SEVEN MEDITATIONS ON AESTHETICS
(apologies to Mark Weiss, whose fault this isn't)
1. Gene Smith, seeking tears from his viewers via the perfect image,
feeds mercury-laden fish to the children of Minamata, a village the
proverbial stone's throw from the more famous city of Nagasaki. His
strategy works: in 1985, at a retrospective of his work at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors look at the great Pieta, "Tomoko
in her bath," and weep unashamedly. But this does Smith no good,
since he had, in addition to his quest for the Great Picture, the
worst thing an artist can have, a conscience, and Chissu Chemical
Company goons beat him into blindness.
2. Greyhounds are the most aesthetically pleasing dogs on earth, and
are its second fastest animal, able to attain 45 miles per hour in
three strides. However, racing for money is not their idea since they
don't get any of it. Their handlers beat and starve them. They
collide with one another and break bones during races. At the end of
their racing careers--normally at 3 years of age--they are shot
because a bullet is cost-effective, costing only 36 cents; gassing
them en masse would be more expensive. They do not always die at once
and are buried alive. Remarkably, greyhounds are moral creatures with
the forgiveness of St. Maria Goretti: the survivors who live to be
adopted as housepets do not carry resentments and give love
unconditionally to their new humans.
3. Hitler greatly admired the German heldentenor Max Lorenz. He was
dismayed to learn that Lorenz, who had fled to England, was both a
homosexual and a Jew. Lauritz Melchior, another giant of the age,
wasn't a Jew, but could have starred in Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
4. As long as we're talking about Frederick Law Olmstead, who has a
street named for him in the Bronx, not in Manhattan, what were the
working conditions for the men who landscaped, tree-planted, laid
marble and paving blocks in Central Park? For that matter, what was
the original Central Park Zoo like? That's rhetorical: I know the
answer to that question because I am old enough to remember it. Vide
supra notes on greyhounds but read "Siberian Tiger." The only Gates
there were iron bars.
5. Stalin perfectly melded art and politics, for he fancied himself an
music and literary critic. "Fancied," nothing. When you can make
Shostakovitch and Prokofiev shit their pants, when you can dispatch
Mandelstam to some Christ-awful gulag, you are not fancied, you have
become God.
6. Eliot Weinberger writes of Cambodia that its full horror has a
name: Kampuchea, and that the name itself, Kampuchea, sums up all one
needs to know. A land conceived by Pol Pot as a work of agrarian
socialist art, a world without art, a land in which the price of art,
literacy, science, medicine, and breathing is starvation, torture, and
death.
7. Lucky Seven. All the rest is trivia.
KTW/3-1-05
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
If you want patience, go to medical school.
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