Symphony in White

This picture hangs in the National Gallery in DC.

It is one of those pictures I've seen reproduced a thousand times.  Whistler, of course.  I've never been a fan of Whistler.  I wouldn't have expected to find this picture especially interesting.  But when I saw it for the first time, it took my breath away.  I mean that pretty much literally.  I saw it through the doorway, hanging in the next gallery over, and I had an involuntary intake of breath.  If I were less cool, it would have been something almost like a gasp.  As it is, I'd say it was an involuntary intake of breath.  I got my breath back quickly enough, but I was surprised to have lost it.  None of the other pictures I looked at that day prompted such a physical reaction.

Rockwell Parody Poster for "Muhammad Art Exhibit"

As I've discussed before, Rockwell's work is often parodied.  The most recent parody (that I've heard about) was the publicity poster for the recent "Muhammad Art Exhibit" in Texas.  You can see the poster here.  It's pretty standard: take a beloved Rockwell image and try to update it.  I'm not much in the business of trying to guess what Rockwell would make of contemporary happenings.  (Would he have voted for Obama or Romney?  Would he......? etc)  But I am pretty confident that he wouldn't have approved of this event.  He was a very kindhearted man, and he didn't much go in for mockery.

I myself am of two minds about it.  Of course, artists have the right to create virtually anything they like, including images banned by religious authority--Muslim or otherwise.  Moreover, in a world where making such pictures can draw down the wrath of Islamic murderers on you, it does take a certain amount of bravado to go ahead and do it.  It's not like mocking Christ--that's easy.  Mocking Muhammad might put you at risk.

Follow-up on the death of the author

In a recent post, I wrote about the idea of the "death of the author."  In a different recent post here, I mentioned that Roger Reed's review of Deborah Solomon's book on Rockwell put Solomon in the death of the author camp of art criticism, and I mentioned in passing that I wanted to address this claim in a later post.  This is that later post.

A Movie with Rockwellian sensibilities

The makers of "Little Boy" say that their movie has a Norman Rockwell sensibility.  I've wondered before now whether Rockwell's work itself is really all that "Rockwellian," but I'll leave that issue aside for today.  I will also have to leave aside any questions about the merits of "Little Boy," or whether I think it is Rockwellian in any sensible way or what have you.  I haven't seen it.

This post is prompted by Michael O'Sullivan's Washington Post review of the movie.

Rockwell and the Post: at Odds?

Is there a contradiction at the heart of Rockwell’s work?

Consider: he painted many images of charming small-town life, and may possibly be sensibly classified as a regionalist painter.  There is something about him that seems to favor the small, the local, the unique.

And yet, he is perhaps best known as a cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post, which was a massive agent responsible for the flattening of American cultures—sort of the cable TV of its day.

Rosie the Riveter model Mary Doyle dies at 92

The Rutland Herald has the AP account.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Art Criticism and Gun Culture 2.0

My WFU colleague David Yamane is a sociologist working on America's gun culture.  He has a great blog on the topic, and a couple of his recent posts were--oddly enough--remarkably relevant to art criticism as it's currently (too often) practiced.  In these two posts (One and Two) Yamane was writing about Warrior Dreams by James William Gibson.

The very short version is that Gibson apparently sees not only firearms themselves, but various gun-related items (including ammunition and holsters) as sexually charged.  Guns are phallic, holsters are vaginal, etc.  Even the wound channel produced by a bullet strike is suggestive of a vagina to Gibson.

Now, this is all very silly.  And it's hard to know what to make of such silliness.  Yamane does as well as one probably could do, saying, among other things,

"Although I do not want to dismiss Gibson’s work entirely, in this case I think a picture of an expanded hollow point bullet or a drawing of a wound channel is like a Rorschach test.  In Rorschach tests, people’s perceptions of various inkblots are understood as projections of their own personality characteristics and emotional functioning. Gibson’s psycho-sexual analysis of defensive ammunition, therefore, probably tells us more about Gibson than about gun culture itself."

Yep, I reckon so.

The reason these posts jumped out at me is quite simple: you find so much of the same kind of thing in art criticism.  I write a good bit about this in my book.  While I don't want to put too much of the book on this blog--else, why bother publishing the book?--I think I can spare a snippet.

Here is part of what one critic had to say about [Winslow Homer's] The Gulf Stream: “The sharks in The Gulf Stream …, encircling the helpless boat with sinuous seductiveness, can be read as castrating temptresses, their mouths particularly resembling the vagina dentate, the toothed sexual organ that so forcefully expressed the male fear of female aggression.”   Here again, the silly fixation with importing Freudian worries about castration.  The two visible shark mouths don’t look especially vaginal.  (They do, however, have an uncanny similarity to a certain toothed orifice—a shark’s mouth.)  It’s hard to see why anyone would take this kind of thing seriously.  (The quotation is taken from Roger Kimball's The Rape of the Masters, Encounter 2004, 123.  Note, however, that Kimball is not the critic in question: Kimball is mocking the critic in question.)

And yet, this style of "criticism" continues to be published, and continues, apparently, to be taken seriously...by somebody out there, somewhere.  In an earlier piece, I called this the "that's what she said" school of art criticism.  Still seems an appropriate label to me.