I'd like to comment on writing about art

A close up I took of a Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum’s special exhibition.

This weekend, I finished reading Bianca Bosker’s Get The Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among The Inspired Artists And Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See. I was about three fourths the way through the book when I realized I had been on a steady diet of books by writers about art, or books by artists and curators about how to see art. A partial list includes:

• Travels in Vermeer, by Michael White

• Seeing Like An Artist, by Lincon Perry

• The Upside-Down World: Meetings With The Dutch Masters, by Benjamin Moser

• The Value of Art and also Seeing Slowly, both by Michael Findlay

And now, Get the Picture. In a trade-book sense, it has the most memoir-like feel (although the quieter Travels in Vermeer is more the kind of book I’m more apt to select). Bosker’s narrative persona is like the friend who wants to dish on what she’s learning about art, which is to say it’s a narrative voice that leans into intimacy with the reader the way that memoir often does. So, for over 300 pages, you get the sensation of being her art quest bestie. I’m not making a value judgement one way or the other on how how narrative persona works—each book demands its own. However, I think the narrative vocie works well for Bosker, who invites other non-art-world specialists into her fold, and her exploration of that world. she makes it safe to not know all about art along with her. Bosker also has an uncanny knack for nailing the simile in a way that’s refreshingingly devoid of cliche, and also illustrative of what she’s trying to communicate. A few of the many that stood out to me:

• “…squiggly bits of metal welded to look like angsty wingdings.”

• “Reyling on context felt lazy, like I was outsourcing my opinions to the hive mind.”

• “Haning out with Rob was like rubbing your gums with whatever white powder you found on the sink at a nightclub, then watching Gossip Girl at 2x speed.”

And so many more. It kept things fresh, lively. Bosker also has an uncanny knack of putting you in the moment with her, a sense that comes off as very of the moment, but, as a writer, I suspect is made of careful selection, careful revising, and full immersion in the project. She’s a seasoned writer, therefore she doesn’t have to come off as seasoned in the art-world’s machinations and leans in on her own vulnerability in the unfamiliar spaces of art. We feel surprise and let-down as she does.

All the good art books I’ve read—and I would count each of the ones I’ve shared here in that definition—give us a sense of exploration along with the author. It’s less about schooling us (for examples of “being schooled,” read Get The Picture, in which Bosker allows herself to be “schooled-up” by gallerists, collectors, artists, museum personnel, and, of course, the art itself), but allowing us into a way of seeing and being in the world. There are moments of discovery, like this one from Bosker, that both tell and invite us into a new relationship with art: “A museum does not have to be read like a book, from beginning to end. I began to think of it more like ordering off a menu. You try a few things.” And, like all good story forms, Bosker becomes a reliably unreliable-trying-to-be-reliable narrator, and because we know from the outset that this is an unfamiliar world, we end up trusting her more than the “experts.” She gives us a way to peer into what feels like an unpenatrable world. As her first guide, a gallerist named Jack continues to reinforce, there’s a desire from within the kingdom of fine art to keep out the “Schmos” (read: non art people, everyday people, non elites). At events, there aren’t just VIP passes, but levels of them. But Bosker, allows us schmos a way into it. As she says in a chapter about her stint as a guard at the Guggenheim, “Policing visitors’ behavior turned viewers into ‘mute receptors’ who were expected to passively accept the culture handed down to them from on high and enjoy whatever the intelligentsia told them to.”

What really wins me over to Bosker is that in the end, she does not succumb to such a cynical viewpoint. In a chapter where she is working as a studio assistant to an artist, she makes the discovery that “embracing beauty was nothing if not a vote for life—an act of optimism, and excited Hell yes! to whatever the world would bring.” She follows this with a quote from Stendhal, that beauty is “only the promise of happiness” but ammends it with her own insight: “But it will draw you deeper into our existence.” And at that point, she finds unexpected beauty nearly everywhere.

Reading Bosker, I’ve been thinking on my own experience, exactly a year ago, at the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibit. A profound experience, I don’t know that I would have appreciated Vermeer in the way I do now at any other point in my life. I found solace in his art while going through menopause, and I’m quite sure that the quiet ambiguity of his painting struck a chord in me as my body wholesale changed, but mostly as an internal tumolt. There’s no narrative arc in Vermeer, nor subjects of stories well known. As Jonathan Moser acknoweledges, “Neither is Vermeer a storyteller.” And while many have commented with clarity and acuity on how Vermeer uses light, fewer comment on the sense of ambiguity captured in the quiet moments of his women subjects. I delight in their depictions— not only the solitary moments of repose but of their not-so-easily-read facial expressions in the company of others, often men, whose faces we do not or only obscurely see. Ambiguity is the gravitational center of Vermeer for me. Moser points out another commonality in the writing about Vermeer, which is the luxury aspect of his work—ultramarine paint, for instance, was prohibitably expensive, and material costs all but bankrupted the painter. This extranvagance is often for rather small, domestic pictures, which seems such a delightful difference from the way we think about grand works of art, where, say, the scale of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch might dwarf the smaller, quieter, yet ultimately luxurous Vermeer.

And so peculiar to be brought back to Vermeer, a seventeenth-century artist, while reading about contemporary art, mostly in New York City.

It’s all half-baked ideas from me, when it comes to art in gneral and Vermeer in particular. I’m not an art historian and only recently started writing regularly about my experience with art. If I stick with it, it may place me in a camp with Michael White, who writes about seeing Vermeer’s works at a time when life itself had been a series of upheavals. Vermeer quiets the grief of losing his first wife and divorcing his second. His travels to see all the known works that he can—a remarkably small cannon—is also an exploration of the self, as is Bosker’s. But hers is to understand the art world as it exists now, where as White’s is about entering the world of a single artist. Still, the desire to immerse onself in the art is a thread between them.

One of the pervasive questions for me, through all my reading, is the value of art. I also keep in mind what Michael Findlay, an internationally known dealer of mostly abstract art says about its value. “All works of art have the potential for commercial value, social value, and essential value. But none of of those values are constant; all are enhanced or diminshed by the fluctuating tastes of different times and cultures.” What Findlay doesn’t include here is that matters of taste are also intensely personal. Sometimes that can come from “schmo-land,” by people like me who just like what they like, perhaps with a bit more of a trained eye for spending a lot of time looking, but without formal training. Sometimes taste can be monetized, as we see from Jack, a gallerist we meet as Bianca Bosker begins moving through the art world. He is constantly priased for his taste, and he drinks the Kool-Aid, seeing his taste as the thing people are buying even more than the art itself.

As a writer, my inclination is more towards the artists. At least, I think so. I found many parallels between the art students in MFAs depicted in bosker’s Get The Pictureand my experiences in writing workshops. What does it mean to be in training for something so subjective? Reading those sections I also found myself thinking often about artist Lincoln Perry’s ideas about the potential of subtraction; “…damaged sculpture packs an energetic surprise,” he opines about fractured sculpture from antiquity. It strikes me as postmodern without it’s typical cycncism. It reminds me of how silences speak in poetry and music.

Perry also asks some questions that I continue to ponder but have so far failed to answer: “Is there an ethical difference between art that connects inner with outer and that which keeps to itself.” While Perry declares he fails to see one, I’ve not yet made up my mind. The ethics behind the art that Bosker views is constantly at the whims of “context” which she protrays as evershifting. As well, it doesn’t always want its own curtain pulled back, doesn’t want everyone to have access to it because it believes this stance is the source of it’s mystery and intrigue. I’m paraphrasing a conversation she has with the gallerist obsessed with taste, but it’s instructive to see the ways in which different writers untangle the myth-making aspects of art. I find this part of a larger ethical discussion about who art is for. The elitism we witness in Bosker serves as a centry between culture and schmos. But it is often counter to what artists themselves believe. I’m drawn pack to Perry again, who champions spending time and absorbing the art (something that another gallerist in Bosker’s book calls “staying in the art”). Perry writes:

That’s what good painting enables us to do: to sense what’s behind the walls as well as what’s on them, to be sheltered or enclosed in an imagained world the way we feel reading a favorite book. We become not passive recipients, but instead active participants.

Who should be held back from that? We all have access to an imagination that needs stimuli. To believe otherwise is a flattened exsistence. And while the arts might not open the imagination for all—for others it may be nature, the telescope, the microscope, an equation—the less artificial barriers we contruct, the more we allow for meaning-making as an equitable activity.

As for me, my writing about art is in its infancy; I’ve not the immersion journalists zeal for infiltrating art’s culture, but a more quietly voyeruistic approach, seeeing how the art is working on me. I tend to revisit paintings, and revel in seeing them in different locales. I saw works from the National Gallery at the Rijksmuseum, and will see others from the Rijksmusem’s exhibit at the Frick Pittsburgh (as the Frick Museum in New York continues to be rennovated). There is much art in Appalachia, where I live and work, that I need to seek out and pay attention to. And who am I, before, during, and after these encounters? I am looking for Michael White’s moments of grace and transformation, I suppose. Or, put another way, as White stands in front for Vermeer’s iconic portrait, The Milkmaid, he simply asks, “Why do I feel this sweet sensation of joy?”

Odds and Ends

I just have to say it: Diane Seuss is blowing my mind. If I can ever overcome the mutness of being so bowled-over by her book, Modern Poetry, I hope to share some thoughts on it soon. In the meantime, I share this excellent review at Chicago Review of Books.

I’ve been in a jazz place lately and have enjoyed The Lucky Thompson Quartet’s Lucky Strikes, Booker Ervin’s Tex Book Tenor, and Kind of Blue, the 1959 Miles Davis classic album that also features Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, Paul Chambers, James Cobb, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly.

Next week I’m off to a writers weekend in Tucker County, where I’ll be taking in some Celtic-Punk at the iconic Purple Fiddle in Thomas, WV. That should be a change of pace, for sure.