http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/06/art-review-the-spectacular-art-of-j-paul-getty-museum.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/06/art-race-colonialism-and-changing-tastes.html
http://www.latimes.com/la-ca-geromeatgetty-20100613,0,624102.story
Gerome may have been part of an "academic" tradition that the next generation of French painters had to reject in order to make their own progress. He may have been part of an exoticizing "orientalist" tradition that Edward Said among others has criticized. But he is also an amazing artist whom we can now take a better measure of. Rejection is seldom final. Almost everything that is rejected in the arts eventually comes back, and it is good that it does.
Neglected books are usually not rejected as such; they just slip away. But literary explorers are always pulling back drowned books to the surface, as Graham Greene tried to do with his Century Library reprint series in the 1930s:
http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=467
One of the most obscure authors intended for the series, although not actually reprinted in it, is Leonard Merrick, who seems to have been adored by his fellow writers -- when I was a book dealer, I handled a 15 volume set of his collected novels with introductions by some very big names, such as J.M. Barrie -- but today does not even have a Wikipedia entry. Someone ought to remedy that; he is the very model of The Neglected Novelist.
Although there are artists who take a while to attain the fame they deserve, or maybe never do, I generally think that those who do achieve and sustain fame in their lifetimes (like Gerome) have a lot to offer. I am not one of those "The emperor has no clothes" types. For example, take the film directors who are considered to be at the apex of cinematic expression right now -- Martin Scorsese, Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Bela Tarr, Ang Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, the Dardenne Brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-wai, Gus Van Sant. They are all incredible. In the future, each of them may go in and out of favor at times, but I don't think that any of them will be lost. Michael Haneke is unquestionably of their number:
...what’s most interesting and important in his films is the way he deals with [representation], in terms of the formal techniques he uses, and the doubling. For example, you never know in Caché what the source of any image is. He destabilizes the image. You never know at any moment whether you’re watching a video done by some unknown person that you never discover who it is, or whether it’s Haneke’s shot. He’s keeping you on your toes. Watching his films....you have to pay attention. You can’t nod off. You can’t think about other things. You’ll miss something crucial.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/michael-hanekes-cinema-of-aesthetic-manipulation-colin-marshall-talks-to-film-scholar-peter-brunette.html
As anti-Twitter and anti-Facebook as I am for my own purposes, I certainly am not against artists who find those media a useful way of projecting their activities around the world. Icelandic jazz pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs talks to Jason Crane about how participating in the virtual world makes her feel far less isolated:
http://thejazzsession.com/2010/06/14/the-jazz-session-177-sunna-gunnlaugs/
Living as I now do in another country (and one that is very outward-focused), I see more than ever that continuing the global artistic and intellectual dialogue is urgently important. That dialogue may be at its highest pitch since the Enlightenment, and for all that is wrong with the world today, that is profoundly right.
As a further instance of our necessary internationalism, consider an American newspaper reviewing an English/Dutch co-production of an important recent Russian opera, Alexander Raskatov's A Dog's Life (based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/arts/23iht-loomis23.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Raskatov
Suicide is a perennially interesting topic, and since I spent some time within the orbit of that idea and discussed it with my therapists, I try not to fear the subject, but to accept the intellectual exploration of it as something illuminating for me, rather than threatening. Andrew Hinderaker's "wise, rich and deeply moving new play" Suicide, Incorporated, currently being performed in Chicago, the greatest theater city in America, would therefore be a play I would attend rather than avoid:
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2010/06/suicide-incorporated-at-gift-theatre-a-deeply-moving-inquiry-into-what-lives-are-worth.html
My mother adored the American Craftsman furniture of Gustav Stickley, which we had more than usual exposure to in New Jersey because of Stickley's long association with the state (the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms is in Morris Plains, New Jersey). She was always delighted to see a new book about Stickley, or a new PBS documentary about him. So whenever I see a Stickley news item today, it revives happy memories:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38760
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Stickley
http://www.stickleymuseum.org/
Among notables born on this date are Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, novelists Charles W. Chesnutt and Vikram Seth, poets Kurt Schwitters and Paul Muldoon, playwright Lillian Hellman, country guitarist Chet Atkins, Beach Boy Brian Wilson, pop singers Lionel Richie and Anne Murray, composer Jacques Offenbach, jazzman Eric Dolphy, pianist Andre Watts, painter Georges Dufrenoy, film directors Stephen Frears and Robert Rodriguez, and actors Errol Flynn, Audie Murphy, Olympia Dukakis, Martin Landau, John Goodman, and Nicole Kidman. One of my favorite films that never found the popular audience it deserved -- maybe it is really more for film and pop culture buffs -- is Joe Dante's 1993 take on the great schlockmeister William Castle, Matinee, with John Goodman irresistible in the Castle role, absolutely spot-on casting.
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