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art from all over
Aug. 7th, 2007 08:02 pmSome would say this belongs on my other blog, counterforces.blogspot.com, but it's more general than that. I hope.
I’ve recently spent an afternoon speeding through the New-York-artworld beach-read of the season, Danielle Ganek’s Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him. And despite the immense incommensurabilities between the Manhattan and Atlanta art scenes, it all seems painfully familiar.
I approach the reasons why, as you would expect, by way of the design of villas and synagogues and basilicas in the late Roman Empire.
The archaeologists may beg to differ, but it seems to me that the hip villa designer for the oyster baron of Uriconium on what is today called the Severn River was as eager to get the latest mosaic-floor pattern books as was the hip villa designer for the olive-oil magnate of Sepphoris in Galilee. They and their clients spoke different local languages and even different linguae francae (Latin in Britain and Greek in the Galilee), and both took pride in throwing in wry local references, but their basic reference books on what was cool this season in hunting scenes came from the distant cultural capitals. And that is also why the synagogue destroyed by the Persian invasions at Dura-Europos has Moses adapted from a how-to-draw-Aristotle pattern and Pharaoh’s daughter finding the baby in the bulrushes has such kinship with a standard-issue water goddess. (Bearing in mind that memory is probably getting the details wrong on these decades-old recollections from E. R. Goodenough.)
Despite the visual kinship of their villas, one doesn’t want to collapse the worlds of the oyster exporter of Uriconium and the olive-oil exporter of Sepphoris into one cozy Family-of-Man unity even if they paid taxes to the same Emperor (which, after the division of the Empire, they didn’t). And I am making up my examples on the fly, so it is likely that Uriconium didn’t export oysters (those were further south on the British coast, if I recall) or Sepphoris olive oil, and I don’t recall mosaic floors from either of those cities, though I do from their close neighbors.
But I do recall when the first up-to-the-minute gallery-space designs from New York and London showed up in Atlanta, and then became the expected rule rather than the rare exception. And I recall my surprise more recently at encountering launch parties and gallery openings in London that made me feel like I hadn’t left home.
Which brings me to the point that even though Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him is a roman à clef about a longtime financial and cultural capital of the global art world (now being given a run for its money and its culture alike by London and other global centers), most of the incidents in the novel seemed parodies of events that I recall vividly from the art world in Atlanta. Shift the geography and reduce the dollar amounts appropriately, and I could have confidently told you who a good many of the people were supposed to be, including the wholly fictional “gallerina” narrator.
Are the social dynamics and details of personality types really so predictable and replicable in every global social structure? I suppose they are; that is what all the scholarly disciplines would lead us to suspect. But it still comes as a surprise to find such recognizable figures and situations in a scene one thinks of as taking place on a whole other order of magnitude and sophistication (because it actually is taking place on a whole other order of magnitude and sophistication).
And you have no idea how long it took me to begin a newspaper-story sentence with “But” without wincing.
And lest the foregoing make us sound like no more than provincial copycats (a distinction I wish to reserve exclusively for myself), the opening I attended the previous night at the Edgewood carriage-house gallery (where “Viva la Frida” had just closed) presented new work by a biracial collaborative of “six Southern gentlemen who make stuff.” Their oeuvre fits comfortably into the delectable weirdnesses of global hipness, but with ample regional inflections. And the hiply appropriate opening-reception fare of barbecue with all the fixin’s left red-meat-abstainers, such as myself and the Iranian physics professor whose paintings are also represented by the gallery, with no options but the biscuits and pepper jelly.
See the reference to wryly informed regionalisms in the art and architecture of the Roman Empire, above.
This was not a throwback to the days of Baudrillard’s simulacrum; I am told the ’cue was way too good to be an ironic copy of anything.
( Ganek )
I’ve recently spent an afternoon speeding through the New-York-artworld beach-read of the season, Danielle Ganek’s Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him. And despite the immense incommensurabilities between the Manhattan and Atlanta art scenes, it all seems painfully familiar.
I approach the reasons why, as you would expect, by way of the design of villas and synagogues and basilicas in the late Roman Empire.
The archaeologists may beg to differ, but it seems to me that the hip villa designer for the oyster baron of Uriconium on what is today called the Severn River was as eager to get the latest mosaic-floor pattern books as was the hip villa designer for the olive-oil magnate of Sepphoris in Galilee. They and their clients spoke different local languages and even different linguae francae (Latin in Britain and Greek in the Galilee), and both took pride in throwing in wry local references, but their basic reference books on what was cool this season in hunting scenes came from the distant cultural capitals. And that is also why the synagogue destroyed by the Persian invasions at Dura-Europos has Moses adapted from a how-to-draw-Aristotle pattern and Pharaoh’s daughter finding the baby in the bulrushes has such kinship with a standard-issue water goddess. (Bearing in mind that memory is probably getting the details wrong on these decades-old recollections from E. R. Goodenough.)
Despite the visual kinship of their villas, one doesn’t want to collapse the worlds of the oyster exporter of Uriconium and the olive-oil exporter of Sepphoris into one cozy Family-of-Man unity even if they paid taxes to the same Emperor (which, after the division of the Empire, they didn’t). And I am making up my examples on the fly, so it is likely that Uriconium didn’t export oysters (those were further south on the British coast, if I recall) or Sepphoris olive oil, and I don’t recall mosaic floors from either of those cities, though I do from their close neighbors.
But I do recall when the first up-to-the-minute gallery-space designs from New York and London showed up in Atlanta, and then became the expected rule rather than the rare exception. And I recall my surprise more recently at encountering launch parties and gallery openings in London that made me feel like I hadn’t left home.
Which brings me to the point that even though Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him is a roman à clef about a longtime financial and cultural capital of the global art world (now being given a run for its money and its culture alike by London and other global centers), most of the incidents in the novel seemed parodies of events that I recall vividly from the art world in Atlanta. Shift the geography and reduce the dollar amounts appropriately, and I could have confidently told you who a good many of the people were supposed to be, including the wholly fictional “gallerina” narrator.
Are the social dynamics and details of personality types really so predictable and replicable in every global social structure? I suppose they are; that is what all the scholarly disciplines would lead us to suspect. But it still comes as a surprise to find such recognizable figures and situations in a scene one thinks of as taking place on a whole other order of magnitude and sophistication (because it actually is taking place on a whole other order of magnitude and sophistication).
And you have no idea how long it took me to begin a newspaper-story sentence with “But” without wincing.
And lest the foregoing make us sound like no more than provincial copycats (a distinction I wish to reserve exclusively for myself), the opening I attended the previous night at the Edgewood carriage-house gallery (where “Viva la Frida” had just closed) presented new work by a biracial collaborative of “six Southern gentlemen who make stuff.” Their oeuvre fits comfortably into the delectable weirdnesses of global hipness, but with ample regional inflections. And the hiply appropriate opening-reception fare of barbecue with all the fixin’s left red-meat-abstainers, such as myself and the Iranian physics professor whose paintings are also represented by the gallery, with no options but the biscuits and pepper jelly.
See the reference to wryly informed regionalisms in the art and architecture of the Roman Empire, above.
This was not a throwback to the days of Baudrillard’s simulacrum; I am told the ’cue was way too good to be an ironic copy of anything.
( Ganek )
