DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS?

 

 

I was just listening to a collection of traditional Christmas Carols when I called to mind a conversation I had during a Christmas party held by the English Dept. when I was in college.

The English Dept. had the best Christmas parties, and I was drinking wine with one of the Professors. He said that Christmas was the province of the English Dept, because English majors loved tradition, history, language and humanity.

I suspect that sentiment would be considered risible today.

 

Halloween ... Already?

On Sale At Target!

I have been thinking much about the aesthetics of the Gothic as Halloween approaches.  As I coast into my 55^th year, I continue to be amazed at how adults have successfully co-opted the holiday.  When I was a boy, Halloween was primarily a children’s holiday, and when most adults thought about it (if they did at all), it was as a nuisance.

All of that has changed.  For 2017, the National Retail Foundation (NRF) predicts that 69.1 percent of Americans will celebrate the Halloween holiday this year.  To do so, they will spend $8.4 billion (billion!) – with 44.4 percent of them starting their Halloween observance in the first two weeks of October.

This figure has been steadily increasing; for 2007, for instance, Halloween spending was “only” $5.1 billion.  This year, we will spend more than $350 million on costumes … for our pets.

People of my generation remember that Halloween was quite a big deal to us as children, but we were mostly on our own.  Halloween costumes from the Ben Cooper company arrived in October, along with some plastic pumpkin satchels and some cardboard window decorations – and that was it.  Today, each and every retail store (from card shops to food stores) has some kind of Halloween selection.  The broad array of choice and quality in Halloween products is remarkable.  These include candelabrum, snow globes, coffin-shaped jewelry boxes, plaster gargoyles and gnomes, monster bookends, dining and bedroom sundries, let alone more perishable items, like black plastic curtains and crepe paper wall coverings.  If anyone were seriously interested in spooky décor, one could furnish their home during the Halloween season and be set for the year.

We here at The Jade Sphinx love Halloween, of course. But the co-opting of the holiday by adults seems to hit a discordant note. Much like the vulgarization of classic children’s properties like Peter Rabbit, the infantilized adults we have become continue to pollute things ideally left for children.

It seems as if we are hell-bent on ruining all the great rituals of childhood because … we, as a culture, seem incapable of growing up ourselves.

Cultural Decay: The Trailer for Peter Rabbit

Longtime readers of The Jade Sphinx know of our longstanding love for children’s literature. Now, Beatrix Potter’s classic tales of Peter Rabbit have been adapted into a new, animated film. Here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pa_Weidt08.

Since this simply beggars description, I will simply remain silent.

“Artist” Jeff Koons Scams $8 Million for Coloring Book #4

"Artist" Jeff Koons (left) and Owner of the Sacramento Kings, 

Who Will Go Unnamed to Save Him Further Embarrassment

The latest Jeff Koons (born 1955) assault on public taste and mores just arrived in sunny Sacramento, CA.  And in doing so, he made a cool $8 million.  Nice work if you can get it.

The sculpture, Coloring Book #4, was just set into place outside the Golden 1 Center, standing on a pedestal near what will be the main entrance of the arena’s northwest corner. 

Coloring Book #4 is 18 feet tall, and is part of his Coloring Book collection, a series the artist said was inspired by the (hardly Renaissance-worthy) notion of a child coloring out of the lines of an image of Piglet.

Just take a moment to let both the money involved and the inspiration to sink in.  Good?  Let’s proceed.

As the huckster artist explained to The Sacramento Bee in 2015: I hope that a piece like Coloring Book can excite young children who are going hand-in-hand with their mother and father and with their sisters and grandparents to a sporting event (at the arena), that all generations can find some contemplative interaction with the piece.

Or something.

Most of this latest attack on public taste was funded by the Sacramento Kings; the city of Sacramento also threw away $2.5 million for its share of the public financing of the Golden 1 Center.  (This money came from the Art in Public Places program, which clearly has a very loose definition of both “art” and “public places.”)

I must make it clear that my disgust with this has little to do with city fathers spending $8 million on art.  Actually, I think city, state and federal governments should increase arts spending, not cut them.  Art spending increases, say I!

What I find so clearly offensive is spending money on bad art, or worse still, non-art.  Think, for a moment, about “public art projects” (for want of a better term) of earlier times, and compare them to the rubbish pushed down our throats today.  Where are projects with the sobriety, seriousness and artistic virtuosity of the Jefferson Memorial, the Tower of Pisa, Notre Dame … good heaves, we could even make a case for Mount Rushmore… 

But we do not create public work like this, mainly thanks to Modernity’s flight from beauty, the decadent and debased language of contemporary art criticism, and the sick influence of money by uneducated, tasteless collectors.

Let’s look at this $8 million piece of “art.”  It says … nothing.  It is a towering, misshapen mess, made of reflective material that mirrors its surroundings, but does not comment or improve upon them.  Even for the sake of argument, Piglet is invisible (for those Pooh fans hoping to salvage something from this debacle); and the contours and colors have no power of suggestion or reference.

Had Koons spent $1.95 on a bellows to blow color-tinted bubbles, the result would be much the same.  Here is a work without intelligence, without virtuosity, and without any internal coherence.  Simple human ethics should shame him out of the field of artistic endeavor, and make his name a byword for chicanery, hucksterism and bad taste.

Our feelings about Koons are best summarized by the late, great art critic and humanist Robert Hughes (1938-2012), who wrote (about including Koons in a new program on art): Jeff Koons [is included]: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topography of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.

The United States is filled with artists, great artists, doing great work.  Work that really is about transcendence, connecting us with the sublime, and fostering the better parts of our basic humanity.  Why do we reward the Jeff Koons of this world, and not them?  When will art replace hucksterism, and when will the public rise in a body and reject this junk?

We have recently arrived on the West Coast, having left a New York where countless people spend a significant amount of time urinating on public art.  It may be the most base and unhygienic mode of criticism I have come across, but they were doing they best they could.  And looking at Koons’ latest ‘masterwork,’ the memory brought a warm, yellow glow.

Stuff Heard in Museums

Sargent's Portrait of Graham Robertson

During our recent (too long!) sojourn, we had the opportunity to visit many museums and see multiple shows.  Certainly the finest show of 2015 was the overview of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now traveling around the country.  (Look for this show … it is among the most beautiful things you will ever see.)

Aside from Sargent’s mastery, however, my multiple visits garnered some of the most amusing comments I’ve heard in my nearly 40 years of museum going.  Here’s a sampling:

Upon looking at Sargent’s masterful portrait of Graham Robertson (covered elsewhere in these pages), one Upper East Side lady-who-lunches said to her companion, “Let’s go see some art that is not as pretentious.”  (I hasten to remind you that it is she and others like her that keeps the museum industry alive.  Dark days, indeed.)

Standing before Sargent’s dramatic picture of the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, one teenager bent to read the explanatory card and explained (in a voice that carried all the way to the lunch counter downstairs), “F—k, this sh-t is old!”  This is, perhaps, the most incisive example of art criticism coming from young people today.

Again, two middle-aged ladies standing in front of the magnificent portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi (perhaps the most striking piece in the show), exclaimed, “he was a gynecologist!  How crazy was that!”

Not that it was easy to see many of these masterpieces – one had to brush aside a forest of selfi-sticks, or stand aside from people having their pictures taken beside the paintings.  Indeed, we don’t seem to look a pictures any more, we merely record that we were in their presence.  A dear friend and knowing art critic once said that cameras should be banned from museums, but that each and every visitor should have access to paper and pencil so they could sketch their own impressions.  Since the greatest threat to art in museums today is not theft, but defacement from visitors, perhaps this is not such a good idea…

In another visit to the Met, I took a break from the Sargent exhibition and strolled through the medieval collection, where a couple nearby examined each and every piece of armor and wondered what the dollar value of the silver would be.  That same day, in the Chinese wing, I overheard someone say, “Those people sure were smart.”

If all of this sounds elitist or condescending, it is certainly not meant in that light and not my intention at all.  At heart, it is a call for more passionate, more engaged, more aware museum-going.  A museum is not a destination to be seen, but a place in which to see.  In the right museum, you are witnessing the triumph of the human spirit over barbarism, the evolution of artistic technique both intellectual and spiritual, and connecting with something more primal an elemental than ourselves.  Museums are sacred places … shouldn’t we behave differently inside of them?

We Go To the Movies

Or, rather … we don’t.

We here at The Jade Sphinx must confess that we rarely go to the movies.  (I hear they talk now.)  There are several reasons for this, and I’m sure I am not alone in my feelings on them.

Let us not even discuss the simple, depressing fact that the majority of major American films are not fit for adult consumption.  If your idea of cinema is Pacific Rim or The Avengers, you have problems beyond the scope of this blog to fix.

No, instead, let’s talk about how unpleasant it can be simply to go to the theater.

At one time (and certainly in the living memory of many readers), going to the movies was simple and a joy.  It did not cost much, and if one got caught seeing a bad or indifferent film, it was not too much of an investment to simply leave and go to another theater and see a different film.  With ticket prices upwards of $15 here in New York, that course of action is a little less likely.

Also, theaters were not always so sold out in advance, so there was no need of getting there 15-to-20 minutes in advance to ensure a good seat.  Better still, there was no need to sit through 15 minutes of commercials.

Yes – commercials, not trailers for other films.  How often have you been trapped in a theater and subjected to commercials for Coke or other revolting products?  If I wanted to watch commercials with little-or-no intrinsic merit, I would stay home and look at them for free.  To pay top dollar and get stuck with commercials is adding insult to injury.

And the trailers are no better.  Either they provide all the major plot points in advance (or all of the laughs), or they show that the film to come will be so horrific as to save us the trouble of going.  But we still have to sit through them.  Think we are kidding?  Look at the trailer for the upcoming Avengers film.  It has science fiction and comic book fans salivating – when actually, it is a coarse, ugly and noisy piece of work.  (You have been warned.)  You can see it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk24PuBUUkQ.

Who in heaven’s name would see rubbish like that?

Worse still, since the rise of the multiplex and the thudding, eardrum-bursting event film, it is almost impossible to see a smaller, more introspective film without hearing the latest mindless blockbuster through the wall of the neighboring theater.  Somehow, the sound of gunshots, explosions and various fart jokes do not improve all movies.

However, the very worst aspect of going to the movies today is the people in the theater with you.  Raised on television, raised without simple manners or even common human decency, one goes to the theater today with people who talk back to the screen, discuss the movies with their friends, and who text or make phone calls during the film.  Finding someone in New York who actually bathes before going to the movies is always a pleasure – and an increasingly rare one. 

The last time we visited the cinema was to see The Lone Ranger – which, because it was an (undeserved) flop, the theater was empty except for my friend and myself.  And it was the Ziegfeld, one of New York’s flagship theaters.  All theater visits should be so pleasant.

New York revival houses are no safer – to “sophisticated” New York audiences, anything more than 15 minutes old is camp.  It is nearly impossible to enjoy films from the 1920s-through-the-1950s without witless catcalls and derisive hoots from unwashed hipsters.  For the cineaste, digitization and the Internet have been a blessing – it means we can catch rarities without the hipsters.

Perhaps, really, the problem isn’t going to the movies, but going to the movies in New York.  The city is a teeming, seething, pulsating mass of putrescent offal, malodorous and greasy by turns, and unfit for civilized human habitation

We Get Letters

One of the many benefits of conducting one’s education publicly, as we try to do here at the Jade Sphinx, is that our broad range of subjects brings us a broad range of letters.  (Oh, very well … emails; but it doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?)

Without further ado, let’s dip into our mailbag in-box, and see what we have there.

You write about children’s literature a great deal.  Do you think that’s a fit subject for adult criticism?

Short answer: yes.  In fact, I’m rather surprised at the question.  There are many children’s books – the works of Andersen, Grahame, Milne and Barrie come to mind – that rank among the most important novels in the language.  More important – a truly interesting children’s book can be read on multiple levels.  I believe that children are amused by the animal shenanigans to be found in Wind in the Willows, while adults will pause at the more subtle philosophical asides and implications. And if my home were sinking into a concrete quagmire, I would salvage a great many classic children’s books from my library before I grabbed many contemporary novels.

And keeping on a contemporary note, some of the most interesting things on bookshelves today are found in children’s books.  Look at the rich imaginative world of William Joyce, for example.

Do you really hate all rock music, or is that an affectation?  And if you do, how do you avoid it?

I am nothing but a catalog of affectations.  But, seriously, yes, I have hated most all popular music from the rock era onwards.  It’s not simply that all of it is bad – though it is; or that it is very bad for you – though it is that, too; rather, it is simply because we have lost so much by embracing so little.  The palette from which rock (and funk, pop, bubblegum, rap … and all the other playground words we use to describe it) paints with sound is a very limited one, indeed.  We now find ourselves in a musical landscape which has very little room for romantic love, or simple idealism, or even, it seems, common decency.  It is no surprise that mores and society have both degraded since the advent of rock.  If a personal library is the measure of a man, then popular music is the measure of a people, and what our music says about us flatters no one.  When contemplating contemporary music, it is inexplicable to me that we do not all simply retreat from it in shame.

As for hiding from it … it is a continual battle.

I found your lamenting a lack of humor in The Iliad and The Homesman to be more than a little quirky.  Do you really think that humor can be found in most anything?

This reminds me of another reader who asked how an aesthete could have a sense of humor.  I think the only possible reply is that an aesthete must have one.

True story: my husband and I were leaving Cambodia on our way to Thailand.  We were at the airport, going through customs.  The customs agent processing my husband’s passport looked at him, looked at the document, stamped it, and nodded him on.  My customs agent looked at me, looked at my passport, looked at me, looked at my passport…. Finally stamping it and holding it out to me.  But – before I could take it, he snatched it away and held up and tiny, printed sign that read, TEN DOLLARS COFFEE MONEY.  I cocked an eyebrow at him and countered, “how much do you want for tea?”

What encounter with art changed you profoundly?

Too many to list here.  Perhaps the most formative was a one-man show by John Gay about Oscar Wilde called Diversions and Delights.  It starred Vincent Price and I went multiple times in my early teenage years.  I’ve never been the same.

When the Apollo Belvedere came to New York as part of the touring Vatican show – again in my teenage years – I stood before it for hours, transfixed.  Here, I thought, was something utterly and completely perfect in every way. 

After reading your piece on the New American Philistine, I suggest you leave your mother’s basement and walk around the real-world for a bit.

Many thanks for the breath of fresh air.  Or something.

Brickbats aside, America isn’t the Land of the Philistine, it’s the Promised Land of the Philistine.  We don’t want to hear it, and pretend that all aesthetic opinions are created equal, and that democratization of taste allows the cream to rise to the top.  But none of that, however, is quite true.  Signs of our cultural decay are all around us, and plain to see.  We are gorging ourselves on junk, and it is killing us. 

Do you have questions?  Send them in for a future column!

Halloween at The Jade Sphinx

Look … before your correspondent is branded as the Ebenezer Scrooge of the Halloween set, let me say that I really like Halloween.  Readers of this blog know my high respect for the tradition of Gothic literature, my taste for Gothic films, and my sometimes recherché taste in the arts.  So, I like Halloween quite a bit.

But, something has gone seriously off-kilter.  When I was a boy, my brothers and I went out trick-or-treating for several hours in home-made costumes (or some pretty spiffy store-bought ones made by Ben Cooper), went home and ate candy and then looked at whatever spooky movie the local television channels played until bedtime.  And, let me tell you, this was a great night.

Now, children are kept off the streets (have you seen an unattended child anywhere lately?) and adults get into sometimes quite gruesome or lewd costumes and party with abandon. 

Think I’m kidding?  According to the NRF’s Halloween Consumer Spending Survey conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics, more costumes than ever will be bought in 2014.  Add to that, more than two-thirds (67.4%) of celebrants will buy Halloween costumes for the holiday, the most in the survey’s 11 year history.  And the price tag?  Wait for it …. Americans will spend $7.4 billion on Halloween this year.

I will not say that this money would be better spent on books (though it would), or clothing, or on-line courses or simple, edible food.  But, I have to say that this is madness.  We have taken a simple, fun holiday away from children and tarted it up for adult consumption.  Do we really need to see Halloween zombie masks complete with rotting jaw bone sliding from the skull?  Or adult women in bunny suits or corseted as seductive vamps?  And does Halloween have to mean a complete abandon of the governors of decent behavior and a celebration of the untrammeled ID? 

Again – I get it.  I like Halloween fine.  We are hosting a Halloween party ourselves, this year.  But somehow the more innocent pleasures of Halloween have given way to Mardi Gras excess.  Can't we find a way to integrate children into this holiday once again?  Because no matter how much I like Halloween now, I sure liked it more when I was 12.

And now, onto Thanksgiving….

Repulsive Ads and Ridiculous Covers

We here at The Jade Sphinx are often … well …, shocked by what we see plastered on bus and train walls, and in our bookstalls.  Movie and television show ads are often much too grotesque to actually see the light of day, and I am unsure why we as a people need to be bombarded by ugliness.

Mind, this is not Mrs. Grundy speaking.  My objections are not moral; morals are out of the scope of our ongoing discussion.  We deal in aesthetics, and as aesthetes we must rebel against revolting images.

Take the ad above, which I photographed on the side of a bus traveling across Central Park South.  It is for a film or television show called The Strain – but the strain is entirely on any innocent confronted with this repellent and gruesome image.  I ask with candor – are the people responsible for this ad criminally insane?  Reprehensively irresponsible?  Morally bankrupt?  Knaves and fools?

Then, upon closer examination, we see that the ‘brains’ behind The Strain is “auteur” Guillermo Del Toro, who has made an entire career of ugly and unsettling images.  At least he has the charm of consistency.

Then, we are greeted by the new cover for the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Isn’t this something you want to buy for your child?

The cover has already created something of a furor, with many customers (and potential customers) wondering why a great children’s classic has been tarted up as a cheap publicity stunt.  Penguin has already been doing damage control, pointing out that this is the "adult" edition, and have released a statement on their blog:  the Modern Classics cover looks at the children at the centre of the story, and highlights the way Roald Dahl's writing manages to embrace both the light and the dark aspects of life.

We here at The Jade Sphinx have been in public relations long enough to detect the heady, sweet odor of bullshit when we smell it.  I’ve read Charlie both as a child and an adult, and I’m not sure that “dark” is the adjective I would use.  But “dark” has become a marketing buzzword, bandied about usually when marketers want adults to buy children’s material without feeling any guilt.  It is this ridiculous argument that has resulted in various frauds, illiterates and numbskulls wanting to call everything from The Wizard of Oz to Superman “dark.”  I am waiting for the “dark” version of Beatle Baily….

Do we really need to see these things?  To marketers really have to pander to our basest selves?  And isn’t it time that we ask, don’t we deserve better?

When I Was a Kid (1905), by Charles Marion Russell

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

 

Charlie’s vision of the West was that of a boy, one of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

Charlie spent the rest of his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  He often sketched himself in his wryly funny letters, and sometimes showed up in his own paintings.  This wonderful gouache picture from 1905 is Russell at his relaxed best.  The landscape and figures in the background are effectively accomplished with some broad strokes of color, while Russell reserves the full potency of his representational prowess on himself and his horse.  Russell was not an especially effective horseman in real life, and much of his boyhood West was spent sheep-herding.  But here is Russell’s youth as he saw it in his mind’s eye, with steely eye looking into the distance, rifle over saddle and ready for whatever was over the next horizon.

Remembrances of boyhood and anticipation of what’s over the next horizon hit somewhat somber notes for your correspondent this July 4^th.  Russell’s work remains a poignant reminder of what we have lost in our culture, our national spirit, and, more important, in our civil liberties. 

 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and preserve the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves) along with the vision of the Founding Fathers as we move as bravely forward as we can.

The Dilemma of the Detroit Institute of Arts

We resume The Jade Sphinx this week with some thoughts on something of a controversy regarding the role of museums and the public trust.

Detroit, Michigan is some $15-$17 billion dollars in debt.  Seeking to find revenue, there has been some discussion of selling the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a fabulous museum in a severely financially-strapped city.

The collection at the DIA is world-class.  It includes work by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569).  If Detroit seeks bankruptcy protection, city officials say that the collection could be sold to satisfy creditors.  The city’s state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr is debating whether the collection should be considered city assets that could be sold to cover the long-term debt.  The art, if sold, could be worth billions of dollars.  Brugel’s The Wedding Dance, for example, is estimated to be worth between $100-$150 million dollars.  A fire sale at the DIA might be just what the exhausted and depleted city needs.

This should be chilling to anyone actively involved in museums.  The historical wisdom is that the city (or state) is the best possible guardian of nonprofit cultural institutions like museums – but the modern-day reality may be that museums have to be protected from them.  Governments can destroy art in any number of ways – censorship, war, religious intolerance – but simply spending more than we have seems a distinctly American twist to the challenge.

The outrage about this possibility has been swift – its efficacy not yet demonstrated.  Voting 24-13, the Senate passed a bill introduced by Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R-Monroe) that would create obstacles standing in the way of any effort to sell the collection.  In addition, the Michigan Attorney General, Bill Schuette, said that the collection is held in charitable trust for the people of Michigan and could be not sold to help settle debts.  But, city officials disagree.

Where do we at The Jade Sphinx stand on this debate?

Well, the protection and curatorship of great art is a covenant.  This covenant stands between our artistic heritage and the people and their leaders.  The covenant is not just that the works be accessible to the public, but also protected, cherished and held valuable by the public.  In this case, that covenant has been broken.

The population of Detroit has dropped from nearly 2 million in the mid-1950s to somewhere around 700,000 today.  Detroit is no longer heavily visited, with the result that these great treasures are little-seen outside of a dwindling population.

If we respect the covenant that binds responsible stewardship to great art, we believe the works here are too culturally important, too artistically relevant and too precious to be so underutilized.  Our recommendation would be – if Detroit insists on the sale of these treasures – that they be sold to other museums in cities with more sizable populations and with greater resources to promote the arts. 

Tomorrow we look at a picture in the DIA collection, Selene and Endymion by Nicolas Poussin.

Harlem’s Franco the Great

Readers yesterday were momentarily concerned by my advocacy of some genre fiction.  Has The Jade Sphinx abandoned high artistic ideals?  Is junk now art?

Well, no.  My point is simply that sometimes the keenest satisfaction is to be found in art in its humblest forms.  However – that does not change the fundamental proposition that there is good art and there is bad art.  And also that -- somewhat lower in stature than bad art -- we find much of graffiti and street art.

This brings us to a quick look at Harlem, New York celebrity Franco the Great.  Self promotion does not seem to be a problem for Franco the Great – if you don’t think he’s great, he’ll be the first to correct you.  A quick look at his Web site reveals his own tagline, Franco the Great.  Known as Harlem’s Picasso.  Artist Extraordinaire. 

Franco Gaskins was born in Panama.  After a rather tragic accident in his youth (he fell on his head), he became an amateur magician while maintaining an interest in the arts.  He came to the United States at the urging of his grandmother in 1958, where he established himself in New York as muralist.  Since the 1960s, Franco has been painting pictures on the iron security gates that protect many Harlem storefronts at night.  His images are often of celebrities (Mr. T, Michael Jackson, various basketball players), or turgid representations of angels, heaven or some other syrupy strain of mysticism.

There is very little that can be said of Franco’s art that hasn’t already been said about the work of the child or younger relation adorning your refrigerator: it’s not actually good, but if you like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing you like.  To my eye, his lack of composition, unsteady anatomy, bad coloration, parochial worldview and vapid technique does not make him a master of folk art; rather, it makes him a practitioner of something much more insidious: non-art.

Non-art is the sort of thing that vandals scrawled all over subway cars and on the sides of abandoned buildings throughout the 1970s.  Non-art is often a crypto-criminal act, a defacement making a political statement or a desperate cry to improve self-esteem.  Non-art is forging an identity at someone else’s expense; usually made by the artistically and intellectually unengaged.  Non-art is the repulsive “community projects” erected by amateur artists for tasteless bureaucrats as a sop to the aesthetically impoverished.

Harlem is also the site of another wonderful example of non-art: the mural on the side wall of the Adam Clayton Powell Plaza at West 125^th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.  By no aesthetic yardstick could this be called good work (see below); but it does seem to draw both tourists and locals.  One amusing trick learned in long contemplation of this work is how to tell tourists from Harlem natives: tourists pose in front of it for photos, residents stand in front of it to urinate.  (My New York readers are welcome to visit the site themselves lest I be accused of yellow journalism.)

Many of Franco’s security-gate murals would have been mercifully removed by a new city law concerning gates; however, his works have been preserved for removal to an outside art gallery at the East River.  One can only hope the critics there don’t stream in so regularly as those at Adam Clayton Powell Plaza.

Non-Art and Public Restroom

at Adam Clayton Powell Plaza

The First Anniversary of The Jade Sphinx

Twelve months and 172 posts later, The Jade Sphinx celebrates its first anniversary.

The first post appeared on Friday, April 22^nd, and detailed my thoughts on The Page Turner, by David Leavitt.  In the months since then, we have looked at topics as diverse as Benvenuto Cellini and Fred Astaire, Cultural Decay and Christmas Carols, public statuary and role of the artist in society.

The Jade Sphinx came about courtesy of my deep and abiding dedication to a 19^th Century aesthetic philosophy.  I had felt (and still do) that beauty had lost its primacy and cultural importance; that we as a people were on a road leading to a deep and arid cultural abyss.  The significance of this sea change chilled me to my very soul, and I sought to create an Eden were beauty was celebrated and willful ugliness condemned.  I wanted it to be a place where, if I could call down from the heavens the shade of Oscar Wilde, the great artist and critic would feel at home.  In my hubris, my goal was to educate the public.  Instead, I educated myself.

Of the Top Ten posts for the first year, according to sheer numbers of readers, eight of them have been about fine arts practitioners both past and present, one has been a film review (oddly enough, for a little-appreciated animated masterpiece, The Iron Giant), and one an overview of a children’s book (The Man in the Moon, by William Joyce).  It is my hope that the eclectic nature of The Jade Sphinx is one of the reasons you return again and again, and it is my goal to continue that in the future.

Finally, there is no point in thinking aloud if no one is listening.  I am deeply humbled and gratified by the number of people who have come to The Jade Sphinx for beauty or solace, and appreciate the many emails and comments I’ve received.

As this is a work in progress, please take this opportunity to comment on this enterprise, both past and future.  What has moved you?  Annoyed you?  What would you eliminate?  What stirs you to return?

Many thanks, and now on to Year Two!

Best,

James Abbott