So I watched the "Atlas Shrugged" movie trailer...

... over at Instapundit. And when I got to the end, I said "Part One"?! People are supposed to put up with more than one movie full of that stuff?! It was all I could do to look at 2 and a half minutes of that sloshy melodrama.

Is that opus really the rich repository of conservative values it purports to be? Quite aside from the flabby aesthetics, we're supposed to get all righteous about — of all things — building railroads?

And, no, I haven't read the book. I don't read long, badly written novels. A simple summary of the idea Rand strains to propound is quite enough for me. As a general rule, I stay away from novels that were written to make some big political or philosophical point. Writing that last sentence, I realized I needed to quote something Vladimir Nabokov said about art. Googling, I came to this old article by Allen Barra in Salon — "Reading 'Lolita' in Alabama" — and I'm delighted to see that Barra brings up Ayn Rand in the first paragraph:

I knew of only one other writer who inspired such an odd cult among high schoolers, Ayn Rand, who, like Nabokov, was a Russian émigré with an intense hatred of communism. Aside from that, the two could not have been more different. Rand's novels were the kind of transparent philosophical tracts that Nabokov loathed as much as he loathed Marxism. The similarities between the Nabokov and Rand cults was creepy; even more creepy was that I almost never came across anyone who read both of them.

Put me on the Nabokov side of that dichotomy. Anyway, here's what I was looking for from Nabokov:

"Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."... "I don't give a damn for the group... the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas"... "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales."

Movie watched last night: "Citizen Kane."

What was the motivation to pull the old reputedly-greatest-movie-ever-made down off the shelf? Some conversation about putting together a story by interviewing various people who knew a specific individual one had never met and wanted to try to understand. I said that's the famous, highly praised narrative structure of "Citizen Kane," you realize, but you didn't realize that because you'd never seen "Citizen Kane." How do you get through life without seeing "Citizen Kane"? People are always pushing "Citizen Kane," which you rightly pointed out is a reason to resist it. So thanks for not resisting it when I pushed it, which I did not because I'm shocked that you'd failed to take in the greatest movie blah blah blah — in fact, I admire resistance to that sort of pressure — but because it had to do with an idea we were already talking about that had nothing to do with the irritating pseudo-accomplishment of seeing all the things you're supposed to see.

"Citizen Kane" questions for discussion:

1. Why did you see "Citizen Kane," or how have you managed to avoid it? Have you been bullied into seeing it, or are you one of the bullies? Do you feel like there are movies you're supposed to see, and do you see them or avoid them?

2. If you've seen it, do you like it? What don't you like about it? Do you like that kind of extreme visual composition where one actor is right up against the edge of the frame and the other actor walks away into the set and looks about one tenth the size of the other guy? Do you like that stagey acting? Do those special achievements in makeup from 1941 drive you crazy or do you find them heart-rendingly touching evidence of striving after Art?

3. With all this snow we've been having, we could make a list of movies with important snow, and "Citizen Kane" belongs on that list. What else? "The Shining"...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg says "I am certainly not going to retire before I get my Albers back."

(Via CNS.)

"The juxtaposition between the portrait of this girl against the ad featuring a portrait of Krauthammer is intolerably jarring."

Wrote Chip Ahoy in the middle of the night when this was the top post. And he didn't just complain. He did something about it. He "reconciled" the photographs in a girlKrauthammer mashup:

At the Sweet Child Café...

(Enlarge.)

... you can be as sticky sweet and maudlin as you like.

Inside the glass cylinder.

Views from Calatrava's elevator. If you want to know what it looked like from the outside: As we stepped in, Meade said "I feel like a deposit slip."

The sculptural museum-goer.

(Yesterday, in Milwaukee.)

Christmas greetings!

A card from Palladian. Check out his cool sketchbook here.

Captain Beefheart has died!

Don Van Vliet was 69. In his post-Trout Mask Replica days, he was a successful painter.



"A primitive genius."

Here he is on Letterman:



"If you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school."

AND: You should know "Trout Mask Replica."

AND:

Late in the 1970s, as Van Vliet rehearsed with yet another lineup, Devo's Mothersbaugh met his hero. He found him intimidating, yet childlike.

"Everyone in the band complained about what a pain in the ass he was, how ridiculous he could be at times," Mothersbaugh says. "But they all took care of him, and they all loved him, and they all respected him. And, uh, they were almost all acting like babysitters that they all loved but that frustrated the heck out of them."

The "ants on Jesus" video isn't blasphemy — it belongs in the tradition of Christian art.

S. Brent Plate explains. Excerpt:

Christianity itself has produced some of the most gruesome images of tortured, dying, suffering, and dead bodies, especially Jesus's own body. From Latin American Roman Catholic piety to German Protestantism, the dead and dying Jesus is a point of power, passion, and ultimately compassion. Take, for example, Matthias Grünewald's Small Crucifixion (early 16th century) in the publicly funded National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. ... mangled limbs, pocked skin oozing pus and blood.

That Christ on the cross is actually dead, and the body so dead that ants might eat it, is both the most orthodox Christian statement, and the most scandalous. But here is where the power of words and images begin to show their differences.

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, the character Ippolit kills himself. In his suicide note he meditates on a reproduction of a 16th century painting by Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ:

The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously. The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow. They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?

Holbein's is an image, as Prince Myshkin says in Dostoyevsky's story, that could make one lose one's faith.... And yet, the image offers a profound meditation on the power of death, that "dark insolent, and senselessly eternal power." The picture becomes, like so many before and after, a point of great healing, compassion, and understanding about this central, paradoxical thing that Christians hold dear: Incarnation.

The artist who made the ants-on-Jesus video — which is really called "A Fire in My Belly" — was David Wojnarowicz. He died of AIDS in 1992, only 4 years older than Jesus was at the time of crucifixion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Tyrone Slothrop said..

It's the anty Christ.

"When Mr. Miller informs you that he’s going to burn the California and American flags onstage... you know he’s not going to do it."

"And if he did, would anyone mind? Flag burning was much, ahem, hotter during the George H. W. Bush administration, when Tim Miller was known as one of the N.E.A. Four..."

Ah, it's late in human history to be a performance artist. But one must soldier on.

Steve Martin is in trouble.

For luring people to pay $50 to hear him interviewed and then having the interview be all about the art world and his book about the art world.

It is exactly — exactly — like demanding your money back because Elton John didn't play "Rocket Man." 

No, it's like going to see Elton John and demanding your money back because he played only classical music — and not at the level of a professional classical pianist.

"Norman Rockwell would get the boot... if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents..."

"... which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from 'Hide/Seek.' Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it."

Writes Blake Gopnik about the ants-on-Jesus to-do.

Rush Limbaugh reacted:

Now, what is there to hate about Norman Rockwell? Very simply answered question: pro-America. Classic Americana. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate the flag. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate biscuits and gravy. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate breakfast. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate farms. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate grandmother. If you hate Norman Rockwell, you hate the family. What in the world is there to hate about Norman Rockwell?

Ha. I remember when everyone hated Norman Rockwell... and not just because he was regarded as an excessively literal illustrator and not a real artist.

(And by "everyone," I mean that in the sense that everyone voted against Nixon.)

"If they’ve got money to squander like this – of a crucifix being eaten by ants, of Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, men in chains, naked brothers kissing..."

"... then I think we should look at their budget," said Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, scaring the Smithsonian Institution into taking down the ants-on-Jesus video. Cowed, the Institution nevertheless defended the artist, whose "intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim." The museum assures us it had no "intention to offend."

"I have an old-fashioned rubber bicycle horn that I thought I'd stuff down into my junk before the pat-down."

"Hilarity ensues! Besides, anything that increases my junk profile has to be a good thing, right?"

No video of this actually happening at a real TSA groping at the link. Just some (genitalia-free) artwork.

U.S. Treasury unfair to Thomas Jefferson.

ADDED: I finally got an in-sync video to embed. Watching it, I see I called Andrew Jackson "Alexander Hamilton." I do know the difference!

AND: I said "Pocahontas" for Sacajawea. This post, originally intended as an amusing trifle, turned into a big snafu.

Computerized projections on the 600-year-old Astronomical Clock on Old Town Square in Prague

Video mapping incorporates the structure of the tower itself into the images (which evoke the history of the years of the clock's existence). It's nearly 10 minutes long — and worth it.

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

"A kind of Marfa-meets-ganja art retreat north of San Francisco and a new economic engine for art philanthropy."

What?!

I love the way the paragraph I took that quote from has one hot link  — you know those links the NYT throws in that take you to other NYT articles? — and the link is on the word "marijuana." I know and you know what marijuana is, but what about Marfa? Eh. You either get the joke or you get that it is a joke... and move on.

Move on to the odd news about what would otherwise not be news — that you can make a lot of money growing and selling marijuana. But look! There's art in there. And pretty people. And it's medical marijuana...

At a going wholesale rate of $200 or more an ounce in the Bay Area for high-quality medical marijuana, it’s a lot simpler than raising money the traditional way, the project’s organizers point out. And — except for the nagging fact that selling marijuana remains a crime under federal law — it even feels more honest to the people behind Life Is Art. They see it as a way of supporting the cause with physical labor and the fruits of the land instead of the wheedling of donors, an especially appealing prospect in an economy where raising money has become more difficult than ever.

The nagging fact that selling marijuana remains a crime under federal law... which is so unenforced that pretty people pose in the New York Times with their pitchforks in American Gothic japery in the company of their big, sunlit marijuana plant. Tell me, how will it ever be possible to enforce those laws again? And if they are not going to be enforced, how can we accept the continual degradation of respect for the idea that it means something for an activity to be a crime?

"Man Walking Down the Side of a Building."

Where's the line between art/dance and stuntwork? Don't let the fact that the building is an art museum muddle your thinking.

(Video.)

"True to Munster's love of modern art, light bulbs now hang in the cages..."

"... as a symbol that ideas cannot be bound by bars."