Bridget Bishop Hanged

On this day, June 10, in 1692, Bridget Bishop was executed. No, she wasn't burnt. Nobody was burnt in Salem. She was hanged.

Bishop's execution was the first. The witch-hunting fever would continue for months. A total of 19 people would be hanged, one would die of the pressing of stones, and several would die in prison.

The trial of Mrs Bishop included the following exchange:

Q: Bishop, what do you say? You stand here charged with sundry acts of witchcraft by you done or committed upon the bodies of Mercy Lewis and Ann Putman and others.

A: I am innocent, I know nothing of it, I have done no witchcraft .... I am as innocent as the child unborn. ....

Q: Goody Bishop, what contact have you made with the Devil?

A: I have made no contact with the Devil. I have never seen him before in my life.

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I have to wonder whether the word "contact" in that exchange is a mistranscription of "contract," which is surely what the one party meant to ask about and the other meant to deny.

Auction Season

We're into the thick of the art world's auction season, and on May 4th a painting by Pablo Picasso, "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" went for more than $106 million, at Christie's.

What do you do after you (as a private person, not a museum) purchase a Picasso for that kind of price? Do you hang it above your mantle, or put it away in a climate-controlled and well-guarded storage facility? I suppose if you think of it as an investment, in the hope that somebody will pay even more at Sotheby's a year from now, you put it in storage. If you bought it for the aesthetic experience, it goes on the living room wall.

This raises further questions in my mind. Didn't I read at some point that there was an antitrust investigation underway involving Sotheby's and Christie's? Checking ....

Yes, I did. But that isn't exactly news. The reason my memory of it was so vague may be that it all happened nine years ago. An indictment charged A. Alfred Taubman, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sotheby's from 1983 to 2000, and Anthony J. Tennant, a member of the Board of Directors of Christie's from 1993 to 1998 and Chairman of its Board of Directors from 1993 to 1996, with conspiring to fix auction commission rates.

Taubman was convicted in December of that year, fined $7.5 million and imprisoned for ten months.

Tennant was never tried. He is a citizen of the United Kingdom, and extradiction arrangements between our two countries don't provide for such cases.

That link will get you to an intriguing article in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics says that the Taubman trial "provided detailed evidence as to how the price fixing worked, and the economic conditions under which it was started and began to fall apart." Specifically, the price-fixing conspiracy came about as a result of a downturn in the art auction market, and began to fall apart during and as a result of the subsequent upturn.

Alternative theories of cartel formation appear to have different views as to whether things should happen that way. But that is the way they did happen in this matter, theory schmeary.

Happy Mother's Day.

Renaissance Florence

I've been reading diligently through Richard Goldthwaite's Summa, "The Economy of Renaissance Florence."

I use the word "Summa" with care. Goldthwaite has spent a long and distinguished academic career studying this fascinating subject, so what he says over the course of these 600-plus pages deserves our careful attention.

And his expansive vocabulary is a wonder in itself. But to that I devoted an entry in my other blog at an earlier stage in my reading.

Today I'd like to address your attention to a nugget I found on page 390. It seems that the art critic and biographer Giorgio Vasari was "one of the very first writers in the Italian language to use the word 'competition,' especially in its economic sense."

The Italian for "competition" is concorrenza, and competing is "concorrente."

Vasari used both words repeatedly, notably in his introduction to his life of Perugino.

Why? Because the idea of competition was essential to Vasari's conception of why Florence possessed its eminence as a center of the arts. The artists of Florence are lean and hungry, he said, driven by "the need to be industrious ... to know how to make a living." In this context, he called concorrenza "one of the nourishments that maintain them."

Words to heed, I think.

Last weekend

I don' usually add to this blog on a Tuesday, but this week I'll give you an expanded schedule, in order to celebrate the fulfillment of one of my New Years' resolutions for 2008 -- I had said that I would watch an opera at the Met while wearing a tuxedo. Check.

There was much else to my weekend in Manhattan too. There was the Frick collection, for example. Let me start with that.

Who was Henry Clay Frick? He was the enterprising fellow who in 1871 created the Frick Coke Company. It consisted of a beehive oven that turned coal into the coke used in turn to produce steel. Years later Frick entered into a partnership with Andrew Carnegie, because Carnegie needed a secure supply of coke for his expanding steel manufacturing empire.

The business history of that time is fascinating, but let us return to his eye for art, which would seem to have been superb.

The Frick Collection, somewhat (though it appears only sporadically) updated by his heirs remains HQ-ed where he wanted it to be, and is filled with a variety of works in many media from many countries and periods, including great works from the Italian renaissance up to those of the impressionists and post-impressionists of his own era.

One of the first paintings we saw when we walked into the place was, as it happens, a Dutch baroque work, a Vermeer that I have described on this blog before.

The painting I have in mind is "Officer and Laughing Girl" and I first encountered a reproduction thereof as the cover art for a book, Vermeer's Hat, which I read earlier this year.

I found the painting quite compelling, even as cover art, chiefly because of the map. Behind the man and woman seated at a table, and just above their heads from our perspective, there is a large wall map. I stared at that for an hour the first time I saw the book, trying to figure out what part of the world the map depicts.

Eventually, I got it. Part of the problem is that the orientation of the map treats WEST as "up." We are so accustomed in the early 21st century to seeing the north edge of a map as up that this is literally disorientating. Dis-occidentalating too.

The other problem is that Vermeer has painted the land as blue and the water as brown, rather than the reverse.

Once a viewer has made both of these adjustments, he can see that this is a map of Holland.

So I knew of this painting, and had even discussed it recently with the friend who was my companion as we walked into the Frick building. (She had used it to tweak me about my literalness, "are painters allowed to do that???") But I had no idea of its provenance, and was delighted to see it.

Indeed, nearly too delighted. I was excitedly pointing out the features of the painting that fascinate me and, in my absorption in the moment, my pointing finger must have gotten a bit too close to the painting. Some sort of alarm went off and a security guard asked me -- nicely but firmly -- to step back.

I hope the readers of this blog enjoy the painting too. And not just in the tiny pixellated form above. Get thee to Manhattan.

Still here? Okay. Anyway, I'll say something more about the Frick tomorrow and then on Thursday and Friday turn to the other elements of my trip. Including the aforementioned opera.

A passage from Updike

I'm leafing today for no good reason through the Updike novel SEEK MY FACE (2002). The action of the novel consists entirely of a day-long interview. The only two characters, then, in the novel's present tense are an elderly artist, Hope, and a young reporter.

In this passage, about one-quarter of the way into the book, Hope is showing Kathryn her studio.

"Photographs of herself with others in other times goingback to Ardmore in the 'twenties, framed certificates of graduation and commendation ... the hideous trophies of crystal and painted metal one gets as tokens of recognition and public gratitude (the most ungainly of them handed to her sheepishly by the first President Bush, a tall and boyish Connecticut gent apparently as pleasantly surprised to find himself in the White House as she was; at lunch afterward, seated beside her, he pointed out for Hope to admire the daily flowers, the elegantly clad Marine guards, the splendidly imposing punctilio which momentarily surrounded them, two proper children of the fading Protestant hegemony): these souvenirs, still in the hasty order of an afternoon's arranging when the studio was newly built, attract Kathryn's attention less than Hope exected. Only the old photographs tempt the interloper to move closer, her neck craned forward in that unbecoming way: 'How pretty you were.'"

I love that. But in my lazy-Sunday fashion, I won't bother enumerating why.

Time after Time

I'm back in town.

So, what should we talk about today? This: someone asked me recently, pretty much out of the blue, what I would list as the ten most important events in the world since 1993. I was allowed to interpret the word "important" any way I wanted to.

I composed a list. But I'm not going to share that with you until tomorrow. Today, I want to discuss the nature of such questions.

I can only understand such a question as an effort to predict which events will make it into the history books of our posterity, and how much text or emphasis each will receive there. Of course a phrase like "our posterity" is still vague, but we might just for fun pick the date 2107. What will a historian, writing then, regard as most important to know about the years 1993-2007?

I suspect that history will remain a matter of constructing narratives, and won't deteriorate into a mere data base. Narrative history responds to the human love of stories, of plots, and adds the assurance, "by the way, it really happened." Contrary narratives keep the blodd boiling and the word processing software upgrades selling.

Furthermore, I'm going to indulge for now in the supposition that anarchists aren't going to prevail in the world any time soon, and that the central narrative of history books written in 2107 will continue to involve sovereignty. Various governments claiming sovereignty over various chunks of the earth, and their clashes with rebels who deny that authority as well as with foes from outside their chunk. History will continue to be largely (though it won't of course be entirely) a matter of past politics, past military actions, past diplomacy.

Other sorts of history (the stories of technical inventions, of commerce and finance, of everyday life) will continue to make contributions, but developments in each will be perceived as "important" to the extent that they feed into the central narrative of sovereigns, rebels, and foes.

To illustrate, here are ten events from the period 1842-1856.

We'll start with international war and diplomacy:

1. The Anglo-Chinese, or Opium, Wars.
2. A wave of revolutions, 1848-49, swept the occidental world from Brazil to Hungary.
3. November 1853, a battle between the Russian and Ottoman fleets ended in a clear victory for the former and began the Crimean War.

Now let's say something about the national politics (narrowly understood) of some of the leading powers of the day.
4. May 1846, the UK repealed its "corn laws," allowing the unimpeded importation of agricultural products. This became a key victory of free trade as a political/ideological platform.
5. December 1851, Louis Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly in France, effectively ending the life of the Second Republic.
6. 1855, the first legislature of the territory of Kansas in the US convened, and started enacting pro-slavery legislation.

What else? Well, let's try a bit of everything else.
7. 1844, in Illinois, religious leader Joseph Smith is murdered
8. 1845, the beginning of the potato famine in Ireland
9. 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, in New York
10.1849, a Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoyevsky, student activist/revolutionary, to death. (The sentence is later commuted, and the experience has enormous traumatic consequences for the budding artist.)

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This is a thoroughly objectionable list, surely. You might object for example that I've given scientific and technological achievement no place at all. Morse's telegraph, Siemens' improvements upon it, and the creation of the Siemens corporation in 1847, all have one might argue importance as great as that of anything I've listed.

Or what about the discovery of gold near Sacramento in 1848 and the subsequent rush of would-be prospectors?

And so it goes, on and on. At least in arguing about inclusion and exclusion we have the benefit of the practices of contemporary historians to work from. We aren't forced to speculate about the contents of texts still unwritten. Tomorrow then, we'll do just that. We'll return to the original question, most significant world events from 1993 to the present.

Anatoly Fomenko

I'd like to recommend the drawings of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko.

Here's a URL. http://anatoly-fomenko.com/art/main.php

From what I understand, Fomenko is a brilliant mathematician, who has taken it into his head that he's also a historian -- although his theories in the latter sphere (his "New Chronology") have the whiff of the crackpot about them.

Still, the drawings have a wonderful quality to them, combining minimalism and surrealism if you will. What is the minimum you can do on a two-dimensional surface to produce a surreal result?

John Updike

Just fifteen entries ago, July 11, I discussed a passage from a book of Updike's SEEK MY FACE. That book was a fictionalization of the history of modernist art.

Today, I'd like to bring another of Updike's recent novels to your attention. This is VILLAGES (2004). Again, it is on one level a fictionalization of some recent history -- in this case, the development of computing. The protagonist, Owen McKenzie, grew up in rural Pennsylvania through the era of the Second World War, studied electrical engineering at MIT, and co-founded a computer-servicing firm in the pre-Apollo era.

At the suggestion of his partner, Ed Mervine, the two men set up shop in rural Connecticut -- to the north and west of New Haven. They each make a modest fortune before the style of computer off of which they thrive becomes obsolete as Silicon Valley, California, rises to dominance.

That's the narrative arc. But in this novel, as in SEEK MY FACE, Updike is also concerned with the visual arts, and with contrasting ideas about them. He sets one scene in the living room of a neighboring couple in that Connecticut village -- the husband of that couple is an illustrator for the mass-market magazines -- framed samples of his work from POST and COLLIER's and REDBOOK grace the "cracked plaster walls" of the Morrissey home. But we've arrived at 1968, and the magazine world is shifting away from the sort of work Ian Morrissey has to offer -- nonfiction outsells fiction, and nonfiction is illustrated by photographers.

Ian is understandably cranky about this, and he blames computer nerds like Owen for the disappearance of his market. This spirited tirade is part of the result:

"But you, O. dear boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way -- you know something's missing, and still you've signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses."

I'll give only a bit of Owen's reply, for the flavor of the exchange.

"Some would say, incidentally, that the women's magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It's the Devil's bargain, Ian -- medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven."

It's a perfect 1968 conversation. C.P. Snow's expression for the rift between the humanities and the sciences, "the two cultures," -- first coined by Snow in 1959 -- had taken this long to become common coin, and such self-conscious bantering of representatives of the two might I imagine have been heard in such a living room. Updike takes the ideas of his characters seriously, yet all the time they remain characters, defined by time place and plot -- not mouthpieces.

Stone versus Clay

The latest issue of The New Republic has a fascinating review by Jed Perl of the Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

What struck me was Perl's speculation, which he attributes to a scholar named John Onians, that the Greek sense of volume, mass, and weight -- the sense that underlies their pottery, architecture, and sculpture, follows from their creation myths.

Onians explains, says Perl, "that in Greek creation myths there is an idea that mankind was made from stone, and contrasts this with the thinking of people who" lived on flooded plains, and conceived of humans as created from something softer -- mud or clay.

The Renaissance inherited, or revived, the Greek sense of creation as distinct from that Mesopotamian alternative.

Onians' theory is, Perl writes, "a convincing prologue to the art of Michelangelo and Bancusi, in which the emphasis is always on the centeredness of the masses, on the gravitational pull of the forms, on the sense of the work of art as a massing of energies that displaces other energies in the world."

Lucien Freud

We're into the art world's auction season, and Lucien Freud's "Bruce Bernard" (1992) will go "under the hammer" at Christie's auction house in London next month.

This is one of twenty-one major works from the so called "School of London" that are coming to auction for the first time. I've tried to find a decent on-line photo to which to link you here, but am having poor luck.

In September 2003 the London Times ran an appreciative essay on Lucien Freud's career by John Russell Taylor, which said in part: "He has continued to change and develop throughout his 80 years: it is perfectly permissible to prefer his early, hard-edged style to his later flourishes of heavy impasto, but that is a matter of taste rather than of general consent."

The painting on the block in June will presumably belong to the "later flourishes" category.

I read something recently about how the art market is a way in which "the rich try to get richer." But I suspect that's wrong, that speculation on possible price increases is a relatively small part of the motivation that will presumably fill the room at Christie's.

Aside from such speculation, and aside too from any genuine love of the art, there is I think a sense of status anxiety that drives the market.

But, of course, possessing a Lucien Freud only soothes your status anxiety if you put it on a wall somewhere. Having it in a carefully monitored, climate-controlled, warehouse might be just fine for a speculator, but improves one's status not at all. It has to be, "Oh, look at what a nice painting I've got in my foyer." THAT will relieve some anxieties.

Van Gogh Discovery

Curators at a museum in Croatia report that they've found a new Van Gogh.

Apparently, they simply asked themselves, "what is this thing in storage in our attic?" and unwrapped it. Then said, "Gee, those brushstrokes look familiar" and called in an expert on Dutch art.

That expert, John Sillevis, says it is Van Gogh.

Here's a link to the story as covered by a newspaper based in Berlin, Germany.

http://jurnalo.com/jurnalo/storyPage.do?story_id=28610

Personally, I'm just astonished that the world of museum curating is as casual as this story makes it appear.

Romanticism and Classicism

Should you feel it necessary to develop a considered position on aesthetic philosophy (a felt necessity for only a small part of the population of the globe, I grant) it won't be necessary, or I think advisable, to do so by taking sides as between romanticism and classicism.

It is better simply to see those two labels as representing timeless possibilities for craftsmen, and markers in the history of taste. The history of taste, one might say, is a battle between novelty and connoisseurship. When a new movement gets underway, it is because taste has been sated by the old, and people are ready for novelty. Connoisseurs of the previous dominant school (which had been a revolutionary innovation itself once), who know all its rules and standards, are unhappy about this because their expertise has been rendered obsolete. So they end up writing art history texts, while the new school in time develops its own rules and standards, and its own connoisseurs. It time, this new becomes old, and the quest for novelty has been sated, so there is another break and the cycle is complete. That cycle has a lot of "cosms," micro and macro.

The greatest macrocosmic form of that cycle is the alternation between classicism and romanticism. I believe that what is known as "modernism" was in its essence a reversion to classicism, and "post-modernism" has been a re-enactment of the romantic rebellion.

By "classicism" in this sense I understand chiefly art that appeals to the intellect, whereas by "romanicism" I understand art that appeals chiefly through physiology. A classicism will understand the rightness of a chord, a romantic will feel the thrill of the trill. It is possible to write for either taste, for standards to develop around both, and for satiation to develop around both. Good and bad are possible in each line.

So let's not presume to choose sides between them, any more than we would presume to choose sides between hot dogs with, and those without, the relish.

The above is nearly identical to a column in my old blog posted a year ago today. I confess this before anyone catches me at it.