general

Yves Smith:

Thanksgiving has become a day of food and sports bacchanalia for many Americans. It is too often forgotten that only half of the passengers of the Mayflower lived through the first winter in Plymouth harbor. Ironically, it is probably closest to its historical roots, a day of gratitude for surviving brutal conditions, for those who are enduring physical or financial hardships but manage to get some respite and personal cheer today.

Excerpt from a longer post. Smith's blog Naked Capitalism offers cogent analysis and indispensable daily counter-spin on the economic news front--highly recommended for Turkey or any other day.

Nicholas O'Brien reports on the newly-opened Clyfford Still museum in Denver.

An elegant, expensive concrete cube dedicated to the work of one artist--and he's a pale male! and a...painter!--is monumentally incorrect, so incorrect it never should have happened and almost didn't. The story of how Still's widow kept the collection together in order to realize Clyfford's dream of a museum dedicated solely to his work, in the face of peer and financial pressure to sell off individual paintings, was a staple of the art press 20 years ago. Detractors predicted that no regional museum would saddle itself with such a large, permanent, all-or-nothing commitment. Back seat drivers suggested Mrs. Still stop hoarding her husbands's paintings and let them escape to diverse collections. Worry warts fretted that Still was no Pollock, public recognition-wise, and that the passage of time would consign the uncirculated paintings to endless rolled-up storage and decay.

Possibly precedents such as the Cy Twombly museum in Houston made the "one off museum" seem less speculative.

So the story now--or at least one of them--is how one artist's vision, ego and obstinacy, famous during his lifetime, was transmitted to his heirs and institutional supporters and led to this happy ending of an intact oeuvre in a state of bunker-like enshrinement.

The same backbiters are going to say that this is business as usual, that institutions dedicated to artists who happened to belong to a particular group at a particular moment and be recognized by particular authorities are an indulgence and monument to the power of the 1 percent who rule us.

People who genuinely like Still's work, such as O'Brien, will cast aside these petty political concerns--or embrace some kind of revisionist criticism to refute them, such as saying that Still's work has a feminine aspect and he was nurturing in relations with other artists. C'mon, he was a narcissistic holy terror, you'd have to be to be so dedicated to the idea of perpetual real estate dedicated to you, you, you.

So far we haven't talked about the work at all. O'Brien describes it well so please go read his essay. A painter friend said he liked the "stoner concentration with which Still followed an edge." Some of the paintings are quite good--seen here and there--but now you will have to go to Denver to have the ultimate case made. Probably when it's all said and done the work is better served by a collection than piecemeal dispersion. Let's hope now it's not ransacked by howling philistine mobs when the .1 percent finally go to the guillotine, ha ha.

Update:
(1) Peter Plagens on the museum prior to opening and the sale of four Stills to finance it, in contravention of the artist's and his widow's wills.
(2) Whitney Kimball on the first attack on a Denver Still painting (by a random inebriated person). Also mentioned are the protests that occurred at the time of the sale of the four Stills (the sales per se weren't the issue, just huge takes by an auction house in a labor dispute with its art handlers).

1. John Cale, "Gideon's Bible," from the Vintage Violence LP. Not long after leaving the Velvet Underground Cale essentially invented '70s pop with this album of short country-inflected songs. (Anything with prominent pedal steel guitar is country-inflected.) "Gideon" begins with a slightly jazzy intro reminiscent of pre-Joker Steve Miller, and builds to a chorus that is unadulterated Brian Wilson, with strange lyrics: "Gideon lied/and Gideon died/the force of China fell."

2. Tod Dockstader, "Traveling Music" from Organized Sound by Tod Dockstader (Owl Records). Early '60s electronic music that doffs the serialist hair shirt and has some serious fun, or fun seriousness. Exploiting stereo, tape effects and reverb, Dockstader's abstract blips and pulses move with a rhythm of expansion and contraction over a 9 minute run time. Surprise, humor and seductive aural textures keep the listener's attention completely in the moment. While it is not as unforgiving as, say, Milton Babbitt from the same time period, "Traveling Music" never detours into Enoch Light stereo hi-fi kitsch. It hasn't dated in the slightest.

3. Ornette Coleman, "Free Jazz," a 37 minute continuous improvisation with one drum-bass-sax-trumpet quartet parked in the left channel and another in the right. Each group was listening to its own members as well as the playing of the other quartet and one hears quite a bit of antiphonal dialogue. The piece is not as "free" as it probably sounded in 1961, and maintains a steady hard bop rhythm for most of its length. The overall feel is as "all-over" as the Pollock painting gracing its gatefold cover but one's ear has a tendency to linger on the lapidary skronks of Eric Dolphy's bass clarinet. (About that Pollock painting: the cover tells us that White Light appeared with the permission of art dealer Sidney Janis, meaning it was still a few years away from MOMA, where it now resides. Per Naifeh & Smith's Pollock bio it was a late embarrassment for Pollock, a messy so-called return to his drip style after some figurative experiments, which was in fact "painted long before" the other works in his final one-person show in '54. While overworked, it's not a bad painting, and reproduces boldly on the Coleman LP jacket.)

Some reading:
Six Rebuttals to Mayor Bloomberg's ignoramus argument that government lending to minorities caused the financial crisis (Global Economic Intersection)
What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral (Barry Ritholtz)

Will try to make updates on Simon Reynolds' book Retromania as I am reading it.
An earlier post has been mostly rewritten to object on general grounds to the book's thesis--that we are caught in a backward-looking loop and nothing new is happening in culture.
But individual chapters give the reader pause. Just finished one on British conceptual artists re-enacting old Cramps and Einstürzende Neubauten concerts with full institutional support of spaces such as the ICA. That is pretty sad.
Reynolds doesn't mention the economic side of re-creations and re-enactments. Most of the ones he discusses happened during boom or bubble years (dot com, housing bubble). When there's gratuitous cash floating around people can indulge the stupidest whims imaginable, such as spending thousands of hours studying old concert footage to figure out where every band and audience member was standing at a particular moment. Woolgathering is time and time is money.
Also the involvement of the ICA compromises these events as any kind of authentic culture. Everything will have quotes around it and the only threat is that something bad becomes canonical. In the Cramps' heyday, they performed in an institution--a mental institution.
As an aside, was surprised to read Reynolds' description of the Cramps as "a group who believed in rock'n'roll's primal frenzy, but who were too knowledgeable and too knowing, as record-collector scholars of rockabilly. to get 'real gone' for real." Anyone who saw Lux Interior hang himself with a microphone cord while jabbering the chorus of "Surfing Bird" would beg to differ.

Update: Most of the re-enactments Reynolds describes were pop acts recreated in an art setting (Bowie, Smiths, Cobain, etc). The Einstürzende Neubauten gig was at the ICA both times. Concerto for Voice and Machinery II was art in 2007 but merely arty in 1984.