A Christmas Cornucopia Part I: R. O. Blechman and Victorian Voices

As we close out our holiday week, I thought I would add some holiday cheer with smaller stories before posting a special Christmas message.  (Be sure to read it on the 25^th!)  And so, with no further ado:

Vintage Holiday Greetings From R. O. Blechman

Jade Sphinx readers of a certain age surely remember a period before cable television when national networks created simple, heart-felt holiday messages at this time of year.  Though such a gesture would be unthinkable in these rather hard and uncharitable times, these spots brought home simple messages of charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence. 

The CBS network excelled at these messages, and the most famous were created in 1966 by celebrated cartoonist and animator R. O. Blechman (born 1930).  Blechman is perhaps best remembered for his amusing, simply-drawn cartoons for The New Yorker, but is also a champion author of children’s books, including The Juggler of Our Lady (1953).

Robert Oscar Blechman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended the High School of Music and Art.  He worked for animation studio Terrytoons (home of Mighty Mouse), winning a BAFTA for his animated version of The Juggler of Our Lady, narrated by Boris Karloff (1887-1969).

In 1977, Blechman produced a holiday special animating his drawings, along with segments by Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) and Seymour Chwast (born 1931), and it was narrated by Colleen Dewhurst (1924-1991). 

These moving stories are simply too good to be missed, and here are links.

Simple Gifts can be seen here (the first of seven parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2tbVaDqHXA.

One of his CBS holiday greetings can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFixiBGmskI

Your Correspondent’s favorite holiday message can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUWMjUjit_U

That last piece has haunted me for years, so thank heavens for Youtube!

Victorian Voices at Christmas and All The Year Round

For many (myself included), Christmas means A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  But for writer, archivist and cat-lover Moira Allen, the Victorian world is an endless feast of articles, stories and dispatches, all lovingly culled from the hundreds of periodicals printed during the era. 

Allen has created an indispensable resource for neo-Victorians, an entire Website devoted to reproductions of Victorian-era magazine articles.  Each and every month the indefatigable Allen sends out a collection, and the December number is filled with treats.  You can find the current issue (and hundreds of archived pieces) here: http://www.victorianvoices.net/index.shtml.

Better, still, Allen also has a deluxe paperback collection called A Victorian Christmas Treasury, also available on her site.  We got this book last year and have been paging through it this season with great satisfaction.

Serious historians, lovers of the Victorian ethos, designers, Christmas buffs – there is something here for everyone who is keenly aware of the past.  Be sure to check out Moira Allen’s site, and be remember to say that The Jade Sphinx sent you!

More Christmas dispatches tomorrow!

Tolkien Will Never Be a Hobbit With Me

We here at the Jade Sphinx spent the Christmas holidays reading The Hobbit, written in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973).  It was the sole blot on a wonderful season.

I should state here that I have been reading – with great satisfaction and complicity – works of science fiction and fantasy for more than 40 years.  In my high school days (or, perhaps, daze), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was pressed into my hands by appreciative classmates, and I was never able to get beyond the mid-point of the second novel.  I have been allergic to hobbits, trolls, orcs and dwarves ever since.

As I reached my middle years, I have become more and more fascinated by the great works of children’s literature, books that I missed entirely during my actual growing up.  I did not read Wind in the Willows (1908) or Peter Pan (1911), or the Pooh or Oz books until well into adulthood.  Friends insisted that The Hobbit was a classic children’s novel, one of the most important of the 20th Century, and that I could not seriously say that I have read deeply in the field until I have digested this book.

My misgivings were exacerbated by the spate of recent truly awful film versions of Tolkien’s books.  I had an uncontrollable fit of the giggles during the first Lord of the Rings film (exploding into loud hilarity when I saw Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen beat up one-another), and the visuals of the films never quite gelled with the fleeting mental pictures I had made while trying to read the books.  I always think of hobbits as sort hominid rabbits, and seeing well-known actors in big-foot shoes and Mr. Spock ears does not quite gibe with my mental image.  We left the first film after the mid-way point, and kept our distance from all others until the recent first-film of The Hobbit series, and saw, with disappointment, that things never got any better.

But, on to the book.  The Hobbit deals with Bilbo Baggins, a member of a race of little people called hobbits, who travels away from his comfortable home in the company of dwarves to kill a dragon called Smaug and retrieve the treasure Smaug stole from the dwarves.  They are accompanied by a wizard, Gandalf, for the first and final halves of the journey – he is unaccountably absent from the hazardous middle-section.

At the end, dragon dead and dwarves reunited with gold, various groups of dwarves and elves and men, now in conflict over the treasure, band together to defeat a marauding band of goblins.  After much death and slaughter, Bilbo returns to his country home, a sadder but wiser hobbit.

In summary, it sounds like an interesting read, but the entire book is rendered a thudding bore by Tolkien’s lugubrious, turgid literary style.  Tolkien struggles to give his work the cadence of fairy tale or baldric epic, but succeeds only in creating faux-King-James-Bible or slightly rancid Kenneth-Grahame-knockoff. 

It is amazing that Tolkien, who made his career as a philologist as well as a professor of English Language and Literature, should have such a tin ear, but there it is.  Listening to The Hobbit read aloud (as I did to my better half during much of the holiday), is to experience a particularly donnish deconstruction of a tale created to excite into something quite bland and uninteresting.

The sections of The Hobbit that I enjoyed the most were those passages in the early part of the book where Bilbo Baggins is at home.  Hobbits, it seems, like good food (and lots of it), pipes and tobacco, a wee dram of something every now and then, warm homes and a life close to nature.  In short, all the best things found in Wind in the Willows and the Pooh books.  I actually love that part of the book … and certainly wish there was more of it.  (I dimly recall the opening birthday party scene of The Lord of the Rings, and hoping the books would get back on track with that – to no avail.)  As soon as the ‘adventure’ starts, my sympathy evaporates.  Tolkien obviously shared my sympathy for a pre-Industrial world, but the quest tale he creates for his ancient world invariably disappoints.

More telling, too, is that Tolkien often writes himself into a corner and then takes the easy way out.  Gandalf seems to have extremely limited powers for a wizard (he seems to be quite good with fireworks, and that’s about it), and the one time Gandalf can actually do some good, Tolkien absents him from the action while he is away on “other business.”  Worse yet, for a coming of age story, Bilbo uses his ring of invisibility much too often to keep himself out of any real danger; indeed, during the climactic battle, he spends most of his time literally invisible on the sidelines, keeping out of trouble.

Tolkien also drapes his cultural prejudices a little too thinly.  Clearly hobbits are the rural English, caught up in outer-world events not to their tastes and beyond their control.  The avaricious dwarves seem uncomfortably Jewish to this reader, and the wood elves a bit too much like gypsies.

Some wag at The New Yorker has called The Hobbit The Wind in the Willows Meets The Ring of the Nibelungen, and I can’t seem to top that. 

A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan

Perhaps one of the most compelling of individual dreams is to have a place of one’s own.  Whether that be a study, studio, off-limits bedroom, basement hideaway or personal garage, many of us yearn for a secluded place situated to our own personalities, where our will was law.

Author Michael Pollan (born 1955) found himself in much the same place shortly before the birth of his first son, Isaac.  A writer and editor for Harper’s Magazine and a columnist for House & Garden, Pollan moved to a few acres in rural Connecticut in the late 1990s.  But while there, he began to dream of a little shack, a ‘writer’s hut’ where he could work, look at nature and collect his thoughts.

This dream took Pollan on a personal odyssey.  Though more at home with words and concepts than tools and building materials, Pollan decided to build his own little writer’s hut behind his home.  He hired an architect to design it up-to-code, but, other than that, he strove to build it himself with just the help of a local handyman.

The project, which should’ve taken just two months, took more than a year and taught Pollan a great deal about both the natural and theoretical worlds.  Though buildings first exist as constructs and drawings on pieces of paper, they must be translated into solid, three-dimensional entities.  And, more importantly, the materials must first be converted from raw materials – trees, stones, etc. – before they can be turned into building components.

While building, Pollan developed a new understanding of wood, of the complications that come with the execution of plans, and of landscape.  He investigated the mysteries of architecture, as well as such philosophies as feng shui and postmodernism.  He also had something of an imaginary dialogue with Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who faced many of the same challenges while building his shack at Walden Pond, and much of Pollen’s book detailing his experience, A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, is a prolonged discussion with the now-dead philosopher.

A Place of My Own benefits from Pollan’s jaunty writing style, as well as from his self-deprecating honesty.  He admits upfront that he is not handy, that he has no grasp of math, and that the idea of building something is entirely alien to his experience.  However, he also felt that dealing in a purely theoretical world of words and ideas kept him separate from some vital part of the human experience.  Moreover, he also believed that our technological advances had somehow separated us from some component of our basic humanity, and that building something that would last – like his writer’s hut – was a way of reconnecting with that missing link.

Here is Pollan on why he did it: For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for the literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do.  Work is how we situation ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand.  Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other people’s words, rewriting, revising, rewording.  Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn’t always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address.  (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.)  Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do.  Whenever I heard myself described as an “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.

A Place of My Own is a fascinating meditation on our relationship to man-made spaces, as well as how we incorporate ourselves into nature.  The main flaw of the book, however, is that it seems as if Pollan has never had an unrecorded thought, and many of his ruminations pad a fascinating story with irrelevancies.  Think of A Place of My Own is much like the world’s longest New Yorker article – filled with great stuff, sometimes numbingly repetitious or padded, but ultimately rewarding.  Recommended for anyone who is feeling penned in by our modern world.

The New Yorker Misses the Point … Again

Every now and then your correspondent can only shake his head in wonderment at the good people at The New Yorker. 

For example it’s not unusual for Adam Gopnik, the magazine’s resident Renaissance man, to say something utterly and completely off the deep end.  And the art criticism in the magazine sometimes seems predicated on nothing more than insisting that Modernism is still relevant, gosh-darn-it, and you had better believe it because we at the New Yorker say it’s so.  And as for its film criticism …, well, let’s say that, like most Puritans, New Yorker film critics suffer from the sneaking suspicion that some one, some where is having a good time.

So I was not greatly surprised when I found in the latest issue an especially witless essay by Arthur Krystal on “guilty pleasures” in fiction.  (“Easy Writers,” May 28, page 81.)  Now, let me say upfront that I certainly believe that there is such a thing as good art and bad art.  Indeed, The Jade Sphinx is predicated on the very notion that there is a hierarchy in art.  However, your correspondent must part company with Krystal when he uses the idea of genre fiction as his baseline for gauging a guilty pleasure.

Now, as Oscar Wilde, patron saint of our blog wrote, “there is no such thing as moral or immoral book.  Books are well written or badly written.  That is all.”  I’m sure the ghost of Wilde would forgive us if we also observed that there is no such thing as a novel that is a guilty pleasure or not a guilty pleasure – again, novels are well written or badly written.  What astonishes me is not that Krystal is so far off the mark … but that we, in 2012, are still having the discussion at all.

One hundred or so years ago, our intellectual and aesthetic betters knew this.  Bookstores were not broken into ghettos of mysteries, young adult novels or science fiction stories.  Indeed, the new H. G. Wells novel was set alongside the new book by Henry James, and Arthur Conan Doyle shared shelf space with Joseph Conrad.  If you want to make the argument that a mere genre story could never be art, let’s admit that Hamlet is a crime story (and a rather good one at that) and Macbeth a fantasy (ditto) and start relegating Shakespeare to the proper literary ghettos.

Even more amusing is that Krystal seems to have little understanding of what fiction is or what it does.  Here’s a sample: “Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate.  It’s plot we want and plenty of it.  Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win out; and a satisfying sense of closure and comeuppance should top off the experience.  Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story, a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.”  In that brief passage, Krystal has relegated to “genre fiction” nearly the entire corpus of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.  No small feat, that.

However, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Krystal does make one intelligent observation: “Modernism, of course, confirmed the idea of the commercial novel as a guilty pleasure by making the literary novel tough sledding.”  He mitigates the quality of the observation by implying that perhaps, this is the way things should be.  Indeed, “serious fiction was serious business, and a reader might tire of it.”

Well, he’s half right, at any rate.  Most contemporary literary fiction is virtually unreadable.  (The New Yorker is an especially egregious offender in this regard: often, the short fiction reads as if it were missing the opening and closing paragraphs.)  I remember emerging from Susan Sontag’s “novel” The Volcano Lover, for instance, with all the cheer of one who had been repeatedly battered about the head and face.  David Leavitt, Toni Morrison (fit punishment, really, only for serial murderers and repeat sex offenders), Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx have all written their share of unreadable books adored by the literati.  And if this is the current state of literature, I think I’ll hide deep within the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs until the whole thing blows over.

However, I am being too hard on Krystal, as he closes his essay with an apology to genre fiction:  “Such writers have a gift that is as mysterious to nonwriters as plucking melodies out of thin air is to nonmusicians.  Plotting, inventing, creating characters, putting words in their mouths and quirks in their personalities – it all seems pretty astonishing to me.  The prose may be uneven and the observations about life and society predictable, but, if the story moves, we, always involuntarily, move with it.  And, if we feel a little guilty about getting so swept up, there’s always ‘The Death of Virgil’ to read as penance.”

Looking at the Critics

One of the more interesting things about keeping up with the arts, both fine and popular, is reading what my colleagues across the aisle have to say.  Sometimes my reaction can only be a heavy sigh (close-cousin of hyper-ventilating), or a resigned shrug.

Take, for instance, David Denby in a recent issue of The New Yorker.  In the March 26^th issue, Denby undertakes a review of the recent science fiction epic John Carter.  Now, at this point, I must confess that I have not only seen John Carter, but I also enjoyed it immensely.

Before my poetic license is revoked, let me say that John Carter is not art.  However, it never pretends to be art.  Even the most stringent fine arts critic must take a film like John Carter on its own terms.  To expect Summer Hours or The Dreamers (both reviewed in these pages) is fatuity.

Fatuity, however, seems to be Denby’s stock in trade during this review.  His bias is clear in the second sentence:  Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars…..

Hold the phone.  “An ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs??”  One wonders how he would describe a film adaptation of Hamlet.  “Based on the super-duper ancient play by William Shakespeare?”  What did he say about Troy?    “Based on The Iliad, which is so old that we can’t even imagine its age?”

Later on in his review, Denby also adds I wouldn’t trust the sanity of any critic who claimed to understand what goes on in this movie.  Frankly, I would not trust the intelligence of any critic who couldn’t.

Denby is the author of quite an excellent book on bad behavior called Snark.  Sadly, I don’t think he took his own writing to heart.

My problems with Denby’s snark fade away to nothingness when I read an article by Michael Atkinson in a recent issue of LA Weekly.  This esteemed critic was providing an overview on a film retrospective of various versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  This is his opening sentence.

It's such a toxic-potent paradigm it's hard to believe Lewis Carroll came up with it first -- female puberty as a mud-wrestle with the irrational, a maiden's journey into a quasi-adult sphere drunk on its own rules and power but actually f--king nuts. It's an elemental conflict that's as political as it is psychosexual -- which is why Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, despite having little story to speak of, will not fade into a vague memory of 19th-century kid lit.

You correspondent must admit that he had to read the above three times before he almost got some glimmer of the author’s meaning.  But wait, it gets better.

No, the linchpin adaptation is naturally Jan Svankmajer's 1988 Alice (April 6, 7:30 p.m.), which only loosely intersects with the book yet musters an uncomfortable physical world of unpleasant juxtapositions, mucous mixtures, semi-animated impossibilities, revolting taxidermic tension and a pervasive sense of real childhood danger (without, fascinatingly, inciting the merest drop of anxiety from his star, placid blond Kristyna Kohoutova). Self-referential and playfully conscious of pedophiliac threat as only a surrealist's film could be, Svankmajer's Alice does Carroll better than Carroll did Carroll, swapping the smarmy wordplay and faux innocence for the claustrophobia and stress you taste in a real dream.

Mucous mixtures.  Revolting taxidermic tension.  Playfully conscious of pedophiliac threat as only a surrealist’s film could be.

You may be ready for more, but I don’t think my heart can stand it.  

Damien Hirst Hits the Spot

LSD, by Damien Hirst; Insert Your Own Joke Here

One can only imagine that Damien Hirst had a very accommodating mother. Think of them together in little Damien’s nursery so many years ago…

Damien (age three): Look, Mommy, I’ve painted a picture!

Hands her a page littered with multi-colored dots.

Mother Hirst: That’s nice, dear.

Damien: Do you know what it is?

Mother Hirst (turning it this way and that): Ahh … surprise me.

Damien: It’s a painting of Daddy!

Mother Hirst: Someday, lad, you’re going to be a great painter. Or something.

Damien: No, no, Mommy. I’m going to be a rich painter!

Mother Hirst: Come give Mother a kiss and be sure to behave.

Damien Hirst (born 1965) is Britain’s wealthiest living artist, valued at £215m by the Sunday Times. (That’s more than $300 million American, folks.) He stands, with Professor of Drawing Tracey Emin of England’s Royal Academy, as a horrific example of the cynicism and hucksterism that has penetrated the contemporary art scene.

Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father, a car mechanic, left the family when Hirst was 12 and he was raised, for the most part, by his mother, Mary Brennan. Though she was a strict disciplinarian (and, if one reads between the lines, boarder-line abusive), Mrs. Hirst encouraged his artistic ambitions. Hirst would later attend the Leeds College of Art.

Hirst hit the jackpot when crackpot Charles Saatchi (of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi) promised to fund whatever work Hirst wanted to make. With this bankroll, Hirst “created” The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which debuted at the misnamed Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Physical Impossibility was a dead shark pickled in a tank of formaldehyde -- it sold for £50,000 and Hirst was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Hirst went back to the slaughterhouse with Away From the Flock, which was a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde. Sadly … Hirst gets the money, but not the joke. In 1993 artist Mark Bridger walked into the gallery where Away From the Flock was on display and poured black ink into the tank, retitling the work Black Sheep. One would think the world owed Bridger a vote of profound thanks (at least we could no longer see the sheep), but Hirst did not enjoy being topped by a wit greater than his, and pressed charges.

Hirst is currently in the news again thanks to The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, which are featured in Larry Gargosian’s 11 galleries dotted around New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills. And if you love spots, then these 331 paintings are for you. Teenagers with acne – beware!

Now, the most amazing thing about these paintings – aside from how utterly puerile and ridiculous they are – is that Hirst himself did not paint most of them. He has had a team of assistants spotting canvasses for him for decades – for Hirst, like a deadbeat dad, the creative act often begins and ends with conception. Many of his spot paintings were actually done by Rachel Howard – and Hirst himself has said the only difference between spots painted by himself and spots painted by someone else was merely a question of money...

Fortunately, we here at The Jade Sphinx are not the sole voices of sanity wailing in the wilderness. In a recent New Yorker review Peter Schjeldahl wrote that, “…to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism, as heards of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.”

Substitute “immorality” for “immortality,” and I could not agree more.

Snark by David Denby

If you’re reading these words, it’s more than probable that you have spent some time on the Internet.  The Web has been a mixed blessing – it has, for instance, allowed some of us to create like-minded communities dedicated to a single ideal or ideals.  It has also, however, allowed many of us to engage in anonymous invective and gratuitous cruelty.

Do you doubt that?  Read the message boards of most any site covering the arts, our celebrity culture or sports, and you can feast on snide attacks and juvenile backbiting. 

That snark has invaded our culture cannot be denied; sadly, it has gravitated off of the Web and pervaded our personal discussions, our public discourse, and our cultural identity.  Snark is the open sore of our shared cultural decay.

What is snark, exactly?  As David Denby points out, sark is “the bad kind of invective – low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing, in brief, snark.”

Denby has attacked the pervasive use of snark in his terrific little book, Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation.  (And before your correspondent is accused of snark because of the adjective ‘little,’ I point out that Denby’s compelling polemic is a scant 122 pages.)

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  In it, Denby traces the history of snark as a style from ancient Greece and Rome through the modern era and into its current degraded age.  He takes pains to separate irony and satire from snark (praising ironists as diverse as Jonathan Swift and Stephen Colbert), and pillories those who trade on snark as a de facto means of communication (sticking it to such guilty parties are Maureen Dowd, Gawker and Joe Queenan).

Though Denby takes examples from a variety of media, his key target is how the Internet has adopted snark as its unofficial voice, and how that injudicious choice has hurt the Web as a tool to connect people and drive the shared discussion.  Or, as Denby writes:

It turns out that in the wake of the Internet revolution, snark as a style has outgrown its original limited function.  The Internet has allowed it to metastasize as a pop writing form: A snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web.  Not only that, it’s there forever, since it’s easily Googled out of obscurity.  Along with all the useful, solid, clever, playful information and opinion circulating around, a style of creepy nastiness is rampaging all over the place, too.  The zombies are biting, and a hell of a lot of us are enjoying the spectacle.  The Internet did not invent sarcasm, or the porous back fence where our gossiping parents gathered, or the tenderly merciful tabloids; but it provides universal distribution of what had earlier reached a limited number of eyes and ears.  In brief, the knowing group has been enlarged to an enormous audience that enjoys cruelty as a blood sport.

Denby (born 1943) is a film critic for The New Yorker.  He is a graduate of Columbia University and he re-enrolled in later adulthood to write a nonfiction account of the core curriculum, Great Books (1996).  While I certainly do not agree with many of Denby’s assertions, Great Books is superb in that it allows us to watch an active and fecund intelligence grapple with the Western Canon. 

No doubt many will take issue with Snark, but I suggest that much of the squirming it produces will be borne of self-recognition rather than disagreement.  This is an important and timely essay – highly recommended.

Jacob Collins in The New Yorker

This week, instead of the usual hectoring of the benighted Brooklyn Bohemians at Time Out New York (TONY), let’s focus our attention on a worthy publication and an important article that gets it (mostly) right. 

The New Yorker has been a beacon of intelligent reportage and arts coverage since 1925.  Reading The New Yorker after a steady diet of TONY is rather like drinking from a clean, clear mountain spring after living off of spunk water.   This week, journalist Adam Gopnik details his attempts to learn to draw and, in the process, profiles artist Jacob Collins.

My long-established admiration for Collins as an artist, an arts activist and a teacher is without bounds.  He has been at the forefront of a strong, pervasive and ever-growing movement to correct the course that art (and art history) has taken after its disastrous, dehumanizing collision with Modernism.  For Collins (like your correspondent and millions of others in an invisible majority), the break from the Academy was not an explosion of new freedoms, but an invitation to hollow, ridiculous and often offensive amateurism and self-indulgence.  Aside from the beauty of his work, Collins also joins such diverse figures as Graydon Parrish, Ted Seth Jacobs, Anthony Ryder and Ephraim Rubenstein as an important teacher to new generations of artists who aspire to virtuosity.

There is much to savor in Gopnik’s story, as well as much that induces the shrug of resignation that always greets comments from critics steeped in the Modernist/Post Modernist tradition.  Gopnik relates how he met Collins at a dinner party, but obviously does not know who he is.  For a reporter with a history of arts reportage not to know of Jacob Collins is rather like a music critic unaware of Simone Dinnerstein – but I suppose that’s not too surprising.  The line that pierced me to (and through) the heart, however, was the comment Gopnik records while learning to draw at Collins’ atelier: How do they do that trick?

This is the kind of misguided thinking that has made artistic technical virtuosity suspect while applauding the childish scrawls of Julian Schnabel.  Beautiful drawing is not a trick … it’s a discipline, it’s a skill, it’s a state of grace.  It comes only after a long, arduous and committed apprenticeship, and only to those with both talent and dedication.  The flight from beauty (to use Roger Scuton’s felicitous phrase) that reduces this sublime mystery to a trick is endemic of the Modernist mindset, and the enemy of art.

But, happily, Gopnik gets it in the end.  After a trip with Collins to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they view both the Bonzino drawings and doodles by Alex Katz, Gopnik finally comes to some détente with Collins on the idea of beauty.  He writes, “I had come to feel not just inadequate as an art critic, in the absence of any skill, but also alienated from art in its current guise.  Learning to draw was my way of confronting my disillusion with some of the louder sonorities and certitudes of the art with which I had grown up and for which I had once been a fierce advocate … Over the years, however, the absence of true skill – the skill to do something with your fingers at the command of your mind, which can be done only by a few, after long practice – unmanned my love, and that created a problem for me.”

Gopnik is also ready to entertain the notion that it is possible that the abstract approach might be, well, wrong.  “Jacob knew the score,” he writes.  “But what if he was right, and the whole thing had been a mistake, and we all had to start over from scratch, or at least from a sketch?  It was a possibility worth looking at.”

This article, I think, is an important moment in the reclamation of our artistic tradition.  The invisible majority mentioned previously is becoming more and more visible.  Perhaps the saturation of absurdity found in most pop culture has finally persuaded art’s critical establishment that it is a game without rules, and therefore not worth playing.  We’ll see.  However, I think the intellectual garage sale that has been Modernism (and all the pufferies that followed it) is collecting its last dime before closing up shop.  Now we just have to wait for galleries and the market they manipulate to catch up to the rest of us.

One last brief word about The Grand Central Academy of Art.  This is the school founded by Jacob Collins, located in mid-town Manhattan.  To quote their Web site, “The Grand Central Academy of Art … is built on the skills and ideas that have come from the classical world, the Italian Renaissance and through to the Beaux-Art tradition of the nineteenth century.   The Academy is a center for the revival of the classical tradition where a new generation of artists is supported in the pursuit of skill and beauty.”  Interested readers can learn more at: http://grandcentralacademy.classicist.org/index.html.