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books

books, ideas
Convenience Store Theory?
Comment?

After reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory and attending the slideshow presentation for Bill Mackey’s newly released Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores at MOCA, I’m wondering if there’s not a cigarette-smoking monkey sitting at a typewriter somewhere out there writing Convenience Store Theory. The presentation and book were excellent, and - in hopes there will be another - I can’t wait to check out the next IGNITE! Tucson (which took place on Oct. 18 but am unable to find any descriptive links about).

In the pamphlet’s introduction, Mr. Mackey writes “Convenience stores are our landmarks, our meeting places, a part of our cultural heritage.” Since my journey moving a houseful of furniture, a husband and a 57 lb. dog 1,000 miles from Austin to here just over two months ago, I strongly concur with the idea of convenience stores as landmarks and cultural sites. But perhaps “meeting places” needs to be qualified. Yes, they are gathering places in the sense that everyone simply goes there because, at some point, you have to. Indeed, they’re convenient but they are really more like fleeing places. Places of shame. Places to starve the body of nutrition with a high fructose carbonated 32 oz. fountain drink and possibly a cheese powder-covered corn-based snack to get me through the next 200 miles, items I’d never purchase in my regular grocery shopping. When traveling in-town, a place to occasionally stop for a 99-cent tall boy to sip covertly in the car en route to a party. For others, to buy candy and porn and beef jerky and skewered hot dogs. Jarring, uncomfortable places with faceless consumers and workers that I want to exit as soon as possible, praying litanies to Our Lady of Clean Restrooms. A place of its own exclusive mood, like a hotel. Just as Koestenbaum identifies the taxonomy of what he calls “hotel women,” surely the shadows of convenience store women exist (subsist?) in a similar twilight realm.

P.S. DRAWN, on display in the gallery, was also pretty cool, for a drawing show (hint: it’s also a fundraiser). I especially liked the glitter on posterboard pieces.
books, ideas
Image - Text - Image - Text
1 Comment

Two books I’ve read recently, in a sort of home audit of my husband’s grad school creative writing classes, have inspired me to think about works of literature as works of visual art. Not just they way they’re laid out in a graphic design sense where the layout works with the content, but the content of the text itself and the way that text is arranged as a separate element alongside, achieve the impact of the whole work meaningful in the particular flavor of visual art.

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, first published in 1973, consists mostly of hundereds of clips from a small town newspaper in the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Stories of murders, epidemic disease, farmers being hauled off to the nuthouse - catastrophic life events summed up in a few brief sentences. Spliced between the listings from each year are a series archival images by the local studio photographer: individuals standing in front of their homes and businesses, funeral flower arrangements, studio portraits, corpse portraits, horses, candid snapshots. Lesy shows how one’s trained response to history is to experience it in a Big Picture sense, the persepective we were taught in school, separated from intimate individual lives. The reader/viewer zooms sharply in to understand the misery of late 19th century rural life. Yet in the repetition of reports, we are re-detatched, cut off at the pass from feeling sorry for the victims. At the end, we realize there is indeed a distinct line between understanding and empathy.

Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum is rather simplistically described as “two books in one,” like a buy-one-get-one free sale. But really it’s two books side-by-side: a pulp novel set in a non-place, non-time at a Hollywood hotel in one column, and in a second column on each page, a series of documents - dossiers - incoporating literature, music, poetry and visual art describing and analyzing what Koestenbaum calls hotel theory. We all know this mood. My mom calls it “livin’ the Motel Life” (our standard was more Motel 6 than Marriott). It’s both indulgent and grating. You arrive at a hotel. It’s afternoon, it’s evening, you’re tired from being cooped up in the car or plane. You first turn on the air conditioner, go to the ice machine and drink a Coke with ice from plastic cups wrapped in cellophane, or perhaps the paper-covered glass tumblers. The toilet paper is folded into a point. You wonder whether to re-hang your towels or throw them on the floor. Maybe you have some Tom’s peanut butter-cheese crackers or peanut M&M’s from the vending machine - something you’d never eat at home - or go swimming in the pool. You keep vigil watching cable TV, trying to ignore the silence/noise of the faceless strangers staying in identical cells all around you by cranking up the A/C. The streetlight shines through the uncloseable chink in the curtains right onto your pillow. It’s worse when you have to stay more than one night. As you’re reading the book (and the choice is entirely yours on how to read it), you are reading one column only but you know there is something going on simultaneously on the other side of it, you just can’t participate in both. Just like a hotel room or lobby.

Thursday, October 30, MOCA Press in Tucson presents its Multiples & Monographs imprint with Bill Mackey’s Field Guide and Check Lists in a limited edition of 75 copies. According to the email invitation, Mackey playfully analyzes our current patterns of consumption and leisure, appropriating the classic practices of ethnographers and natural scientists. The $10 member/$25 non-member admission includes the Mackey created pamphlet: Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores. I’m really curious to get my hands on a copy of this. Ever since I moved to Tucson, I’ve been fascinated by the large number of winged 60’s convenience store throughout the city. I don’t think I’ve seen stores quite like these except for random backstreets in Ft. Worth and what was, in the early 1980’s, the only 24-hour store in New Braunfels. I’ve been waiting till the weather gets cooler (yes, I’m a big pansy, but it’s not the heat that’ll get ya here, it’s the dryness) to spend a day cycling around town and taking documentary photos of all the 60’s stores I can find.
books, words
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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I woke up at 3:49 a.m. last night, unable to fall asleep again. So I finished reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by 5:30. It’s definitely my favorite novel of his, so far – I’ve also read Identity, Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I’m 4 generations removed from my Bohemian (literally) ancestors and one generation removed from from speaking Czech as a second language, so I feel a strong interest in Kundera’s writing. It’s not at all a connection – the language, the culture is lost to me, but I believe it’s important to know one’s roots, to know where things came from, and what is happening as a result of that history in the present day. I may be far removed The Old Country, but the fact that they emigrated 125 years ago not only affects my personal history, but the history of a country an ocean away. This is why One After the Other at Arthouse was so engrossing. I was surprised that the person at the front desk gave me an odd, sideways look when, after viewing the 2nd floor, I asked if they had any materials on the history of the building. I was even more surprised when I was handed a dogeared, faded Xerox copy.

I don’t consider myself a writer because it doesn’t come naturally to me. Being an artist is a little different – the ideas have always come through me ever since I could hold a pencil. But I still have my doubts about that because 1) I’m don’t feel educated enough to be sure that my technical execution is up to snuff. Even so (with all the crappy drawings and pop graffiti abounding since 2000), 2) I’m never in the right place at the right time. Life constantly humbles me: my face is forgotten by people I’ve come across several times, I forget people’s names and faces that I’ve met several times, things rarely turn out right in general (which to me means completely, idealistically perfect). Thus it always surprises me when I’m complimented on anything. I think others manifest what’s in between my head, or my 7 grams, better than I could even begin to, which is why I’m sharing this passage from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, among some other fragments forthcoming.

Some time ago, I went across Paris in a taxi with a garrulous driver. He couldn’t sleep nights. He had chronic insomnia. Had it ever since the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Then he was rescued. He spent several months between life and death. He recovered, but he had lost the ability to sleep.
“I’ve had a third more of life than you,” he said.
“And what do you do with that extra third?” I asked him.
“I write.”
I asked him what he was writing.
He was writing his life story…
“Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?”
He chuckled bitterly: “For my children? They’re not interested in that. I’m writing a book. I think it would help a lot of people.”
You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our concepts… Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In that sense, the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one’s passion’s different results.
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably take on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
1) An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life…
But by backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation… In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

First written in the 1970’s, this passage is ahead of its time. Is this “graphomania” what we’d now call blogging? And re-read it substituting all the writing-oriented words with “photographer” and “artist.” Let me know what you think. It seems this is part of the quandary artists face in the 21st century. The issue of separating art from the design, craft, trade, etc. while still engaging patrons and/or the general public indicates that something fundamental has changed.
books
The Books of MMVII
Comment?

Falling Angels
Tracy Chevalier
Jan 2007 (re-read)

There’s nothing like coming down from the Holidays on some gothic fluff. It’s a little on the sappy side, but I don’t think most people would see it that way. I just have a very low tolerance for sappiness and will stop reading if it goes too far, but I made it through this book. The attention to historical details are really what make it interesting to read. I think I’ll re-read Girl With The Pearl Earring this year (I read it in 2001) and maybe rent the movie.

Lost City Radio
Daniel Alarcón
February 2007 - new

I’ll have to re-read this one in a couple of years. It still haunts me. Definitely one of the best new books I’ve read in some time. I also recommend Alarcón’s short stories.

Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
Feb 2007 (re-read)

This is just a plain ol’ good book. The story is an old fashioned page-turner. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a Classic Masterpiece of American Literature, but for a romance, the language is very juicy and robust without being overly sentimental. Also unusual for a romance, I think men and women could both enjoy the characters. The unconventional dialogue works OK once you get used to it.

Balkan Ghosts
Robert Kaplan
March - April 2007 (re-read)

I love travel essays. I could read this book over and over and still find it fresh each time because the writing and stories are so intense. Probably too wordy for a lot of people though. But I like that. I like to feel a little lost when I’m reading a book or watching a movie, like I’ve walked into a story as it’s in progress and got swept up into it. In this sense, I truly feel like I’m traveling to a new place, using my dictionary and occasionally the internet to connect those extra bits of trivia and history, as my guides.

The Art of the Personal Essay
Selected by Philip Lopate
March 2007

My husband & I have been passing this one back & forth… although I’ve mostly been hogging it I’ve been sailing around this vast 800-page book. So far, my favorite essays are:

The exquisitely artistic In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki expressed many thoughts I’ve had in mind for years about the imposition of Western technology on Eastern civilizations and undeveloped nations.

Hateful Things by Sei Shonagon - hilarious! She’s like the devious friend you keep just because it’s so entertaining to hear her make fun of people.

George Orwell’s chilling Such, Such Were the Joys flushed the toilet on the head of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf captured this rare feeling I’ve experienced on certain walks in various cities.

Finally, Philip Lopate’s genius Against Joie de Vivre is a funny, prickly, tender self-portrait.

Saving Fish From Drowning
Amy Tan
July 2007 - new

I adore Amy Tan’s epic novels, like The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, but they were written years ago. Saving Fish From Drowning was the first recent work I’ve read of hers. It’s a comedy about a group of Western tourists that disappear in Burma, written from the perspective of a ghost. It was mostly a page-turning read but really dragged in some chapters, especially the last part.

Despite the omniscient point of view, I found the characters to be flat and bland. I wouldn’t say they were undeveloped, it was more like the author went through a lot of trouble to make them sound like they had interesting lives (a TV personality, an African-American philanthropist, a former cannabis grower-turned-botanist, an international art consultant…) but they were actually very boring, stupid people.

On the other hand, the ghost’s voice was inspired by a rather opinionated real-life woman, so maybe the lack of development was an important part of the narrative after all. And maybe Tan also did it to show that educated people can be just as closed-minded and culturally ignorant as backwater rubes, and how it’s worse because they are educated. But these people were just plain stoo-pid. In the end, it left me confused, frustrated, and hating all the characters.

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father
Richard Rodriguez
July 2007 - new

My husband just finished this book, so I picked it up over the weekend. It was an interesting, sort of fateful, choice after reading Amy Tan’s novel. While Tan’s novel was a critique of Western/European culture clashing with Eastern/indigenous peoples disguised as a comedy, Rodriguez’s multi-faceted analysis is as perfect and sharp and breathakingly beautiful as cut crystal.

Days of Obligation is not just regional non-fiction about “history” and “culture,” it is an all-encompassing work about the concepts of time and people in the U.S. and Mexico. Usually, critical essays (and movies) about culture make me depressed and feel a lot of scummy white American guilt, but Rodriguez just tells it like it is, which is the one of the hardest skills, I think, for a writer to master. He goes from the deeply personal to the universal and back again in a single, awesomely-worded sentence, yet his profundities are so easy to read and understand.

I feel Days of Obligation on many levels: as a lifelong Texas resident (a state that was born from the clash of two cultures), an inhabitant of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of color, in my spiritual life as a Catholic, in my marriage.

And so I say everyone - regardless of color, language, status, background, religion, sexual orientation - everyone in a border state (Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona) needs to read this book, everyone in congress making laws about immigration and education needs to read this book, everyone in agricultural/rural areas and industrial centers of the U.S. needs to read this book, high school and college students and teachers need to read this book. You will get something out of it.

The Shining Company
Rosemary Sutcliff
July 2007 - re-read

I got The Shining Company at age 9 but couldn’t get through the vocabulary, unpronounceable names, advanced structure, and mature subject matter till I first read it completely at age 13. By that, I mean I wasn’t old enough to understand the complex personalities and relationships of the characters, not that the content was rated R.

Since then, though, I’ve read this wonderful book many, many times with great pleasure, and each time I get something different out of it. It’s a historical coming-of-age adventure set in early medieval Wales and Scotland about a boy who leaves home to become a warrior. In the process, he learns important things about friendship, justice and valor.

What I love about this book is what is doesn’t do. First, rather than being approached from a sci-fi-tinged or romantic angle, the tone is academic in its treatment of history. It discusses the Roman occupation of the British Isles, religious practices of the Druids and very early Christians, and way of life of the tribes and clans all over the country. A really interesting, shadowy time. Second, instead of presenting a patronizing view of the young teenage protagonist, the predominant theme of the book is about the real strength of children to learn hard truths about life (something adults underestimate and often do not possess themselves).

Possession
A. S. Byatt
August 2007 - re-read

Another one I’ve read over and over. This book is just… Wow. Magnificent on so many levels. I was surprised a movie was made about it, because it’s got so many threads and themes, you really can’t follow them all in one reading. And of course, the movie paled in comparison to the book.

There are several layers of storytelling happening simultaneously. Besides a very complex omniscient viewpoint, there’s correspondence, diaries, short stories and other texts within stories, all making for a lush character-driven novel that is super-realistic and yet a fantasy at the same time.

The Game
A. S. Byatt
August 2007 - re-read

I friggin’ love A. S. Byatt. That sentence doesn’t sound like I enjoy lit-er-a-ture does it?! But she is a master of the English language in a way that few fiction writers are nowdays.

This book traces the bizarre childhood relationship between two sisters (one a barely sane, medieval academic, the other an insecure yet popular pulp novelist/TV personality), and the disasterous impact it has on their adult life and everyone surrounding them. The storytelling is all mixed up into a tapestry (this cliché metaphor is actually a very appropriate description) of flashbacks, diary excerpts, letters, sections from novels and essays, poems, dream sequences and schizophrenic tripping.

Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus
Robert Kaplan
September 2007 - new

Kaplan educates and fascinates once again in the extension of his travels begun in Balkan Ghosts. While Ghosts describes his journalistic adventures, history and current events in the early 80’s to very early 90’s, Eastward surveys the changes in the political landscape of this forgotten region a few years later. He gives accounts of oligarchies and mafias in Bulgaria, pre -WWII history in Turkey, ethnic tensions in the Caucasus mountains, ancient watering-holes in Lebanon, current politics in Turkmenistan, oil wealth in Georgia, religion in Armenia, Kurdish claims to land in Iraq. The main point of this book is to show how the collapse of the Communism in Russia and eastern Europe has allowed the people of far Eastern Europe and the Near and Middle East to their pre-WWI thoughts, passions and beliefs, which the were brutally crushed throughout much of the 20th century. So in looking back and trying to use the history of the past 75 years as a guide for what is happening in this volatile and resourch-rich region now risks irrelevancy and shortsightedness.

Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790
Oliver Logan
October 2007 -new

My thoughts in these two posts.

Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
October - November 2007 - re-read

I got about halfway through this book over a year ago but had to put it away for awhile. It made me feel depressed and claustrophobic, and the action moved very slowly. I picked it up again just looking for something to put me to sleep quickly at night. I was surprised that I rather enjoyed the second part - the pace picked up, there were fewer raving inner monologues, and the dialogue was fantastic. Having just read Eastward to Tartary, the characters seemed more alive because the culture of the East was fresh in my mind.

I have to read this short story collection once a year, it’s so good. What else can I say about Dorothy Parker that hasn’t already been said?

Special
Bella Bathurst
December 2007 - re-read

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s a sordid tale about a group of middle-class 13-year-old English boarding school girls dragged to the countryside by their two teachers for sort of P.E. camp for two weeks. What starts off as merely a hellish way to kill time between terms mutates into an all-out war between a trio who appears to be best friends, beautiful, precocious Caz, Hen, a silently suffering anorexic, and temperamental Jules. While on the trip, the girls are largely un- or misguided by adults who are dealing with their own problems. But this war is not fought with the physical violence or straightforward abuse of Lord of the Flies (which I read bits and pieces of around New Year’s), it’s a female war: brutally manipulative, secretive, deceptive, undermining of confidences and dreams, all waged with a smile under the pretense of friendship. It’s a chilling reminder of the awkwardness and impressionability of adolescence.

Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
December 2007 - new

I appreciate Miss Austen’s talent, but her novels just aren’t my cup of tea. I saw the movie years ago, and I kept thinking, “Now what part of the movie was this? Or was that in Pride and Prejudice? And which version of Pride and Prejudice?” The movie I really do like is Persuasion, although I haven’t read the book.

The City of Your Final Destination
Peter Cameron
December 2007 - re-read

Peter Cameron’s quiet, delicate storytelling is exquisite. The variety of characters is refreshing, not because they are of different backgrounds, ages, and sexual orientations, but because the dialogues between them are somehow so calmly measured, even when they are impassioned. The wackier people in Cameron’s stories aren’t half as loudmouthed and annoying as the cast in Amy Tan’s novel. And we all have people in our lives, especially in our families, who are completely different from us, and yet we’re able to, we have to communicate with them civilly because it’s our lot in life - we’re thrown together. I also like the escape to faraway places. City is about a grad student who travels to Uruguay to research his thesis. It’s not as suspenseful or intoxicating as Andorra (one of Cameron’s other novels that came out about 10 years ago) but I think it will make a good movie.
books, oracles, culture, observations
Historical Correlations
Comment?

I finally found what I was looking for in Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the connection between the Postmodern and the Post-Renaissance (may be my own coinage). The Counter-Reformation was a conservative backlash against the Humanists and the Protestants in which the Church machine sought to regain control of the people through art, music and intellectual life. It could be that we are entering a similar phase now after the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s through the 1990s. A bloody time of religious strife (100 Years War, anyone?), a time of ornate insignificance (palazzos:altarpieces; McMansions:myspace pages).

Within this context, read this passage regarding the educational schism in the Post-Renaissance. I feel it strongly correlates to today’s academic environment and art world.

The Counter-Reformation influence did perhaps have the effect of pushing classical studies in the direction of compendious accumulation of knowledge devoid of ultimate philosophical or ethical purpose. Precisely because of this, however, it may hae stimulated the direction of scholarly energies into other fields of enquiry such as antiquarian studies, historiography and even science. At the same time, the climate of intellectual caution which it engendered probably tended to canalise these energies into the patient accumulation of facts; while enquiry was restricted, erudition burgeoned.

It has become common to refer to an “erudite” movement in seventeenth-century scholarship, the roots of which can be seen in Renaissance humanism… Those men of the eighteenth century, especially in France, who rejoiced in the title of philosophes and who believed that their own age was one of “enlightenment,” were to counterpose their own “philosophical history,” which had a strong polemical and didactic purpose, to the “erudite” historiography and antiquarianism of the preceding age, which was essentially concerned with the accumulation of facts…

The ethos of “erudition” can be characterized a belief that facts were in themselves things of value, worthy of being collected, and this did in fact contain certain creative possibilities… Vera historia–”true history”–had a certain literary form, usually based on classical models, it was selective, it dealt essentially with “great events,” which basically meant political and military one, it examined the causes of events… It was distinguished from “annals,” the unadorned record, and again from “antiquities,” the study of “fragments,” whether archaeological remains or isolated documents. The essence of the study of “antiquities” was that it dealt with the fragmentary…

By this time, the intellectual interests of Venetians were, it seems, becoming increasingly encyclopaedic… For instance, there was a tradition of vernacular historiography, basically independent of classical models, which followed annal form or synthesised it with that of vera historia… [B]y the end of the century [1500’s], the passion for accumulating antique sculptures, coins and medals was becoming a veritable mania…

[I]t was the Venetians who…took the lead in raising the claims of the volgare [vernacular] as a literary language… With regard to the visual arts, it was perhaps through interest in antique literature no less than in antique art that the influence of classical scholarship made itself felt in painting in the first instance. By the mid-sixteenth century, the effects of antiquarianism were to be seen with particular clarity in architecture and sculpture…

I think what the Venetians were inspired by is close to the perpetuation of retro imagery in art, design and fashion and the nerding-out about everything old school from comic books to knitting. The acceptance of casual, informal, deeplly first person-based language in everyday use such as email, text messages, and general etiquette as well as in literature does not necessarily stem from the Internet. Rather, the Internet is the vehicle of this language that is educated so it can merely regurgitate, driven away from the philosophical basis of the act of learning as a path to find meaning in life.

But as with any cultural movement, the backlash has already begun from Day 1. Something is bubbling under the surface, we are having the conversations already. I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but perhaps a new Enlightenment is coming that will break away from all this.
books, culture, words, critique
The Greater Good and the Lesser Evil
1 Comment
The more art web- and paper-based publications I read, the less I want to read. Such a polarized landscape. The dumbing-down, super-mass audience camp has been reporting on the same type of subjects over and over for years. Then there are the upper-crust writers that because they self-publish their own blog or magazine feel entitled to say what is good and what isn’t without giving a thorough argument. There is no non-defensive-sounding way to say that; the logic follows that If I’m critical of other writers, it means I’m simply jealous because I can’t bring it. I’m not defending crappy art though. For every snooty artist or critic, there’s a glut of uneducated painters that take their fairy watercolors and abstract acrylics veeerrrrry seriously.

I acknowledge that some art coverage is better than none in the legit and self-published media. But I think the question we should be asking ourselves is, “What does the most good?” Should we in the educated art community enable schoolchildren to draw comics as they please, or should we lead the sliver of the population that really are interested in art in our highbrow ways? Should major newspapers continue writing about dead white guys without a fuss from the local art scene, or should we leave the serious writing to erudite journals with a circulation of 5?

Let’s be honest. We can’t engage everyone. Entertainment is inertia. The acutal learning of information and learning from experiences is a choice (how many times have you told a friend in love to break up with their horrible SO?). I think the key to doing the most good in educating the general public about contemporary art lies in finding means to challenge the hearts and minds of as many people as possible.

But intellectual stiumulation will not get us very far. There’s that pesky emotional factor to consider. Connecting. Meaningfulness. Sincerity. To roughly quote Kant, “To persuade people, you have to appeal to their emotions and desires.” The key also lies in encouraging intimidated viewers and reluctant participants. The key lies in reaching out not just to inform but understand ~~(to live with, to respect, to not appropriate)~~ the marginalized. The key lies in inspiring the average and empowering the promising talent.

For the past week, I’ve been winding my way through a meticulous history of the golden age of the Venetian empire. I checked out Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790 at the library because I noticed as I was browsing through, there were some thick chapters about art collecting, commissioning, and the role of art in education and society. Yes, I’ve been skipping sections because weeding through its densely-written paragraphs of name after name is like reading the Old Testament books of Chronicles: Hathshebaz begat Jethanashat, Jethanashat begat Uzbekiah, and so on). Overall, reading this book has also brought back slideshow memories of all the undulating (as my professor described them over and over and over) Baroque facades, gilded ornamentation, flourishes of all kinds, robust physiques, elegant gestures and profiles that I absorbed in Italy some years ago. It is obviously incredible to think how much technically difficult and thickly decorative art and architcture were constructed in an intense period of about 100 years (1530-1630), but more impressive is how patient patrons were to wait decades for their palazzo or church to be comleted.

I thought I might be able to glean some nuggets of wisdom from these art-related chapters. The previous book I read asserts that while political history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does tend to stay in patterns for centuries. But this theory does not seem to correlate to art history. Although one could consider the West to be in its golden age of development (perhaps one that the sun is setting on), the societal structure and religious system could not be more different than ours, which formed the basis for most artistic commissions. The writer does raise some interesting points though.
- The noble class was expected to know something of art, or at least understand that having good art in one’s home and being a patron was necessary to exemplify and thus maintain their status.
- This art-producing burst occurred in a less prosperous, stable time after a trade bust due to some conflicts and plagues in the mid-1500’s
- Patrons who were educated and/or enthusiastic about art wrote letters to less-knowledgable cronies, educating them about art in a non-condescending tone. They also promoted and encouraged support for certain artists in their sphere of influence.
- Art theory was highly cohesive–and perhaps limiting–and based on representational (as opposed to purely conceptual) stylisic qualities: invenzione (overall direction, as in a work of theatre), disegno (draftsmanship and formal composition), colore (color, brushstrokes, modeling), naturalezza (realism, capturing the unique character of an individual as shown through their physical form in gestures and facial expressions), belleza (ideal beauty that surpasses nature), grazia (intrinsic elegance, gracefulness).
In some roundabout ways, these ideas sheds a shard of light on the questioning the judgement of good and bad, and offer some means to achieve more incorporation of art in everyday public life while supporting artists financially, and challenging all. Art history may not repeat itself, but history does judge societies on their treatment of art.

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