminders of multiples of humans performing repetitive tasks. For a complete rundown on the biennials, visit her website and check out her youtube video.

The Responsibilities of Art

"In the meantime, Neto's vast playpen is a good reminder that there are art worlds within art worlds and fields of 'otherness' not yet conquered because we stay too focused on what peaks and speaks (or used to peak) in auction houses."

"Many of our artists, suffering the repercussions of this desacralized mentality, have pretended for some time now that painting is merely a way of solving formal problems. The total opposition between art and life that formalism proposes exempts art from its moral tasks."

The first quote is from John Perreault's Artopia blog, and the second from Suzi Gablik's book, Has Modernism Failed?. Twenty-five years separate the two. Are the artists who play in the participatory fields of otherness the same ones who have re-sacralized art by restoring its moral tasks? In 1984, Gablik was complaining about the lack of moral and ethical positions taken by contemporary (Western) art, a lack which resulted from our producer/consumer society in which the individual's desires trumped the common good.

I'm also reading The Invisible Dragon by Dave Hickey. This book is a group of essays on beauty originally published in 1993, and occasioned by "the plague of intellectual dishonesty that infected every aspect of the controversy surrounding the public exhibition" of Robert Mapplethorpe's pornographic photographs. Again, a text about the function of images and the responsibilities of the artist. Would the great art of the Renaissance have remained so great to this day, had it not once addressed the moral issues of its time?

Is art that refuses to address life and the human condition ultimately destined for the trashcan? Does every artist have a moral responsibility to the rest of humanity? I'm not arguing for any particular brand of morality, just making a roundabout case against indifference, and looking for art that engages - intelligently and passionately - what it means to be human.

The Flaying of Dudley

If you’re looking to incite discussion on facebook, you should become a fan of Julian Schnabel. In the melee I’ve forgotten now which of my fb friends had steered me in that direction, but I know for certain the friends who think I’m wrong-headed. What I said was that I’ve always liked hubris when it’s art-driven, and that I thought The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. I did not say I like Schnabel’s paintings. The plates on velvet never lived up to Schnabel’s ambition or to the hype he generated for them, but I do remember liking il cardinale if that’s indeed what he was, painted on the ceiling of a portico at PS 1, above a refectory table. There was an unintended existential vacuum that magnified the Renaissance antecedents of the space.

So what is hubris?? Marsyas had it. It’s presumption, originally toward the gods, that one is better than one’s betters. A long time ago, in the Art Starry Eighties, Schnabel set himself up as the peer of Duccio, Giotto and van Gogh. Things have calmed down some since. Schnabel is acknowledged to be a better film maker than painter or real estate mogul. Lesser lights like Damien Hirst have come and almost gone, John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage have had their moment, and Jeff Koons is making accessible balloon dogs instead of unfathomable basketballs in water tanks. Art is having an extended moment of anti-heroism, which is not to say that artists’ egos have ceased to exist, only that it’s become unfashionable to display them.

But I like poor flayed Marsyas for believing that he could, even when it turned out he couldn’t. Apollo’s such a buzzkill.

Run for the Roses

So Susan has thrown down the gauntlet. Write about the Kentucky Derby and bring it around to art, she said. If you watched the Derby Saturday, you know that Calvin Borel’s victory on Mine That Bird was the second biggest upset in the Derby’s history. You should read the whole story here, but in a nutshell, what happened was that Borel and his horse, a gelding from nowheresville and a 50-1 long shot, stumbled out of the gate, came from way behind, squeaked through a narrow opening on the rail, and won the race by six and a quarter lengths. About that narrow opening - “I wasn’t worried,” Borel said. “He’s a small horse and I knew I could squeeze him through.”

As a kid growing up in Kentucky, I knew the names of Derby winners long before I ever heard of Pollock, Picasso or Van Gogh. Aristides, Gallant Fox, Whirlaway, Citation – all the romance of horse racing is tied up with the magic that happens when a horse and rider surge through the pack and across the finish line into history. In spite of the millions of dollars spent and earned in races these days, it’s still not about the money thing.

The wraparound is not some sentimental drivel about art being an equally wonderful and romantic pursuit to which money is only a corollary. Nope – it’s cut and dried a question of time. The fact of the matter is that a three-year-old gets a single less-than-two-minute crack at winning the Derby, and the win can neither be faked nor bought. By contrast, an artist can fake or buy his way right to the top of the heap, and only the passing of years can out the truth.