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Weather or not…

That orange dot was Wednesday July 5.

You want to believe the reports or your lying eyes, it’s getting more and more difficult to hydrate climate denial. Yes, people are still getting rich doing so, with full employment for lobbyists who still help companies muddle the puddles. But that’s basically what they are now and we are full on in our incoherence meltdown. Slow moving isn’t slow enough for the summer news cycle, and though they are always looks for way to spice things up, there’s not a lot of chase left to cut to:

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica.

The spike comes as forecasters warn that the Earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by two main factors: continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by humans burning oil, gas and coal; and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.

…

The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.

“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”

On Tuesday, global average temperatures climbed to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17 Celsius, making it the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Up next: stuck weather patterns, wavy flow, amplified troughs and ridges – and that’s just for the mid-latitudes. Get wise to the flimflammery.

Image: By Elena Shao/The New York Times

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Art into Business

I know a lot of people, sure don’t we all. And I know many of them think this ‘slide’ is a horse that departed the barn, found the violin factory and played no small part in a performance of the Brandenburg concerto in 1971. Okay, fine.

But still. I’m going to interview the critic Jed Perl for my show in a month or so. He had a recent piece out about the Met director and Davos and well, horse… barn… Brandenburg D minor 7th:

“We need to make our case with metrics, framed in a language that businessmen understand.” That’s what Thomas Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had to say the other day, while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. My heart sank when I read these words. They may be the saddest words ever spoken by the director of a major museum. Campbell had begun by complaining that at Davos culture was “an add-on,” “the entertainment”—and I can sympathize with his frustration on that score. But Campbell’s problem—and more than five years into his tenure it’s beginning to look like Campbell’s tragedy—is that at the first sign of frustration he’s ready to turn art into a business.

I’ve been told by people close to Campbell that I misunderstand him. I’ve been told that deep down he’s still the scrupulous scholar who as a curator at the Metropolitan produced what are probably the two greatest tapestry shows ever mounted in a museum. But the gifts that make a great curator (visual refinement, historical imagination) are not necessarily the gifts required to be a great museum director, who must make the case for art’s elusive, transcendent powers in the face of a world dominated by the rapacity of metrics, big data, and businessmen who live and die by such measures. I don’t think Campbell meant any harm to the arts when he argued at Davos that what he called “the culture industry” had to connect with the rest of the world “at a deeper socioeconomic level.” The effect of Campbell’s words, however, was to deny art the unique, stand-alone power it must have in a modern society.

The trouble with Campbell is that he imagines the only way to speak truth to power is in a language you’re absolutely sure the powerbrokers understand. But the great cultural arbiters have always taken an altogether different approach. They have taken it upon themselves to reimagine the nature of power. They have set out to convince the people with the fat bank accounts and the political clout that transcendent values are urgently important, an essential aspect of a healthy democratic society. What the great cultural arbiters have always done is insist on the power of art in the face of other kinds of power—the power of bottom lines, flow charts, metrics, big data.

As they say in the old country, read the whole thing.

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The Irascibles

It’s akin to a cliché folding in on itself and forming a kind of ironic paper airplane that gets tossed into the future.

the-irascibles

It landed on my table in the form of the Stevens and Swan biography of Willem de Kooning and it’s funny to set aside your naiveté or nostalgia – or invite them both in for a drink – and think about our mid-century art heroes. To set the scene, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to include no judges sympathetic to abstract art on the panel of its juried show “American Art Today, 1950”:

The snub was a godsend to the downtown artists: the museum performed to perfection the part of stuffy, blinkered fool, evoking the famous failure of the bourgeois Salon in Paris to include many of the great modernists. The artists around the Club could now, in turn, play the part of the slighted impressionists. They wrote an “open letter,” intended to be widely disseminated, to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dated May 20, 1950, and reported two days later on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan: Charge ‘Hostility to Advanced Art.” the letter began, “The undersigned painters reject the monster national exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next December, and will not submit work to its jury.” The artists patronized the Metropolitan – the presumable guardian of eternal values – by offering its leaders a history lesson: “We draw to the attention of those gentlemen the historical fact that, for roughly a hundred years, only advanced art has made any consequential contribution to civilization.” The group also picketed the museum, attracting further attention.

Emphasis mine. Part of that further attention was that Life magazine, “following the actions of the avant-garde with bemused interest since its feature on Pollock,” decided to publish a piece on the opening of the controversial exhibition – including the above picture of the excluded protesters.

Published under the headlines of “The Irascibles,” a name taken from an earlier editorial in the Herald Tribune criticizing the protesters, the photo by Nina Leen portrayed fifteen of the original eighteen painters who signed the letter to the Met. Highly theatrical, the artists were “arranged like a still life, staring into space, their expression serious, skeptical, demanding. Not one smiled.”

Pollock is at the center, very carefully positioned, with de Kooning on the upper left. The only woman is Hedda Sterne. A key to all the people in the photo is here. “Together, the artists seemed to embody their headline, “The Irascibles,” a name that was itself a dramatic piece of public relations that brought to mind every cliché about the struggle between the avant-garde and bourgeois society.”

And yet, can you imagine any subject getting a group of artists on the front pages of national publications today? Wait, don’t answer that.