Archive for November, 2009

Is there a future for Christian art?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Monday, November 30th, 2009

The Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum

Pope Benedict XVI hopes so.  In fact, just a few weeks back he invited more than 200 contemporary artists (including musicians, writers, and architects) into the Sistine Chapel to urge them to embark on a ”Quest for Beauty” (Rachael Donadio, “Benedict Woos Artists, Urging ‘Quest for Beauty’,” The New York Times, November 22). Above and behind His Holiness, powerfully driving his point home, was, of course,  Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

AAAhhh… Those were the days, with Michelangelo and Raphael simultaneously working in the Vatican, on Papal commissions.

Cardinal Keeler, right here in Baltimore, has long advocated for a rapprochement between artists of all faiths and the Church. His dream was, and probably still is, a national competition, and an exhibition of the works of the winners.

But will it happen?  Can it happen?

Benedict has brought into the Vatican hierarchy a powerful arts advocate in Archbishop Ravisi, former director of the famous Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Ravisi’s aim is for the Vatican to have its own pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Imagine that!

America’s renowned video artist, Bill Viola, was greatly enthused  by what he heard that day – which is not so surprising, given his powerful reinterpretation of Renaissance Christian iconography, as he creates what might best be called “altarpieces in super-slow motion.” My own favorite is Emergence, from Viola’s The Passions, organized a few years back by the Getty. 

Viola is quoted at length in The Times article, ruminating on the Church/Artist challenge, as distilled into the inherent tension between artistic freedom and “rules”  – and the artist’s need for rule bending, and even rule breaking.

But Viola sees “real potential.” 

Maybe.

Posted in Art, Religion | 792 Comments »

Why Kansas City Leads in the Arts

Posted by Gary Vikan on Friday, November 27th, 2009

Photo: Dean Vikan

Photo: Dean Vikan

I was at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City last weekend, and saw for the first time the new addition by architect Steven Holl, that opened to universal praise in 2007. There are many wonderful contrasts between this building and the neo-classical original of 1934. Both work well for the collections they house, and the the ultra-modernist addition – the Bloch Building – which radiates a cool, extraterrestrial glow at night, is scaled to and fully respectful of its older companion.

But for all the differences between the two buildings there is one startling, and revealing constant.  The “major benefactors” list of 1934 and that of 2007 both bear the names Hall and Block – as in greeting cards and taxes.  Two successful, local families that stayed true to a vision of artistic leadership for the Nelson-Atkins and Kansas City for more than seven decades.

Do we have their equivalents here?

Posted in Architecture, Art, Baltimore | 1,134 Comments »

Hunter-Gatherers, Michelangelo, and the Buddha

Posted by Gary Vikan on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

IMG_8318In the Ideas & Trends section of The New York Times of  November 15th, Nicholas Wade waded into the murky waters of natural selection and religion (“The Evolution of the God Gene”). The idea is that religion – the potentiality for any and all religions – is hardwired into our brains from our hunter-gatherer days, some 50,000 years ago. Why? Because those  egalitarian groups of naked warriors from which we descend were in constant battle with their neighbors, and internal cohesion as generated by ”religious” rituals (initially dancing, later ancestor-worship, later still, the worship of solar deities) had great utility to the group’s survival. And thus, procreation.

The article was illustrated with pictures of Catholic bishops and Buddhist monks doing their respective (but fundamentally identical) things.  But the article’s editors could as will have show Michelangelo’s famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel or a bronze Buddha from Thailand at the Walters. Since both would be, no less than the bishops and monks in action, the glittering “residue” of our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ survival rituals.

Posted in Anthropology, Art, Neuroscience, Religion | 45 Comments »

Has time passed us by…?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Monday, November 23rd, 2009

A few weeks back, Nicolai Ouroussoff, architectural critic for The New York Times, officially called an end to our recent explosion of new art museums, concert halls, and performing arts centers – an extraordinary decade that he compares to the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th century (An American Architectural Epoch Locks Its Doors, 10/24). Ouroussoff used the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, by Frank Gehry, to illustrate the former, and the Beaux-Arts extravaganza of Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 for the latter. Dallas, Denver, Miami, Chicago, and even Milwaukee were mentioned, sometimes favorably, sometimes not, but Baltimore gets no mention at all.

No question, we would have been there a century ago. Baltimore was then rising from the devastating fire of February, 1904 to become one of America’s truly exciting architectural cities: MICA’s award-winning Main Building, atop Mount Royal Avenue, by the New York firm of Pell & Corbett, was dedicated in November 1908, the Walters, by the New York firm of Aldrich and Delano, opened three months later, and Penn Station, by Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, also of New York, was just two years off.

What happend?  Is it simply that we’ve slipped from being one of the largest cities in the country to somewhere around #20?  That we’ve lost our corporate headquarters? Is it that Baltimore just doesn’t have the money?

Or is it the will? And the imagination?Borofsky

MICA’s Brown Center, just opposite the 1908  Main Building, by Charles Brickbauer and  Ziger/Snead, from right here in Baltimore  –  is a triumph, and by the standards of the  Disney Concert Hall, a real bargain!

So it can happen.

But maybe we’re just victims of our own past. Our continuing inability to come to terms with Borofsky’s Male/Female in front of our beloved 100-year-old train station suggests to me that it’s true.

But what do you think?

Posted in Architecture, Baltimore, The Walters | 17 Comments »

Why do some shapes look better than others?

Posted by Gary Vikan on Friday, November 20th, 2009

When I was an undergraduate I was taken with aesthetics. And especially with Clive Bell’s notion of ”significant form.” The idea that some shapes simply look better than others, eternally and universally, as he said. Kant had said so, too, but the idea never really stuck.  Why? Because of it’s circularity. Who, after all, gets to decide what shapes look better – art critics, those “in the know”? If so, what happens to the idea of  universality?Picture1

But now, the “century of the brain” invites a  revisit.

The Walters has partnered with the  Mind/Brain Institute at Hopkins in an  exhibition/experiment that will open at the  WAM in January (thewalters.org). It’s called  Beauty and the Brain. Our colleagues at the Mind/Brain Institute, under Professor Ed Connor, have supplied groupings of 3D shapes that are “morphed,” in some cases (as illustrated), from original works of art by the French/German sculpture Jean Arp.

Visitors will put on old-fashioned 3D glasses, look at the groupings, and choose the 3D shapes that they find most and least appealing.

The project is based on the idea that artists are “intuitive neuroscientists,” always searching for new and more powerful ways to stimulate the visual brain. And that there is, in fact, a neural reality to “significant form.”

Our goal is to begin to understand how people recognize and appreciate beauty, which lies at the heart of the museum experience.

Here, you’ve got 15 variant forms to choose from. Which do you like the most, and which the least?

Posted in Art, Neuroscience, The Walters | 1 Comment »