Hedgehog in the Blog

Girl goes broke, gets evicted, wants to be an actress, becomes a prostitute, and has a very peculiar name: Nana Kleinfrankenheim. Overall she’s happy because she’s able to transcend the conditioning that would otherwise make her situation quite depressing.

I found my moment of Zen in her words:

I’m unhappy — I’m responsible. I close my eyes — I’m responsible. I forget that I’m responsible, but I am. I told you escape is a pipe dream. After all everything is beautiful. You only have to take an interest in things, see their beauty. After all, things are just what they are. A face is a face. Plates are plates.  Men are men. And life is life.

The Zen of French New Wave? Also, at what point can we just accept that it’s now French Old Wave? It’s black and white. They talk slow. They dance funny, and they all smoke.

Europeans, particularly the intellectually inclined, bemoan both America’s perceived lack of culture and centralized support for the arts. Although my European roots are less pronounced, a sense of camaraderie pulls me into agreeing. But is it actually true?

Off the top of my head, a range of works including Pixar’s UP, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs, and Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers seem no less potent than works by Botticelli, Beethoven, Kundera, or Calvino. If the question is really about “high art” whatever that may mean to you, it likely doesn’t change the proportion of people who seek out art for entertainment and escape from apathy or a malaise.

In 2009 National Public Radio reported that the attendance for every major-league baseball, basketball, football and hockey game in the US was approximately 140 million. The number of people who visited America’s museums was about 850 million!

But, why no Minister of Culture and such a confusing web of federal arts commissions and appointees? This may give off signals that as a civilization we don’t value culture and the arts. Defining culture in the US melting pot within its rhetoric of freedom of expression may be at odds with an institutional body, especially a federal one. This oversight may imply “official” definition of culture, a slippery slope to censorship.

Historically, it has proven to be a political dead end.

In 1859, President James Buchanan appointed a National Arts Commission, but it disbanded after two years. Teddy Roosevelt made a similar attempt 50 years later, and in 1937, during a fit of New Deal-fueled government expansion, a New York congressman introduced legislation to create a Department of Science, Art, and Literature, but the proposal never got beyond committee. Subsequent efforts to create a centralized cultural agency were hampered at least in part by negative associations with Nazi propaganda and “cultural planning” in the USSR.” (Christopher Beam, Slate)

The official line may read something like: American culture is freedom from the need for an official definition of culture.

A Ministry of Arts may not have emerged in the United States because artists are and have been largely privately funded and less dependent on state support. This does mean the arts are subject to market fluctuations. While a great deal of European art was funded by centralized churches and royal courts, private patronage from merchants from Italian and Flemish city-states funded many historically significant works. Examples include van Dyke’s portrait commissions and the Palazzo di Rucellai and the Scrovegni Chapel in Italy. Economic growth and an emergence of a middle class tied art closer to private funds.

I decided to explore this topic after listening to a TED talk by a Shrin Neshat: Art in exile. Neshat is an Iranian photographer and filmmaker living in exile. Her work explores cultural, religious and political topics as they relate to identities of Muslim women. She concludes the talk with concerns over the West’s focus of art and culture as entertainment. Her conclusion made me think about what causes the “lack of culture” critique of the US, and how it may now extend broadly to the West.

Seeking something higher is part of us. We do it through religion, history, family roots, ideals, and beauty. Neshat may be warning us that we are not making the higher a priority.

Objectively, I am fortunate enough to live in a city with a regular stream of artistic production. It may not always fit my taste or temperament, but it’s not lacking. Perhaps what is really at issue is taste and purpose, not presence of American culture and art.

UW Alum, Chuck Close was appointed by President Obama to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities earlier this week. I learned about this from a post on Facebook. Having never heard of Close, I checked out his entry in Wikipedia, where I found this great idea:

Facing a slump, Close made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush for unfamiliar methods. ‘I threw away my tools’, Close said. ‘I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you’ve done before, it will push you to where you’ve never gone before.’”

Close suffered a seizure that left him paralyzed from the neck down, but has regained enough movement to continue painting.

“In some ways, though, Close’s rigorous acceptance of self-imposed limits as an artist prepared him for physical challenges he didn’t choose. ’When I went into the hospital, there were just other problems to be solved,” he said. After resuming his stride, ‘things had a greater urgency and pleasure, and it was more celebratory,’ Close said. ‘When you lose something, you’re very happy to get it back. I missed walking on the beach with my kids, but I could still paint.’”

(Additional quotes taken from Cleveland Arts News)

Martin Scorsese’s acceptance speech of the Cecil B. DeMille award from this year’s Golden Globes is worth a close listen. I have an undue amount of time to search for muses, and when my imagination wavers, I turn to Hulu. When I exhaust 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation for the week, I improvise. On such an occasion, three Ricky Gervais beer-jokes-along-stabs-at-usual-Hollywood-suspects videos into my wanderings, I was rewarded with Mr. Scorcese’s words.

Lifetime achievement awards are my weakness. I end chocked up with knots in my throat and dangerously vulnerable to inspiration and hope. Mr. Scorcese spared me. Instead of the common barrage of thank yous and coy nods to the struggles that shaped the drama of the win, Scorcese celebrated a timeline of film talent that came before him, honoring it for instilling in him the passion to brave filmmaking.

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose urges writers  to learn from enduring works of the past and use them as positive models. Prose shows how today’s writing is a dot at the end of the long complex sentence which literature has written. The writer serves the craft: if you put in the requisite time and respect, you may- now that’s a narrow margin of a may- be rewarded. No wonder writers like many artists are often probed for their technique: Do you use a computer? Where do you find inspiration? What genius supplements are you on? The answers given have less to do with the details of the process, but instead nod to great teachers, mistakes, the inability to restrain themselves from a medium, and the desire to add a new dish to the buffet of art.

That is what I remembered when I saw the small notice in the local newspaper that the old man had died of cancer on his 83rd birthday. I remembered Alfred Kazin, a boy in Brooklyn, myself a boy as reader, the two of us intent on assuming an American voice, on joining our voices to the chorus that has sounded through generations before us. – Richard Rodriguez

Time I reclaimed the notebooks and pens I’ve compulsively collected over the years from the dust mites. I ask the universe to give me courage and focus to make it work, as I would like to eventually move out of my parent’s house.