American Graffiti.

One of the fascinating things to me about art history is the way decorating styles have changed over the millennia. In most cultures decoration—which I’ll just define broadly as little fiddly bits added on to something that don’t really need to be there but make it look nicer—is used to some degree or other. In Europe decoration really reached its height in the Baroque and Rococo periods with decoration getting so elaborate I’m not sure the eye could take it all in, and in a lot of cases there were details that were missed. Once, while I was visiting a late Baroque cathedral in Austria, the tour guide pointed out a carving on the armrest of a pew of a couple in the 69 position, and it probably went unnoticed for a really long time because it was dark wood and there was so much other stuff around it. And eventually there’d be a decline and some movements, particularly in architecture, aimed for more utilitarian designs, such as the Bauhaus which had an aesthetic based on straight lines and little decoration but then moved into singing about Bela Lugosi, but that’s another story.

Even the sparest, least decorated art can also be very emotionally effective. Some people point to Mark Rothko’s large blocks of color and say, “Well, hell, I could do that,” but his paintings can be very haunting and up close reveal a lot of detail in the brushwork. It’s also worth noting that he designed a special building with carefully controlled lighting to give people a very specific experience of seeing his paintings.

Because graffiti is illegal it usually has to be quick and dirty—as opposed to elaborately carved couples in flagrante delicto which would be long and dirty–or at least quick, so there’s not a lot of time for decorating, but I always appreciate it when it adds a little something to an otherwise bland space.

From up close it looked like a random scribble. There wasn’t anything unusual about that. I see a lot of random scribbles on benches and walls and gas meters. Most of the time they’re done in pen although sometimes they’re done in paint. And I always wonder when they’re done in paint why the person who made them even bothered. Then I think maybe they were practicing. Or maybe they’re gang signs, although that seems unlikely. The random scribbles are so, well, random, and so generic I can’t imagine any gang being able to identify them as their own.

“Is this one of ours?”

“Beats me. They all look like that.”

The random scribbles, I always think, lack more than purpose. They lack passion, intent, a desire to share something.

And then for some reason I crossed the street and looked back, and I was glad I did. What looked like a random scribble turned out to be something a lot more interesting. Maybe it was still someone practicing, or maybe its distinctive look was intentional. The mark at the end certainly seemed to signal more to come.

Looking back I could see passion, intent, and a desire to share something, and I was glad I gave what I thought was nothing another look.

A few years ago I got a gig writing art criticism for a small magazine. I’m not sure what the editors were thinking. I’d taken a few classes, but as far as being an art critic I was mostly self-taught. Still I was excited. I’d seen an exhibit at a local gallery that I thought was amazing and I thought I could say a lot about it so I went back to the gallery, notebook and pen in hand, and the exhibit was gone. It had been replaced by another, a series of paintings. And I couldn’t make sense of them. It also didn’t help that I didn’t know anything about the artist aside from a brief bio on the gallery wall, and I started wondering if I’d made a mistake. I was doing the job pro bono even though I wasn’t a pro and feeling less bono every minute. And then a couple of things happened. For one thing I remembered a piece I’d read by the art critic David Sylvester. Sylvester was an interesting character. In spite of not having any formal art education himself Sylvester managed to become a major art critic, promoting the work of artists like Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. He was a friend of Alberto Giacometti, and for a while worked as an assistant for the sculptor Henry Moore. He lost the job because he and Moore spent so much time arguing about art neither one of them could get any work done, which makes me think that if you’re working for a major artist you should agree with whatever their opinions are, unless that’s not what they want in which case agree to disagree, but that’s another story. Anyway I remembered that in one piece of criticism Sylvester started off by admitting he didn’t know anything about the artist, but he sort of muddled through, mostly by describing the artists’ works on display and extrapolating some ideas.
And so I did the same thing.

And the funny thing is the more I looked at the works in the gallery the more I liked them, the more I felt I understood them. The great Yogi Berra said “You can observe a lot by watching,” and it’s true that you can also see a lot by looking.

A problem some people see with graffiti is that it might encourage more, and worse, crime in an area. It’s the broken windows theory of crime—the idea that a bad environment is responsible for crime. It goes sort of like this: one broken window in an empty building will encourage people to break more windows and next thing you know you have hooliganism running amok which sounds bad in spite of the fact that “hooliganism” and “amok” are fun words to throw around, especially if you’re playing Scrabble where they’re worth a lot of points, but that’s another story.

The broken windows theory has, depending on whom you ask, been discredited. I don’t think it’s ever been completely discredited because crime is a complicated thing and it’s impossible to point to a single factor that causes or contributes to it, or to even find a specific set of factors.

And sometimes I think that a little graffiti can make something you wouldn’t stop to look at or think about more interesting. It can actually improve an area.

Some friends and I were walking through Gorky Park, the actual park, not the 1983 film, although it is interesting to me that one of my favorite comedians, Alexei Sayle, has a small role in the film. He gets shot in the head and because the special effects technicians got a little overzealous when they shot the shooting he was left temporarily deaf. While he was sitting around the set recovering Lee Marvin sat down and talked to him for about half an hour and all Sayle, who was understandably starstruck, could do was smile and nod politely.

My friends and I had just been to a Marc Chagall exhibit at a Moscow museum which, at the time, was a pretty big deal. This was 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed less than a week earlier, and Chagall’s paintings were being shown in his native Russia for the first time since he left in 1923. It was striking to me that even though Chagall himself wouldn’t live to see it his paintings had outlasted the Soviet Union. And even though I really loved the Chagall  paintings I’d seen in books this was the first time I’d ever seen his pictures in person. No matter how good a reproduction may be it can never capture the feeling of being in front of an original painting, seeing its size, the brushstrokes, and the colors unfiltered.

Because it was snowing and because we were in a park we decided to build a snowman, although we didn’t pretend he was Parson Brown, but if we had and he’d asked, “Are you married?” we would have said, “Holy crap, it’s a talking snowman!” but that’s another story. Since we didn’t have coal or carrots we used kopecks for the eyes and nose and mouth. Some Russian kids gave us weird looks. As we walked away I looked back and saw them examining the snowman. I figured they’d take the kopecks but they didn’t touch it.

On the metro going back to the hotel we sat across from a boy who might have been seven or eight.

“Would you like a piece of candy?” one of my friends asked. He gave her a blank look. She held out a lollipop from her candy stash. He took it and politely muttered “Спасибо.” He then took out a red plastic pencil case and put the lollipop in it, keeping his head down. The rest of the trip he kept moving around the lollipop and his pencils, a smile pushing out at the corners of his mouth.

Every once in a while I think about that kid and how he must be grown now, and I wonder if any memory of us has melted away, like the lollipop and the snowman, or if he remembers that, if he feels lucky to have been there.

When I was young one of the most popularly quoted lines among my peers was “Hell is other people” from Sarte’s No Exit. In college it was posted on the door of every dorm room, or at least every third dorm room, or maybe it was just a few on every floor and it just seemed like it was everywhere.

The problem is it was almost always misquoted, or rather misunderstood. Sure, Sarte wrote in French, and the play was originally called Huis Clos, so, yeah, anyone who said “Hell is other people” was, strictly speaking, quoting a translation of the original, but the important thing is that Sarte was one of the major figures of the Existentialist movement, and even though one of his characters says, “Hell is other people,” or something like it, the author of Being And Nothingness believed that it is our perceptions that shape the world. If Sarte knew how many kids were going around saying “Hell is other people” it would probably make him say, “Merde.”

A character from the TV show Justified put it much more succinctly: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

One of the functions of art in the classical tradition is to capture the ephemeral, to make it permanent, to capture what’s fleeting and make it permanent. From the moment we’re born we start dying, but art can stop that, freeze what melts away. That’s just one idea of what art is supposed to do, but it’s a widespread idea and one that’s lasted and influenced art for thousands of years. Even as so many works have disappeared that idea has held one. Maybe that’s why, of all the graffiti I’ve collected, of all the graffiti I’ve seen, even of all the art I’ve seen, this is one of my favorite works.

It’s simple but well made, with details added by the artist and details added by the artist and details added by chance, by the wall that served as its canvas. The figures are skeletal but the gold suggests an Egyptian pharaoh’s sarcophagus: a lasting monument to a short life. I don’t know how long it had been there when I found it, when I took this picture, but the paint was starting to peel in some places, a natural underlining that nothing lasts forever.

And that, too, is a function of art: to remind us that nothing lasts forever.

These ruins are to the future what the past is to us

–Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History

The following contains spoilers.

For many of us the holidays are a time for binge-watching, and if you didn’t catch it when it was released in September you may have been binging the fourth season of Bojack Horseman. If you’re a Netflix subscriber and if you like that sort of thing–I get that emotionally difficult sarcastic animated comedies about anthropomorphized animals with a lot of inside jokes about celebrity culture aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s for those who like their tea dark and bitter.

I only just started watching Bojack Horseman a few months ago and immediately noticed something. The Warhol-esque horseshoes on his bedroom wall, first seen in the opening sequence, didn’t seem all that striking, since parodies of Warhol were a cliché even when Warhol was still alive.

Then there was the painting in Bojack’s office where he and Diane start on the book about him.

Source: The Sartler

Cute, I thought. Someone’s a fan of David Hockney. I recognized the painting referenced but didn’t get the full significance until I went back and looked up the original–the title is Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures).

And then there was the Matisse in Bojack’s living room.

Source: The Sartler

And the Keith Haring paintings in a ’90’s flashback.

Source: The Movie Goer

And Basquiat paintings in the office of Bojack’s former friend and mentor Herb Kazazz. The ’90’s were a peak time for both Haring and Basquait.

Source: Imgur

In the present day, when Bojack returns to the office after Herb’s funeral, the paintings are still there, although one is damaged and one almost completely destroyed–a comment on how Basquiat’s reputation fell. Perhaps it’s also a comment on how, when their relationship ended, Herb sealed off this part of his life.

Source: Imgur

Other bloggers beat me to this a long time ago, compiling several of the references up through season 3, and not every episode has an art reference, but it’s interesting to me how expansive they are. The references range from classical–I’m guessing Bojack’s tile portrait is a nod to ancient Rome:

Source: The Sartler

To high modernism and contemporary. There’s even a bit of graffiti:

Source: YouTube

Sometimes what’s in the background is clever misdirection. In a season 3 episode Mr. Peanutbutter, voiced by Paul F. Thompkins, waits in a dressing room for news about his brother’s surgery. His brother, by the way, is voiced by Weird Al Yankovic, which is a deep inside reference in itself. On the wall of the dressing room are posters for Old Yeller and Where The Red Fern Grows. These turn out to not be the somber portents they would appear to be.

In the next episode, though, there is very heavy foreshadowing when Bojack’s former co-star turned pop singer Sara Lynn has a painting of Ophelia by John Everett Millais over her bed. A Chagall painting in her living room is subtler but still significant. Chagall’s first wife Bella died suddenly from an untreated infection. The striking thing is, unlike other works that appear in the series, these paintings aren’t parodied but are recreated.

Source: Cultura Colectiva

The show cleverly uses art history to comment on the present, the past, but is the future inevitable? It’s heartbreaking when, following her death, Bojack says, “This didn’t have to happen.” Even though he’s right we see again and again how the past is prologue. Bojack Horseman can be hard to watch because, for a satirical cartoon, it’s shockingly real. Mistakes are cumulative. The characters grow, change, and even die.And for the ones who go on it’s a struggle. As Diane says,

It’s not about being happy, that is the thing. I’m just trying to get through each day. I can’t keep asking myself ‘Am I happy?’ It just makes me more miserable. I don’t know If I believe in it, real lasting happiness, All those perky, well-adjusted people you see in movies and TV shows ? I don’t think they exist.

The nods to art history aren’t just foreshadowing or clever visual puns. Taken together they’re a reminder that we live in a period of cultural confluence. The past doesn’t just inform the present. The past is still very much with us. Why does the Botticelli in the restaurant Bojack bought on a whim have an elephant’s head? The simple answer is it’s because the restaurant is called Elefante; the subtler answer is that, according to legend, elephants never forget.

Source: BuzzFeed

Flashbacks are regular in Bojack Horseman: we get scenes from the ’70’s, ’80’s, ’90’s, and an ultra-specific series of flashbacks to 2007. Each major character has a dark and complicated history, except possibly Mr. Peanutbutter whose cheerful disposition masks, or maybe comes from, a nihilistic outlook on life:

The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you’ll be dead.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go binge watch season four, and after that take a shower so I won’t know if I’m crying or not.

What’s your wish for this holiday season?

I was inspired to ask that question by the mural on the side of a building, one which I really like because it only seems simple. The seeds blowing away mark the passing of time and the end of life that naturally comes with winter, but they also represent renewal and therefore hope. The seeds also become origami cranes. Birds fly south for the winter and will return when the seeds are sprouting. The fact that they’re origami cranes represents, I think, the transformative power of art, and there’s also a Japanese tradition that if one folds one thousand paper cranes one’s wish will come true. This tradition has been popularized by the life of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who developed leukemia after being exposed to radiation from the Hiroshima bombing and started folding paper cranes while fighting the disease. And, on that same subject please read this over at Rubber Shoes In Hell about a child who transformed lives and how you can help others.

The mural also inspired me to ask, has any work of art ever really changed the world? That’s not an easy question and takes me back to high school when I thought about joining the debate team because some of my friends were on it. The teacher who headed the team gave me this practice question: Is the pen mightier than the sword? And that sent me spinning down a mental rabbit hole. The power of the pen, in the sense of communication, can command, organize, and even inspire swords, in the sense of military weaponry. An army marches on its stomach but the orders have to come in writing. On the other hand if we’re talking about literal pens and swords, well, I still think it depends on whether the person with the pen is small and quick or maybe able to sneak up behind the person with the sword, or maybe if one person has only one sword and the other has a shitload of pens, and finally, flop sweat pouring off of me, I asked, just how abstract is this question supposed to be? And I got sent to the principal’s office for saying “shitload” but that’s another story.

Can a work of art change the world? I guess it depends. One of the most transformative events in human history is the development of written language. It allowed us to store and pass on more information than the memory could hold. It allowed that information to be passed not only from one person to another but across generations. And it’s no accident that the greatest advances in technology and the most significant changes to what we call civilization really began with the invention of the printing press which allowed for the mass production of the written word. Can the mass-produced book, though, the mere written word, be considered a work of art? So my wish is that you’d please tell me just how abstract this question is supposed to be.

And also that all your wishes this year come true.

Source: Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently.

When I was a kid I begged my parents to get Christmas lights for our house. We’d drive by other houses with Christmas lights and I always thought they looked so fantastic. I thought it must be wonderful for the people who lived in those houses to have those lights right there all the time. I didn’t think about the problems of running electricity outside, storage, or the annual disentangling of the wires. As anyone who’s ever dealt with them knows that strings of Christmas lights get bored sitting in the attic eleven months of the year and amuse themselves by seeing just how tangled they can get. Either that or they’re mating, a prospect I find highly unlikely because I’ve never known Christmas lights to increase in number. Or maybe they’re wrestling, which is why one bulb is always knocked out, but that’s another story.

Anyway, my parents did finally get some outdoor Christmas lights and strung them up around a couple of holly bushes on either side of the house. It was subdued and tasteful, which is probably just as well since we lived on a cul-de-sac. And I realized something about Christmas lights: they’re not that interesting from inside the house. People passing by might see them and smile but if they’re your lights chances are the only times you’ll notice them are when you put them up and take them down. The neighbors, on the other hand, might see your lights all the time.

At about the same time some friends of my parents who lived on another cul-de-sac had a neighbor who put up what was, even for the ’80’s, a garish and extravagant amount of decorations. There were at least nine Santas–three of which were on the roof and threatening to collide, elves, giant candles, light-up snowmen, and lights, lights, lights over everything. It was on the news–and was noted for being one of three such displays around the city–and caused traffic jams as people came from all over to gawk. Did the guy who lived in the house care? Did he even notice? After all he was in the house.

One year I lived in a house next door to someone who set up an elaborate Christmas display. I have to give the neighbor credit: it wasn’t gaudy or tasteless. It was, in fact, a matched set of trains and candy canes and snowmen and a jolly Santa, all made out of blinking LEDs. About seven-hundred million of them, which was the problem. It was so bright I swear I could hear the damn thing–it sounded like The Magic Roundabout theme. I’m pretty sure it used up more electricity than the state of Wyoming. He left it on all night long, and my room faced his house. When I went to bed and closed the curtains the light burned through and looked like flickering flames.

All of which makes me wonder: Was the Grinch born that way or was he made?