[Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters, "Chameleon", 1973]
[Roy Hargrove & RH Factor, "Riff," live 2005]
[Frank Zappa, with Jean-Luc Ponty, "Greggary Peccary Suite," live 1973]
[Dave Matthews Band, "You & Me," 2009]
Ever read a book that you agree with heartily...right up until the final few pages? Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct; Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2009)is that book for me right now. I recommend The Art Instinct-- it is cogent, thought-provoking, stylish (Dutton writes very well, as we would expect from the founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily).
Dutton is bold: he seeks to explain the arts as a necessary driver and outcome of our biological evolution. In doing so, he sets his views against both many biologists on the one side, and many philosophers of arts and aestheticians on the other. If you like books by Steven Pinker, Steven Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson, you'll like The Art Instinct.
I was nodding my head on just about every page...until I got to page 223 and the first of Dutton's four assertions about what makes a masterpiece:
"The arts are not essentially social."
The bolding and italics are in the original-- Dutton is stressing his assertion, and then takes the next four pages to support his point. Dutton-- as he is throughout the book-- is nuanced and balanced. He acknowledges that the arts demonstrably enhance empathy, group solidarity, and cooperation. But he argues ultimately that the primary, most important role of art-making is to enhance the individual's ability to compete for a mate.
"My [i.e., Dutton, page 226] own view is that traces of sexual selection, a process that pits suitors against each other in a competition with real winners and losers, tends partially to undermine the communal spirit as having a defining role in the arts. [...] The motives of art, as even Darwin knew, are ancient and complicated-- directed towards a community, perhaps, but also created to captivate an audience of one."
Fair enough, and nicely qualified... and no one could doubt that music can play a significant part in sexual display/ selection. I would just flip the priority, and emphasize instead the group dynamics.
Quick example:
Decades ago, I was a stagehand for a musical in college. As we dimmed the lights to signal the end of intermission at one of the shows, the pit orchestra began to tune up. Imagine the usual sounds of spectators rustling and talking as they return to their seats, and the musicians noodling around, with random toots, plinks, and honks. Suddenly-- and now the lights were out entirely-- one line cut through the hub-bub: the bass player thrumming the unmistakable opening riff from Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon."
"Boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump, boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump..."
Over and over. If you can hear a smile in the dark, spreading from face to face on silent feet, then we heard the broadest of collective smiles.
The drummer joined in, and then the guitarist. For a minute or so, in the shared darkness, entirely impromptu (as far as any of us outside the pit could tell), the band jammed and the audience murmured and clapped and whistled.
And then, with a flourish, the band shifted into the entirely unrelated overture to the musical and we brought up the lights and raised the curtain.
One of those moments in life when you are randomly yet very certainly, viscerally, connected to a hundred strangers. Music did that-- it could have been any one of the arts, a painting, a poem. We could not see each other, and I do not recall (though I could be wrong) audience members rushing to the band afterwards for post-play erotics. The impact was profound-- a spark to defy the dark, a human note to defeat the emptiness that stretches out into infinity.
YouTube is a trove of live music. I picked three from hundreds of favorites. Watch for the joy communicated from face to face.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Romanticism in Pomerania; Teofilo Olivieri; Graham Franciose
[Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald in Moonlight, 1816/17]
[Three by Teofilo Olivieri]
[Two by Graham Franciose]Fall is here at last in New York City: shadows ever longer, goldenrod coming into bloom on Chelsea Piers, the sun still fierce but knowing her power is waning, fleets of Monarch Butterflies sailing by (as far up as thirty stories)...
It is autumn in Pomerania too, along the southern shores of the Baltic, where I lived for over a year. The Pomeranian State Museum in Greifswald (where I spent a great deal of time) just opened what must be a wonderful exhibit on the "Birth of Romanticism," featuring work by three native sons: Friedrich, Runge and Klinkowstroem. Most exciting: the National Museum in Oslo (where I lived for six years) has sent Friedrich's Greifswald by Moonlight, the first time I believe that it has ever been displayed in its hometown. For more, click here.
Closer to home, the lobster and the canary last month stumbled across the artist Teofilo Olivieri and his work. He was selling his boldly delineated, vibrantly colored, enigmatic pieces on the street just south of Union Square-- we bought one of the ambiguous horned owl-people. For more, click here.
Graham Franciose sent me a link to his new website-- for which, click here. I love his mournful, pensive, rum little people...and the way they twine with and are entwined by the natural world (birds, roots, nests).
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Sunday Evening Soup: Brooklyn Book Festival
Today the lobster and the canary enjoyed the fifth annual Brooklyn Book Festival, undeterred by a mizzle of rain.
Was good to talk with the ever-jovial Gavin Grant, staffing the booth at Small Beer Press.
Ditto our good friends at Brooklyn's own Greenlight Bookstore.
We also spoke with (and bought books from!) the good folks at:
* NY Review of Books Classics
* Archipelago Books
* Coffee House Press
* Poetry Society of America
* New Directions
* Europa Editions
If you are in or around Brooklyn next September, visit the Festival!
Click here for more information.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Sunday Morning Coffee: Visual Arts in NYC This Fall
[Jocelyn Hobbie, Pilgrim]
[TM Davy, untitled]
[Louise Despont, moonface & his carrier birds]
[Dante Horoiwa, Distracted, We'll Win]
[Alex Gross, Discrepancies]
[Flor Echevarria, Torres]
[Hugo Martinez Rapari, La Tierra Sopla-Tormenta! Earth Blows: Sand Storm!]
[Fred Tomaselli, Big Raven (2008)]First cool breezes off the Hudson, the first slants of sunshine in Central Park this weekend...fall is on its way.
Some exhibitions we are looking forward to this autumn in the city:
* Fred Tomaselli at the Brooklyn Museum.
* Miro at the Metropolitan, and also the Gossarts at ditto.
* At the MoMA: "On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century," which (per the museum website)"...explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century, a period when numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of drawing to a critical examination and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed line across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world."
* The group show "Ain't I a Woman" at The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts.
* Hugo Martinez Rapari, Flor Echevarria and others at Agora Gallery's "Masters of the Imagination" group show.
* Alex Gross at Jonathan Levine.
* Dante Horoiwa and others in RH Gallery's inaugural show, The Third Meaning.
* Louise Despont's House of Instruments show at Nicelle Beauchene.
* TM Davy at Eleven Rivington.
* Jocelyn Hobbie's "portraits of imaginary women" at Kerry Schuss.
And-- the lobster clacks his claws in anticipation, the canary whistles praise in advance!-- that just scratches the surface.
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