TRAJEN PRO
Good Morning!
Shredded and torn uniform day!
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Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups
Moving to new media
Dozens are turning to venture capitalists, seeking to bypass Hollywood and reach viewers directly online.
By Joseph Menn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 17, 2007
Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.
At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.
Three of the groups are working on ventures that would function much like United Artists, the production company created 80 years ago by Charlie Chaplin and other top stars who wanted to break free from the studios.
"It's in development and rapidly incubating," said Aaron Mendelsohn, a guild board member and co-creator of the "Air Bud" movies.
Writers walked off their jobs Nov. 5, virtually shutting down television production and throwing 10,000 people out of work. The Writers Guild is fighting the major studios over how much their members are paid when their work is distributed online.
Silicon Valley investors historically have been averse to backing entertainment start-ups, believing that such efforts were less likely to generate huge paydays than technology companies. But they began considering a broader range of entertainment investments after observing the enormous sums paid for popular Web video companies, including the $1.65 billion that Google Inc. plunked down last year for YouTube, a site where users post their own clips.
They also have been emboldened by major advertisers, which prefer supporting professionally created Web entertainment to backing user-generated content on sites such as MySpace that can be in poor taste.
"I'm 100% confident that you will see some companies get formed," said Todd Dagres, a Boston-based venture capitalist who has been flying to L.A. and meeting with top writers for weeks. "People have made up their minds."
What effect this would have on the strike is unclear. So far, the percentage of the guild's 10,000 striking writers who are in discussions with venture capitalists appears to be small. Any deal of this kind, however, could put pressure on the studios and help the writers' public relations campaign. Writers who are talking to venture investors say the studios would suffer a brain drain if high-profile talents received outside funding and were no longer beholden to them.
Mendelsohn and others said they would stick with their ventures after the strike ended.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios in negotiations, declined to comment on the issue, as did the Writers Guild.
Already this year, a handful of sites have received venture backing, including FunnyorDie.com, co-founded by comedic actor Will Ferrell, and MyDamnChannel.com, launched by former MTV executive Rob Barnett.
MyDamnChannel pays for the production of original content by a handful of artists and splits ad revenue with them.
Under the Hollywood system, writers, in most cases, are employed by the studios to create and manage TV shows and movies. The studios own the copyrights and pay writers for the initial use of the material and a small percentage of the licensing fees they collect when the work is rerun or sold on DVD.
With television viewership and DVD revenue declining in the digital age, writers have sought bigger rewards when their work is distributed online. There have been isolated successes, such as Viacom Inc.'s agreement in August to give the co-creators of "South Park" 50% of a new online entertainment venture based on the TV program.
For the most part, however, the studios have argued that Web economics are still too uncertain for them to give a larger share of the proceeds to writers.
Most writers who have been talking with venture capitalists declined to discuss their plans on the record, saying it was too early to provide details. Yet an array of strategies have emerged from interviews with writers, investors and others involved in the process.
The groups modeled after United Artists (which eventually was bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and recently was revived with the help of Tom Cruise) envision creating and distributing programming for the Web and recouping their investments by selling rights to the most successful properties to TV networks or movie companies.
The initiative would change the career paths of many writers. They would be leaving well-paying jobs in television and film for the Internet, which often has been viewed as a steppingstone to Hollywood.
Some high-profile writers and technologists are trying to create a collaborative studio they hope would be officially sanctioned by the Writers Guild. They want to build on the popularity of strike-related videos on the guild-inspired blog UnitedHollywood, YouTube and elsewhere.
"We are uniquely positioned to take our case and new business model directly to consumers," said a leader of that effort, the primary writer on a TV show that was a blockbuster a decade ago. "This will be the officially sanctioned Hollywood union portal."
Others seek to create a privately owned studio that would develop episodic series for the Web. The studio could turn a profit even without cutting movie or TV deals if it developed an audience coveted by advertisers.
Dagres said he had met with one group focused on developing material for potential theatrical distribution and another concentrating on Web series.
At least two additional groups plan to create companies that would distribute material on Facebook or other online gathering places where they might quickly become popular.
Facebook director Jim Breyer, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners, said he was weighing deals that would rely on Facebook's platform. "It is likely we will make investments in Los Angeles screenwriter/content-oriented companies in 2008," he said.
Accel and Dagres' Spark Capital are among four venture firms that have been meeting with writers since the strike began. Hedge funds are also interested in investing, writers who have met with them said.
The screenwriters have been consulting with writer-entrepreneurs who say they earn their living from their work online by running low-cost operations.
"I basically give them a 'Come on in, the water's grand,' " said news website owner Andrew Breitbart, the coauthor of a 2004 book on celebrity culture who worked on the Drudge Report and Huffington Post websites.
"There is no one answer about what works," Breitbart said. "The great thing about online is you can adapt to the changes."
Another common stop on the educational tour is Kent Nichols, co-creator of the profitable "Ask a Ninja" franchise, a two-man Web operation.
His advice is, "You have to think like Jerry Bruckheimer," the television and movie producer who keeps ownership of everything he makes and tries to wring profit from every revenue stream, including merchandise, advertising and licensing.
Even before the strike, changes were afoot that made the recent ventures possible.
The spread of broadband access has allowed more Americans to watch video online. That has prompted the big entertainment companies and a host of others to put more clips on the Web, which in turn has brought in more viewers.
Among broadband users, the proportion who watch videos at least weekly has risen to 61% from 45% a year ago, market research firm Horowitz Associates Inc. reported this month.
"I think it's a great opportunity," said Silicon Valley investor Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures. "This trend started prior to the strike and is only accelerating."
Some of the writers who are drafting business plans said that if the strike had lasted only a week, they would have just gone back to work. But now they've had time to plot strategy -- and to realize that a prolonged strike with reruns and reality shows filling the airwaves might allow them to grab a wandering audience.
"The companies are pushing us into the embrace of people that are going to cut them out of the loop," marveled one show runner who is tracking the start-up trend but not participating.
"We are one Connecticut hedge-fund checkbook, one Silicon Valley server farm and two creators away from having channels on YouTube, where the studios don't own anything."
joseph.menn@latimes.com
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*swearing in Bill Cosby-ese*
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Working for reality TV? Sorry
When push comes to shove, residuals are going to matter more than reality writers in the union.
By Scott Collins, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 17, 2007
PREDICTIONS often come back to haunt the predictor, but this column will go out on a limb anyway: Chances are slim to none that the Writers Guild of America will make good on its vow to organize large numbers of reality-show workers as a result of its current strike.
Unless you're one of the harried wage slaves helping to crack story arcs on, say, "America's Most Smartest Model," that forecast may not sound so earth-shattering. But it has important implications for the 6-week-old strike that's paralyzing large swaths of the entertainment industry.
Reality TV, the amorphous catch-all that includes everything from "Survivor" to "Dancing With the Stars" to "The Hills," has emerged as the unlikely flash point of the work stoppage, and not just because the networks hope that hundreds of hours of unscripted series will serve as substitute programming once the networks' well of comedies and dramas runs bone-dry.
Indeed, a no-holds-barred bid to organize more reality-show writers was a major plank of Patric Verrone's successful campaign to become president of the Writers Guild of America, West, two years ago. Verrone, perceived as a hard-liner, has since become a thorn in the studios' side during the recent negotiations. One key factor in the rancorous breakdown of talks Dec. 7 was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers' demand that the guild drop its proposal to extend union membership to writers of reality, as well as animated, material.
Allow us to pause for the uninitiated. Reality shows have writers? Wait -- aren't these shows supposed to be unscripted? Don't they just film whatever happens to fly out of the mouth of Flavor Flav or Nicole Richie or Prince Lorenzo Borghese?
Well, not exactly. Many of these programs are "written" in the editing room by "story producers" who string together hours of footage into some sort of recognizable narrative, frequently with little regard for, um, reality. Supposedly spontaneous events are staged or restaged, chronologies adjusted. Editors routinely use "frankenbites," out-of-context quotes that illustrate points the speakers never intended to make. And yes, contestants have been known to claim they were fed lines and told how to react on camera.
(If reading this spoiled anyone's illusions about reality TV, we are very sorry. At least there's still a Santa Claus.)
But back to the strike. When Variety reported in late October -- less than two weeks before the strike started -- that the guild was abandoning its efforts on behalf of unscripted shows, Verrone lashed back with a memo, published on DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com, saying that the union "continues to be committed to organizing reality." And on Nov. 26, the guild issued a blistering report that accused producers of reality shows, most of which make extensive use of nonunion workers, of violating U.S. and California wage and labor laws.
According to the study, which polled 300 reality-TV "writers," 91% reported getting no pay for overtime work, and 86% said they received no health insurance from their employers. More than half said they were ordered to hand in time cards early.
"These are kids who are making a few hundred bucks a week, not guys like me who are making lots of money for doing rewrites," Paul Haggis, a guild member and the writer-director behind the Oscar-winning feature "Crash," told me Friday. Haggis also appeared with Verrone and others at a Dec. 7 rally in Burbank for reality-TV workers' rights. At the rally, Verrone promised listeners that reality-TV jurisdiction "will be in our next contract."
Last year, when writers on the CW's "America's Next Top Model" struck over wages and benefits and sought representation through the WGA, the producers canned them. In October, a California labor agency awarded $35,000 in back pay to a story producer on TBS' "Outback Jack" who was denied overtime (a legal appeal is pending).
And state Sen. Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), chairwoman of the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee, has scheduled hearings for Feb. 1 on the reality-TV labor law issue. "We intend to monitor this situation closely to ensure that reality-TV story producers and other reality-TV employees are paid in accordance to California labor laws," Migden said in a statement.
We wanted to find out what reality producers had to say about all this. Maybe there's some reasonable explanation for why their workers seem so shabbily treated.
So we called up four of the biggest names in the business: Mark Burnett ("Survivor," "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"), Mark Cronin ("America's Most Smartest Model," "I Love New York 2"), Jonathan Murray ("The Real World," "Keeping Up with the Kardashians") and Bruce Nash ("Meet My Folks," "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?").
Through representatives, all of them declined to say one word.
But wait. It turns out that maybe the guild itself isn't as unyielding on the reality-TV issue as it seemed.
During an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Verrone told the reporter that there was "room to negotiate" on the reality-TV proposal. That at the very least throws a different light on the guild's supposedly hard-core stance.
This column wanted to ask Verrone exactly what he meant, but a guild spokesperson said he was unavailable (attempts to reach Verrone since Tuesday were likewise unsuccessful).
Haggis, who admitted he was unfamiliar with the specifics of the reality-TV issue, said that Verrone was merely trying to signal to the studios that they "are reasonable human beings . . . everything is negotiable." But he added: "If you ask me, 'Should we give up on reality TV?' No. That's my personal opinion. I think these workers are literally being treated like wage slaves."
But not everyone shares that opinion, even within the guild. And that may explain why Verrone is softening his rhetoric as the pressure to resume talks hits the boiling point. At some point, the guild will almost certainly have to trim its menu of demands to one or two core points. Try to guess which will get dropped sooner, residuals or reality TV.
It's clear, though, that the issue of how reality TV treats its workers isn't going to go away. Because it's mostly nonunion and unregulated, these shows frequently cut corners, and workers who feel they've been treated unfairly have little or no recourse beyond the legal system.
But then, that's talking about airy concepts like social justice, which can easily be kicked down the curb during a costly strike.
So as more and more "below-the-line" Hollywood workers get tossed out of jobs just in time for the holidays, and as the studios and show runners continue to tally up their ghastly losses from the strike, don't count on the guild negotiators going to the mat for folks who frankenbite.
The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com.
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"Mad Men" (AMC). A vision of 1960 (pictured above) as much based on the movies as the reality of the time, ripe with the dreadful thrill of a world on the verge of redefinition. Beautifully designed, with an abundance of fine performances, out of which I am arbitrarily moved to mention Robert Morse as the corporate eminence and Christina Hendricks as a smart woman stuck in an old mode.
"Yo Gabba Gabba!" (Nickelodeon), "Pancake Mountain" (a Washington, D.C.-based cable access show, also available on DVD). That a life in pop means never having to quite grow up is borne out in these two super-hip, music-filled kids shows, not for kids only. Indie stars participate.
Al Gore. At the Oscars, at the Emmys, on "30 Rock," the former vice president and recent Nobel Prize winner was funny, self-deprecating and relentless in his message to end global warming, single-handedly creating a new template for activism. Turns out Gore, not Bill Clinton, is the love child of politics and pop culture.
"Weeds." What can we say? The Showtime serial about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), soccer mom turned drug dealer, went over the top at times, what with brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk) dabbling in porn and Doug (Kevin Nealon) sabotaging septic systems. But that's why the top was invented. With her porcelain-doll beauty and steely talent, Parker is impossible to resist, and the cast is the best comedic ensemble on television. Period.
"Dexter." Last year, many of us wondered what Showtime was thinking, putting a show about a serial killer for good on the air, but Michael C. Hall's performance as a sociopath struggling to control his murderous needs, a tremendous supporting cast and terrific writing made this season even better than last.
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Batgirl is not supposed to be this busty.
Wonder Woman, sure. Power Girl, of course.
Batgirl, no.
(: It does say "EXTRA-SIZED ISSUE," though. :)
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"The Bat! World's largest bug!" was Calvin's school report
(assisted by Hobbes), on bats. Even though he did no research on it,
he put it in a nice plastic cover, because a good-looking report always gets an 'A'.
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DAVID SARNO / BEST OF 2007
The Year on the Web
Photo illustration and artist¡¦s concept of dusty grains in the winds of a quasar.
In the debris field of www.
December 16, 2007
A decade after the Internet's Big Bang, the online cosmos is expanding as fast as ever. Much more so than a year ago, we can now download or stream many of our favorite movies, most of the TV shows we didn't TiVo, and just about any song you want (Music lovers: I'm exaggerating for effect. Thanks). Larger, higher-resolution online video players are emerging. It won't be long before we
think back bemusedly on how many clips we watched on that fuzzy miniature YouTube screen. Remember?
And social networking, now in its third generation thanks largely to Facebook, has achieved a degree of cultural permanence few of us fuddy-duddies over 21 were expecting.
But back to the early universe metaphor -- way back when everything was new, it took a few hundred millenniums for atoms to form, let alone big stars. Just so, in terms of Internet entertainment, this year did not see the birth of a thousand suns. A few stars blinked on, to be sure, but most of what was created was unremarkable debris.
Part of the lull is technological -- people may not be eager to watch a lot of Internet content until the Internet can support a higher-quality viewing experience. Another factor is the generally awkward efforts of the entertainment industry to adapt itself to a medium it doesn't appear to understand.
YouTube puts on weight. The world's No. 1 online video site completed its first full year under the auspices of the world's No. 1 search engine. With Google's guidance, YouTube grew like a supernova, opening home pages in 17 new countries so viewers could have access to what has become a massive global video database.
The last traces of YouTube's early maverick identity disappeared as corporate entertainment entities began to take over its most viewed lists. As of this writing, eight of YouTube's nine most-viewed channels of all time are held by major media outlets such as CBS, Sony/BMG and Universal Music Group, whose videos have a combined 692 million views.
The site also partnered with CNN to sponsor a series of presidential primary debates in which the candidates faced questions posed by YouTube users. The veneer of unmediated access -- where YouTubers were invited to ask candidates whatever questions they liked -- was almost invisibly thin, however. In the most recent GOP debate, candidates were thrown such hardballs as "What measures will you take to tackle the national debt?" and "Will you eliminate farm subsidies?"
Still, YouTube continued to spawn the homegrown, viral hits it's famous for and helped a few unknowns gain either note or notoriety. Esmée Denters, a Dutch teenager who started out singing karaoke into her bedroom webcam, became an international star, winning a spot on tour with Justin Timberlake and an appearance on "Oprah" (who, incidentally, also made her YouTube debut last month). Tay Zonday, a 25-year-old composer from Minneapolis, insinuated his "Chocolate Rain" tune into a million minds, and Lauren Caitlin Upton, a.k.a. Miss South Carolina Teen USA, put herself on the map with creative suggestions about enhancing global education.
Facebook's grand illusion. Facebook wins 2007's Internet buzz prize. With its series of game-changing innovations, the smart young social network made competitor MySpace look positively stodgy.
After abjuring its college-only roots late last year in favor of an open-door policy, Facebook opened up further by allowing, in essence, anyone to design mini-programs for it. The result has been a tidal wave of Facebook "apps," as they're called, allowing users to engage in a multitude of ostensibly social online activities. It's nice to be able to share music suggestions with friends, certainly. But once you've sent pals a few virtual cocktails or spent an hour attacking your cousin's zombie with your vampire, you begin to detect Facebook's central prestidigitation: That's your friend's profile you're hanging out with, not your friend.
Facebook had its share of bad press too. But worries about privacy and sexual predation pretty much go with the Internet territory.
Big players, little screen. Hollywood got a little wiser to the promise of the Internet. First, it boosted the number of television episodes offered online, either for free, as NBC.com did with "The Office," or for a small fee, as AMC did by offering $2 downloads of "Mad Men" from iTunes.
Meanwhile, NBC Universal closed up shop on YouTube in favor of its shiny new video site Hulu.com, a joint venture with Fox owner News Corp. Hulu will be a one-stop shop for titles from a variety of network and cable channels. "Simpsons"? Check. "Heroes?" Check. "A-Team"? Airwolf"? You won't be disappointed.
Established names also hurled their share of spaghetti against the wall in the form of original Web programming. With "Prom Queen," Michael Eisner's production company Tornante experimented with brazenly short 90-second episodes -- 80 of them. The show is generally credited with establishing that 90 seconds is not even close to long enough for an episode of TV.
Production team Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick ("thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life") took a longer-form approach with their Web-exclusive show "quarterlife," which is essentially a series of six hourlong episodes broken into eight-minute segments.
Then there was FunnyOrDie.com, the comedy site launched in April with Will Ferrell's "The Landlord" -- the short and highly virulent clip featuring the trash-talking baby daughter of Ferrell's moviemaking chum Adam McKay. "The Landlord" was so successful it seemed to instantly define a genre: online video starring a boldface name. The only problem is, eight months have passed, and FunnyOrDie has not been able to follow its own first act, even with a string of celebrity videos and a loudly touted alliance with rainmaker Judd Apatow. Guys, please don't make me make a joke about the name of your site.
Despite these and various other attempts to create the first big Web-only hit -- which we might define as a show someone on the other end of a randomly dialed phone number would've heard of -- it may have to wait till twenty-oh-eight.
Strike that. The writers strike has produced a healthy slate of strike-related online content -- indeed, dozens of YouTube videos have been posted representing almost every conceivable WGA joke, rant, entreaty and talking point. But, sort of by definition, the strike has not produced much scripted Internet content.
It would seem that, given the above-mentioned lack of an established Internet hit, the writers could pool their collective talent and capital and score a victory by establishing one.
More than a few people have suggested that the writers ought to circumvent the studios and just form their own online production companies. One could guess that there are at least one or two giant Internet companies out there that might be interested in sponsoring scripted Web TV from the world's most sought-after TV writers. Some of us even think one or two such alliances are likely to happen before the strike is resolved.
Anyone want to talk over-under?
david.sarno@latimes.com
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And then my little piggies will take wing! Fly, my pretties, fly!
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December 16, 2007, 6:12 pm
Two Aesthetics
Tags: Starting Out in the Evening, The Fugitive, The New Museum
I spent the month of November in New York, and for part of that time I hung out at the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), doing research for a book I’m writing on the ’60s TV show “The Fugitive.” When I wasn’t reading reviews and cover stories in old issues of TV guide, I was going to galleries, listening to concerts and seeking out movies that would probably not make it up to Delaware County. The movie I found was “Starting Out in the Evening,” described in the reviews as a “small film,” which means not only that there are no special effects, but that almost nothing happens (a point of criticism on the part of some reviewers).
Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist whose four books are out of print, is laboring without much success to produce a fifth when a beautiful young woman enters his life and challenges the insularity of his hitherto inviolate routines. She is writing a master’s thesis on him and wants to explore the relationship between his writing and his emotional history.
He resists any such probing — he says that his characters have their own lives and that he just follows them around waiting for something interesting to happen — and the tension between them reflects the ancient quarrel between those who think that art is an expression of personal experience and those, like Schiller, who think that art is its own realm and is responsible only to the demands and laws of craft.
In a parallel story, Schiller’s 40-year-old daughter is also having birth pangs, but in a more literal sense. Devoted to a father who maintains a severe emotional distance from her, she wants desperately to have a child. But the man she loves is resolved not to bring anyone else into the world, and the two have been busy not negotiating this issue for a number of years.
That’s it; nothing else.
Only two things in the film rise to the status of an event. Schiller has a stroke, but its effect, finally, is only further to slow down a life that was already near quiescent. And in a conversation where it seems to him that Heather Wolfe (his young admirer) is condescending to him, he slaps her. But since the slap comes across almost as a caress — perhaps even a statement of gratitude for her having made him think about what it means to write — it does not have that much force and is in no way a climax to the non-action of the non-plot. In the last moment of the movie, Schiller goes back to his typewriter — an emblem of his refusal to be connected to things outside his study — and begins anew the search for the right word.
Refusal is the film’s mode, and watching it reminded me of why I am so drawn to “The Fugitive,” a series that ran on ABC from 1963 to 1967 and was the basis of a Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster in the nineties. (A new TV version, determinedly unfaithful to the original, tanked in 2000.)
It might seem that “The Fugitive” is the antithesis of “Starting Out in the Evening” because it is apparently so plot-driven. Everyone knows the story: Richard Kimble, a pediatrician, has been convicted of killing his wife. He alone knows that the real killer is a one-armed man he saw running from his house on the night of the murder. He is reprieved from execution when the train taking him and his detective-guard, lieutenant Philip Gerard, runs off the rails allowing him to escape. Gerard pursues him relentlessly and he, not quite as relentlessly, pursues the one-armed man.
But this double-pursuit plot does not give the drama its energy; it is merely a device for getting Kimble in and out of the many small towns where he encounters men and women in various stages of moral and psychological distress. The story really belongs to them and to the moments in which they must respond to the opportunities and dangers Kimble’s presence in their midst produces. Will they betray him? Do they believe in his innocence? Do they trust in the workings of blind justice?
While the decisions they make and the actions they take often affect Kimble (who is always a second away from capture), the real significance of what they do (or fail to do) resides in the lives they will live when he is long gone. He is the catalyst who precipitates a self-examination and a taking of stock he never performs; and it is only when his work is done (or turns out to be impossible; some people are just too far gone) that the plot kicks in – someone recognizes him – and he has to get out of town, often hiding in the back of a truck or in some other ignominious posture.
In short, “The Fugitive” is about character and moral choice and not about plot, even though it is through the mechanism of plot that Kimble moves on to the next place where people need his help more than he needs theirs. All the action, such as it is, takes place in small, usually dark rooms where a troubled soul is forced to confront his or her aspirations, doubts and demons.
The same can be said of “Starting Out in the Evening,” in which a typical scene finds Schiller and his adversary/admirer, or Schiller and his daughter, or the daughter and her lover, giving voice to their fears and anxieties and trying to come to terms with their limitations, often in the limited spaces of an upper West Side apartment. “People talk a lot” in this movie, one reviewer complained, and added that it was all too “masturbatory,” that is, self-focused.
And indeed it is, to the exclusion of everything else: The only issues raised are the issues with which the members of the small cast are obsessed — dedication to art vs. openness to the messiness of life, integrity vs. connectedness, purity of purpose vs. the seductions of commerce and fame (which Milton famously called “that last infirmity of noble mind.”) You would never know, while watching this movie, that there was a whole lot going on in the world — wars, famines, international crises, presidential elections, environmental disasters. We are allowed to assume that the setting is contemporary — 2007 — but the scene could be shifted to 1907 or 1607 without any loss whatsoever.
This is part of what I meant when I said earlier that the mode of the film is refusal. First, it refuses cinematic virtuosity. No intricate cutting, no clever camera angles, no hallucinations, no flashbacks, no disruptions of sequence, no tricks. Just a straight-ahead representation of one conversational scene after another in “real time.” Second, it refuses excitement, except of a quiet psychological kind. And third, it refuses relevance. Politics is referenced only once, when the daughter’s boyfriend (who is black, a fact of which, praise be, absolutely nothing is made) says that he would like to start a magazine that would be a forum for left-wing views.
But there are no left wing views expressed; indeed, there are no views expressed at all, except for the ones that relate to the existential plights of the characters. (In its determined austerity, the film sides with Schiller against the women who would draw him out of his aesthetic cocoon.)
And so it is with “The Fugitive,” too. Although the period 1963-1967 saw world-shaking events, none of them takes center stage in the series’ 120 episodes. Kimble and those he encounters can be presumed to have political views and partisan identifications; but we hear nothing about them, for they are no part of the moral deliberations that lead the characters to see what they have become and to consider what they might become were they to make this choice rather than that.
The day after I saw “Starting Out in the Evening,” I had another, instructively different cultural experience. I went to the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery. (Not the V.I.P. opening, to which for some reason I wasn’t invited, but the free-to-the-public opening.) Where I loved every moment of the movie (too much identification with the lead character, I suspect), I hated every moment in the museum, which is all drama, surprise, flash, effect and politics.
I know that I’m supposed to admire the structure of stacked-slightly-off-kilter boxes, but it didn’t do anything for me. The interior irritated me, starting with the pretentious-because-it-declares-itself-to-be-unpretenti ous concrete floor (complete with cracks). Then there were the harsh, industrial-style lights; the gift shop behind a mesh curtain of the kind you find in pawn shops; the cattle-car elevator; and the tiny café, intended, it would seem, to be inadequate to any conceivable occasion. Everything was making a statement and issuing a challenge: Do you get it? (Obviously I didn’t.)
But it was the art that told me how hopelessly retro I am. Here is a description from a reviewer who loved it: “Looking at the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural … exhibition is like visiting the crash pad of a favorite friend, the one that’s creative and stays up all night and leaves dirty dishes piled up in the sink and doesn’t have any real furniture and what’s in their place came from the stuff people threw out on the sidewalk.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The idea is to find bits and pieces of detritus and put them together in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. There’s a picture of Mel Gibson suspended from a long pole attached to a bicycle. There’s an arc of old chairs perched on what looks like broken mattress springs. There is an auditorium in which I sat watching a home movie featuring a pack of barking dogs.
At least you can sit in the auditorium. There are no chairs or benches in the rest of the building, a warning to museum-goers that they are not here to gaze reverently at timeless and monumental works of art. This inaugural exhibition is titled “Unmonumental”; the items in it, the museum’s Web site tells us, are “conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted … unheroic and manifestly unmonumental.” These works do not attempt to defeat time, but embrace it, and with it impermanence and decay.
They also embrace politics as the (vaguely postmodern) aesthetic that produces them demands. If art is not an autonomous discipline obeying internal laws, but is responsive to and constitutive of the contingent events of history, it is already political and offering itself as anything else would be a lie. What lies, the exhibit implies, is the illusion of depth and profundity. Here, everything is surface and perspective; no meanings are stable; no interpretations are authoritative. The largest piece in the exhibit is a multi-media installation — seven channels of ever-changing text messages flashing on rectangular shapes — “that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score.” (You can’t make these things up.)
But although randomness and chance are themes of this installation and of other pieces in the exhibit, there is nothing random in either the concepts or their implementation. I cannot deny the museum’s coherence, its (playful) seriousness. I just don’t like it. What it embraces — the ephemeral and the insubstantial — I shun, and what I embrace — work that aspires to permanence — it pokes fun at.
I cannot help wondering what Leonard Schiller, in search of formal perfection (he wears a tie and jacket in his study), or Richard Kimble, in search of perfect justice even as he flees its imperfect judgment, would think if they walked through the New Museum. But then I already know.
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27 comments so far...
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Professor Fish, I suspect that the foregoing essay could easily have been written in a way that views the museum as having substantial redeeming value, and either or both of the movie or the TV series as having little or no redeeming value.
Perhaps, if you had been on the museum’s VIP list you would have seen it differently, or you might have rubbed shoulders with someone who would have explained why some very ordinary stuff can provide valuable insight or welcome nostalgia or simply an artistic way of presenting an historical record.
Sometimes, comparing apples and oranges is just . . . comparing apples and oranges.
HJBoitel
— Posted by HJBoitel
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Aren’t “the ephemeral and the insubstantial” the stuff of what conversation, emotion, and relationships are made? Our perceptions of fleeting events as they pass us by is imperfect, and the transitory nature of human life is testament to its impermanence.
Art gives us a glimpse of human experience. This glimpse, whether an impromptu street-corner rap battle or an aged medieval cathedral, is nonetheless impermanent and ever-changing, like life itself.
The quest for perfection and permanence is noble and edifying, but it can also blind one to the beauty of the quotidian.
— Posted by Chris Jacques
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Insightful comments by Stanley Fish on pathetic fits of modern (post-modern) “art” in its drive to mock, shock, ridicule in the “praise of nothingness”. What I find most amusing though is that quite often the sham works its “magic”, leaving the viewer dumbstruck, ever so confused by the “critical acclaim”. It takes some courage to tell the king is naked, ugly and pathetic. Bravo, Stanley!
— Posted by David Gurarie
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“They also embrace politics as the (vaguely postmodern) aesthetic that produces them demands. If art is not an autonomous discipline obeying internal laws, but is responsive to and constitutive of the contingent events of history, it is already political and offering itself as anything else would be a lie. What lies, the exhibit implies, is the illusion of depth and profundity.”
This seems to me to be a mistake on the part of the artists. The illusion of profundity, if it is successful, is a profound experience. The mistake (or the apparent failure of the art as you describe it) is in constantly exposing the insubstantiality of the imagination without ever realizing the value (or perhaps function is a better word) of the aporetic experience of that deconstruction. In my view, the function of deconstruction is to release one from the constraining “way of seeing” that subjectivity demands. In Paradise Lost, that function is to purge the intellectual ray by recognizing the impossibility of justifying God’s ways to men, as you, Dr. Fish, so brilliantly observe in your essay, “Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost.” As you put it, “The promise [to justify God’s ways] is given so that its falseness can be more forcefully exposed and so that the reader can learn not to rely on the way of knowing it assumes, but to rely instead on illumination and revelation.”
It is the experience of illumination and revelation that we all seek (or should seek)–not the symbol for that experience, but the experience itself. Whether that experience is an illusion or not is irrelevant in the instant of illumination. The concept of illusion is only relevant within a rational framework, and the experience of limitlessness (call it God, or Christ, or any other term for a transcendental signified) we are seeking can only be had once we have broken free from that limiting framework.
Paradise Lost succeeds, I believe, where the art you viewed at the New Museum fails because the artists’ visions stop short of illumination, focusing only on the negation of reason, what in Zen thought is called emptiness. All they see is the need to see emptiness. Sunyata is a term for the complete vision in which the need to empty emptiness itself is realized. The result is a reaffirmation of what has been negated and it is that reaffirmation that provides the experience of illumination. Sunyata sickness, which is either a nihilistic view of existence or an ironic view of illumination, is the consequence of failing to empty emptiness. The self educatory aspect of Paradise Lost, as described in “Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost,” offers the reader unlimited opportunities to empty emptiness: “The perishability of the insight that awaits us at the end of Paradise Lost assures the poem’s continuing relevance. We may have succeeded to some degree in purging our intellectual ray, but the ‘film of ignorance’ is not so easily removed, and a “sovrain eyesalve” may be needed again. And in that (certain) event, the first reading holds out the promise of another success.”
Milton’s vision, it seems to me, is complete. The New Museum artists’ visions are not. The Fugitive? Perhaps, in its emphasis on interiority, its open ended structure, and it’s serialism, it does in some way gesture towards emptying emptiness.
— Posted by malnicore
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Dear Mr Fish: Permanence/transience. A fascinating topic. What you dislike about the New Museum is that we are living in a celebrity culture where the WORK is less important than the PERSON (i.e: if the person is a “character” his/her work does not need “character”). What Leonard Shiller seeks–immortality through his art–is the opposite of what the new(er) artists seek, which is immortality of their persona. The reason is that most artists today do not remotely possess the necessary skills or experience or debt to craft to make great art (whether literature or fine art) and must therefore settle for something else to be remembered by. Great art, sir, however you cut it, is dead.
— Posted by speedtheplow
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Thank you, Mr. Fish, for such thoughtful observations about art. The artist need not be obviously profound to achieve the aim of universality, which is why the universal can be found in a seemingly mundane particular. But the artist who purposely uses the mundane to snub the universal has betrayed his own purpose.
— Posted by Christopher
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When I read, “There are no chairs or benches in the rest of the building, a warning to museum-goers that they are not here to gaze reverently at timeless and monumental works of art”, the following quote from the article below came to mind:
- We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages — stand quietly before them and wait until they speak to us. (Schopenhauer)
http://starbulletin.com/2007/10/03/editorial/commentary .html
— Posted by C. Ikehara
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It isn’t the fake artists who create this junk that I detest; rather it is the fatuous fools — gallery owners, art critics, etc. — who validate these imagination-free, inspiration-free “works-requiring-no-work”. They are the great garbage-enablers and should be permanently banished beyond the gates of the civilized world.
hugh prestwood
— Posted by hugh prestwood
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I think your discontent with the pretentious museum stems from your connection to Delaware County. If you lived in Dutchess County, you wouldn’t feel compelled to go to such a drecky place to begin with.
Poughkeepsie is the fulcrum of the universe. Manhattan just thinks it is.
— Posted by Gman
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I loved this piece, Stanley. It is absolutely first rate in every way. I would greatly value a signed copy suitable for framing, which I would hang in a prominent place in my study. Kindest regards to you and Jane.
— Posted by David Lange
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Though you were unaware of this, Dr. Fish, I was there amongst you at the New Museum opening, fortunate to have free lodging next door at the loft/residence of my good friend, artist Charles Hinman. I am glad the New Museum exists to breathe new life into Bowery and I have voyeuristically witnessed its birth courtesy of the time-lapse camera. But I fully agree with you that the inaugural exhibit was a mish-mash of junk which did not capture nor hold my interest, and that the building’s interior (with apologies to my architect husband) was sterile, and the location of the lobby gift shop unfortunately interrupted what otherwise might be an interesting large space front to back. Anne Russell PhD, Wilmington NC
— Posted by Anne Russell
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I disagree with just about everything Stanley Fish usually says, but to this I say, “Bravo!”
— Posted by ELIZABETH FULLER
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Fish’s response to the New Museum boils down to this: Conceptual art is boring. It’s boring because it’s one-dimensional — it’s expressive of nothing but the concept. It actually works best (or at least longest) when the concept is obscure — once you get it, you’re done.
Artists rarely understand this, but with good artists that doesn’t matter. Impressionists, post-impressionists and surrealists had some terrific arguments about conceptual approach, but those arguments are today of interest only to curators. What is compelling is the pictures: The powerful subjective visions; the transcendent skills; last, and least, the conceptual approach.
What’s worst about so much of today’s art is that it’s not just conceptual, but self-referential, which is another way of saying narcissistic, all of which, one suspects, is a substitute for the missing craft. Julian Schnabel is a wonderful case in point — what a load of ugly pictures, and what a good idea to move to film, in which the director of photography can supply the craft, and the actors can supply the depth.
— Posted by David Berman
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I marvel at the number of smart people who sit up late reading Stanley’s musings.–Chris Jones of Bend, OR, formerly of Delaware County.
— Posted by Chris Jones
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Aha! I remember seeing Stanley Fish at the School for Theory in Dartmouth one summer, where he sported a “Fugitive” T-shirt.
— Posted by CVH
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But what about Green Acres? Rational man week-after-brutal-week confronting the absurdist rural nightmare he chose to enter. Which side of the divide would that fall on?
— Posted by Jim
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As one writer has put it, “absorption” versus “theatricality.” And I largely — no, entirely — agree with the judgment against the “new” museum (so desperate, so forced). That said, I would probably take the austerity and craft ideal of film to be theatrical in its own way. Autonomy simply cannot explain any of the great art I admire: Courbet and politics, Manet and the transformation of Paris, Picasso and the state of intimacy, Mondrian and theosophy (ugh), Pollock and Jung (yikes). Although I often wish these artists had no dealings with these ephemeral and changing pheomenon — they did; and what is worse, it got them out of bed in the morning. Above all, and I take this to irrevocable, their (often absurd, always historical) commitments materially shaped their practices; it helps explain the depth of their motivations.
— Posted by Todd
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Apparently the only people who actually read this article to the end are people who had some personal connection with the events described.
— Posted by tom
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“Art gives us a glimpse of human experience.” My response: A whole lot of human experience ain’t worth recording.
No fixed measurements, no fixed meanings, no fixed author, no fixed viewer, celebrate flux, “interrogate” this, “intervene” in that, erase these “boundaries,” blah blah blah. Ninety per cent of this stuff is propagated by people who would curl up in a ball and whimper in the corner if what they profess to embrace became the true rule of the world (which it gradually is, come to think of it, thanks to the clowns who dictate the artworld — I come at this myself from the thoroughly coroporate Madison Avenue new-product-for-the-sake-of-new-product Gomorrah of academic art history).
— Posted by Mike D.
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“An artistic way of presenting history?!?” Hmmm. Which history would that be: the history of the artist, the history that’s been written about the world, the history that’s not yet been written about the world but that still has happened, the history that you and I will fight over to settle the argument whether it really is history or not??? And, “Art gives us a glimpse of human experience.” So now, any child who whirls a camera on a busy Manhattan corner and “shoots” is bringing us art?!? Oh, boy! What a mess. What is the art in art?
— Posted by faust
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My wife thinks the place should be called the Ellsworth Toohey Memorial Museum. Let’s see if anybody here gets THAT.
(The Fountainhead - Ellsworth Toohey - The villain of the novel, and Roark’s antithesis—a man with a lust for power but no talent. Since his boyhood, Toohey has despised the achievements of others, and he dedicates himself to squelching other people’s talents and ambitions. He is a small and fragile-looking man, but his persuasive voice and knack for manipulation make him a formidable opponent. He encourages selflessness and altruism to coax others into submission. His philosophy is a blend of religion, Fascism and Socialism, and he at times resembles the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin.)
I’m reminded of a story told, I think by Colin Wilson, of a bunch of British engineering students who snuck a bunch of junk into a modern sculpture exhibition. Nobody noticed it didn’t belong there untll a visitor asked how come it wasn’t in the catalog. Anyway, the museum called the garbage men, who carted off one of the “real” sculptures.
— Posted by John J. Pierce
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I just like the honesty that comes through. I don’t know whether I agree with this or not. But it feels real, made not-to-impress, or even make a point other than: I am here, a human being, and this is what I see, feel, recognize.
Why is that so refreshing?
— Posted by Zoe
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While I loved the building, the art was summed up best in one installation. A piece of plastic sheeting left on the floor(that surely must have been left by the workers as they hurried to complete the building) had to have a security guard standing by it, telling visitors not to pick it up, that it was part of the installation.
Overheard on the stairway (I too was there for the museum’s opening for the masses). “Rebecca you could rip up a piece of plastic, too, but no one will call it art, you don’t have a MFA.”
— Posted by Linda K
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Huh, so a ’60s TV show that was made into a Harrison Ford movie is “work that aspires to permanence.” Who knew?
— Posted by PK
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Yay Stanley. — Michael in Berlin
— Posted by Michael Fried
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Professor Fish, what do you mean by “Everyone knows the story”? Which everyone? Why?
— Posted by James Clifton
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I have newfound respect for the curmudgeonly Fish, who more often than not only aggravates with his professorial parsings of the semantics of contemporary events. Here he weighs in on the great debates; and that is the way in–to this reader.
— Posted by freeassociate
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combine it with a quad cover Marvel Tales and a Lady Death snow globe.
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Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
By JOHN MARKOFF
Newer computer chips with multiple processors require
dauntingly complex software
and programmers are having a hard time keeping up.
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On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: December 17, 2007
Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.
To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”
Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.
Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.
But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.
Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.
Much of the research is continuing and has not been published, so findings are preliminary. In a few studies, the Facebook users do not know they are being examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.
“For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.”
Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how people meet and learn more about potential romantic partners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both those kinds of information,” Professor Smith said.
S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.
In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being. (Note to parents: in an earlier paper the researchers found no correlation between grade-point average and intensity of Facebook use.)
An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.
Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.
Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,” he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.”
But some scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of the ethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large, and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to research using the site. Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.
Facebook began in 2004 at Harvard and was restricted to students until 2006. As Ms. Hargittai points out in her paper, “Requiring such an affiliation clearly limited the number and types of people who could sign up for the service in the beginning.”
Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site’s vast amount of data. The site’s users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it “fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment,” and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook’s “relationship status” box. “You’re not really dating until you put it on Facebook,” she said.
But Derrick B. Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, “I don’t feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook.” He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students’ permission.
Although federal rules govern academic study of human subjects, universities, which approve professors’ research methods, have different interpretations of the guidelines. “The rules were made for a different world, a pre-Facebook world,” said Samuel D. Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Facebook to explore perception and identity. “There is a rule that you are allowed to observe public behavior, but it’s not clear if online behavior is public or not.”
Indiana University appears to have one of the stricter policies. Its Web site states that the university will not approve academic research without permission from social networking sites or specific individuals.
Professor Hargittai of Northwestern conducted her Facebook study through a writing course that is required of all students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Some 1,060 participants answered survey questions on paper. Professor Ellison of Michigan State used a random sample of 800 undergraduates who were invited to participate via an e-mail message that included a link to an online survey.
Dr. Christakis of Harvard said he and his colleagues were studying the profiles of the East Coast college class with the approval of Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, and with the knowledge of the unnamed college’s administration — but unknown to the students being studied.
“Employers are looking at people’s online postings and Googling information about them, and I think researchers are right behind them,” said Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and internist who was an author of a study that received wide attention this year for its suggestion that obesity is “socially contagious.” (The researchers did not use Facebook.)
Among other topics, the Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating a concept, first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, known as triadic closure: whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts.
“Triadic closure was first described by Simmel 100 years ago,” Dr. Christakis said. “He just theorizes about it 100 years ago, but he didn’t have the data. Now we can engage that data.”
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Sn-aining there, bandit? it's sleeting in the valley, pouring down rain in town
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"Self-Portrait: Reflection" (2002)
“The achievement of the strenuously lionized British realist painter Lucian Freud,” writes Roberta Smith, “has not so much been to break new ground as to dig incessantly deeper into the old. By doing so he has intensified our understanding of figurative painting’s familiar landmarks to the point of discomfort.” Mr. Freud’s work is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.
"The Painter's Mother III" (1972)
“Mr. Freud, who turned 85 last week, has managed this in no small measure by painting only people he knows and cares about, while equating flesh with oil paint. His strenuously worked surfaces portray bodies and faces in ways that convey a punishing sense of life lived — of too, too solid flesh weighed down by experience, indulgence and cowardice.”
"Head of a Naked Girl" (1999)
“His canvases never let us lose sight of the effort required to get the painting painted. The rough, slathered expanses offer unstinting views of flesh, thick and folded, or stretched thin over all-too-visible bones, of faces sad or pensive or blank. The portrayals are physical but not sensuous, harsh yet intensely engaged — the painterly equivalent of tough love. Again and again they grant the model enormous respect, but no place to hide.”
His sealed-off, exquisitely controlled, linear manner implied a need for order and a preference for emotional tension satisfied by small, oddly angled, tightly framed images that worked better in paintings than in prints.”
“Mr. Freud’s 1982 return to etching came casually, when he agreed to make prints to be inserted in 100 copies of Lawrence Gowing’s monograph on his work (to help meet the costs of publication).
“In many ways Mr. Freud’s etchings gained power from the cruelty of light when rendered in the black and white of etching. You can imagine this fact dawning on him while depicting the obese, dozing figure in ‘Woman With an Arm Tattoo,’ another print from 1987. Here the eye speeds past the woman’s immense blemished bicep and the halter top that resembles a plowed field to struggle with her nose, a crumpled form not unlike a squashed soda can.”
Around this time Mr. Freud also made a body of work exploring psychological states, some of which were collected in “About People: A Book of Symbolic Drawings” (1939). “Melancholia” shows a woman reclining in a cradle; “Loss of a Memory” depicts a man gazing at the empty space where his hands should be. Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s editor then, called these works “too personal and not funny enough,” but they caught on with devotees of psychoanalysis.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/12/13/arts/1214-FREU_index.html
archive
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Shredded and torn uniform day!
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Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups
Moving to new media
Dozens are turning to venture capitalists, seeking to bypass Hollywood and reach viewers directly online.
By Joseph Menn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 17, 2007
Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.
At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.
Three of the groups are working on ventures that would function much like United Artists, the production company created 80 years ago by Charlie Chaplin and other top stars who wanted to break free from the studios.
"It's in development and rapidly incubating," said Aaron Mendelsohn, a guild board member and co-creator of the "Air Bud" movies.
Writers walked off their jobs Nov. 5, virtually shutting down television production and throwing 10,000 people out of work. The Writers Guild is fighting the major studios over how much their members are paid when their work is distributed online.
Silicon Valley investors historically have been averse to backing entertainment start-ups, believing that such efforts were less likely to generate huge paydays than technology companies. But they began considering a broader range of entertainment investments after observing the enormous sums paid for popular Web video companies, including the $1.65 billion that Google Inc. plunked down last year for YouTube, a site where users post their own clips.
They also have been emboldened by major advertisers, which prefer supporting professionally created Web entertainment to backing user-generated content on sites such as MySpace that can be in poor taste.
"I'm 100% confident that you will see some companies get formed," said Todd Dagres, a Boston-based venture capitalist who has been flying to L.A. and meeting with top writers for weeks. "People have made up their minds."
What effect this would have on the strike is unclear. So far, the percentage of the guild's 10,000 striking writers who are in discussions with venture capitalists appears to be small. Any deal of this kind, however, could put pressure on the studios and help the writers' public relations campaign. Writers who are talking to venture investors say the studios would suffer a brain drain if high-profile talents received outside funding and were no longer beholden to them.
Mendelsohn and others said they would stick with their ventures after the strike ended.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios in negotiations, declined to comment on the issue, as did the Writers Guild.
Already this year, a handful of sites have received venture backing, including FunnyorDie.com, co-founded by comedic actor Will Ferrell, and MyDamnChannel.com, launched by former MTV executive Rob Barnett.
MyDamnChannel pays for the production of original content by a handful of artists and splits ad revenue with them.
Under the Hollywood system, writers, in most cases, are employed by the studios to create and manage TV shows and movies. The studios own the copyrights and pay writers for the initial use of the material and a small percentage of the licensing fees they collect when the work is rerun or sold on DVD.
With television viewership and DVD revenue declining in the digital age, writers have sought bigger rewards when their work is distributed online. There have been isolated successes, such as Viacom Inc.'s agreement in August to give the co-creators of "South Park" 50% of a new online entertainment venture based on the TV program.
For the most part, however, the studios have argued that Web economics are still too uncertain for them to give a larger share of the proceeds to writers.
Most writers who have been talking with venture capitalists declined to discuss their plans on the record, saying it was too early to provide details. Yet an array of strategies have emerged from interviews with writers, investors and others involved in the process.
The groups modeled after United Artists (which eventually was bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and recently was revived with the help of Tom Cruise) envision creating and distributing programming for the Web and recouping their investments by selling rights to the most successful properties to TV networks or movie companies.
The initiative would change the career paths of many writers. They would be leaving well-paying jobs in television and film for the Internet, which often has been viewed as a steppingstone to Hollywood.
Some high-profile writers and technologists are trying to create a collaborative studio they hope would be officially sanctioned by the Writers Guild. They want to build on the popularity of strike-related videos on the guild-inspired blog UnitedHollywood, YouTube and elsewhere.
"We are uniquely positioned to take our case and new business model directly to consumers," said a leader of that effort, the primary writer on a TV show that was a blockbuster a decade ago. "This will be the officially sanctioned Hollywood union portal."
Others seek to create a privately owned studio that would develop episodic series for the Web. The studio could turn a profit even without cutting movie or TV deals if it developed an audience coveted by advertisers.
Dagres said he had met with one group focused on developing material for potential theatrical distribution and another concentrating on Web series.
At least two additional groups plan to create companies that would distribute material on Facebook or other online gathering places where they might quickly become popular.
Facebook director Jim Breyer, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners, said he was weighing deals that would rely on Facebook's platform. "It is likely we will make investments in Los Angeles screenwriter/content-oriented companies in 2008," he said.
Accel and Dagres' Spark Capital are among four venture firms that have been meeting with writers since the strike began. Hedge funds are also interested in investing, writers who have met with them said.
The screenwriters have been consulting with writer-entrepreneurs who say they earn their living from their work online by running low-cost operations.
"I basically give them a 'Come on in, the water's grand,' " said news website owner Andrew Breitbart, the coauthor of a 2004 book on celebrity culture who worked on the Drudge Report and Huffington Post websites.
"There is no one answer about what works," Breitbart said. "The great thing about online is you can adapt to the changes."
Another common stop on the educational tour is Kent Nichols, co-creator of the profitable "Ask a Ninja" franchise, a two-man Web operation.
His advice is, "You have to think like Jerry Bruckheimer," the television and movie producer who keeps ownership of everything he makes and tries to wring profit from every revenue stream, including merchandise, advertising and licensing.
Even before the strike, changes were afoot that made the recent ventures possible.
The spread of broadband access has allowed more Americans to watch video online. That has prompted the big entertainment companies and a host of others to put more clips on the Web, which in turn has brought in more viewers.
Among broadband users, the proportion who watch videos at least weekly has risen to 61% from 45% a year ago, market research firm Horowitz Associates Inc. reported this month.
"I think it's a great opportunity," said Silicon Valley investor Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures. "This trend started prior to the strike and is only accelerating."
Some of the writers who are drafting business plans said that if the strike had lasted only a week, they would have just gone back to work. But now they've had time to plot strategy -- and to realize that a prolonged strike with reruns and reality shows filling the airwaves might allow them to grab a wandering audience.
"The companies are pushing us into the embrace of people that are going to cut them out of the loop," marveled one show runner who is tracking the start-up trend but not participating.
"We are one Connecticut hedge-fund checkbook, one Silicon Valley server farm and two creators away from having channels on YouTube, where the studios don't own anything."
joseph.menn@latimes.com
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*swearing in Bill Cosby-ese*
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Working for reality TV? Sorry
When push comes to shove, residuals are going to matter more than reality writers in the union.
By Scott Collins, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 17, 2007
PREDICTIONS often come back to haunt the predictor, but this column will go out on a limb anyway: Chances are slim to none that the Writers Guild of America will make good on its vow to organize large numbers of reality-show workers as a result of its current strike.
Unless you're one of the harried wage slaves helping to crack story arcs on, say, "America's Most Smartest Model," that forecast may not sound so earth-shattering. But it has important implications for the 6-week-old strike that's paralyzing large swaths of the entertainment industry.
Reality TV, the amorphous catch-all that includes everything from "Survivor" to "Dancing With the Stars" to "The Hills," has emerged as the unlikely flash point of the work stoppage, and not just because the networks hope that hundreds of hours of unscripted series will serve as substitute programming once the networks' well of comedies and dramas runs bone-dry.
Indeed, a no-holds-barred bid to organize more reality-show writers was a major plank of Patric Verrone's successful campaign to become president of the Writers Guild of America, West, two years ago. Verrone, perceived as a hard-liner, has since become a thorn in the studios' side during the recent negotiations. One key factor in the rancorous breakdown of talks Dec. 7 was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers' demand that the guild drop its proposal to extend union membership to writers of reality, as well as animated, material.
Allow us to pause for the uninitiated. Reality shows have writers? Wait -- aren't these shows supposed to be unscripted? Don't they just film whatever happens to fly out of the mouth of Flavor Flav or Nicole Richie or Prince Lorenzo Borghese?
Well, not exactly. Many of these programs are "written" in the editing room by "story producers" who string together hours of footage into some sort of recognizable narrative, frequently with little regard for, um, reality. Supposedly spontaneous events are staged or restaged, chronologies adjusted. Editors routinely use "frankenbites," out-of-context quotes that illustrate points the speakers never intended to make. And yes, contestants have been known to claim they were fed lines and told how to react on camera.
(If reading this spoiled anyone's illusions about reality TV, we are very sorry. At least there's still a Santa Claus.)
But back to the strike. When Variety reported in late October -- less than two weeks before the strike started -- that the guild was abandoning its efforts on behalf of unscripted shows, Verrone lashed back with a memo, published on DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com, saying that the union "continues to be committed to organizing reality." And on Nov. 26, the guild issued a blistering report that accused producers of reality shows, most of which make extensive use of nonunion workers, of violating U.S. and California wage and labor laws.
According to the study, which polled 300 reality-TV "writers," 91% reported getting no pay for overtime work, and 86% said they received no health insurance from their employers. More than half said they were ordered to hand in time cards early.
"These are kids who are making a few hundred bucks a week, not guys like me who are making lots of money for doing rewrites," Paul Haggis, a guild member and the writer-director behind the Oscar-winning feature "Crash," told me Friday. Haggis also appeared with Verrone and others at a Dec. 7 rally in Burbank for reality-TV workers' rights. At the rally, Verrone promised listeners that reality-TV jurisdiction "will be in our next contract."
Last year, when writers on the CW's "America's Next Top Model" struck over wages and benefits and sought representation through the WGA, the producers canned them. In October, a California labor agency awarded $35,000 in back pay to a story producer on TBS' "Outback Jack" who was denied overtime (a legal appeal is pending).
And state Sen. Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), chairwoman of the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee, has scheduled hearings for Feb. 1 on the reality-TV labor law issue. "We intend to monitor this situation closely to ensure that reality-TV story producers and other reality-TV employees are paid in accordance to California labor laws," Migden said in a statement.
We wanted to find out what reality producers had to say about all this. Maybe there's some reasonable explanation for why their workers seem so shabbily treated.
So we called up four of the biggest names in the business: Mark Burnett ("Survivor," "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"), Mark Cronin ("America's Most Smartest Model," "I Love New York 2"), Jonathan Murray ("The Real World," "Keeping Up with the Kardashians") and Bruce Nash ("Meet My Folks," "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?").
Through representatives, all of them declined to say one word.
But wait. It turns out that maybe the guild itself isn't as unyielding on the reality-TV issue as it seemed.
During an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Verrone told the reporter that there was "room to negotiate" on the reality-TV proposal. That at the very least throws a different light on the guild's supposedly hard-core stance.
This column wanted to ask Verrone exactly what he meant, but a guild spokesperson said he was unavailable (attempts to reach Verrone since Tuesday were likewise unsuccessful).
Haggis, who admitted he was unfamiliar with the specifics of the reality-TV issue, said that Verrone was merely trying to signal to the studios that they "are reasonable human beings . . . everything is negotiable." But he added: "If you ask me, 'Should we give up on reality TV?' No. That's my personal opinion. I think these workers are literally being treated like wage slaves."
But not everyone shares that opinion, even within the guild. And that may explain why Verrone is softening his rhetoric as the pressure to resume talks hits the boiling point. At some point, the guild will almost certainly have to trim its menu of demands to one or two core points. Try to guess which will get dropped sooner, residuals or reality TV.
It's clear, though, that the issue of how reality TV treats its workers isn't going to go away. Because it's mostly nonunion and unregulated, these shows frequently cut corners, and workers who feel they've been treated unfairly have little or no recourse beyond the legal system.
But then, that's talking about airy concepts like social justice, which can easily be kicked down the curb during a costly strike.
So as more and more "below-the-line" Hollywood workers get tossed out of jobs just in time for the holidays, and as the studios and show runners continue to tally up their ghastly losses from the strike, don't count on the guild negotiators going to the mat for folks who frankenbite.
The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com.
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"Mad Men" (AMC). A vision of 1960 (pictured above) as much based on the movies as the reality of the time, ripe with the dreadful thrill of a world on the verge of redefinition. Beautifully designed, with an abundance of fine performances, out of which I am arbitrarily moved to mention Robert Morse as the corporate eminence and Christina Hendricks as a smart woman stuck in an old mode.
"Yo Gabba Gabba!" (Nickelodeon), "Pancake Mountain" (a Washington, D.C.-based cable access show, also available on DVD). That a life in pop means never having to quite grow up is borne out in these two super-hip, music-filled kids shows, not for kids only. Indie stars participate.
Al Gore. At the Oscars, at the Emmys, on "30 Rock," the former vice president and recent Nobel Prize winner was funny, self-deprecating and relentless in his message to end global warming, single-handedly creating a new template for activism. Turns out Gore, not Bill Clinton, is the love child of politics and pop culture.
"Weeds." What can we say? The Showtime serial about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), soccer mom turned drug dealer, went over the top at times, what with brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk) dabbling in porn and Doug (Kevin Nealon) sabotaging septic systems. But that's why the top was invented. With her porcelain-doll beauty and steely talent, Parker is impossible to resist, and the cast is the best comedic ensemble on television. Period.
"Dexter." Last year, many of us wondered what Showtime was thinking, putting a show about a serial killer for good on the air, but Michael C. Hall's performance as a sociopath struggling to control his murderous needs, a tremendous supporting cast and terrific writing made this season even better than last.
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Batgirl is not supposed to be this busty.
Wonder Woman, sure. Power Girl, of course.
Batgirl, no.
(: It does say "EXTRA-SIZED ISSUE," though. :)
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"The Bat! World's largest bug!" was Calvin's school report
(assisted by Hobbes), on bats. Even though he did no research on it,
he put it in a nice plastic cover, because a good-looking report always gets an 'A'.
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DAVID SARNO / BEST OF 2007
The Year on the Web
Photo illustration and artist¡¦s concept of dusty grains in the winds of a quasar.
In the debris field of www.
December 16, 2007
A decade after the Internet's Big Bang, the online cosmos is expanding as fast as ever. Much more so than a year ago, we can now download or stream many of our favorite movies, most of the TV shows we didn't TiVo, and just about any song you want (Music lovers: I'm exaggerating for effect. Thanks). Larger, higher-resolution online video players are emerging. It won't be long before we
think back bemusedly on how many clips we watched on that fuzzy miniature YouTube screen. Remember?
And social networking, now in its third generation thanks largely to Facebook, has achieved a degree of cultural permanence few of us fuddy-duddies over 21 were expecting.
But back to the early universe metaphor -- way back when everything was new, it took a few hundred millenniums for atoms to form, let alone big stars. Just so, in terms of Internet entertainment, this year did not see the birth of a thousand suns. A few stars blinked on, to be sure, but most of what was created was unremarkable debris.
Part of the lull is technological -- people may not be eager to watch a lot of Internet content until the Internet can support a higher-quality viewing experience. Another factor is the generally awkward efforts of the entertainment industry to adapt itself to a medium it doesn't appear to understand.
YouTube puts on weight. The world's No. 1 online video site completed its first full year under the auspices of the world's No. 1 search engine. With Google's guidance, YouTube grew like a supernova, opening home pages in 17 new countries so viewers could have access to what has become a massive global video database.
The last traces of YouTube's early maverick identity disappeared as corporate entertainment entities began to take over its most viewed lists. As of this writing, eight of YouTube's nine most-viewed channels of all time are held by major media outlets such as CBS, Sony/BMG and Universal Music Group, whose videos have a combined 692 million views.
The site also partnered with CNN to sponsor a series of presidential primary debates in which the candidates faced questions posed by YouTube users. The veneer of unmediated access -- where YouTubers were invited to ask candidates whatever questions they liked -- was almost invisibly thin, however. In the most recent GOP debate, candidates were thrown such hardballs as "What measures will you take to tackle the national debt?" and "Will you eliminate farm subsidies?"
Still, YouTube continued to spawn the homegrown, viral hits it's famous for and helped a few unknowns gain either note or notoriety. Esmée Denters, a Dutch teenager who started out singing karaoke into her bedroom webcam, became an international star, winning a spot on tour with Justin Timberlake and an appearance on "Oprah" (who, incidentally, also made her YouTube debut last month). Tay Zonday, a 25-year-old composer from Minneapolis, insinuated his "Chocolate Rain" tune into a million minds, and Lauren Caitlin Upton, a.k.a. Miss South Carolina Teen USA, put herself on the map with creative suggestions about enhancing global education.
Facebook's grand illusion. Facebook wins 2007's Internet buzz prize. With its series of game-changing innovations, the smart young social network made competitor MySpace look positively stodgy.
After abjuring its college-only roots late last year in favor of an open-door policy, Facebook opened up further by allowing, in essence, anyone to design mini-programs for it. The result has been a tidal wave of Facebook "apps," as they're called, allowing users to engage in a multitude of ostensibly social online activities. It's nice to be able to share music suggestions with friends, certainly. But once you've sent pals a few virtual cocktails or spent an hour attacking your cousin's zombie with your vampire, you begin to detect Facebook's central prestidigitation: That's your friend's profile you're hanging out with, not your friend.
Facebook had its share of bad press too. But worries about privacy and sexual predation pretty much go with the Internet territory.
Big players, little screen. Hollywood got a little wiser to the promise of the Internet. First, it boosted the number of television episodes offered online, either for free, as NBC.com did with "The Office," or for a small fee, as AMC did by offering $2 downloads of "Mad Men" from iTunes.
Meanwhile, NBC Universal closed up shop on YouTube in favor of its shiny new video site Hulu.com, a joint venture with Fox owner News Corp. Hulu will be a one-stop shop for titles from a variety of network and cable channels. "Simpsons"? Check. "Heroes?" Check. "A-Team"? Airwolf"? You won't be disappointed.
Established names also hurled their share of spaghetti against the wall in the form of original Web programming. With "Prom Queen," Michael Eisner's production company Tornante experimented with brazenly short 90-second episodes -- 80 of them. The show is generally credited with establishing that 90 seconds is not even close to long enough for an episode of TV.
Production team Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick ("thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life") took a longer-form approach with their Web-exclusive show "quarterlife," which is essentially a series of six hourlong episodes broken into eight-minute segments.
Then there was FunnyOrDie.com, the comedy site launched in April with Will Ferrell's "The Landlord" -- the short and highly virulent clip featuring the trash-talking baby daughter of Ferrell's moviemaking chum Adam McKay. "The Landlord" was so successful it seemed to instantly define a genre: online video starring a boldface name. The only problem is, eight months have passed, and FunnyOrDie has not been able to follow its own first act, even with a string of celebrity videos and a loudly touted alliance with rainmaker Judd Apatow. Guys, please don't make me make a joke about the name of your site.
Despite these and various other attempts to create the first big Web-only hit -- which we might define as a show someone on the other end of a randomly dialed phone number would've heard of -- it may have to wait till twenty-oh-eight.
Strike that. The writers strike has produced a healthy slate of strike-related online content -- indeed, dozens of YouTube videos have been posted representing almost every conceivable WGA joke, rant, entreaty and talking point. But, sort of by definition, the strike has not produced much scripted Internet content.
It would seem that, given the above-mentioned lack of an established Internet hit, the writers could pool their collective talent and capital and score a victory by establishing one.
More than a few people have suggested that the writers ought to circumvent the studios and just form their own online production companies. One could guess that there are at least one or two giant Internet companies out there that might be interested in sponsoring scripted Web TV from the world's most sought-after TV writers. Some of us even think one or two such alliances are likely to happen before the strike is resolved.
Anyone want to talk over-under?
david.sarno@latimes.com
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And then my little piggies will take wing! Fly, my pretties, fly!
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December 16, 2007, 6:12 pm
Two Aesthetics
Tags: Starting Out in the Evening, The Fugitive, The New Museum
I spent the month of November in New York, and for part of that time I hung out at the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), doing research for a book I’m writing on the ’60s TV show “The Fugitive.” When I wasn’t reading reviews and cover stories in old issues of TV guide, I was going to galleries, listening to concerts and seeking out movies that would probably not make it up to Delaware County. The movie I found was “Starting Out in the Evening,” described in the reviews as a “small film,” which means not only that there are no special effects, but that almost nothing happens (a point of criticism on the part of some reviewers).
Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist whose four books are out of print, is laboring without much success to produce a fifth when a beautiful young woman enters his life and challenges the insularity of his hitherto inviolate routines. She is writing a master’s thesis on him and wants to explore the relationship between his writing and his emotional history.
He resists any such probing — he says that his characters have their own lives and that he just follows them around waiting for something interesting to happen — and the tension between them reflects the ancient quarrel between those who think that art is an expression of personal experience and those, like Schiller, who think that art is its own realm and is responsible only to the demands and laws of craft.
In a parallel story, Schiller’s 40-year-old daughter is also having birth pangs, but in a more literal sense. Devoted to a father who maintains a severe emotional distance from her, she wants desperately to have a child. But the man she loves is resolved not to bring anyone else into the world, and the two have been busy not negotiating this issue for a number of years.
That’s it; nothing else.
Only two things in the film rise to the status of an event. Schiller has a stroke, but its effect, finally, is only further to slow down a life that was already near quiescent. And in a conversation where it seems to him that Heather Wolfe (his young admirer) is condescending to him, he slaps her. But since the slap comes across almost as a caress — perhaps even a statement of gratitude for her having made him think about what it means to write — it does not have that much force and is in no way a climax to the non-action of the non-plot. In the last moment of the movie, Schiller goes back to his typewriter — an emblem of his refusal to be connected to things outside his study — and begins anew the search for the right word.
Refusal is the film’s mode, and watching it reminded me of why I am so drawn to “The Fugitive,” a series that ran on ABC from 1963 to 1967 and was the basis of a Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster in the nineties. (A new TV version, determinedly unfaithful to the original, tanked in 2000.)
It might seem that “The Fugitive” is the antithesis of “Starting Out in the Evening” because it is apparently so plot-driven. Everyone knows the story: Richard Kimble, a pediatrician, has been convicted of killing his wife. He alone knows that the real killer is a one-armed man he saw running from his house on the night of the murder. He is reprieved from execution when the train taking him and his detective-guard, lieutenant Philip Gerard, runs off the rails allowing him to escape. Gerard pursues him relentlessly and he, not quite as relentlessly, pursues the one-armed man.
But this double-pursuit plot does not give the drama its energy; it is merely a device for getting Kimble in and out of the many small towns where he encounters men and women in various stages of moral and psychological distress. The story really belongs to them and to the moments in which they must respond to the opportunities and dangers Kimble’s presence in their midst produces. Will they betray him? Do they believe in his innocence? Do they trust in the workings of blind justice?
While the decisions they make and the actions they take often affect Kimble (who is always a second away from capture), the real significance of what they do (or fail to do) resides in the lives they will live when he is long gone. He is the catalyst who precipitates a self-examination and a taking of stock he never performs; and it is only when his work is done (or turns out to be impossible; some people are just too far gone) that the plot kicks in – someone recognizes him – and he has to get out of town, often hiding in the back of a truck or in some other ignominious posture.
In short, “The Fugitive” is about character and moral choice and not about plot, even though it is through the mechanism of plot that Kimble moves on to the next place where people need his help more than he needs theirs. All the action, such as it is, takes place in small, usually dark rooms where a troubled soul is forced to confront his or her aspirations, doubts and demons.
The same can be said of “Starting Out in the Evening,” in which a typical scene finds Schiller and his adversary/admirer, or Schiller and his daughter, or the daughter and her lover, giving voice to their fears and anxieties and trying to come to terms with their limitations, often in the limited spaces of an upper West Side apartment. “People talk a lot” in this movie, one reviewer complained, and added that it was all too “masturbatory,” that is, self-focused.
And indeed it is, to the exclusion of everything else: The only issues raised are the issues with which the members of the small cast are obsessed — dedication to art vs. openness to the messiness of life, integrity vs. connectedness, purity of purpose vs. the seductions of commerce and fame (which Milton famously called “that last infirmity of noble mind.”) You would never know, while watching this movie, that there was a whole lot going on in the world — wars, famines, international crises, presidential elections, environmental disasters. We are allowed to assume that the setting is contemporary — 2007 — but the scene could be shifted to 1907 or 1607 without any loss whatsoever.
This is part of what I meant when I said earlier that the mode of the film is refusal. First, it refuses cinematic virtuosity. No intricate cutting, no clever camera angles, no hallucinations, no flashbacks, no disruptions of sequence, no tricks. Just a straight-ahead representation of one conversational scene after another in “real time.” Second, it refuses excitement, except of a quiet psychological kind. And third, it refuses relevance. Politics is referenced only once, when the daughter’s boyfriend (who is black, a fact of which, praise be, absolutely nothing is made) says that he would like to start a magazine that would be a forum for left-wing views.
But there are no left wing views expressed; indeed, there are no views expressed at all, except for the ones that relate to the existential plights of the characters. (In its determined austerity, the film sides with Schiller against the women who would draw him out of his aesthetic cocoon.)
And so it is with “The Fugitive,” too. Although the period 1963-1967 saw world-shaking events, none of them takes center stage in the series’ 120 episodes. Kimble and those he encounters can be presumed to have political views and partisan identifications; but we hear nothing about them, for they are no part of the moral deliberations that lead the characters to see what they have become and to consider what they might become were they to make this choice rather than that.
The day after I saw “Starting Out in the Evening,” I had another, instructively different cultural experience. I went to the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery. (Not the V.I.P. opening, to which for some reason I wasn’t invited, but the free-to-the-public opening.) Where I loved every moment of the movie (too much identification with the lead character, I suspect), I hated every moment in the museum, which is all drama, surprise, flash, effect and politics.
I know that I’m supposed to admire the structure of stacked-slightly-off-kilter boxes, but it didn’t do anything for me. The interior irritated me, starting with the pretentious-because-it-declares-itself-to-be-unpretenti ous concrete floor (complete with cracks). Then there were the harsh, industrial-style lights; the gift shop behind a mesh curtain of the kind you find in pawn shops; the cattle-car elevator; and the tiny café, intended, it would seem, to be inadequate to any conceivable occasion. Everything was making a statement and issuing a challenge: Do you get it? (Obviously I didn’t.)
But it was the art that told me how hopelessly retro I am. Here is a description from a reviewer who loved it: “Looking at the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural … exhibition is like visiting the crash pad of a favorite friend, the one that’s creative and stays up all night and leaves dirty dishes piled up in the sink and doesn’t have any real furniture and what’s in their place came from the stuff people threw out on the sidewalk.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The idea is to find bits and pieces of detritus and put them together in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. There’s a picture of Mel Gibson suspended from a long pole attached to a bicycle. There’s an arc of old chairs perched on what looks like broken mattress springs. There is an auditorium in which I sat watching a home movie featuring a pack of barking dogs.
At least you can sit in the auditorium. There are no chairs or benches in the rest of the building, a warning to museum-goers that they are not here to gaze reverently at timeless and monumental works of art. This inaugural exhibition is titled “Unmonumental”; the items in it, the museum’s Web site tells us, are “conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted … unheroic and manifestly unmonumental.” These works do not attempt to defeat time, but embrace it, and with it impermanence and decay.
They also embrace politics as the (vaguely postmodern) aesthetic that produces them demands. If art is not an autonomous discipline obeying internal laws, but is responsive to and constitutive of the contingent events of history, it is already political and offering itself as anything else would be a lie. What lies, the exhibit implies, is the illusion of depth and profundity. Here, everything is surface and perspective; no meanings are stable; no interpretations are authoritative. The largest piece in the exhibit is a multi-media installation — seven channels of ever-changing text messages flashing on rectangular shapes — “that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score.” (You can’t make these things up.)
But although randomness and chance are themes of this installation and of other pieces in the exhibit, there is nothing random in either the concepts or their implementation. I cannot deny the museum’s coherence, its (playful) seriousness. I just don’t like it. What it embraces — the ephemeral and the insubstantial — I shun, and what I embrace — work that aspires to permanence — it pokes fun at.
I cannot help wondering what Leonard Schiller, in search of formal perfection (he wears a tie and jacket in his study), or Richard Kimble, in search of perfect justice even as he flees its imperfect judgment, would think if they walked through the New Museum. But then I already know.
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27 comments so far...
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Professor Fish, I suspect that the foregoing essay could easily have been written in a way that views the museum as having substantial redeeming value, and either or both of the movie or the TV series as having little or no redeeming value.
Perhaps, if you had been on the museum’s VIP list you would have seen it differently, or you might have rubbed shoulders with someone who would have explained why some very ordinary stuff can provide valuable insight or welcome nostalgia or simply an artistic way of presenting an historical record.
Sometimes, comparing apples and oranges is just . . . comparing apples and oranges.
HJBoitel
— Posted by HJBoitel
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Aren’t “the ephemeral and the insubstantial” the stuff of what conversation, emotion, and relationships are made? Our perceptions of fleeting events as they pass us by is imperfect, and the transitory nature of human life is testament to its impermanence.
Art gives us a glimpse of human experience. This glimpse, whether an impromptu street-corner rap battle or an aged medieval cathedral, is nonetheless impermanent and ever-changing, like life itself.
The quest for perfection and permanence is noble and edifying, but it can also blind one to the beauty of the quotidian.
— Posted by Chris Jacques
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Insightful comments by Stanley Fish on pathetic fits of modern (post-modern) “art” in its drive to mock, shock, ridicule in the “praise of nothingness”. What I find most amusing though is that quite often the sham works its “magic”, leaving the viewer dumbstruck, ever so confused by the “critical acclaim”. It takes some courage to tell the king is naked, ugly and pathetic. Bravo, Stanley!
— Posted by David Gurarie
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“They also embrace politics as the (vaguely postmodern) aesthetic that produces them demands. If art is not an autonomous discipline obeying internal laws, but is responsive to and constitutive of the contingent events of history, it is already political and offering itself as anything else would be a lie. What lies, the exhibit implies, is the illusion of depth and profundity.”
This seems to me to be a mistake on the part of the artists. The illusion of profundity, if it is successful, is a profound experience. The mistake (or the apparent failure of the art as you describe it) is in constantly exposing the insubstantiality of the imagination without ever realizing the value (or perhaps function is a better word) of the aporetic experience of that deconstruction. In my view, the function of deconstruction is to release one from the constraining “way of seeing” that subjectivity demands. In Paradise Lost, that function is to purge the intellectual ray by recognizing the impossibility of justifying God’s ways to men, as you, Dr. Fish, so brilliantly observe in your essay, “Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost.” As you put it, “The promise [to justify God’s ways] is given so that its falseness can be more forcefully exposed and so that the reader can learn not to rely on the way of knowing it assumes, but to rely instead on illumination and revelation.”
It is the experience of illumination and revelation that we all seek (or should seek)–not the symbol for that experience, but the experience itself. Whether that experience is an illusion or not is irrelevant in the instant of illumination. The concept of illusion is only relevant within a rational framework, and the experience of limitlessness (call it God, or Christ, or any other term for a transcendental signified) we are seeking can only be had once we have broken free from that limiting framework.
Paradise Lost succeeds, I believe, where the art you viewed at the New Museum fails because the artists’ visions stop short of illumination, focusing only on the negation of reason, what in Zen thought is called emptiness. All they see is the need to see emptiness. Sunyata is a term for the complete vision in which the need to empty emptiness itself is realized. The result is a reaffirmation of what has been negated and it is that reaffirmation that provides the experience of illumination. Sunyata sickness, which is either a nihilistic view of existence or an ironic view of illumination, is the consequence of failing to empty emptiness. The self educatory aspect of Paradise Lost, as described in “Discovery as Form in Paradise Lost,” offers the reader unlimited opportunities to empty emptiness: “The perishability of the insight that awaits us at the end of Paradise Lost assures the poem’s continuing relevance. We may have succeeded to some degree in purging our intellectual ray, but the ‘film of ignorance’ is not so easily removed, and a “sovrain eyesalve” may be needed again. And in that (certain) event, the first reading holds out the promise of another success.”
Milton’s vision, it seems to me, is complete. The New Museum artists’ visions are not. The Fugitive? Perhaps, in its emphasis on interiority, its open ended structure, and it’s serialism, it does in some way gesture towards emptying emptiness.
— Posted by malnicore
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Dear Mr Fish: Permanence/transience. A fascinating topic. What you dislike about the New Museum is that we are living in a celebrity culture where the WORK is less important than the PERSON (i.e: if the person is a “character” his/her work does not need “character”). What Leonard Shiller seeks–immortality through his art–is the opposite of what the new(er) artists seek, which is immortality of their persona. The reason is that most artists today do not remotely possess the necessary skills or experience or debt to craft to make great art (whether literature or fine art) and must therefore settle for something else to be remembered by. Great art, sir, however you cut it, is dead.
— Posted by speedtheplow
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Thank you, Mr. Fish, for such thoughtful observations about art. The artist need not be obviously profound to achieve the aim of universality, which is why the universal can be found in a seemingly mundane particular. But the artist who purposely uses the mundane to snub the universal has betrayed his own purpose.
— Posted by Christopher
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When I read, “There are no chairs or benches in the rest of the building, a warning to museum-goers that they are not here to gaze reverently at timeless and monumental works of art”, the following quote from the article below came to mind:
- We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages — stand quietly before them and wait until they speak to us. (Schopenhauer)
http://starbulletin.com/2007/10/03/editorial/commentary .html
— Posted by C. Ikehara
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It isn’t the fake artists who create this junk that I detest; rather it is the fatuous fools — gallery owners, art critics, etc. — who validate these imagination-free, inspiration-free “works-requiring-no-work”. They are the great garbage-enablers and should be permanently banished beyond the gates of the civilized world.
hugh prestwood
— Posted by hugh prestwood
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I think your discontent with the pretentious museum stems from your connection to Delaware County. If you lived in Dutchess County, you wouldn’t feel compelled to go to such a drecky place to begin with.
Poughkeepsie is the fulcrum of the universe. Manhattan just thinks it is.
— Posted by Gman
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I loved this piece, Stanley. It is absolutely first rate in every way. I would greatly value a signed copy suitable for framing, which I would hang in a prominent place in my study. Kindest regards to you and Jane.
— Posted by David Lange
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Though you were unaware of this, Dr. Fish, I was there amongst you at the New Museum opening, fortunate to have free lodging next door at the loft/residence of my good friend, artist Charles Hinman. I am glad the New Museum exists to breathe new life into Bowery and I have voyeuristically witnessed its birth courtesy of the time-lapse camera. But I fully agree with you that the inaugural exhibit was a mish-mash of junk which did not capture nor hold my interest, and that the building’s interior (with apologies to my architect husband) was sterile, and the location of the lobby gift shop unfortunately interrupted what otherwise might be an interesting large space front to back. Anne Russell PhD, Wilmington NC
— Posted by Anne Russell
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I disagree with just about everything Stanley Fish usually says, but to this I say, “Bravo!”
— Posted by ELIZABETH FULLER
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Fish’s response to the New Museum boils down to this: Conceptual art is boring. It’s boring because it’s one-dimensional — it’s expressive of nothing but the concept. It actually works best (or at least longest) when the concept is obscure — once you get it, you’re done.
Artists rarely understand this, but with good artists that doesn’t matter. Impressionists, post-impressionists and surrealists had some terrific arguments about conceptual approach, but those arguments are today of interest only to curators. What is compelling is the pictures: The powerful subjective visions; the transcendent skills; last, and least, the conceptual approach.
What’s worst about so much of today’s art is that it’s not just conceptual, but self-referential, which is another way of saying narcissistic, all of which, one suspects, is a substitute for the missing craft. Julian Schnabel is a wonderful case in point — what a load of ugly pictures, and what a good idea to move to film, in which the director of photography can supply the craft, and the actors can supply the depth.
— Posted by David Berman
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I marvel at the number of smart people who sit up late reading Stanley’s musings.–Chris Jones of Bend, OR, formerly of Delaware County.
— Posted by Chris Jones
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Aha! I remember seeing Stanley Fish at the School for Theory in Dartmouth one summer, where he sported a “Fugitive” T-shirt.
— Posted by CVH
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But what about Green Acres? Rational man week-after-brutal-week confronting the absurdist rural nightmare he chose to enter. Which side of the divide would that fall on?
— Posted by Jim
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As one writer has put it, “absorption” versus “theatricality.” And I largely — no, entirely — agree with the judgment against the “new” museum (so desperate, so forced). That said, I would probably take the austerity and craft ideal of film to be theatrical in its own way. Autonomy simply cannot explain any of the great art I admire: Courbet and politics, Manet and the transformation of Paris, Picasso and the state of intimacy, Mondrian and theosophy (ugh), Pollock and Jung (yikes). Although I often wish these artists had no dealings with these ephemeral and changing pheomenon — they did; and what is worse, it got them out of bed in the morning. Above all, and I take this to irrevocable, their (often absurd, always historical) commitments materially shaped their practices; it helps explain the depth of their motivations.
— Posted by Todd
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Apparently the only people who actually read this article to the end are people who had some personal connection with the events described.
— Posted by tom
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“Art gives us a glimpse of human experience.” My response: A whole lot of human experience ain’t worth recording.
No fixed measurements, no fixed meanings, no fixed author, no fixed viewer, celebrate flux, “interrogate” this, “intervene” in that, erase these “boundaries,” blah blah blah. Ninety per cent of this stuff is propagated by people who would curl up in a ball and whimper in the corner if what they profess to embrace became the true rule of the world (which it gradually is, come to think of it, thanks to the clowns who dictate the artworld — I come at this myself from the thoroughly coroporate Madison Avenue new-product-for-the-sake-of-new-product Gomorrah of academic art history).
— Posted by Mike D.
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“An artistic way of presenting history?!?” Hmmm. Which history would that be: the history of the artist, the history that’s been written about the world, the history that’s not yet been written about the world but that still has happened, the history that you and I will fight over to settle the argument whether it really is history or not??? And, “Art gives us a glimpse of human experience.” So now, any child who whirls a camera on a busy Manhattan corner and “shoots” is bringing us art?!? Oh, boy! What a mess. What is the art in art?
— Posted by faust
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My wife thinks the place should be called the Ellsworth Toohey Memorial Museum. Let’s see if anybody here gets THAT.
(The Fountainhead - Ellsworth Toohey - The villain of the novel, and Roark’s antithesis—a man with a lust for power but no talent. Since his boyhood, Toohey has despised the achievements of others, and he dedicates himself to squelching other people’s talents and ambitions. He is a small and fragile-looking man, but his persuasive voice and knack for manipulation make him a formidable opponent. He encourages selflessness and altruism to coax others into submission. His philosophy is a blend of religion, Fascism and Socialism, and he at times resembles the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin.)
I’m reminded of a story told, I think by Colin Wilson, of a bunch of British engineering students who snuck a bunch of junk into a modern sculpture exhibition. Nobody noticed it didn’t belong there untll a visitor asked how come it wasn’t in the catalog. Anyway, the museum called the garbage men, who carted off one of the “real” sculptures.
— Posted by John J. Pierce
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I just like the honesty that comes through. I don’t know whether I agree with this or not. But it feels real, made not-to-impress, or even make a point other than: I am here, a human being, and this is what I see, feel, recognize.
Why is that so refreshing?
— Posted by Zoe
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While I loved the building, the art was summed up best in one installation. A piece of plastic sheeting left on the floor(that surely must have been left by the workers as they hurried to complete the building) had to have a security guard standing by it, telling visitors not to pick it up, that it was part of the installation.
Overheard on the stairway (I too was there for the museum’s opening for the masses). “Rebecca you could rip up a piece of plastic, too, but no one will call it art, you don’t have a MFA.”
— Posted by Linda K
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Huh, so a ’60s TV show that was made into a Harrison Ford movie is “work that aspires to permanence.” Who knew?
— Posted by PK
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Yay Stanley. — Michael in Berlin
— Posted by Michael Fried
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Professor Fish, what do you mean by “Everyone knows the story”? Which everyone? Why?
— Posted by James Clifton
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I have newfound respect for the curmudgeonly Fish, who more often than not only aggravates with his professorial parsings of the semantics of contemporary events. Here he weighs in on the great debates; and that is the way in–to this reader.
— Posted by freeassociate
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combine it with a quad cover Marvel Tales and a Lady Death snow globe.
====================================================
Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
By JOHN MARKOFF
Newer computer chips with multiple processors require
dauntingly complex software
and programmers are having a hard time keeping up.
===============================
On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: December 17, 2007
Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.
To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”
Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.
Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.
But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.
Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.
Much of the research is continuing and has not been published, so findings are preliminary. In a few studies, the Facebook users do not know they are being examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.
“For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.”
Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how people meet and learn more about potential romantic partners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both those kinds of information,” Professor Smith said.
S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.
In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being. (Note to parents: in an earlier paper the researchers found no correlation between grade-point average and intensity of Facebook use.)
An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.
Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.
Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,” he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.”
But some scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of the ethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large, and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to research using the site. Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.
Facebook began in 2004 at Harvard and was restricted to students until 2006. As Ms. Hargittai points out in her paper, “Requiring such an affiliation clearly limited the number and types of people who could sign up for the service in the beginning.”
Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site’s vast amount of data. The site’s users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it “fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment,” and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook’s “relationship status” box. “You’re not really dating until you put it on Facebook,” she said.
But Derrick B. Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, “I don’t feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook.” He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students’ permission.
Although federal rules govern academic study of human subjects, universities, which approve professors’ research methods, have different interpretations of the guidelines. “The rules were made for a different world, a pre-Facebook world,” said Samuel D. Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Facebook to explore perception and identity. “There is a rule that you are allowed to observe public behavior, but it’s not clear if online behavior is public or not.”
Indiana University appears to have one of the stricter policies. Its Web site states that the university will not approve academic research without permission from social networking sites or specific individuals.
Professor Hargittai of Northwestern conducted her Facebook study through a writing course that is required of all students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Some 1,060 participants answered survey questions on paper. Professor Ellison of Michigan State used a random sample of 800 undergraduates who were invited to participate via an e-mail message that included a link to an online survey.
Dr. Christakis of Harvard said he and his colleagues were studying the profiles of the East Coast college class with the approval of Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, and with the knowledge of the unnamed college’s administration — but unknown to the students being studied.
“Employers are looking at people’s online postings and Googling information about them, and I think researchers are right behind them,” said Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and internist who was an author of a study that received wide attention this year for its suggestion that obesity is “socially contagious.” (The researchers did not use Facebook.)
Among other topics, the Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating a concept, first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, known as triadic closure: whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts.
“Triadic closure was first described by Simmel 100 years ago,” Dr. Christakis said. “He just theorizes about it 100 years ago, but he didn’t have the data. Now we can engage that data.”
======================================================
Sn-aining there, bandit? it's sleeting in the valley, pouring down rain in town
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Self-Portrait: Reflection" (2002)
“The achievement of the strenuously lionized British realist painter Lucian Freud,” writes Roberta Smith, “has not so much been to break new ground as to dig incessantly deeper into the old. By doing so he has intensified our understanding of figurative painting’s familiar landmarks to the point of discomfort.” Mr. Freud’s work is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.
"The Painter's Mother III" (1972)
“Mr. Freud, who turned 85 last week, has managed this in no small measure by painting only people he knows and cares about, while equating flesh with oil paint. His strenuously worked surfaces portray bodies and faces in ways that convey a punishing sense of life lived — of too, too solid flesh weighed down by experience, indulgence and cowardice.”
"Head of a Naked Girl" (1999)
“His canvases never let us lose sight of the effort required to get the painting painted. The rough, slathered expanses offer unstinting views of flesh, thick and folded, or stretched thin over all-too-visible bones, of faces sad or pensive or blank. The portrayals are physical but not sensuous, harsh yet intensely engaged — the painterly equivalent of tough love. Again and again they grant the model enormous respect, but no place to hide.”
His sealed-off, exquisitely controlled, linear manner implied a need for order and a preference for emotional tension satisfied by small, oddly angled, tightly framed images that worked better in paintings than in prints.”
“Mr. Freud’s 1982 return to etching came casually, when he agreed to make prints to be inserted in 100 copies of Lawrence Gowing’s monograph on his work (to help meet the costs of publication).
“In many ways Mr. Freud’s etchings gained power from the cruelty of light when rendered in the black and white of etching. You can imagine this fact dawning on him while depicting the obese, dozing figure in ‘Woman With an Arm Tattoo,’ another print from 1987. Here the eye speeds past the woman’s immense blemished bicep and the halter top that resembles a plowed field to struggle with her nose, a crumpled form not unlike a squashed soda can.”
Around this time Mr. Freud also made a body of work exploring psychological states, some of which were collected in “About People: A Book of Symbolic Drawings” (1939). “Melancholia” shows a woman reclining in a cradle; “Loss of a Memory” depicts a man gazing at the empty space where his hands should be. Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s editor then, called these works “too personal and not funny enough,” but they caught on with devotees of psychoanalysis.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/12/13/arts/1214-FREU_index.html
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