Anyone fancy a free concert with formidable vocal talent on the Merkin Concert Hall stage tomorrow night! Great intimate music venue. Easy to get to. Composer Luna Pearl Woolf is how I heard about this. Watch this video and hear her cheeky sincerity, a simplicity of line that could easily be enhanced by period instruments. How new a new music is this? The question really isn’t the point. Rather: does the music enable one to hear again anew?
Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960
Curatorship is a very strange vessel to plug nowadays. Everyone seems now to be fully registered, a diploma, a flag flying whatever haven. There are performance art diplomas everywhere you go whereas 40 years ago there was just a brave human (or two or few) out there onstage in the wilderness. The word 'curatorship' is now used, forgive me, as if 'home maker'. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that but are any of these curators actually making homes for art?
The yearly re-hang of the Whitney Museum's holdings doesn't necessarily make the heart of the NY 'scene' race. And in truth I almost missed out as I planned being somewhere else aus-NY. The cards deal you a very strange hand. They give and take. It is a cruel game. Yet the truth is without the cards I wouldn't be here writing about my experiences at the Whitney this morning. A conversation that totally made me write something (when I have no need to).
It can seem a cruel game for artists too. But the Whitney Museum is quite possibly the only casino in town that will bend over backwards to help them. Such derives not from any altruism simply sense of belief that the Museum's mission is to help the public see American art anew.
I was skeptical about Where We Are's thematicism. So deeply thought through by curator David Breslin is the show, however, that criticism itself lies banal. What he got so right is that curating a show is not simply creating clever/whatever juxtapositions of the works. Stating the obvious, perhaps. What you get with curatorship, though. So often!
Breslin mentioned in his remarks this morning the tremulous of overstepping the mark of sentiment onto sentimentality. Auden whose poem September 1, 1939 becomes a 'mascot' was equally troubled by this 'giddy' line and withdrew his work several times before 'coming to terms' with it.
On the one-hand curatorship is s/deemed objective. What the hell does that mean? ! Art is so subjective it is unbearable when brilliant. It is awesome (a word meaning lost to this century's users). Mounting a show is indeed a 'giddy line' of reason and passion. Did the Whitney get it 'right' where there is no 'wrong'?
The great photographers of this world curate their work by the same criteria. And it isn't just those of the street. It can also be the medium's 'manipulators' (some…). The elements are there in front of their eyes. They choreograph. The 'users' are easy to sniff out. It is still the same 'giddy line' of reason and amour fou.
I joked with curator David Breslin this morning that the very thing you don't want is the Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction whereby one of your audience sees the Eiffel Tower for the first time and is so disappointed that it is drab and smaller than the postcard. He reposed: "exactly. You want them to see the work for the first time not just exit and buy the poster".
Curatorship is indeed the most fascinating dialectic. Life is always curated for you, yet you may always create something more than ever it is dreamed.
A game of cards. Hope you all win!
The Queen of Spades like Dauntless Little John- fearless but not of his own.
Film director Jonathan Demme passed yesterday (he DIED- hate American platitudes). Always remembered here for Melvin and Howard. How much American truth can one film offer up? Few know that he was a wonderful crazy collector of Haitian and 'outsider art'. I bought his very own poster for Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem (Strategia del ragno, 1970). What a guy!
