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Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
My Day at the New Getty Museum: You know how it is, people who live in a city never visit the tourist attractions there, right? Well, until today I had not visited the new Getty Museum, and I thought I would relate some of what I saw.
Overall, it was actually better than I had feared it would be. At the old Getty it was clear that many of the folks running the place were pretty determined modernists who included very biased commentary in the placards, kept trying to hide away their best 19th century works, and constantly bemoaned Mr. Getty's poor taste for Alma-Tadema, Godward, and ancient Greek and Roman art as opposed to modernist dreck. My take on the new museum is that the situation remains mostly the same at the new facility with regard to the collection, while the facility itself suffers from a nasty case of the usual modernist-with-someone-else's-money syndrome. I guess that's mostly good news.
First, a few criticisms of the facilities themselves. The Getty foundation invested the old man's money well and found itself with more cash on hand than the IRS would allow during the construction of the museum, so they spared no expense (and I mean NO expense!) in the construction of the museum. They shipped a million cubic feet of travertine marble from Italy for the construction of the main buildings for example. I have no quarrel with lavish spending in general, though the white marble, polished steel, and glass buildings don't seem ideal for the Southern California climate. The plazas are white, the buildings are white, the awnings are white, and the effect is quite blinding on the always sunny SoCal days. Not the best thing to do for your eyes before walking into relatively dim museum corridors to see artworks and antiques. The layout of the place in general was done far more in the interest of fancy architecture than practical matters. Pools, fountains, walls, and gardens cut off natural traffic paths with geometric regularity outside while inside, the meandering maze of display spaces and staircases make it easy to miss whole rooms full of goodies and to lost track of the direction one is headed. I imagine that was a "feature" rather than a bug...some people seem to think that the feeling of being lost is more important than the experience of great art. There are a lot of smaller things representing practical problems as well such as the nonsensical traffic flow in the cafeteria, and the shin-bumping design of the pipe-like fancy door handles throughout the museum. The buildings and gardens can be summed up as very expensive, very clean and well-maintained, very inconvenient to use, and rather bland and uninspiring.
On the positive side, the lighting and air conditioning were pretty good overall. I can't say that the lighting of the paintings was the best I have ever seen, but only a few paintings were even a little hard to see (mostly the biggest ones). That's certainly better than the old museum was. The rest areas and so on were also fairly comfy, at least with today's weather (which was the standard LA 76, breezy, and sunny thing). Another nice thing about the Getty (old and new) is that since the whole affair is underwritten by the Getty fortune, they aren't geared to gouge you for every penny possible in the cafes, the bookstore, etc. (It's just $5 to park, free to get in, and the internal prices were not bloated.) Speaking of the bookstore, they had a good collection of books there, some of this even I (owner of just about every good art book there is) found a few things to buy, including (ironically enough) that Bauhaus design book that was mentioned on the list earlier today.
Now for the art. I was happy to see a nice selection of older paintings (especially the renaissance Italians) and several of my favorites from the old museum (like Alma-Tadema's Spring in particular) and not too much mixing of 20th century garbage in the way (though there's a hideous Tom Wolfesque "turd" made of aluminum pipes about 20 feet tall greeting you the moment you get off the tram to go inside). They did have Bouguereau's "Young Girl Defending Herself From Eros" on display and it was a center of attention in that area of the room, as was Alma-Tadema's "Spring" which was very nearby. Spring was hanging fairly high on the wall compared to the way they had it at the old museum (now the front of the procession is at around eye level). This has the advantage of letting you see those great figures, though it seems less three dimensional that way. They also don't have it behind glass anymore and they don't have a little brass bar preventing people from trying to walk into the painting anymore either. The European bronzes seemed much better displayed than they were at the old museum, though I can't recall why. Perhaps less clutter, perhaps less direct comparison to their glorious Greek sculptures. I do recall that a lot of their Roman sculpture seemed a whole lot better looking if they weren't standing next to the Greek stuff. The same seemed to be true of the glassware and some other antiques.
The extra space made most of the stuff there (especially the antiques) easier to see and less jumbled, and for whatever reason, it seemed that more of the inlaid wood and marble pieces looked better and more impressive. Perhaps it's the lack of clutter, perhaps it's restoration, perhaps it's lighting, but the bottom line is that they seemed to look better.
I did miss the Greek and Roman works from the old museum and that has be fired up to go visit there in the next few weeks to see what's up over there. For those of you who have not been to the old Getty, the museum is built as a Roman Villa would be, complete with pools and fountains, courtyards, roman columns, and so on. My understanding is that the whole Greek and Roman collection will be on display at the old museum using the space left open by the removal of all the other stuff that has been moved to the new museum.
They had one room they labeled as "Symbolist" which had a few decent works (not a lot though) which was dominated by a huge and decidedly not Symbolist "thing" portraying some kind of big socialist parade. Perhaps they confused "Socialist" and "Symbolist". ;-) Perhaps they also just needed to fill the space and this was the only thing that would fit.
They did take a few subtle swipes at the good guys in the signage I should mention. One was to classify a whole floor full of post-1800 art as "Impressionist" when in fact they only had a few impressionist works on display and most of what was there was academic, Pre-Raphaelite, and other non-impressionist 19th century work. Another little jab was in the placard about Alma-Tadema's "Spring", which commented that while Sir Lawrence was portraying a festival of flowers akin to the British "May Day" the "true" meaning of that holiday was one of labor struggles (who says Marx is dead?). I also noticed that several of the placards for the best 19th century paintings took pains to explain that these artists and paintings "were very popular in their time" (and in a back-handed way focusing on how they aren't popular anymore). That's a pretty funny way to talk about the most popular paintings in your collection isn't it?
I should also mention that they had several strategically placed "learning centers" for kids that actually seemed pretty good for the most part in two ways. First, as a place to leave the kids in a supervised place while Mom and Dad go off to look at the art, it's very handy. Second, they had some well thought out, sturdy things to play with which would allow the kids to understand a little more about what they were seeing. There were a few stations that had been disabled by maniac children (in most museums and public displays of this kind I have seen they are completely destroyed by the kids in a matter of hours), but most were working fine and I had the sense that "the repairman is on the way"...it's just that kind of place.
Now let me say a few things about the people I saw there today. Most were tourists and locals like us (some with kids I thought were far too young to be in a place like this), and the place seemed thankfully devoid of docents spouting idiotic modernist theories. There was however a large group of kids (they looked to be between about 10 and about 18) on some kind of organized field trip and I had a chance to talk to a few of them and peek at the clipboards they were carrying around. Their "observation" tasks were absolutely inane! They were asked to take the time to feel the walls, think about their shoes and backpacks, feel the sunshine, count the number of paintings in each room, and any other possible thing EXCEPT to actually look at the paintings and think about them. I'm sure that the theory was something along the lines of "Looking at old paintings is boring. We need to keep the kid's from falling asleep by making him focus on things he knows (like counting things, sunshine, and his own underwear) rather than the alien and boring world of painting, sculpture, and decoration." Of course, this is bound to fail since the idea of counting paintings has got to be the most deadly boring thing you could possibly do with them, and the kids did seem to oblivious to the stuff around them. Some were giggling and gossiping, and others seemed to be just going through the boring motions they had been prescribed. If they were asked to look at the art rather than just counting the frames I think they would have had a lot more fun and been a lot less bored (OK, OK, some might have still been giggling about the nudes, but what can you really expect?).
The place is huge and I can't say that we made it through every last room in the place, but I got a good idea of what was going on there, and I definitely recommend that you visit if you get a chance. The collection isn't as nice as Fred's, but it's still worth seeing. ;-)
--Brian
11:29:15 PM 
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A Discussion of Theory's Proper Role in Understanding Art and Design: Here's a letter that's part of a discussion of how to enrich the art education system...
> From: tiber@enteract.com [mailto:tiber@enteract.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 2:14 PM
> To: goodart@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [GoodArt] Interesting Possibilities For Education
>
> The idea that is such a thing as "good design" (i.e. good visual design) with
> general principles that can be observed in everything from teacups to
> cathedrals has only been made part of an educational curriculum in modern
> times.
I find it hard to believe that it was never discussed before that. I think the difference is that in modern times it was treated as an end in itself rather than a way of making things better. As I read history the change can be traced to the time when the arts were taken over from actual practicing artists by academics whose goals were to write ever more abstract theoretical papers as a profession rather than learning to make things better and better as a profession.
> I don't think you'll find any books about these principles earlier than
> 1900. The great pioneering institution in the field was the
> Bauhaus - and probably every design text written since that time can be seen as
> a variation on their approach (I haven't done more than glance at them -- so if
> any of you know different, please speak up)
I'd be very surprised if William Morris if nobody else wrote things about design principles and he didn't live past 1900. I can't think of any books on that subject before 1900, but I would be very surprised if that was caused by anything other than my poor education. ;-)
> And I have a hunch that nobody on Goodart is a fan of the Bauhaus artists
> (Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius,Marcel Breuer, Vassily
> Kandinsky, Paul Klee,and Lyonel Feininger)
Of course not, but while what these guys were doing was not of great artistic value, some of them were trying to implement hyper-formalistic principles of design as works of art in and of themselves. A painting with all design but no artistic content is a lot like having an excellent driver with no car...neither will manage to go anywhere. Early in the modernist era "artists" tried dissecting art's components to see whether they could be a success with just one element and by discarding all the rest. Some tried formalism without content, others tried using color without form, others tried using color without paint, or paint for the sake of paint, others tried using the audience without the artist, and still others tried good intentions without anything at all. These were all flops of course, but that doesn't mean that meaning, color, design principles, the artist, the audience, a subject, paint, and so on are bad, it's just that all of them have been misused for 100 years and we need to reclaim them all in their proper context.
> Well --- maybe some of us enjoy the minimalist style of a German coffee-maker
> or sports car --but the road to general principles of design is the road of
> reductionism - unless those general principles are so mystical that no one can
> apply them. (this was Louis Sullivan's approach in his attempt at a textbook
> on design: "Kindergarden Chats" - where the principle of
> design is the life spirit exemplified by the seed growing into the plant. Yes,
> this is a fine idea, but how are we supposed to apply it ? Pour water on the
> canvas and hope that it sprouts ?)
Well, one thing I think happens with a lot of practitioners of art (and engineering too for that matter) have a good intuitive feel for basic principles but they aren't inclined to think of them in an abstract way (by pulling them out of the context of their particular work). One reason for this is that people who specialize in applications tend to be less interested in theoretical matters than theoreticians are. Another is that many such people have been bombarded by foolish theories to the point that they have been soured to the very idea of deriving principles from the particulars of their work. This is particularly common today since the advocates of theories in the arts have both insanely wrong theories and their theories are so divorced from applicability that to spend any time on them at all is a waste.
> This is not to deny that many teachers try to teach the general principles of
> the style that they are teaching - but these "general principles" are only
> general to that style. So, for example, when Khaimraj recently applied the
> compositional principles that he had learned for academic painting to a non-
> academic painting, it was just one of his many jokes.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "principles of style". Ideas like balance, color theory, the golden ratio, and so on apply across styles. No?
> This is also not to deny that the quality that distinguishes a good teacup from
> all the others is similar to the quality that distinguishes a good Rembrandt
> from the work of his students. But this quality of good design is something
> that is felt - not something that can be explained
> by applying general principles.
Why not?
> (in fact, general principles is what
> Rembrandt's pupils have in common with the master -- but what makes the
> master's designs so good is something else)
Whatever it is, clearly his pupils did learn some of them, no?
> It's a great disservice to smart young people to tell them that the "general
> principles of design" are something that they can ever know or that anyone else
> has ever completely known. Instead, they need to be shown that the world of
> human creation is too wonderful and diverse to ever be completely
> comprehended.
Is that supposed to make them interested or to give up in frustration? The way this idea is usually presented it is usually the latter.
> They need to be encouraged to explore the many paths of
> experience rather than to theorize themselves into a dead end.
Of course that is true, and the modernists have very much theorized themselves into a dead end, but that doesn't mean theories and analysis are useless tools, they are just useless tools in a vacuum, and when the theories and analysis are irrational and false. There's no question that memorizing a few simple rules of design will make you a good artist, it won't. This is no more so for art than learning Newton's laws will make you a great scientist or engineer. Kids do need to start somewhere, and getting hands-on experience with the process of drawing is another basic part of a good foundation. Learning that art is neither a mystical power that can't be learned nor an innate ability we all equally have is another bit of a good foundation. Alone, nothing you can do in a few hours to turn someone into a great artist or a great "consumer" of art, but if we do things right perhaps we can inch people a little closer toward that end, don't you think?
--Brian
6:33:00 PM
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Ellsworth Toohey Would be Proud: Rabid Anti-Rebuilding New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp and his gang of heavy hitters of the architectural profession will (according to an article in the New York Observer) announce their plan for the WTC site. Rather than a series of dwarvish towers, this proposal will presumably be to permanently install some hideous empty hole in the skyline. No doubt this will be seen as his great achievement in influencing the look of Manhattan.
10:50:53 AM
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HyperCard Forgotten, but Not Gone. Apple is famous for great software, but HyperCard, one of its best, is programma non grata within the company. Remarkably, the 20-year-old programming environment still has a strong following. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
4:39:11 AM
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Amusing and Informative at the Same Time: Intellectual property lawyer Larry Lessig speaks to OSCon in this cool Flash presentation. It's mostly about the history of copyrights and the dirty rotten things being done with software patents and endless extensions of the term of copyrights. It's mostly audio, but the animations are pretty cool. [Slashdot]
2:29:44 AM
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Free Mickey!: In support of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case you can get a free bumper sticker. There's more information on the site about the case.
2:23:48 AM
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Some Artwork Examples: I suppose I should have done this before, but there's a demand out there for some examples of the artwork for hte show. Some broad examples are below. You can also download a (lo-res) little demo of the artwork at http://www.wildspacetv.com/NewMergedTrailer1Mbps.wmv (25MB) or a much better (and much bigger) one at http://www.wildspacetv.com/NewMergedTrailer3Mbps.mov (69MB), there's also a similarly huge one in Windows Media format (and oh god what a terrible format it is!) http://www.wildspacetv.com/NewMergedTrailer3Mbps.wmv (75MB) and there are some older and smaller bits showing the development process we have gone through from pencil sketches to (mostly) finished animations at http://www.wildspacetv.com/trailer.html. Enjoy!
These guys are pirates...the bad guys.
This is a patrol ship for the folks who hunt pirates...the good guys.
This is a fighter from a patrol ship.
This is Kira, She's one of the main characters. She was born and grew up in a lab and escaped. She's on the run and figuring out how things work when you aren't living in a cage. Here, she is on a trade depot station.
Here Kira is after having made it inside a pirate cruiser. She doesn't look very afraid does she? She'll learn!
This is Zak and a nasty pirate called Lockjaw. It's a bad idea to make Lockjaw upset.
...a really bad idea.
This is Aurora, a fancy cargo ship that Zak and Kira fly around in. Cool isn't it?
This is a pirate fighter called a "stinger". They annoyingly buzz around like mosquitoes.
Here's a shot of Aurora launching.
2:20:38 AM
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More on Prague Flooding: Here's an interesting simulation of where the water went in Prague during the big flood in 1890. It looks like this one if likely to peak out at slightly larger than that one.
12:03:16 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brian Yoder.
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