Little Lenten Sacrifices

For some people Lent is pretty hardcore.  I have at least two friends who are Eastern Catholics—that is, they belong to the churches in union with Rome, but have their own liturgy and customs, including the custom of eliminating all meat and dairy from their diets during Lent. I distinctly remember watching one of these friends at a restaurant a few years back. We had all gone out after a choir event and, while the music had been appropriately Lenten, it’s fair to say that the meals being ordered were on the celebratory, wow-I’m-glad-we-pulled-that-off side. Some time after the rest of us had finished making up our minds and were chatting away, this friend was scrutinizing the menu. Ultimately he ordered a salad, asking the waitress to hold the crumbled bacon, the cheese, and dairy-based dressing. I can’t recall, but I’m hoping there were a few nuts or seeds in there somewhere.

Read the rest at the Register.

Of Artistry

The recently unveiled Obama portraits have sparked some mild, entertaining controversy.  There is no need for me to offer an artistic review.  I haven’t the credentials (not compared to my credentials for talking literature and philosophy, anyway); as for my taste, that is clear enough to anyone who has spent time on this blog.

But I did find it interesting when some people began to take note of the fact that Mr. Obama’s portrait may have been “outsourced to China.”  A cursory search (come, come, mon frowning frères, this is not my day job) indicates that bits of the work may well have been done in China, since the artist who painted the portrait, Kehinde Wiley, has a studio there.  According to New York Magazine …

Producing work in China cuts costs, but not as much as it used to, Wiley says. These days in Beijing he employs anywhere from four to ten workers, depending on the urgency, plus a studio manager, the American artist Ain Cocke. The Beijing studio began as a lark: After visiting an artist friend there and liking what he saw, he and a couple of his New York staffers flew out, rented some space, and started painting, “sort of like a retreat,” he says. One thing led to another—“another” being a five-year relationship with a Chinese D.J.—and eventually the Beijing studio became the main production hub as well as his second home.  (Source)

There has been some tut-tutting over this revelation—The Obama portrait may not have been painted entirely by the artist?  Quelle scandal!—but it really isn’t scandalous.  (By comparison, Wiley’s portraits involving severed heads—also discussed in the article above, and by the left-leaning site Snopes—are perhaps worthy of discussion.)  As the magazine observes, “There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride …”  At the same time, “Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject.”

Should he?  I don’t know.  In the wise words (which I have quoted before) of Pitti-Sing, “Bless you, it all depends!”

For hundreds, probably thousands of years artists have used assistants to create their work.  It was common during the Renaissance for a master painter to run a studio where his assistants, themselves in training to become master artists, would fill in the details of large works under his direction.  (Here’s a quick primer on the topic.)  In fact, the practice was so common that museums sometimes list works as coming “from the workshop of —.”  (I don’t know for sure, but I assume there is some fairly sophisticated art detective work involved in determining whether an artist had assistance, and how much he had—in other words, when a museum decides to list a painting with that caveat, it may be a guess, but it is a well-educated guess.)

The same sort of attitude can be seen in pre-modern literature.  Shakespeare was famously not embarrassed to “steal” his plots from elsewhere—everybody did it, and everybody knew about it.  Such “theft” could even be a selling point for a new work.  During the medieval era a common trope was to claim “an ancient book” as the source for one’s own ideas, since readers attributed more authority to older works.  (Does the phrase “stood the test of time” ring a bell?)  The earliest collection of King Arthur stories was produced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who makes an “ancient book” source claim.  In his time, he was probably believed.  Today, though scholars think there may well have been a chieftain (more likely several) who inspired the Arthurian legends, it is generally admitted the Geoffrey made most of his stuff up.

A modern instance of this sort of thinking can be found in varying attitudes towards plagiarism.  For many non-Western students (middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian), the idea that you oughtn’t repeat another person’s words without attribution is strange.  For some Asian cultures, there is an assumption that if a thing is worth repeating it is also the sort of thing that everyone would recognize.  One does not put Confucius in quotes because to do so would be insulting to one’s readers.

It is the West that changed, largely through the adoption of the Romantic idea of the Artist as Solitary Genius.  For figures as enormous as Byron or Beethoven, collaborating with mere mortals would have been absurd (and, probably, given the personalities involved, painful for everyone concerned).  Somehow this notion spread throughout the arts and among the consumers of art, so that today the idea that a painter—like Wiley—might not create every brushstroke seems practically scandalous to those outside the field.

Back to the article on Wiley himself:

… Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject [of his assistants]. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I [the reporter] first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public ­knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”

So, Wiley is embarrassed by his studio.  And I ask again: But should he be?

Here’s a question that would resolve that question—and I don’t know the answer; and I should emphasize that: I don’t know the answer.  Does Wiley’s work as a master artist actually overflow into the work that his assistants do?  Or, to put that another way: How much of the style we see in Wiley’s work is owing to him, and how much to chance?  Film directors are not ashamed to admit that their cameramen contribute, but that’s because they give the cameras well, direction.  How directed are Wiley’s assistants?

But that’s just what he doesn’t want to show.  “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”  I very much doubt he actually has anything to be embarrassed about.  He just thinks he does.  It would probably be to his benefit if he embraced the reality and let people like his friendly interviewer into the kitchen.  But our Romantic ideas are in the way.

Of course, the other question, and the other possible difference between Wiley’s method and that of Michelangelo et al., is that there was a presumption that the assistants of Renaissance masters were learning the trade in order to become masters themselves.  Some of them did—del Sarto, Romano, Botticelli, Perugino …  Some even surpassed their teachers—Michelangelo himself was the student of the less famous Ghirlandaio.  One of my favorite examples of “group work” is a painting of “Tobias and the Angel” attributed to the workshop of Verrocchio; the painting is famous in part because some of the detail-work may have been done by a young Leonardo da Vinci.

That, of course, is what takes the sting out of the terms “master” and “assistant.”  If the relationship is not exploitive, but more that of teacher and apprentice, there is every reason to applaud the practice of studio work.  Hopefully, Wiley’s Beijing studio meets that description.  Will we be seeing portraits of Asian women à la Judith and Holofernes in ten or fifteen years?  Time will tell.

SQT 2-2-18 – On the Other Hand

"Seven QuickTakes" is hosted at "This Ain't the Lyceum."

1.     Number One Son now has not handed me weights during my workout, tried to feed me peas for lunch, and beat my breast during the penitential rite at Mass.  Nothing like an oldest child to keep his parents in line!  On the other hand, he flipped out when a latecomer to Mass did a full prostration next to our pew.  Apparently too much devotion is upsetting to the toddler mind?

2.     Fun money fact: If you have an IRA, you cannot transfer it to anyone else as long as you are alive.  No, not even your spouse.  No, not even if you’re unemployed.  No, not even if the account fees are slowly draining away your tiny balance so that it will be halfway evaporated by the time you can withdraw at age 59.  On the other hand, you can withdraw early and avoid the tax penalties if one of a few choice situations applies in your case.

3.     Dr. Seuss now lives in the drawer that we never open where the good silverware lives.  (Don’t ask me why we have good silverware; we haven’t used it yet because our ordinary silverware is pretty dang nice, and because I haven’t gotten around to ever washing the good silverware, ever, in three years of marriage.  #firstworldproblems)  It’s not that I am morally opposed to Dr. Seuss.  Nor am I actually opposed to anyone else reading Dr. Seuss while I’m around.  I’m just opposed to reading it myself.  I have no problems reading “I Am a Bunny” 2,347,891 times in an afternoon, but there’s just something about “Fox in Socks” that makes me want to curl up and die after the third repetition.  Part of it is probably the shortness of the lines and the similarity of the rhymes (see what I did there?), since ordinary Mother Goose is no problem for me.  Part of my repulsion, no doubt, is due to the ugly pictures.  (Really.  If they don’t corrode your soul on some level, maybe you ought to see a spiritual body mechanic about the damage that’s already been done.)  Whatever the reason, I’m not pretending it’s logically defensible.  As the Italian Mama says about her cooking, “You must feeeeeeeeel the love, Gino!  You no feeeeeeel it, you no coooook it.”

4.     On the other hand … It occurs to me that some people may feel that I am selfishly depriving my son of one of his chief joys in life, namelich, hearing Mama read “Fox in Socks” very fast with perfect diction and (depending on how insane she’s turned today) either the Boris and Natasha accent or the Julia Child voice.  Sorry, folks; I feel no guilt.  Here’s the thing about toddler desires: they’re pretty malleable, as long as you keep things out of sight.  Sometimes even if you don’t keep things out of sight.  A sixty-second snapshot of Number One Son’s brain this morning (expressed in whines, grunts, running, pointing, and the occasional “Pwee! pwee pwee pwee!”): I want … milk!  What?  No!!  I want … outside!!!!  Daddy, read book!!!! Mama, read book!  I like my stacking bowls.  Ice?!!!!  Is that my milk?!!! Outside?!!!!! OUTSIDE FOOLISH PARENTS!!!!!!!!  Oh, we’re going upstairs now??  OK.  Great!  My favorite place.

 *                    *                     *

Don’t feel too bad for him.  He’s just a little bipolar, like all toddlers.  And believe me, as long as he doesn’t know Dr. Seuss is in the drawer, he—and Mama—will be juuuuust fine.

5.     A little more fallout news from Hawaii: https://xkcd.com/1946/  (For those not familiar with XKCD, language and content warning—this installment is clean, but on the other hand there are plenty of others that are not.)

6.     It’s very sweet when all your high-energy sick child wants to do is lie in a blanket on your lap and babble at you.

7.     On the other hand, when said child tries to express his affection and gratitude by giving you open-mouthed kisses on the mouth …

"A Man Grimacing Grotesquely"

Source

Bonus take: Another place to find old free images!