Debarking Eucalyptus
Skip to 1:40 in for the big fun stuff.
Ramos & The Devil Doll
The Image Is Erotic. But Is It Art?
WALKING out of a Mel Ramos exhibition the other day, my companion remarked on how benignly amusing his paintings now seemed. Back in the 1970s, when she was a younger, more fiery feminist, his works infuriated her.
Times have changed, although Mr. Ramos evidently has not, judging from a small (19 pieces) career survey at Louis K. Meisel Gallery in SoHo that includes paintings from the early ’60s to the present, as well as luminous painted cast-resin sculptural versions of some of his classic images.
Mr. Ramos is still painting naked, pneumatic women emerging “Birth of Venus”-like from candy-bar wrappers and banana peels, riding oversize cigars like horses and otherwise toying with the lubricious responses of his viewers. What is different is that a 50-year history of ever more sexually provocative imagery in art and popular culture at large makes Mr. Ramos’s paintings now seem comparatively innocent and even wholesome.
Although he seems to be continually hovering just outside the club door, the serious art world’s velvet ropes have never been let down for him.
Mr. Ramos always painted on the teasing edge between acceptable and unacceptable taste. In the early ’60s he made Pop-style paintings of Amazonian comic-book heroines like Wonder Woman and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Thickly painted in vivid colors within sharp contour lines, statuesque women in scanty costumes appear in posterlike compositions with their names spelled out in big, graphically charged letters. In the current exhibition, Cave Girl poses in a white fur-trimmed leather one-piece suit in front of the monumental letters of her name, which look as though they were carved from stone.
Unlike the women in Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, Mr. Ramos’s sirens were not just enlarged, slightly modified copies of comic-book images. His innovation was to model their bodies on those of real women — movie stars like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe or anonymous magazine models. So despite their nonrealistic comic style, Mr. Ramos’s women had an erotic presence that comic-book women of the day never had.
Dina Vierny Gone
Dina Vierny dies at 89; sculptor’s muse, artists’ model
Louis Carre / AFP-Getty Images
Dina Vierny, seen in 1944 with French sculptor Aristide Maillol, began modeling for him at age 15. She was his greatest devotee and the leading force in making his acclaimed figurative bronzes available to the public.
Dina Vierny, muse to French sculptor Aristide Maillol and model for painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, has died, her sons announced Wednesday in Paris. She was 89.
Vierny, who began modeling for Maillol at age 15, died Tuesday morning at an undisclosed location.
Vierny was Maillol’s greatest devotee and the leading force in making his acclaimed figurative bronzes available to the public.
Born in 1919 in what is now the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, and was then part of the Russian empire, Vierny fled Stalinist Russia with her family, settling in France.
Through a family friend, she was presented to Maillol, becoming his model in 1934. She collaborated with the artist until his death in a car accident in 1944, inspiring sleek, bold works like “La Montagne” (The Mountain), “L’Air” (Air) and “La Riviere” (The River), one of his last works.
She was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and was arrested. After helping to obtain her release, Maillol sent her to southern France to stay with his friend Matisse, reportedly instructing him to use her as a model.
The Kid With The Lobster Accordion
Hank Williams Jr & Hunter Hayes
by hotrockers
I want this kid’s shirt.
The reason the world thinks health care in America sucks is b/c of the dental work on The Nashville Network. – Editor
Doug Aitken’s “Write-In Jerry Brown President”
After the opening [for Doug Aitken’s latest art book, Write-In Jerry Brown President], a group of us caravanned to Lucques for the gallery dinner. Anderson regaled her tablemates over plates of salted cod and lamb-shank with tales of her genius preteen son, apparently being “recruited by the Pentagon.” Pamela Anderson dominated Richard Prince throughout the dinner, though she wasn’t the only power-player at the table. Wherever Prince is, Larry Gagosian isn’t far behind.
Left: Dealer Stellan Holm with musician Anthony Kiedis. Right: Writers James Frey and Bret Easton Ellis.
Bret Easton Ellis finally broke from his seat, bookended by Anderson and James Frey, to join editor Karen Marta and me over a couple of glasses of wine. Ellis’s latest tale of ’80s hedonistic excess, The Informers, premiered at Sundance days before amid some controversy, a topic that seemed to bore Ellis to no end. He was much more excited about his most recent project, a screenplay on the mysterious suicides of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, two onetime Angelenos who died in New York. Having recently said goodbye to all that to return to the West Coast, he still seemed to be suffering ennui. “I moved back and live here now permanently,” he said, looking askance at the glamorama crowd. “But somehow I thought it would be different.”
— Andrew Berardini
Grand Theft Dali
Spanish police seize fake and stolen Dalís
£1.1m bronze elephant among 81 works confiscated in raid on Costa del Sol hotel
Salvador Dali and his wife, Gala, photographed in 1954. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
Spanish police are seeking the owner of a £1.1m bronze elephant, possibly sculpted by Salvador Dalí, that was stolen with a major haul of work purportedly created by the mustachioed master of the so-called paranoid-critical method.
The three-metre-high elephant was impounded with 81 works that had been on display at a hotel in the southern Costa del Sol region. It was not clear whether the pieces were stolen, genuine or fakes.
The works, which included sculpture, bas reliefs, lithographs, textiles, furniture and cutlery had been transported to the hotel in Estepona from France and were due to be auctioned there. The asking price for the elephant sculpture, believed to be a work known as the Space Elephant, was €1.2m (£1.1m) .
Police said they were investigating reports from around the world that up to a dozen pieces similar to those on display had been stolen. The robberies had been reported in the United States, France, Belgium and Spain. An unidentified Frenchman was arrested and charged with fraud and faking documents, they said.
Still Publishing
Books Unbound
Here’s a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn’t get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn’t get an agent. “I did what you’re supposed to do,” she says. “I queried literary agents. I went to writers’ conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it.” So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.
That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all–and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5. “So this is extreme to extreme, right?” Genova says. “This time last year, I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car.” (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)
Something has changed, and it’s not just the contents of Lisa Genova’s trunk. We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances.
Spam Musubi
Contradicting Rich
How the web is undermining reading
From Plato to Guitar Hero, we have always been wary of change – but the internet poses a serious threat to society’s ability to read
Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer. Photograph: Corbis
For as long as humans have been developing new technology, we’ve been worrying that our inventions will cause our brains to decay.
Even the development of writing was seen as a threat to the memory skills that enabled ancient poems to be passed from teller to teller –many scholars believe Homer‘s epics weren’t written by a single man, but were the product of a long tradition of oral poetry. Arguably civilisation gained something better in exchange, but there were still those who bemoaned the loss of the memory skills of the oral culture; in Mary Renault’s novel The Praise Singer, master-memoriser Simonides worries that his student’s memory will become hazy because he is writing things down.
There are some signs that we may be approaching a similar cultural moment, although perhaps with fewer reasons to be cheerful. Reading has been on the decline for the past half-century – largely, it seems, because television has replaced reading in our leisure time. I love television: even with the slew of boring reality shows currently broadcast, TV still offers some very enriching cultural experiences. But the loss of reading – that is, not purely literacy but reading for pleasure – could have wide cultural implications. Reading brings with it a host of other skills and benefits, the loss of which would leave our society poorer, including the ability to absorb information quickly, to think through complex problems or to compare points of view.
And it’s not just television that poses a threat to reading, it’s the internet too.
Caveat Emptor
Asking the Artist for a Do-Over
By DANIEL GRANT
Art is long and life is short, according to the old Roman saying, but sometimes art doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain. The canvas warps, the metal bends, the paper turns brown: New artworks may look like old works in a short period of time, leaving their buyers perhaps feeling as though they have been had. One such collector brought back to New York gallery owner Martina Hamilton a painting she had purchased there by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum that now looked as though the “painting was falling off the canvas,” Ms. Hamilton said.
Art is sold “as is” by galleries or directly from artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don’t want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. But it’s not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold. That’s particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral materials in their art (bee pollen, banana peels, lard, elephant dung, leaves, mud, moss and newspaper clippings, to name just a few examples) — isn’t it the buyers’ responsibility to know what they are getting?
![[Asking the Artist for a Do-Over]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AI896_grant_D_20090121151420.jpg)
Barbara Kelley
David Novros, a Manhattan artist, was asked in 2006 what to do about a 1965 acrylic lacquer painting in the Menil Collection in Houston that had extensive “cracks, canyons and fissures” all over the surface, and he decided “to remake the work with the same materials as before.” The work, “6:30,” is now dated “1965/2006.” Back in 1990, the Museum of Modern Art had come to Mr. Novros about a 1966 painting in its collection whose canvas had discolored, also affecting the handmade plywood stretcher. He scraped off the old paint and put on new. The museum labels the work, titled “VI.XXXII,” as “1966 (repainted in 1990).”
Artists’ experimenting with materials is only one reason contemporary art may not hold up even in the short-run. Another is that the training of artists nowadays rarely includes educating them about the properties of the materials they use. Sometimes, artists shortchanged their own art because of a lack of money, a problem not unique to artists alive today. Early in their careers, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquieros and French cubist Fernand Léger both painted on burlap sacks, while Marc Chagall made designs on bed sheets and Franz Kline worked on cardboard. And sometimes the artists simply lacked the technical know-how to make their art last.
mental_floss on Rumpus
Raisin’ a Rumpus: an Interview with Stephen Elliott
by – January 21, 2009 – 7:21 AM
There are many short biographies of writer Stephen Elliot floating around the internet, but this one, from the Chicago Tribune, is my favorite:
Elliott has been a ward of the State of Illinois, a stripper and a law school admissions counselor. Now, he’s becoming a literary success. He is starting to get some serious book buzz and was just named a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award to be announced this spring. He’s a player in the hipster, cult publishing world of writer Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s Quarterly, and it was Eggers himself who edited “Happy Baby” (”Surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and drugs,” said an excerpt from a New York Times review printed on the cover.) In short, in some circles, Elliott’s got — or is, at least, getting — rock star status.
Now, after all the excitement that’s been generated about Elliott’s literary career, he’s gone and done something few could have anticipated: started a website. Therumpus.net isn’t your run-of-the-mill content aggregator/blog, though: it features original reviews, interviews and essays on art, culture and whatever Elliott finds interesting by writers of literary merit, and blogs by long-established icons like Rick Moody (who wrote The Ice Storm), Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight) and others. But enough of my yakkin’ — I’ll let Stephen Elliott tell you about it himself.
Ransom: Who is the site for? What’s the angle?
Stephen Elliott: The site’s for a lot of people. It’s for people who are overeducated and underemployed. People who want to kill time at work and want an intelligent website that’s always being updated (we update fifteen to twenty times a day). A lot of these people are visiting sites like The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast because they don’t know where else to go. They’re reading rants and they’re reading different takes on the same “story of the day.” A lot of those people would rather read a short interview with somebody interesting or a book review or a really well written short personal essay.
Sandburg’s Line
The Play’s The Scene
Director accidentally shoots actor during play rehearsal
A Smith and Wesson .38 calibre gun. Photograph: PA
Real-life tragedy nearly struck at a Florida theatre on Monday night, when an actor fired a live gun at a cast member’s head.
During rehearsals for an amateur production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in Sarasota, the show’s director, Bill Bordy, shot 81-year-old actor Fred Kellerman in the back of the head at point-blank range, only to realise with horror that the gun he used was loaded with live ammunition. Luckily the shot only grazed Kellerman’s skull, and he was quickly released from hospital.
The incident occurred during the final run-through of the play’s last scene, in which George Milton shoots his friend Lennie Small to spare him a painful death at the hands of a lynch mob. The Smith and Wesson pistol had been borrowed from a fellow cast member in the Sarasota Senior Theater who had, it appeared, forgotten that it was loaded.
In his defence, Bordy told reporters: “I’m the actor, I’m the director and we’re running late, and without thinking I didn’t check the gun.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, dear Lord, no’. Luckily I was a lousy shot.”
The End of The End
“Crazed and broke and very much alone.”
Our Critic’s Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Peter Ackroyd Briefly Resurrects Edgar Allan Poe, Birthday Boy
2:59 PM JANUARY 19, 2009
Grim is the only way to begin the story of Edgar Allan Poe, who was born 200 years ago this week; grim is the only way to end it. In between there’s poverty, drunken sprees, illness, dashed hopes, more drunkenness and a messy heap of bad behavior (Hemingway, operating on the two-birds-one-stone principle, once remarked that Faulkner was “almost as much of a prick as Poe”). And yet Poe managed to produce a body of work that’s frankly amazing and heroically perverse (the painter Robert Motherwell once called him “a one-man modernist”). The gothic tales and the poems (especially “The Raven”) made him briefly semi-famous, but never eased his financial misery. Born poor and swiftly orphaned, Poe died at the age of 40, crazed and broke and very much alone.
Right on time for his bicentennial comes Peter Ackroyd’s biography, Poe: A Life Cut Short(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95).
Jose ‘Cheguí’ Torres Gone
Puerto Rican boxer Jose ‘Cheguí’ Torres dies at 72
Updated Monday, January 19th 2009, 5:55 PM
Garrett, Jim
Jose “Cheguí” Torres sparing with Cleo Daniels in a training session before a fight in 1969
Hall of Fame boxer Jose “Chegui” Torres, the former light heavyweight champion and Olympic Silver Medalist who went on to become a newspaper columnist, author, boxing official and revered representative of the Puerto Rican community, died at his home in Puerto Rico early this morning of a massive heart attack. He was 72.
On March 30, 1965, Torres electrified the Latin American world when he defeated Willie Pastrano by a technical knockout at Madison Square Garden to become the first Hispanic light heavyweight champion.
Before the match, Torres exhibited his fierce pride in his Puerto Rican heritage when insisted he would not get in the ring unless Madison Square Garden officials agreed to play the island’s national anthem as well as the Star Spangled Banner. Garden officials agreed.
Pissed Off Catholic Mother
from TCarney’s FB feed
More Emo Belittlement (because it’s there)
How Many Pollacks Does It Take To Break The Ice
Cerny Riles Again
Art Hoax Unites Europe in Displeasure
By SARAH LYALL
Published: January 14, 2009
LONDON — Why didn’t anyone realize right away that there was something seriously weird about the new piece of art in Brussels?
The piece, an enormous mosaic installed in the European Council building over the weekend, was meant to symbolize the glory of a unified Europe by reflecting something special about each country in the European Union.
But wait. Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.
The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries. It was proudly commissioned by the Czech Republic to mark the start of its six-month presidency of the European Union. But the Czechs made the mistake of hiring the artist David Cerny to put together the project.
[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]
[ click to view slideshow of David Cerny’s ‘Entropa’ ]
Get It On
Dandelion Greens & Goat Cheese Empanadas
Daniel Nagrin Gone
Dancer’s choreography defied gravity
When he was a teenager, Daniel Nagrin learned to cope with the burden of homework. He’d plug away for hours, but before long, he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He’d jump from his seat, flip on the radio and dance. Dance. Dance. Dance.
In telling the tale, he described such outbursts as intoxicating, happy with the “sheer act of flying over furniture.” He should have known then that his plan to become a psychiatrist was headed down a new path.
Nagrin eventually followed the beat he couldn’t ignore, becoming an eminent professional dancer and choreographer known for his frenetic, passionate style. A private man who often couched his emotions in public, he let his guard down on stage, leaving audiences rocking from poignant and raw techniques.
He never garnered the fame of a Mikhail Baryshnikov but ironically, it was Baryshnikov who once told a reporter that Nagrin was one of his heroes.
Nagrin, who defied the laws of physics with leaps that seemed to hang in midair, had a career that spanned New York City’s Broadway to the academic halls as a dance professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. He danced for decades, until just a few years ago. Illness finally sidelined him, and he died Dec. 29. The Tempe resident was 91.
“Hey, Look – here comes that cute little Paulie-boy.”
The Rumpus Beta Gone
from Stephen Elliot’s TheRumpus.net
THE EDITOR’S DESK: What’s Been Going On
Well, we’re getting ready to launch this bad boy. I know for a lot of regular readers the site is already launched, but things are going to be different around here once Obama is sworn in as president. For example, after Obama is sworn in there will be design on every page, not just the front page. When you click through to Rick Moody’s blog, for example, you’ll see other recent blog posts on the right. The site’s going to be more colorful and easier to navigate. Rumpy, The Rumpus mascot, will be wearing nicer clothes. 
We’re also going to have a neat new easily accesible feature called “The River.” That’s basically for hard-core Rumpus readers, people who are seriously over-educated and under-employed, checking this site three or four times a day, who want to read The Rumpus in a continual stream of updated content right down the center of the page. The choice will be yours.
In addition to tons of new content (like Josh Mohr’s review of America America or Scott Hutchins interview with Steven Soderbergh, both coming this week) we’re going to republish a lot of our original content from this beta period. So don’t freak out when you see our interview with James Frey or Malcolm Gladwell in the feature box; this is not a rerun, it’s a starting over. The Morning Coffee will still be fresh every day at 6a.m.
Andrew Wyeth Gone
American painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
Artist gained fame for his ‘Christina’s World’ collection, Helga portraits
Andrew Wyeth / AP
“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth is the artist’s best-known painting.
PHILADELPHIA – Artist Andrew Wyeth, who portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as “Christina’s World,” died early Friday. He was 91.
Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity on his own. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
Wyeth was a secretive man who spent hours tramping the countryside alone. He painted many portraits, working several times with favorite subjects, but said he disliked having someone else watching him paint.
Much of Wyeth’s work had a melancholy feel — aging people and brown, dead plants — but he chose to describe his work as “thoughtful.”
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.
“I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?”
Stephen Lynch’s “Craig Christ”
George Tooker Slideshow
Spoonbridge Sculptress Gone
Coosje van Bruggen dies at 66; art historian made sculptures with husband Claes Oldenburg
Vera Isler
Coosje van Bruggen was a respected art historian, writer and curator known for her almost scientific approach to looking at an artist’s oeuvre. She collaborated with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, to build startlingly large sculptures of ordinary objects.
Works include a dropped ice cream cone in Germany; a bow and arrow in San Francisco; a broom and dustpan in Denver, ‘Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint’ in downtown L.A. and binoculars in Venice.
By Suzanne Muchnic, January 13, 2009
Coosje van Bruggen — an art historian, writer and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world — died Saturday at her Los Angeles residence. She was 66 and was battling metastatic breast cancer.
Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly books and essays on the work of major contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter. She also wrote a monograph on architect Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But she is best known for collaborations with Oldenburg, which have placed giant trowels, shuttlecocks, bowling pins and typewriter erasers on parklands, civic squares and museum grounds in Europe, Asia and the United States. Cologne, Germany, has its upside-down ice cream cone; San Francisco, its bow and arrow; Denver, its dustpan and broom.
In Los Angeles, “Collar and Bow” — a 65-foot metal and fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a man’s dress shirt collar and bow tie, designed for a spot outside Walt Disney Concert Hall — was stalled and eventually canceled because of technical problems and escalating costs. But Van Bruggen and Oldenburg are represented by other public works including “Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint” at Loyola Law School in downtown L.A. and “Binoculars,” the central component of a commercial building in Venice designed by Gehry.
“Don’t fµck with me fellas!”
Happy Birthday Faye Dunaway (68 yesterday)