ABOVE: detail from the cover of John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts?.

This book has been around for a good long time, but the Washington Post just got around to reviewing it, so we’ll happily tag along on the WaPo wagon. John Carey’s What Good are the Arts?, says Michael Dirda, has put his finger on a particularly raw nerve regarding the state of the arts (Carey surveys literature, visual art, theatre, dance, and a grab-bag of other cultural fields). The cleavage between so-called high-art and low is damaging to art and to society, Carey argues, so that modern art “has become synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and sensationalism,” and people are being turned off by the snootiness and elitism of contemporary art.

We’re pretty strongly in favour of popular art around here, as you may have noticed. We love the Turner Prize for its whiz-bang entertainment value, we’re strongly in support of street-level art like graffiti and guerilla postering, we’ll even cover glorified screensavers. But one of Carey’s central themes is puzzling: he argues that “a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.” That sounds like a conceptual manifesto to us: the chilly post-modernism of deconstruction and all that, very Derrida and Duchamp, not Dumb and Dumber (which would be art, by Carey’s definition, sounds like). Anyone care to reconcile this for us? If My Bed is art, and so is a Precious Moments figurine, but the devotees of each refuse to acknowledge the artistry of the other, is either better off?

LINK: Washington Post > A populist critic takes a long, hard look at the culture of creativity.

ABOVE: detail from Matisse’s Portrait of Madame Matisse (1913), for which the painter’s wife did more than a hundred sittings, as described in a new book by Hilary Spurling about Matisse’s Life.

Another biography of a modernist painter, another woeful tale of marital rot, emotional breakdown, aesthetic agony, sexual crisis, and political catastrophe. Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Hilary Spurling’s second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse: Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 in the New Yorker is complimentary, praising the book’s colourful explorations of the last half of Matisse’s life, in which the self-taught painter was initially compared—unfavourably—with Picasso, and later perfected the style of painting called Fauvism.

But of course, being an early 20th century French painter, he was also a total nut. For instance, for his Portrait of Madame Matisse, the painter asked his wife Amelie to sit for the portrait over a hundred times while he fussed interminably with it. Spurling announces in her book that she wishes to dispel first the notion that Matisse was diddling all his models, and second that he was a Vichy for the Nazis. To save you reading the whole thing, Schjeldahl agrees with Spurling that a) he wasn’t and b) he wasn’t. Sorry to spoil the ending for you.

LINK: The New Yorker > Art as life: the Matisse we never knew

ABOVE: Left to right: Oprah, Dr. Phil, Rembrandt. They have more in common that just using one name, notes the New York Times, reviewing Roger Housden’s self-help book How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master

What The Da Vinci Code did for airport thrillers, Roger Housden appears poised to do for self-help books, with his atrociously titled How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master— i.e., plunder the works of a great artist for the purposes of selling an aircraft carrier-load of insipid and aesthetically bankrupt books. Apparently, since Rembrandt pulled a couple of boners in the 17th-century stock market and juggled a few emotionally crooked and financially devastating romantic entanglements, he’s fodder for a book aimed at needy, impotent Nebraskan day traders because he, you know, took a real hard look in the mirror from time to time, and couldn’t we all benefit from that?

Carol Kino surveys the psychological wreckage in Sunday’s New York Times, and if the article is to be believed, it’s not as bad as all that. But we are not convinced. As Kino points out early on, the book is filled with the typical brand of East-meets-West imitation Buddhism that is the stock in trade of the contemporary self-help oeuvre, “like ‘Open Your Eyes,’ ‘Troubles Will Come,’ and ‘Keep the Faith.’” Apparently museum gift shoppes across the land are stocking up on the book and Housden is now lecturing and signing books in L.A. as part of the Getty’s current Rembrandt show (which, by the way, opens today). Why get some dusty old tweed-wearing art history prof in to talk about Rembrandt when you can get a bestselling author, and not just any author: The author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life and its dynamite sequel, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart!

Sickening, top to bottom.

LINK: New York Times > Portrait of the Artist as a 17th-Century Oprah

ABOVE: Cover of Art Since 1900

In the galaxy of pointlessness, coffee table books are the nebulae—large, brightly coloured, pleasant to look at, and totally without substance. This profile from The Observer is cause for hope, however: Art Since 1900 is a 700-page tome by four authors which chronicles 20th century art in a non-linear, interdisciplinary format, weaving in themes of psychoanalysis, political theory, social movements, and so on. They select individual artworks, manifestos, meetings, deaths, scandals, and other important moments in art history throughout each year and write essays on them, cross-referencing each other and tracing individual threads throughout the years and different movements.

The authors, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, are, the Observer says, “formidably highbrow,” which frankly sounds like code for “insufferable.” But no matter whether you could stand having them sitting around your kitchen table, they are undeniably serious art critics, having all converged at the superlegitimate art theory journal October.

The subtitle of the book (’Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism’) indicates the breadth of the material that’s covered. The article is at least a good read, regardless of whether the book is.

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