"The Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich/Mary Petty was reclusive, uncompromising, but she peered into a fading world with unmatched warmth and brilliance."

I hope you can get past the New Yorker pay wall to see this article, with writing by the artist Chris Ware, and many wonderful New Yorker covers by Mary Petty.

Excerpt:

Her eye was extraordinary, conjuring an Edwardian era through its tiniest features: the brocaded wallpaper, the finely tiled kitchen floors, the thin brass faucets, the plush upholstery.

James Thurber, in an introduction to “This Petty Pace” (1945), the sole published collection of the artist’s work, describes the young Petty as a “slip of a girl.” Like her husband, she initially preferred to mail in her submissions, but by the nineteen-forties she had become a “common sight” at the magazine’s office, “sitting, cool and almost undismayed, on the edge of a chair.” Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing; when she was done, she would say that she hated it and herself. “Everybody else, of course, loves it and her,” Thurber adds, observing that what Petty offered in her work was “not a trick, but a magic. . . . She catches time in a foreshortened crouch that intensifies her satirical effects.”

Time in a foreshortened crouch — is anyone catching that anymore?

Example:

ADDED: Ware notes that Petty seems to have influenced Edward Gorey. And I'll just note that the book title — "This Petty Pace" — is a reference to a Shakespeare soliloquy, from "MacBeth," which also has something to say about time.

"Juvenal said that being a gladiator turned an ugly man into an Adonis in women’s eyes. 'It’s the steel they love,' the poet wrote."

"Men were obsessed too. Maecenas, a patron of the arts under the emperor Augustus, discussed the warriors’ form on a carriage ride with the poet Horace; the playwright Terence complained that one of his performances had been ruined by a crowd rushing in thinking that gladiators were fighting. The Romans felt it was good luck to part a bride’s hair with a spear that had been thrust into a gladiator’s body and drank tinctures of their blood to cure epilepsy...."

From "Sex, sesterces and status — the perks of being a gladiator/Those Who Are About Die is a myth-slaying history of the world of Roman fighters by the classicist and novelist Harry Sidebottom" (London Times).

The Department of Homeland Security — on Facebook — invites us to reveal ourselves in the discussion of a painting.

Here's the link to the Facebook page, where the image is quite large and clear and it's easy to read the comments. The government's caption is: "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending."

"Proud"? "Worth defending"? This sets some people off.

Even if you like that European-Americans moved across the continent and made it their own — and now your own — you may be taken aback to see America symbolized by a gigantic white woman in a diaphanous gown that whirls and swirls in the breeze — but doesn't slip off of her tenacious left tit — as she brings light, a telegraph line, and a school book westward.

The painting, "American Progress," was done by John Gast in 1872. Here's the Wikipedia article. The piece is very well composed and executed, and it's a good thing to stare at to contemplate Manifest Destiny. The Department of Homeland Security is challenging us to step up and feel proud, to see the westward expansion as beautiful... as beautiful as a half-naked woman.

"I mean, the crazy idea — but in the spirit of crazy ideas — is that if the world — there's like 8, roughly 8 billion people in the world — if the world can generate, like, 8 quintillion tokens per year..."

"... if that's the world, let, let, actually, let's say the world can generate 20 trillion quin- 20 quintillion tokens per year, each word generated by an AI — okay, just making up a huge number here, okay? — we'll say, okay, 12 of those go to, you know, the normal capitalistic system. But 8 of those 8 quintillion tokens are gonna get divided up equally among 8 billion people. So everybody gets 1 trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally. And people can sell those tokens. Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some like new art project we wanna do. But, but instead of just like getting a check, you're getting — everybody on earth is getting — like a slice of the world's AI capacity, and then we're letting the, like, massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's like a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one, but that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more."

Said Sam Altman, in the new episode of Theo Von's podcast (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

The word in boldface is the word that I said out loud as I was listening to the podcast, through earbuds, as I walked in the woods just now. I would describe my tone of voice as: derisive. Art! Art reared its goofball head in the midst of that insanity. I've heard it before, this notion that if only we were set free from the limitations of the workaday world, what we would do would be to make art.

"Amy Sherald — the artist who rocketed to fame with her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama — has withdrawn her upcoming solo show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery..."

"... because she said she had been told the museum was considering removing her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid provoking President Trump. 'American Sublime,' set to arrive at the museum in September, is a much heralded exhibition of works by Ms. Sherald and would have been the first by a Black contemporary artist at the Portrait Gallery... Ms. Sherald said that [Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, which runs the Portrait Gallery]... had proposed replacing the painting with a video of people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues, an idea she rejected because she said it would have included anti-trans views. 'When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,' she said. 'The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the "American Sublime" narrative.’"

From "Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship/The artist said that she made the decision after she said she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see photos of the paintings).

Whatever you think of the painting — "Tranforming Liberty" — it really is an awful idea to replace it with a video that included people critiquing the artist's point of view. Show the artist. She has a point of view. If you don't admire her, don't give her a show. But don't weave in the critics! They're not even art critics as far as I can tell. They just seem to be discordant voices about the visibility of trans people. Ridiculous! Embarrassing! Let the people see the paintings as painted and talk about them amongst themselves or write about them in social media or, as critics, in traditional media. Don't muck up the show!

As for the share of blame that belongs to Trump...

"For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as 'The New York Earth Room,' a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria.... 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep..."

"... on the second floor of an early artists’ co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit.... [T]he artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved. 'That’s what makes the Earth Room so radical,' Mr. Dilworth said.... 'It’s here, and it remains the same.'... He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.)... 'I found the art world to be something that doesn’t appeal to me.... This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to it. But making art has been vital to me always. So how do you make art and not be in the art world? This job allows me to stay tuned to my own art-making — just by the freedom of thought and all that.'"

From "Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of ‘The New York Earth Room,’ Is Dead at 70/For decades, he tended a SoHo loft filled with dirt, made by the conceptual artist Walter De Maria. People made pilgrimages to see it — and Mr. Dilworth, its magnetic steward" (NYT).

"The recurring anti-war messaging that pops up throughout the display, particularly in his scratchy drawings, is both a Japanese artistic trope — think Yoko Ono..."

"... and an unstated recognition of something we forget too easily in the West: that we dropped two atom bombs on Japan to fast-forward the end of the Second World War, and that this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation. What we have here is kids v annihilation."

I'm reading "Drawing like a kid isn’t child’s play — but does it deserve an exhibition?/Picasso and Miró prized naivety and there’s more to the infantile cartoons of Yoshitomo Nara at the Hayward Gallery than meets the eye" (London Times). 

I was surprised at "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation." "Never" is a strong word. The war with Germany was over by the time the atom bomb was ready, but we had other bombs and we used them very harshly against the Germans. We used dehumanizing stereotypes against the Japanese and also against the Germans. I'm disgusted to see "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation" in the London Times.

The Times art critic is Waldemar Januszczak, who was born in England to parents who were Polish refugees of WWII. 

Here's the Yoshitomo Nara art:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hayward Gallery (@hayward.gallery)

"Hundreds of intrepid people would organize themselves into themed gangs and set out in homemade crafts of dubious seaworthiness..."

"... through Jamaica Bay to compete, 'American Gladiators'-style, with various props and pseudo-weapons. The 'boats' disintegrated once the shenanigans were over.... Mr. McNeill’s most ambitious project was... a 500-mile trip along the Ganges River... called... 'The Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood.' Mr. McNeill and a group of collaborators built five metal pontoon boats in Brooklyn — three of them powered by motorcycles, one by sail and oars, and another by paddle wheel — which he would captain. The boats were designed to lock together for camping on the water.... It was an arduous monthslong trip. Marauding monkeys attacked their camp..... Mr. McNeill’s godfather was the author William S. Burroughs, with whom the elder Mr. McNeill had collaborated on a graphic novel. Mr. Burroughs baptized Orien with a dab of vodka from his afternoon drink...."

From "Orien McNeill, Artist Who Made Mischief on the Water, Dies at 45/He was the pied piper of a loose community of DIY artists homesteading on New York City’s waterways, which he used as his canvas and stage" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the photos).

McNeill died on May 15 on his 52-foot-long ferryboat, and we are not told the cause of death.

"I learnt to paint looking at my own photographs; I used to love looking at a photograph with a magnifying glass and getting ideas about how to put paint on."

"I just simplify and use the shapes. I would never paint a whole house, for instance; I would paint part of one, something that tells a little story but not the whole story."

From "Gretchen Dow Simpson obituary: Artist for The New Yorker/Creator known for the rigid geometry of her depictions of staircases, beaches and exteriors of New England houses, dies aged 85" (London Times).

You can view her work at her website, here.

And check out her mural in Rhode Island:

"I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity."

Says the sculptor Thomas J. Price at his website, linked at the New York Times in "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity."

Wow! That headline says so much about "meaningful connections," "intimate emotional states," and "deeper reflection around the human condition."

What could be more meaningfully connected, intimately emotional, or more deeply reflected upon than to call you a big old racist if you scorn a monumental statue of a casually dressed black woman?

Price's hopes are dashed. And the Times doesn't even tell us the title of the statue — "Grounded in the Stars" — until the 7th paragraph. After the headline calls it "Times Sq. Sculpture" and "a 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman," the text calls it "the bronze sculpture," "the 12-foot statue," "the sculpture," and — quoting others — "a statue of an 'angry Black lady,'" "a D.E.I. statue." 

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

"In what is now the guest bedroom, original lath and plaster smoothed over a rough brick insulation called nogging, had decayed in sections..."

"... and was coated in five layers of paint. Gentle application of a scraper revealed a floral lattice wallpaper, which he left as is, creating a distressed cottage-core atmosphere."

From "A 'Romantic Idealist' Renovates a Derelict House on an Artist’s Budget/A street artist had to depend on patrons to help him buy a 19th century house and had to depend on himself to restore it" (NYT)(free-access link, because it's a great story with great photos).

"This house is healing medicine to me,' he said of the 1897 three-story vernacular just steps from the Hudson River. 'It is my deliverance from the darkest of nights and it’s my phoenix rising.'"

(Gift link working now.)

"When he lit a cigarette, a nurse in blue scrubs appeared over his shoulder, peering at Hockney with apparent concern."

"But by staying silent, the nurse respected the buttons that both he and Hockney wore, reading 'End Bossiness Soon.' The artist made those after the British government banned smoking in public spaces in 2007. These days, Hockney has 24-hour medical care, and ensuring that he will be well enough to go to Paris for the exhibition opening has been a priority for his team. He planned to travel by car, with his dachshund, Tess; his doctor would travel separately, he said. 'I am looking forward to it, because it is the largest exhibition I’ve ever had. Which it should be,' Hockney said with a wry smile. 'Shouldn’t it, really?'"

From "David Hockney Wants His Biggest Ever Show to Bring You Joy/The artist is 87 now and under constant medical care. But he was determined to make it to Paris for the exhibition of his life" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made 'Apple,' a piece of fresh fruit on a stand..."

"... at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.) I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.) He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer/David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass" (NYT).

"Yoko, meaning 'ocean child,' was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. 'Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,' Ono once wrote."

"As Jolie moved through the rooms of her gallery with a cup of tea, she paused to take in the unlikely scene. 'Sometimes I think, what are we doing?'..."

"A clutch of women had found their place beside her, urgently wanting to talk about art and activism. 'And then I think, no, this is everything.'"

From "Angelina Jolie Wants to Pick Up Where Warhol and Basquiat Left Off/The actress is building a community of artists, thinkers and doers of all kinds, in a storied building in downtown Manhattan" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the art, the artists, and the artsy spaces).

Jolie listened intently to Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, a striking figure with kohled eyes. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led. It has to relate to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jolie's ex, Brad Pitt, is running into trouble with his real-estate-based humanitarianism: "Brad Pitt Suffers Major Setback In $20M Legal Battle Over Defective Homes For Hurricane Katrina Victims" (Yahoo).

The actor had built homes for these individuals in the wake of the natural disaster, but the homes reportedly developed dangerous mold, leading to the class action they filed.... Pitt had spent $12 million through his Make It Right Project to build these homes, which were designed to be ecologically sustainable....

"This is how I put a bunch of raccoons in trench coats inside of a secret art gallery."

A great art project....

"The predecessor who now inspires Trump in vivid oil paint served only one term, dying shortly after he left office in 1849."

"But in four years Polk nearly doubled the territory of the U.S. On the northern border, Polk’s supporters rallied around the expansionist slogan '54°40’ or Fight,' demanding the U.S. take over the entire Pacific Northwest up to that latitude, then the southern boundary of Russian Alaska, even if it meant going to war with Britain. Instead, in 1846 Polk negotiated a treaty that established the U.S.’s northern border at the 49th parallel. In the Southwest, Polk annexed Texas and fought the Mexican-American War, which ended in Mexico ceding more than 500,000 square miles to the U.S., including all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, in exchange for $15 million. It was 'one of the largest land grabs in world history,' said historian Hampton Sides... 'He wanted it all, and he got it all in one term....' In terms of personality, Polk and Trump have little in common, Sides said. Despite his aggressive foreign policy, Polk 'was not this blustering, loud, bully of a person. He was morose, a kind of dark guy.' Polk was also known 'for being quite honest…He wasn’t this erratic, crazy person who was constantly throwing people off guard....'"

From "The Painting That Explains Trump’s Foreign Policy/James K. Polk expanded the U.S. more than any other president. Now his portrait hangs in the Oval Office, a signal that President Trump’s ambition to take over Canada, Greenland and other territory is more than just talk" (Wall Street Journal).

"The Germans are open-hearted, good-natured, witty, and irresistible in war but inclined to fritter away their time and money on drink."

"The Englishman, by contrast, is affectionate, effeminate and graceful in thought, albeit prone to lechery and 'changeable as the moon' in his religious observances. He gets off comparatively lightly: the Swede is cruel and superstitious, the Hungarian is disloyal and bloodthirsty, and the 'wild, peasant-like' Pole is most likely to meet his end in a cowstall. These are the bald assertions of a 'Table of Peoples' artwork executed by an anonymous Austrian painter in about 1720, during the early throes of the Enlightenment mania for taxonomy."

From "The Enlightenment exhibition that poses troubling questions in Trump era/The German Historical Museum’s landmark exhibition on the 18th-century era has become surprisingly relevant in light of cultural and geopolitical trends" (London Times).

"Not everybody loved blemish patches. Already in 1649, a bill had been put before the increasingly Puritan Parliament calling for the banning of... Wearing Black Patches..."

"... although it was never passed. Meanwhile, an increasing number of tracts railed against the vanity displayed by those sporting beauty patches — 'Those Curles so extravagant, those Patches so abominable, unless it be to Cut the Throat of Chastity,' as noted by the 1683 book England’s Vanity or The Voice of God. The same sentiment is conveyed by an inscription on the Allegorical Portrait of Two Ladies itself, whose full meaning is still the subject of debate: 'I black with white bespott: yu white wth blacke this Evill: proceeds from thy proud hart: then take her: Devill.'"

From "Pimple patches — the 17th century beauty craze resurrected by Gen-Z/Louisa McKenzie traces the surprising history of the jaunty spot stickers loved by Gen-Z and 17th century women, who used them as a tool for seduction as well as concealment" (London Times).

You can buy these cute stars at Amazon (commission earned).

And here's the Allegorical Portrait of Two Ladies ("a 17th-century painting by an unknown artist"):

"George, who painted as a hobby, does a self-portrait in evening clothes and his older brother responds with one of himself wearing underclothes..."

"... dyed yellow in the bathtub, paunch visible: 'My Body.'... He was comically underactive, congratulating himself for what [his biographer] calls 'peregrinations,' and work-avoidant: 'Upstairs to get typewriter ribbon,' he’d say, jumping up from the piano. 'It’s the only way I get exercise.' He had a weakness for puns that some found fatal. 'Lust Horizon,' he proposed as an alternate title to Billy Wilder’s 'Kiss Me, Stupid,' his last Hollywood collaboration, and a bomb. After repeated falls he called himself a 'rhapsody in bruise.'..."

From "It’s Hard to Be the Brother of a Genius Who Died Young/In 'Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,' Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George" (NYT).

"AI will be incredible," tweets Elon Musk...

... showing us this:

AI will be incredible
pic.twitter.com/1fU4Jn7yN9

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2024

But that is not incredible. Everything is credible now that we know A.I. does things like that. It's no more incredible than movies, which amazed people at one time, and in fact, right now, what A.I. did to those famous paintings is worse than any random few seconds in a well-made movie because it is in low taste and it is a step down from the artist's vision, which froze one moment and presented it to signify everything in the surrounding moments. Unfreezing that moment is utterly banal, and it misunderstands what the painting offers, which is to activate our mind about whatever might relate to that picture.

A.I. steps in and generates the next few seconds in the most obvious and superficial way. Let's have the Girl with a Pearl Earring break out of her subtle expression and into a modern-day movie-star smile. There, now, you are relieved from contemplating the mystery of human emotion and entertained by the comfortable reminder that when young beautiful women smile they are simply fantastic.