Arranging marriages between Money and Art

‘… on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered flattered visage lies …’

December 7, 2012 by Angelico Nguyen at 4:00 am

At the very end of Lent 2012, the six members of the Korrektiv Kollektiv received, as a gift from Matthew Lickona, cartoon portraits from the pen of the wonderful Daniel Mitsui. What Mitsui memorialized in those small and startling figures, with unobtrusive allusiveness and an unsettling but corrective touch of the grotesque that exemplified the Korrektiv ethos of the classic period, was a golden age: a flowering, a ripening, the sun at zenith.

But flowers fade; ripeness turns to rot; light declines toward a slow, final failure; and shadows lengthen and coalesce unto the great shade, Night, who is herself the shadow of Death.

You couldn’t have noticed all that fading, rotting, and declining, though, since none of it showed on the surface — until November 1. On that day — All Saints’ Day (bitter irony!) — a mistake was made.

Now, at the beginning of Advent 2012, Mr Lickona has once again hired Daniel Mitsui — not to memorialize glory this time, but folly.

Fittingly so: Our Faith teaches that wrongs can be not merely prevented, not merely undone, but actually redeemed. And this is true.

For example: Though my addition to this blog’s roster may be a loss for you, the reader (not to mention the dragging-down it entails for Jonathans Potter and Webb, Mr Finnegan, Mr Lickona, Mr JOB, and Ms Expat), I get a brilliant Mitsui portrait:

Enigmatic, spooky, funny, and a good likeness to boot, though enough obscured to provide a useful degree of plausible deniability. I could hardly be happier with it. If only it had not come at such awful cost to you, dear friends.

Thank you for the picture, Mr Mitsui. Thank you for the present, Mr Lickona.

Thank you (in advance) for forbearing to sting, scorpion.

12 Comments Filed Under: animalia, barker, cartoonish, Earth, help, Korrektiv Press, marginalia, Nguyen, site news, up from the comments Tagged With: A lot of holes in the desert... and a lot of problems buried in those holes, Arranging marriages between Money and Art, creepy Catholics, Daniel Mitsui, He could never be a saint but he thought he could be a martyr if the scorpion killed him quick, seriously though, So grateful you will never know, vanity of vanities

DCCCVIII

November 11, 2012 by Angelico Nguyen at 2:25 am

I went to a readers’ theater presentation of The Real Inspector Hound yesterday (which was absurd), and found myself a half-stroll from here. (Thanks, notrelatedtoted!)

Mr Potter, was that poem you wrote about throwing baseballs at a target autobiographical? If so, we need:

A Spokane-to-SoCal plane ticket for Potter;
A copy of Surfing with Mel in Word or PDF format, saved on a flash drive; and
A baseball with a cavity carved in it to accommodate said flash drive.

Now then, Mr Potter: See those big corner windows?

11 Comments Filed Under: caution, Nguyen, research, snapshots, Surfing with Mel, up from the comments Tagged With: and that's how you pitch a screenplay!, Arranging marriages between Money and Art, baseball, eggshells:omelettes::barriers:art, In the neighborhood... feeling daffy, inside baseball, palindromes, The Loopy Eye in Tinsel Town, The Message in the Baseball

Dana Gioia

April 30, 2012 by Angelico Nguyen at 9:27 pm

Our coreligionist Dana Gioia — ex-General Foods executive, ex-NEA chairman, really good essayist/critic, pretty good poet — has a book due out next Tuesday, the 8th of May: Pity the Beautiful. Here’s one of the poems, which, though not one of his very best, takes a feeling I’ve felt while browsing through liturgical art in museums, and gives it an extra twist. I bet at least one or two of you out there can sympathize:

‘The Angel with the Broken Wing’

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadows up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.

Gioia’s also done a double-triolet, if you can believe that.

His interviews are always worth reading, and the ideas he expresses seem quite kongenial to Korrektiv. He knows a thing or two about trying to arrange marriages between money and art, and about cultivating patronage. He is a member of two groups — believing/practicing Catholics, and cultural Catholics (he’s of Sicilian and Mexican descent), and envisions a Catholic presence in American arts and letters that includes both groups. We might say he is interested not only in Catholic writers, but in Catholicish writers. JOB’s writing on Seamus Heaney has a similar spirit.

Here’s a short and pointed poem to punctuate this rambling post.

‘Unsaid’

So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

4 Comments Filed Under: Angelic guest posting, bookish, Catholicish writers, Heaven Tagged With: Arranging marriages between Money and Art, Laetare Medalists other than Walker Percy, today in statuary, triolet

The Korrektiv: Bright Youn… um, Bright Somethings?

April 29, 2012 by Angelico Nguyen at 8:34 pm

Via the BBC: ‘In a sense… the history of every medium is also, at least in part, the history of using that medium for fakery, for hoaxes and all kinds of practical jokes.’

When pranksters create internet hoaxes for fun – or for profit – it becomes difficult to trust what we read or see online.

Jokers and for-profit marketing companies are now devising elaborate online hoaxes, taking advantage of the in-built desire among consumers and media outlets to believe what they really know is unbelievable.

Hacking giant video monitors in New York’s Times Square? Kanye West launching a web startup? Fakes like these are just about believable enough.

Fakes that are just believable enough? Sounds familiar….

In the accompanying video, one of the kids behind the ‘Kanye West web startup’ hoax explains why he dragged Kanye West’s name into his little personal prank: ‘We realized this would probably only be funny to us and our friends, and so we need a name bigger attached to it’ — which sounds very familiar… very VERY familiar. Am I right, friends?

But the Korrektiv Konnektions don’t stop there. About halfway through the video, a professor type mentions that Evelyn Waugh and friends staged a fake art exhibit in London in 1929! Did everyone else know that already? I didn’t know that.

But, sure enough:

This celebrated hoax involved all the leading social figures of the time, and was the brainchild of Brian Howard, the effete socialite dilettante, upon whom Evelyn Waugh modelled the languid Anthony Blanche of Brideshead Revisited. Flushed with the success of his twenty-fourth birthday party, a ‘Great Urban Dionysia’ with Greek mythology as its theme, Howard then dreamed up a project that would not only be a good prank, but might also serve the dual purpose of launching him as an artist.

With his great friend Bryan Guinness, who was at that time married to Diana Mitford later to become the wife of Oswald Mosely, he carefully planned an exhibition of paintings by an imaginary artist. The show opened on July 23 1929 at Bryan Guinness’ house at 10 Buckingham Street, London SW1, advance information having been leaked to the press. Lady Eleanor Smith was suitably duped when she reported in the Sunday Despatch: ‘BRUNO HAT. What will be almost a cocktail party, is the private view of the exhibition of paintings by Bruno Hat to be held in London next week. Bruno Hat is a painter of German extraction, and his work is mainly of the abstract type, seemingly derivative from Picasso and De Chirico….’

snip

This natural, intuitive modern artist was in fact Tom Mitford, Bryan Guinness’ brother-in-law in heavy disguise and with a very affected German accent, who sat in a wheelchair and answered questions during the packed private view.

And Waugh himself even wrote an introduction to the exhibition catalogue, called ‘Approach to Hat’:

Now everyone is aware that what has come to be termed “abstract” painting has only just begun to be “taken seriously” in England. Some years ago Mr. Roberts and Mr. Wyndham Lewis achieved a certain success in that direction, but the acknowledged masters, such as Picasso, Gris and, perhaps, Marcoussis, have only recently found a market in this country. Artistically, we are incurably unpunctual.

snip

The painting of Bruno Hat presents a problem of very real importance. He is no Cezanne agonisedly tussling to reconcile the visual appearance of form with his own intuitional perception of it. Like Picasso, he creates it. Though the experienced eye can see at a glance that his work is entirely free of Picasso’s influence, it is to that artist that we go so far as to compare him. Picasso is the greatest painter of our time for one reason: this reason is that he is the most inspired of all the creators of abstract pictures. Those experts who have seen Bruno Hat’s work definitely accredit him with a similar power, developed, because of his youth only, to a less degree. The significance of this cannot be sufficiently stressed. It means, among other things, that Bruno Hat may lead the way in this century’s European painting from Discovery to Tradition. Uninfluenced, virtually untaught, he is the first natural, lonely, spontaneous flower of the one considerable movement in painting to-day.

Hitherto, good abstract painting has been the close preserve of its Hispano-Parisian discoverers. Bruno Hat is the first signal of the coming world movement towards the creation of Pure Form.

And that got me thinking… and thinking… and thinking…

GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!

5 Comments Filed Under: Angelic guest posting, Heaven, Things to discuss with Walker Percy over drinks Tagged With: Arranging marriages between Money and Art, Isn't that right Mr Hat?, Kopy-Kattery: Southern-Expatriotic, Nihil sub sole novum, Note to Dept of Mimicry: Southern Expat is a hard writer to imitate, plastics and/or Picasso and/or sunbathing and/or jazz, Smhzmshzhsmhhzzsh, technobabble, The Beeb, waugh waugh waugh, when are you just going to start calling yourselves the melancholy pranksters and have done with it?

Patronage

April 5, 2012 by Angelico Nguyen at 12:00 am

This deserves to be known, especially in light of the discussion/investigation of Catholic patronage of the arts that Ms Expat and Ms Speed have been leading —

The Korrektiv is not the only group to have commissioned original work from the Lord’s talented servant Daniel Mitsui in the past year.

Mitsui says:

In 2011, I was contacted by the Executive Secretary of the Vox Clara Committee, a Vatican committee of senior bishops from episcopal conferences throughout the English-speaking world that advises the Holy See on English-language liturgy. The Committee will publish in 2012 an interim edition of the Roman Pontifical, including new translations of certain texts drawn from the revised Roman Missal. I was commissioned to create a series of five color illustrations for this Pontifical, depicting the Crucifixion, the Last Supper, the Presentation in the Temple, the Descent of the Holy Ghost and Christ the High Priest. The central images are surrounded by appropriate symbols and Old Testament prefigurements, and the corner scenes depict liturgical rites contained in the Pontifical[.]

This is remarkable. Mitsui himself keeps a web log, and (I believe) first gained wide recognition on the Internet. He is a traditionalist unafraid to express unpopular — usually thought-provoking — opinions (e.g., regarding film, he has repented of his earlier cinephilia and now says ‘the cinema [since the dawn of the talkies] has been a blight upon culture, producing nothing valuable enough to justify its existence.’). He is still in his late twenties or early thirties. And here he is, designing witty avatars for the Korrektiv and sacred illustrations for the Vox Clara committee, within the span of a year.

I hope Mr Mitsui will not mind one of these Vox Clara images, appropriate to the day, appearing below at reduced size. Please click through to view a larger version.

: Roman Pontifical, Drawing 2: Last Supper – by Daniel Mitsui

Click here to view more illustrations in this series and to read about the Roman Pontifical project. And click here to view more of Mitsui’s work, both sacred and secular.

Of his religious work, which has a special reverence and integrity, Mitsui says:

In my religious work, I attempt to be faithful to the instructions of the Second Nicene Council, which stated that the composition of religious imagery is not left to the initiative of artists, but is formed upon principles laid down by the Catholic Church and by religious tradition… The execution alone belongs to the painter, the selection and arrangement of subject belongs to the Fathers. […] My hope is to be faithful to the ancient traditions, but to express them in ways that correspond to the needs of the present.

Needs of the present, indeed.

5 Comments Filed Under: Angelic guest posting, cut and paste, Heaven, reportage and/or commentary Tagged With: Arranging marriages between Money and Art, Daniel Mitsui, Holy Thursday, Last Supper, Patronage

More good news coming out of Wisconsin…

March 15, 2012 by JOB at 12:48 pm

And just in time for the summer! In a rare display of bipartisanship, Cheeseland politicians came together, pretty much unanimously, in a political climate that is (to put it mildy) contentious. Both the governor and many senators are up for recall this summer; the state supreme court has allegedly come to fisticuffs on at least one occasion, and the Packers lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs.

So this bit of news, reported in the Milwaukee Sentinel, comes as a welcomed break in the tension for all four branches of Wisconsin government: the executive, legislative, judicial and domestic!

13 Comments Filed Under: alcohol, tobacco and/or firearms, cartoonish, food and/or drink, JOB, political jumbo-mumbo, reportage and/or commentary Tagged With: Arranging marriages between Money and Art, Despondent Party SuperPAC, gratuitous football posting, If California can make weed legal it's the least we can do...

Vulcan Revealed: The View From Aetna

March 2, 2012 by JOB at 9:25 am

I wrought for Zeus, his holy bolts in hell,
And arrow heads for Cupid’s pricked pursuit
Of thunder-mounting clouds. My fiery hall

Unfettered forgeries for love and war.
But one unfavored by the gods, hirsute,
A gimp, I’m toyed with by a cloying whore.

Her stomach, full of fire, is but the pain
In mine; in dull breast, a dull flame still burns:
Trade art, seal fate, sell out, but do not pine

For love and deal with her in chains and ropes.
Mine is a flagrant heart which knows what turns
A dream: so catch fire and sculpt traps. These rapes

Of justice spill spleen’s bile into your craft –
Her pearl-shelled belly’s big with his war-sperm;
So trick them from your own cuckolded croft.

The flesh shrifts lust like a short winter’s day;
The golden bough is sucked of sap by worm;
So forge the art and cast the life: one die.

They grasp and heave together, love with war
In perfect pain: the roll of flesh and power,
Here stuck together, warrior and whore.

Now bent low, love is gathered like a flower;
The armor falls away behind my door,
And wounded petals whisper to the floor.

21 Comments Filed Under: alcohol, tobacco and/or firearms, clothing and/or shelter and/or weather, JOB, JOB's poetry, one or more of the seven deadly Tagged With: Arranging marriages between Money and Art, never cuckold the gods, the lovetrap

“the wrong aesthetic”?

March 1, 2012 by JOB at 11:27 am

RIP, Andrew Breitbart.

So where does the late AB’s aesthetic fit into Mr. Wolfe’s schema? No, he wasn’t Christian but he didn’t approach politics in the usual way, either.
For all that though did he resist the “preaching and speeching,” or did he play into it?

This line seems deserving of some attention:

“The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems,” he told The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead in 2010. “So you look at the conservative movement — working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places — while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches.”