Painting by Forrest Bess, a naive modernist from Texas who had a stellar New York career, beginning with shows at Betty Parsons (Jackson Pollock's gallery). Recently a Bess turned up on Antiques Roadshow -- the old duffer who got it as a gift from Bess back in the day was pleased and flabbergasted by the $70,000 estimate. Hat tip Bill Schwarz, who has that and other Bess links here.
Some updates I added to an earlier post about the Clyfford Still museum in Denver:
(1) Peter Plagens wrote on the museum for Artnet, prior to its opening, and noted that four Stills were sold to finance it, in contravention of the artist's and his widow's wills.
(2) Writing on Paddy Johnson's blog, Whitney Kimball describes 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).
It was once said that the literary idealist looked at the front of a house and the naturalist went around back and looked at the garbage. It wouldn't be unfair to say that the "art and technology" websites are our idealists, never daring to acknowledge that the internet is a sewer out of which the occasional blossom of "art" emerges. But who are our naturalists?
credits: Mad Magazine-style Dump.fm logo (my screenshot of a frankhats post under the Dump header); Funky Toilet by Diamondie on deviantart.com ("This is for the Pixel Pop Art competition, my first pixelation ever. If a toilet isn't an everyday item, then what is?")
Philip Pilkington reminded me about Christopher Lasch, a critic of big government arguing from the left, who I remember not liking much back in the day. This summary is good, though:
Lasch was a complex figure. A cultural historian by trade, he wrote many fascinating books on topics as diverse as the idea of progress and the origins of cultural politics. His most outstanding work, however, was his critiques of the modern welfare state (most especially in The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self)...
Lasch claimed that as government intervention in the economy grew the state soon found itself mediating more and more social relationships. For example, as the welfare state flourished in the post-war era social workers soon became a significant social force. Lasch claimed that they would swoop in and destroy family ties, replacing these with artificial and technocratic relationships essentially ruled over by the state.
And it was not just in poor families that Lasch saw the creeping hand of the state. Middle class families too were coming to rely more and more on state institutions. From family planners to psychotherapists in public schools (guidance councillors) Lasch thought that many of our social relationships were gradually becoming mediated through a technocratic apparatus at the centre of which stood the modern state.
Lasch then went on to argue that such a shift was hollowing out everyday social relationships. As we came to increasingly rely on these supports our personal and family relationships became ever more distanced, ever more managed. Into this vacuum, Lasch claimed, swept celebrity and consumer culture. The state hollowed out our relationships – the market filled the void with tatty consumer goods and celebrity gossip. It is this mix that Lasch referred to as the "Culture of Narcissism."
In the fights over the NEA and government arts funding some of us pondered the wisdom of taking money from the same "technocratic apparatus" that was at the time funding Central American wars and building H-bombs. In the post quoted above, Pilkington goes on to consider the opposite extreme, which is a libertarian world without centralized government (its most likely short-term contribution, he predicts, would be "a depression from which it would take decades to fully recover"). He concludes that we need the feds for their stabilizing effects on markets but puts forward the idea of a jobs program where funds emanate from Washington but are distributed at the municipal, community level. Sounds fine, as long as there are mechanisms to prevent local Tammany Halls from eating up all the money.
modification by 82times of a collaborative GIF I did with jimpunk back in the Jurassic era (pixel =/= nostalgia)
