Audience: a New York magazine aimed at young adults, like New York Magazine
Jeff Koons represents the epitome of current art, with artistic references to Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp and pop references to Elvis and the Pink Panther. His pieces walk the line between “playfulness (with) a contemporary monumentality,” in his words, and vacuous flops without a frame of reference. Placement is crucial to the effectiveness of Koons’s pieces, a theme which I aim to explore alongside sexuality, bright color, and scale as they mirror trends in wider popular culture.
Koons has reached a sustained stardom during his active career, a feat few visual artists achieve. This popularity comes with much debate; I will use articles with contradictory viewpoints from the “New York Times,” London’s “The Independent,” and other new sources, as well as interviews with Koons from “Charlie Rose,” “CNN,” and a Warhol documentary by Ric Burns. My research will of course be supplemented with Koons’s own work from his web portfolio.
His personal life builds the controversy evoked by his art: he married a porn star turned Italian Parliament member, hired an image consultant, and according to “The Independent” of London “gives interview in the third person.” This profile will have qualities that catch our readers attention: pop culture, art, and controversy through the lens of a New York-based artist.
I am versed in pop culture, art history, and the New York art scene, but not too immersed in any to blind my analysis. I believe that as a young visual artist, I am well-suited to write an informed and critical feature on Jeff Koons.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Pauline Kael Awoke Slumbering Giant in Criticism
Audience: a New York magazine aimed at young adults, like New York Magazine
Amid the disagreements swirling around the late “New Yorker” critic Pauline Kael, one thing is not up for grabs: those who write about Kael cannot help but use her style. Since Kael hit the New York film scene in 1967, magazines have become rife with writers, self-proclaimed “Paulettes” like jazz critic Francis Davis, who reproduce her schismatic language and personal attachment. Kael was fond of superlatives; “New Times” critic Andy Klein sticks one in a Kael obituary, declaring she was “simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.” Even Renata Alder’s essay “House Critic,” perhaps Kael’s largest censure, concludes “once the tone and the ante have been pumped up… it becomes hard - even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work - to write in any other way.”
With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism, part Princess Aurora and part mountain troll, and it demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis, in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on her devotion to film. She delighted in Jean-Luc Godard’s “stunning” use of pop and Barbara Streisand’s “incandescent” comedy, and panned “Hiroshima Mon Amour”s “passive… imposture” and “Top Gun”s “depersonalized… commercial”; she pursued her particular beauty like an 19th century aesthete. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.
The awoken giant shows its ugly side when her convictions persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Her reviews of films like “Silkwood” or “Funny Girl” are essentially argumentative, a challenge to disagree. Kael’s second person, as in “You feel that you understand,” could be construed as including the audience, except that, as Adler indicates, “‘You’ is most often Ms. Kael’s ‘I.’” She co-opts the reader’s power to make his or her own decisions: “The Witches of Eastwick” review states “And damned if (Jack Nicholson) doesn’t entertain us, too.” Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.
When Kael’s quest for beauty dissipates into bullying argument, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Inevitably, those who can’t stand her lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against Kael, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”
Adler, in “House Critic” for example, wants to skewer Kael on her penchant for bodily functions, both in movies and in her writing. But she cannot say “Pauline shouldn't like guts,” so instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and has no place in a movie critique. Ultimately, though, as Louis Menand of The New York Review of Books points out, Kael’s taste “kept the attention of the magazine's readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them” by generally walking the line between Sleeping Beauty and obstinate monster.
Amid the disagreements swirling around the late “New Yorker” critic Pauline Kael, one thing is not up for grabs: those who write about Kael cannot help but use her style. Since Kael hit the New York film scene in 1967, magazines have become rife with writers, self-proclaimed “Paulettes” like jazz critic Francis Davis, who reproduce her schismatic language and personal attachment. Kael was fond of superlatives; “New Times” critic Andy Klein sticks one in a Kael obituary, declaring she was “simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.” Even Renata Alder’s essay “House Critic,” perhaps Kael’s largest censure, concludes “once the tone and the ante have been pumped up… it becomes hard - even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work - to write in any other way.”
With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism, part Princess Aurora and part mountain troll, and it demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis, in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on her devotion to film. She delighted in Jean-Luc Godard’s “stunning” use of pop and Barbara Streisand’s “incandescent” comedy, and panned “Hiroshima Mon Amour”s “passive… imposture” and “Top Gun”s “depersonalized… commercial”; she pursued her particular beauty like an 19th century aesthete. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.
The awoken giant shows its ugly side when her convictions persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Her reviews of films like “Silkwood” or “Funny Girl” are essentially argumentative, a challenge to disagree. Kael’s second person, as in “You feel that you understand,” could be construed as including the audience, except that, as Adler indicates, “‘You’ is most often Ms. Kael’s ‘I.’” She co-opts the reader’s power to make his or her own decisions: “The Witches of Eastwick” review states “And damned if (Jack Nicholson) doesn’t entertain us, too.” Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.
When Kael’s quest for beauty dissipates into bullying argument, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Inevitably, those who can’t stand her lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against Kael, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”
Adler, in “House Critic” for example, wants to skewer Kael on her penchant for bodily functions, both in movies and in her writing. But she cannot say “Pauline shouldn't like guts,” so instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and has no place in a movie critique. Ultimately, though, as Louis Menand of The New York Review of Books points out, Kael’s taste “kept the attention of the magazine's readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them” by generally walking the line between Sleeping Beauty and obstinate monster.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Elements of Pauline Kael: Influence, Taste, and Judgement
Amid the debate about the late “New Yorker” critic Pauline Kael, one thing is not up for grabs: those who write about Kael inevitably use her grammar. Francis Davis, author of “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” counts himself within the ranks of “Paulettes” in today’s magazines. Even the censures, Renata Adler’s essay “House Critic” looming large among them, recognize Kael’s pervasive literary influence. Adler writes in her conclusion that “it becomes hard -- even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work -- to write in any other way,” and exposes her own essay to be rife with Kael’s techniques. Andy Klein, a critic for the New Times and a clear devotee to her superlatives, declares in his obituary of Kael that she was “simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.”
With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism that demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on their convictions or her devotion to her subject. She delighted in Jean-Luc Godard’s “stunning” use of pop and Barbara Streisand’s “incandescent” comedy, and panned “Hiroshima Mon Amour”s “passive… imposture” and “Top Gun”s “depersonalized… commercial”; she pursued beauty like Oscar Wilde at his most conspicuous. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.
The awoken giant sometimes drifts back to sleep in her longer pieces, “Busybody” for example loses all excitement by the third rambling paragraph, and it is here that the controversy surrounding Kael emerges. When visceral excitement can’t carry her, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Those who can’t stand lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against her, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”
In the end, one cannot judge taste on any stronger grounds than those upon which the opinions rely. Rational debate comes to a standstill. Adler, for example, wants to skewer Kael on her penchant for bodily functions, both in movies and in her writing, but she cannot say “Pauline shouldn't like guts” and instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and is outside of “the legitimate borders of polemic.”
Whatever your position on Kael’s taste, it is unfortunate when her energies persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Reviews like “Busybody” or “Funny Girl” are essentially argumentative, a challenge to disagree. Kael’s second person, as in “You feel that you understand,” could be construed as including the audience, except that, as Adler indicates, “‘You’ is most often Ms. Kael’s ‘I.’” She co-opts the reader’s power to make his or her own decisions: “The Witches of Eastwick” review states “And damned if he doesn’t entertain us, too.” The implication is that you are damned if you disagree. Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.
With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism that demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on their convictions or her devotion to her subject. She delighted in Jean-Luc Godard’s “stunning” use of pop and Barbara Streisand’s “incandescent” comedy, and panned “Hiroshima Mon Amour”s “passive… imposture” and “Top Gun”s “depersonalized… commercial”; she pursued beauty like Oscar Wilde at his most conspicuous. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.
The awoken giant sometimes drifts back to sleep in her longer pieces, “Busybody” for example loses all excitement by the third rambling paragraph, and it is here that the controversy surrounding Kael emerges. When visceral excitement can’t carry her, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Those who can’t stand lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against her, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”
In the end, one cannot judge taste on any stronger grounds than those upon which the opinions rely. Rational debate comes to a standstill. Adler, for example, wants to skewer Kael on her penchant for bodily functions, both in movies and in her writing, but she cannot say “Pauline shouldn't like guts” and instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and is outside of “the legitimate borders of polemic.”
Whatever your position on Kael’s taste, it is unfortunate when her energies persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Reviews like “Busybody” or “Funny Girl” are essentially argumentative, a challenge to disagree. Kael’s second person, as in “You feel that you understand,” could be construed as including the audience, except that, as Adler indicates, “‘You’ is most often Ms. Kael’s ‘I.’” She co-opts the reader’s power to make his or her own decisions: “The Witches of Eastwick” review states “And damned if he doesn’t entertain us, too.” The implication is that you are damned if you disagree. Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
How Are Things on the West Coast?
A little excitement from my home town this week:
1) The Musée National Picasso is sending more than 150 of the cubist's works Seattle's way: "Seattle is first U.S. stop for Picasso exhibit"
2) A more nuanced review from Alastair Macaulay of Seattle and New York City's productions of "Sleeping Beauty": "2 Coasts and 2 Troupes: Contrasting Visions of a Well-Trod Ballet"
1) The Musée National Picasso is sending more than 150 of the cubist's works Seattle's way: "Seattle is first U.S. stop for Picasso exhibit"
2) A more nuanced review from Alastair Macaulay of Seattle and New York City's productions of "Sleeping Beauty": "2 Coasts and 2 Troupes: Contrasting Visions of a Well-Trod Ballet"
Monday, February 1, 2010
"Touched Breifly": The English Department Reading
If there was a Wordle of Wednesday night’s English Department Reading, the program would have put the words “light,” “fear,” and “memory” bold, front, and center. Such juxtaposing concepts featured prominently in the original works of Kalamazoo’s ten English professors, weaving together distinct voices and formats.
Perhaps the commonalities speak to the plight of academics desperately seeking warmth in the dead of winter, or perhaps to the candid self-searching that is rampant in the Humphrey House. No matter the interpretation, Wednesday evening provided a looking-glass into the current occupations of our campus’ best writers.
Under the glow of a candelabra, it was easy to feel on the inside of this privileged window. Gail Griffin addressed the comfortably full Olmsted Room, hoping the event would make light of Winter quarter, she said, “before we all want to commit suicide.” The dark humor was unsettlingly appropriate, given Griffin’s power to humanize in the subsequent selection from her book on the murder suicide of K students Maggie Wardle and Neenef Odah ten years ago. A certain phrase seemed to encapsulate the evening, as Griffin “touched the comforter briefly” on Maggie’s old bed. The audience was indeed “touched briefly” by pieces of the past brought exquisitely to light.
Griffin also introduced this year’s two visiting professors, Amy Rodgers and Beth Marzoni, with fortes in theatre and poetry respectively. Rodgers achieves the dramatic, the analytic, and the personal in a unique process piece that explores her inspirations for a new play. The narrative is intensely earnest, and relatable, as Rodgers is determined to write an essay but is instead distracted by a file of pictures of Robert Frost’s late son. Marzoni drops two realist characters, “you” and “me,” into a broad range of surreal landscapes in her poem “Rothko’s Room.” She summons the painter Mark Rothko’s misty stacks of color by repeating t and d sounds atop one another, and by wistfully negating the possibility of an “ending” in the opening line with “if we could arrive” in the closing lines.
Di Suess joined with two characteristically merciless poems, drawing laughs especially with the self-aware and achingly pre-teen “Birthday Confessions.” Babli Sinha’s nuanced analytical paper on the “New Woman’s” role in a Southeast Asian novel also prompted snickers when the main character described a scholar’s life as “barren and cold.” Andy Mozina and Glenn Deutsch read excerpts from witty short fictions, one with suburban sexual undertones, titled “My Non-Sexual Affair,” and the other craving “density” on a road trip in New York.
Amelia Katanski, Marin Heinritz, and Bruce Mills shared creative non-fiction steeped in family matters. Katanski’s main character, struggling to pull a turkey from a dark coop and “yelp(ing) as his fingers are pecked,” seems a metaphor for extracting literature from our own inner darkness, a process in which each author was inherently engaged. Mills stepped up to the podium last to unveil the uneasy balance between order and chaos with sections from his book, “The Archeology of Yearning,” on raising a child with Autism. “Make room for all that is lost” he enjoined, and broke the spell of the evening with a final round of applause.
Perhaps the commonalities speak to the plight of academics desperately seeking warmth in the dead of winter, or perhaps to the candid self-searching that is rampant in the Humphrey House. No matter the interpretation, Wednesday evening provided a looking-glass into the current occupations of our campus’ best writers.
Under the glow of a candelabra, it was easy to feel on the inside of this privileged window. Gail Griffin addressed the comfortably full Olmsted Room, hoping the event would make light of Winter quarter, she said, “before we all want to commit suicide.” The dark humor was unsettlingly appropriate, given Griffin’s power to humanize in the subsequent selection from her book on the murder suicide of K students Maggie Wardle and Neenef Odah ten years ago. A certain phrase seemed to encapsulate the evening, as Griffin “touched the comforter briefly” on Maggie’s old bed. The audience was indeed “touched briefly” by pieces of the past brought exquisitely to light.
Griffin also introduced this year’s two visiting professors, Amy Rodgers and Beth Marzoni, with fortes in theatre and poetry respectively. Rodgers achieves the dramatic, the analytic, and the personal in a unique process piece that explores her inspirations for a new play. The narrative is intensely earnest, and relatable, as Rodgers is determined to write an essay but is instead distracted by a file of pictures of Robert Frost’s late son. Marzoni drops two realist characters, “you” and “me,” into a broad range of surreal landscapes in her poem “Rothko’s Room.” She summons the painter Mark Rothko’s misty stacks of color by repeating t and d sounds atop one another, and by wistfully negating the possibility of an “ending” in the opening line with “if we could arrive” in the closing lines.
Di Suess joined with two characteristically merciless poems, drawing laughs especially with the self-aware and achingly pre-teen “Birthday Confessions.” Babli Sinha’s nuanced analytical paper on the “New Woman’s” role in a Southeast Asian novel also prompted snickers when the main character described a scholar’s life as “barren and cold.” Andy Mozina and Glenn Deutsch read excerpts from witty short fictions, one with suburban sexual undertones, titled “My Non-Sexual Affair,” and the other craving “density” on a road trip in New York.
Amelia Katanski, Marin Heinritz, and Bruce Mills shared creative non-fiction steeped in family matters. Katanski’s main character, struggling to pull a turkey from a dark coop and “yelp(ing) as his fingers are pecked,” seems a metaphor for extracting literature from our own inner darkness, a process in which each author was inherently engaged. Mills stepped up to the podium last to unveil the uneasy balance between order and chaos with sections from his book, “The Archeology of Yearning,” on raising a child with Autism. “Make room for all that is lost” he enjoined, and broke the spell of the evening with a final round of applause.
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