Interesting Ideas Update

Claus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, now recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hugely influential when I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1977. His collection of commercial tchotchkes (salt-and-pepper shakers, Plasticville train set buildings, robot toys, product packaging), shown with pieces of his own art and models for works in progress, validated my own nascent fascination with pop culture objects, proving that they were interesting in and of themselves. I was just starting to collect kitsch items, commercial paraphernalia, handicrafts — prosaic stuff that seemed to resonate with some kind of meaning, wit or design choice. Much of the resonance was in my head rather than in the objects. But Oldenburg’s own collecting made me believe it wasn’t a waste of time, though our underlying purposes were probably very different. Although I doubt I saw these Oldenburg quotes at the time, they reflect the longer-term direction my own interests took in the years after seeing the Mouse Museum: “The city is a landscape worth enjoying — damn necessary if you live in the city,” and “Dirt has depth and beauty.” Starting with serious buildings, evolving through roadside architecture,and eventually encompassing commercial shop signs, I made a conscious choice to observe and appreciate the built landscape exactly because it made living amidst it so much more tolerable, even interesting.

I also visited Inventing Abstraction at MOMA, though the Mouse Museum was my main destination. My fuse is longer than some, and I planned to walk through the show and enjoy some objects without fretting. But the show’s studied isolation of the work and the artists was stunning. Even if the offending title were mitigated by calling it “Abstraction Re-Invented” or “A New Abstraction” or “Inventing Modern Abstraction,” it would not remedy the curation’s reductionism.

I haven’t read the catalog so maybe it mounts a defense, but whatever justification could be applied, the isolation does a disservice to all, the modernist artists included. How can you appreciate the distinctiveness of their creativity if you don’t see it in context with the abstraction that came before? The falseness is even more aggravated by the absence of centuries worth of fabulous abstract art. History and fairness aside, including other threads of abstraction, including European, would have made the show a far richer and meaningful experience.

Signs of Life by Peter Sekaer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had not heard of Sekaer until I saw this book. He was a student of Berenice Abbott and a pal — and sometime photographing companion — of Walker Evans. If you like those two you’ll most likely find his work quite interesting.

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Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty scary stuff about the global financial crisis, and great insights and anecdotes. I’m not sure I’m as convinced as Lewis that each country’s unique flavor of crisis can be attributed to each country’s unique national character, but it’s an interesting perspective.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Forty+ years since I last read it and I still skip many verses of the songs and chants. But otherwise still great.

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The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Caro continues to overwrite, but his obsessive love of detail not surprisingly makes for a fine-grained story, a mark of great history writing and sufficient payoff for those who have the patience to slog through it all. In this volume he also seems to moderate the distaste for his subject that has been evident throughout the biography. This covers the period, after all, where Johnson built a foundation of greatness as he rose above his predecessor’s accomplishments by passing the first strong civil rights law since Reconstruction and launching the war on poverty. I’m guessing the sympathy will wear thin as the Vietnam War escalates, but at least Caro is framing the story as tragedy.

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Lost Chicago by John Paulett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pictures of old buildings. Interesting historical tidbits. What’s not to like?

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The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O’Shea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you lived within the orbit of Tribune Co. or the L.A. Times within the last decade, this book will be interesting to you. It’s a quick read with a number of fine anecdotes. That means it’s mostly inside baseball, so if you’re looking for great insights into the fate of journalism in the (sadly likely) post-newspaper age, you’ll want to look elsewhere. O’Shea throws in a handful of mea culpas but little reflection on how the narrow hard-news definition of journalism he espouses might be a contributor to its decline right along with the Internet and the corporate barbarians who are on the receiving end of his hand-wringing.

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Steven Pinker’s core argument is compelling and important. Contrary to the nearly universal assumption that things have never been worse, human society is actually becoming less violent. As horrifically as the wars and genocides of the last 100 years loom in our consciousness, the long view of history demonstrates that life for many of our ancestors was far nastier. Genocide, rape and enslavement were routine, even heroic, aspects of war. Interpersonal violence was ubiquitous. Human rights as a concept was unknown. Slavery and the subjugation of women were simply facts of life.

Having marshaled a massive array of evidence, Pinker demonstrates across one dimension after another that we’ve never been kinder and gentler than we are now — war, crime, domestic violence, attitudes toward children and animals, and on and on. In fact, he can’t stop himself from piling on the evidence, and at 800-plus pages the book will be unfinishable for many readers, becoming grueling well before they give up altogether.

A more distressing flaw is that in his enthusiasm to demonstrate how nearly every day in nearly every way we’re getting better and better, Pinker departs from the merely factual and pursues arguments that seem obtrusively like personal hobby horses. These include making the case for vegetarianism as an index of human progress as well as a critique of 1960s American culture that is dubious both in the blame it places on rock stars and their fans for dragging civilization backward and in the importance it accords to what in historical perspective was a trivial sideshow.

When he sticks to facts however, he demonstrates conclusively that in far more ways than we’re willing to give ourselves credit for, life on this planet has never been better. Now, if we can only develop the economic and political will to preserve that way of life. In this, Pinker’s optimism wavers a bit, and rightly so. But arguably an understanding that what we’ve collectively created really isn’t so bad should strengthen our resolve to do what it takes to keep the engines of progress running.

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Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00

Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century.

Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density results in a book that feels longer than its 240 pages, but it also enables Russell, professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, to provide succinct but thoughtful and thorough summaries of major themes and historical moments in self-taught art. Read the rest of this entry »

Accidental Genius, Art from the Anthony Petullo Collection, by Lisa Stone and Jane Kallir, Milwaukee Art Museum/DelMonico Books/Prestel, 240 pages, 250 color illustrations, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7913-5200-8. Hard cover $60

Genius is rare enough that it ought to always seem a bit accidental. Genius matched with artistic talent is an even happier coincidence. Artistic genius displayed by art world outsiders is rarer yet. These artists must figure out how to convert their brilliance into powerful acts of creativity on their own, without the support of formal art education and usually with no help at all from outside themselves. While there is a growing canon of established genius in the field, when their ranks are considered against the far greater number of trained artists, or for that matter potential artists in the general population, these geniuses are few indeed. Read the rest of this entry »