fabrisse

Yesterday davesmusictank shared an article from Psychology Today, on how anti-intellectualism is killing America (and by America the authors mean the U.S.)

One of the things I've noticed over the years is that too many of the US people I know don't develop their own tastes. Now, I'm not talking about my friend set because, frankly, y'all not only have your own tastes you share them at top volume over the internet, and I love you for it. But among the people I know briefly or at one remove or are cousins, I've seen a trend for a good part of my life that certain things aren't "real."

I'm going to use music as an example, specifically two forms I like very much: Opera and Jazz. I can't count the number of times I've heard people say something along the lines of "no one really likes opera." The implication being that if I've said I like opera then I'm either pretentious or lying or both (and in some cases it's not implied it's flat out stated).

But I try to explain that I have my own tastes. I don't like all opera. I don't like all operas by the same composer. I don't like the same composers as my mother and father or my best friend.

When I was tutoring (5th - 8th graders), I would try to get them to tell me what they liked or didn't like as part of a lesson. Most of the time they wouldn't. They'd tell me that they didn't want to go to a museum because they didn't like museums. When I asked which ones they'd been to, they admitted they'd never been to one, but they already knew they wouldn't like it.

If I asked about a specific book or song or whatever, I'd often find them waiting until I said whether I liked it or not so that they could agree with me. I tried to explain that I didn't care whether or not they liked it, I just wanted them to a) give their opinions and b) say why they liked or didn't like it.

This ties back, in my head, to critical thinking. The anti-intellectualism we're seeing isn't new. It may have become more widespread since Richard Hofstadter wrote about it in 1966, but he noticed a history, going back at least as far as de Tocqueville, of valuing the popular above the particular. I'm not saying popular culture has no value. I write fanfiction, for heaven's sake.

In my mind this comes down to taste-shaming. If you don't like country music, you're not a real American. If you do like opera or cool jazz or going to museums, you're not a real American.

(A propos of nothing, there was a discussion at The Guardian last week related to the marginalization of non-white culture in the US. One commenter asked where was Kanye West's country album as if West needed to extend his reach into white culture. For the record, I'd listen to Kanye West's country album. I also like some of his music.)

I can think of no better way to encourage critical thinking than to cultivate one's own tastes. It means listening or viewing or tasting things you might never consider in the normal run of things, but it also means that a person can find the most beautiful piece of music in the world (mine's "The Martyr" by Modern Jazz Quartet. What's yours?) or let her eyes rest on an exquisite painting. It can be as simple as statement as "I prefer Brussels to Paris."

To my mind this is the first step toward defining values and defining values is the required step to being a responsible voter which is the next step toward being a good citizen. It all starts by being able to say, "I like that, and here's why."

So.

I've liked, but not loved, the Corcoran for a long time. Their collection was eclectic, but not shaped to one person's/family's taste as the Phillips is (the Phillips is becoming less this way, but it still feels coherent to me). It was also part of a legacy endowment with a fantastic building in a wonderful location. A few years ago, before the crash of 2008, they were trying to expand into my neighborhood by moving their College of Art to an old school building near me which would have freed space in the main building for more art works. They sold that school to a private developer (and there's a great deal of debate over whether they were allowed to since they'd gotten a sweetheart deal on city land) in order to boost their coffers once the crash happened. About a decade prior to that, they'd commissioned a Frank Gehry extension to the original building that failed to raise enough money and/or flunked the zoning and Commission of Fine Arts Review -- which is important since the original building is a) listed on the historic register and b) two blocks from the White House.

Other solutions were presented to the Corcoran's problems, including moving the collection to Virginia and turning the historically registered building into condos. Those of us who paid membership fees for the Corcoran protested that mightily for a wide variety of reasons. Then there were rumors, which I've seen both confirmed and denied by the parties involved, that the University of Maryland was going to take over the collection and the building. Instead, in a last minute move, the National Gallery of Art has taken over the building and the collection in collaboration with George Washington University which is taking over the school and will get some of the collection somehow.

Some of the process of integrating the collections was covered in an article in The New York Times today.

One thing that struck me as odd is that there are people who think the National Gallery has a lot of American Art. It has some, but the major collection of American Art is at the Smithsonian.

UPDATED with the proposed ghastlyGehry extension.

Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. Less than ten years later, I made a remark about not having been back to Berlin since the wall came down and sunspiral's and roozle's eldest son, who was 11-ish, asked if the wall were medieval.

I remember both my first and my last times in Berlin (which sounds far more like the beginnigs of a novel than a personal story). The first time was 1985. My father headed a program for Boston University and the professors moved every four months so that they could make certain that the students got all the credits they needed toward their Master's in International Relations. Because the previous head had let things get muddled, we'd spent the previous year in the Brussels apartment for Christmas.

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Folger Shakespeare Library is going fully digital

From Folger's newsletter:
Looking at the rare documents, books, and other artifacts housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library will soon no longer require being physically onsite as more of the collection increasingly moves online, the BBC explains in a video story. More than 65,000 images already belong to the digital collection. And, thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Folger Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project will further expand access, offering transcriptions and digital images of more than 11,000 manuscripts in a free, searchable database. Next up, a series of interactive Shakespeare apps!

They're also giving out Halloween candy tomorrow night with special prizes to kids dressed as Shakespeare characters. I assume there will be more mini-Pucks than tiny-Hamlets.

I hit the American Art Museum for about an hour on Saturday before my hair appointment. There's a different portrait of Rubens Peale on display there. It's only about six years after the one I adore so much, but he's definitely become a man (rather than a late teen) in that time. He really was quite handsome.

I also stopped in at the Hirshhorn and saw the exhibition Here and There by Peter Coffin. The spiral staircase and dog sculptures are both interesting and amusing, but the projections were fascinating to me. There's one of people climbing a mountain inside a profile portrait that struck me as the best visual metaphor for memory that I've seen. Another painting of a woman on a sofa and a man looking out the window had different things projected out the window.

I'm going to see it again before I have to return to work.

I've been fighting with my lungs again. Thanks to antibiotics and albuterol, I've nearly won. I had an infusion of albuterol at the doctor's office on Tuesday combined with a steroid. Let me say that there is nothing quite like being jittery (the albuterol) and slightly paranoid (the steroid) on public transportation.

I've been exhausted and dizzy. I've missed work, including having to take today as Leave Without Pay which I hate.

On the other hand, I spent the weekend before last up in Baltimore. dexwebster and her husband hosted me overnight and were lovely companions at the Walters Museum and several good meals. They also showed me all over the city including the hip neighborhoods, etc. I left with a ton of good vegetables from the farmer's market and a real sense of well being.

I adored the museum. The one thing we don't have in DC is a museum that includes Greek, Roman, and Egyptian statuary. The Walters Museum had a good selection of pieces that were well laid out. It was a great weekend.

Song 1 is a new art work on the exterior of the Hirschhorn Museum. This is an article about the technique which is very visually oriented.

I walked by the museum in the evening last week, and I saw what I thought was the Mockingjay symbol from The Hunger Games projected on the building and thought the publicity for the movie had gone too far. Then I saw the article on Song 1. On Wednesday night, I walked past in the early evening and saw the work -- or at least 10 minutes of it. It's moving. I don't know why. I was fascinated by the areas where the images meet and, in some portions of the film, herringbone into each other. Many of the images, in the portion I saw, concern traffic, and it was interesting as a pedestrian to watch the movement of the cars on highways from a distance.

The various renditions of "I Only Have Eyes for You" are beautiful and add something touching to the work. It was odd to see the projections on the mall side as I was walking. There are windows on that part of the museum, so the images had voids in them. Walking to the Air and Space Museum side of the building gave me a full image with two seams at the edge of my vision for the herringbone.

I may revisit this after I've seen it again, or stayed for the full 45 minutes to view the whole. It's fascinating.

I know my childhood was unusual, thanks to the military.

We were living in London when I turned 8. There was a pop song by Sandie Shaw that talked about going to Paris for the day, AND we'd been studying the Mona Lisa in second grade. So when my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said that I wanted to go to Paris for the day and see the Mona Lisa.

Bless my parents, they looked into it and found that the USO had a day tour of Paris that wasn't too expensive to take a 5 year old, a not-quite-eight year old, and their parents.

It was great. Yes, the Mona Lisa's eyes follow you around the room, but she was smaller than I'd thought she'd be. In some ways, I appreciated the experience of having seen her when I was eight more when I went back to Paris at fourteen. By then, there was bullet proof glass and an enforced distance from the painting. I had seen her up close, and the adults in the group let me have a few minutes to see if she was always looking at me. The experience six years later was completely different.

The Eiffel Tower was orange. I remember being surprised by that. It was probably a primer coat before the next phase of painting, but it was wondrous to an eight year old.

My other two very strong memories from that trip -- other than my sister crawling on Dad's lap to nap on the bus -- were of the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace (or as I called it then, Winged Victory).

I was slightly shocked at Venus not wearing a bra, but other than that it was the fact that the adults were familiar with her that sticks with me.

The Nike, though...

The old entrance to the Louvre can be seen in the Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face. Right after we passed the ticketing area with our tour guide, there was a huge stair case with red carpeting and Winged Victory at the top. I know I must have seen sculpture before, but I genuinely remember this as the first sculpture I saw. Walking up those steps, getting closer to her, seeing a couple of fragments of her (nose and a hand), all of those things were just subsumed in the power of that piece of art. It's truly glorious, and I'm very happy to know that it is still possible to enter the Louvre there instead of going through the I.M. Pei pyramids because her being the first piece of art a patron sees is part of the overall glory of the experience.

I knew better than to touch, but, even now, I long to. I love her. I don't know if she'd have the same power whole. I think she'd still be beautiful, but the way she struck me might have been different.

I've had some magnificent gifts, but this was definitely the best ever.

I don't particularly care for it, except when I do.

I was a bit of a prig as a kid and into my early twenties, and my tastes were very conservative. But there were always exceptions. I loved the Eero Saarinen buildings I saw -- and I still get a quiet thrill when I see that soaring wing of Dulle Airport -- had a fondness for Salvador Dali's jewelry (that's a YouTube link), and generally liked Man Ray's photographs.

I hated the Hirshhorn Museum and until I moved back here in 2008, I hadn't crossed its threshold since the opening weekend in 1974. About a year after I moved back, I started going to the special exhibits there. I don't like much of the permanent collection, although there are some fantastic Rodin's, and I don't always like the exhibits, but I'm refining my tastes and have often been surprised.

One of the exhibits that surprised me was the one on Louise Bourgeois. I actually went back to it because aspects of it had caught me. She uses a great many spiders in her works, but when you know that her mother was a weaver and lace maker who restored historical fabrics, those images start to make psychological sense. Many of the installations were "rooms," some tiny enough that I stood over them or next to them and looked in, some large enough to walk through, and some large enough to walk through that could only be looked in on. The one thing they all had in common was a marble piece -- it might be a carved block or a hand or just a raw piece of marble -- which worked as a symbol of the artist herself and her protection of her talent within her somewhat fucked up family.

I was sad to hear of her death. She was 98, and her work wasn't really recognized until she was in her 70s.

She gives me hope, and opened my eyes to other aspects of art.

I finally got to see it today. I loved it.

My friend since high school didn't care for most of it, but another friend of hers, who's becoming a friend of mine, adored it as much as I did. K (new friend) has finally felt comfortable about revealing her inner geek to our mutual friend since I do it continually and unapologetically.

I also took the Elders to their first art museum yesterday. The one whose birthday it was kept asking if the paintings were originals.