New England October, Grace Hartigan, 1957/Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
I have recently come into possession of a "book." Contrary to the stereotype of TV critics as illiterates, I even began to read it, after a brief time trying to figure out how to turn it on and flinging it across the room angrily while making ape noises.
The book is
Reality Show, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz's tome about the recent network news wars of Brian, Charlie and Katie (and Dan, and Diane, and Elizabeth...). It's what I think of as an "index book"--you get it, look through the index for the choice bits of gossip you've heard about in the carefully-crafted pre-publication leaks, then forget the book existed.
Other people have already written about the dirt, if you care about that. I'm more interested in the context: why should you read a book about the travails of newscasts that you very likely never watch anymore? And why should any of us care whether there's a way to save them?
Kurtz doesn't deny that the newscasts are foundering. Far from it: though he grew up watching the news,
A few short years ago I realized that I was increasingly missing the network newscasts, for reasons that were all too familiar. I got home too late, or was busy making dinner, or was distracted by a dozen other things. When I had the set on, I realized that I already knew the details of the top stories and often clicked it off. Sometimes I was on the computer, where any story, it seemed, was at my fingertips within seconds.
I was losing the habit.
This is in the introduction. Two pages in, we have learned that even
the guy who wrote the freaking book can, sensibly, hardly be bothered to watch the evening news anymore. Only 440 pages to go! Sign me up!
It's an admirable admission, but it raises the question of why we should care that network newscasts are passing through irrelevance on the way to extinction. In the analytical wrap-up to Reality Show, he offers a version of the usual why-they-still-matter line:
They are still the biggest tent in the media village, still explaining the world--a few chunks of it, anyway--to those too busy to be surfing the Net or watching cable all day. They have the power to cut through the static and give a story a national profile. And because their divisions are essentially constructed to support them, they set the pace for the other network news shows.
I guess it's true, in the sense that rabbit ears still matter because some people still don't have cable. But mainly this seems like a tautology: the evening news still matters because it used to matter. Can they "cut through the static"? I tend to doubt it, and in any event they don't, for reasons Kurtz lays out: they have fewer resources and less airtime, they make safe, near-identical choices, and they are losing viewers because of social and demographic changes there is absolutely no way to reverse--not at 6:30 p.m. anyway. And "other network news shows"? Those would be The Early Show? To Catch a Predator?
Kurtz's final argument--that the big anchors are "national explainers" in an "info-saturated age"--is the least convincing. I've never bought the idea that having fragmented audiences get their news from more sources is bad. Look at online news: the atomized, fragmented masses can choose to get their news from wherever they want, and sure, plenty of them choose Drudge (who after all, mainly links to MSM sources anyway). But what has the anarchic mob chosen to make the most popular newspaper online? The New York Times, arguably the best newspaper in the country--now more widely read than ever--and in any case hardly an example of "info saturation" dumbing down the culture.
Yes, the big news anchors provided a central gathering place for Americans in times of crisis and big news, but (1) that's a fairly brief era in historical terms and (2) why, exactly, was most Americans getting the same information from monolithic sources a good thing? (Ahem, my editors don't read this blog, right?)
Should news gathering be improved, preserved and kept relevant? Of course. Does it need to be preserved in the form of half-hour broadcasts by millionaires at 6:30? Of course not. This is not, by the way, a damnation of Kurtz, or even a review of his book. Because in the end I read his introduction and analysis and flipped through Reality Show for the juicy bits. In the end, that was all I really cared about, and that's not Howard Kurtz's fault. But it is the network news' problem.
The Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan died over the weekend in Baltimore. I hadn’t given her much thought in recent years until last summer, when a couple of her canvases turned up in “Action/Abstraction”, the excellent show organized by the Jewish Museum in New York that’s now at the St. Louis Art Museum. (And which heads next to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo.) In the 1950s Hartigan, along with Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and a few others, was one of the very small handful of prominent women abstractionists. (And even then they were treated much of the time as a kind of ladies auxilliary to the all important boy’s club of guys like Pollock and de Kooning.) She was included in two of the most important group shows of the decade, “Twelve Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and MOMA’s even more crucial “New American Painting”, the famous victory lap exhibition that MOMA sent all over Europe, more or less to announce that New York had now trumped Paris as the capital of modern art. In that one, among 17 artists, she was the only woman.
For a time Hartigan also had the support of Clement Greenberg, the all powerful critic whose competition with Harold Rosenberg for influence over American art is the organizing theme of the “Action/Abstraction” show. It was Greenberg who persuaded the Manhattan gallerist Tibor de Nagy to give Hartigan her first solo exhibition in 1952. But for Greenberg the only kind of painting that mattered was resolutely abstract. And in the early ’50s Hartigan committed the unthinkable sin of re-introducing vaguely representational imagery into her work, generally I would say with a debt to Matisse. Those faint allusions to landscape in New England October, the picture up top, are typical. Likewise the references to a fruit stand in Summer Street.
Summer Street, Grace Hartigan, 1956/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
This week's print TIME includes a special section of Top 10 lists for 2007, which is pretty much the same as the ones you've already seen online, except:
10. Fewer lists
9. Fewer words
8. On paper
7. You have to pay money to read them
6. You can take them to the bathroom
5. More risk of paper cuts
4. Less exposure to computer radiation
3. Prettier ads
2. Can roll them up and use them to swat houseflies
1. Includes
this column by me, on the eternal popularity of top 10 lists:
There's something magical about distilling wisdom into a single gleaming digit, which may be why so many religions use lists, from the Eightfold Path to the 95 Theses to the show-offy 613 laws of the Torah.
Behold, the miracle of paper!
Greenberg was horrified by the new turn in Haritgan’s work and never supported it again. In the (very good) catalogue for the “Action/Abstraction” show there’s a passage where Hartigan describes a studio visit from Greenberg that went badly.
“I was furious and screamed at him that day in my studio, and when he left, I remember breaking some cups and saucers and glasses or whatever — hurling them after him when it was too late to hit him.”
This might explain why Hartigan’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in Art and Culture, the collection of essays Greenberg published in 1961. And it’s probably true that her work in that vein helped inspire a lot of insipid suburban semi-abstraction in the years that followed. But Hartigan was a sophisticated colorist, and in her best work had an interesting way of blurring the line between abstraction and representation, flatness and depth, interior and exterior. In that connection, New England October looks pretty good to me, but Summer Street starts crossing a line into kitsch — maybe it’s that green striped melon in the upper third.
By 1960 Hartigan had moved to Baltimore to follow her new husband, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins. It wouldn’t be true to say she fell off the radar but in those days the American art world was even more New York-centric than it is now. Then Pop came along, a movement she hated. (Pop was cool, Hartigan was tempestuous on the canvas and in life.) Though she had a long and successful career as a teacher in Baltimore, and continued to paint and exhibit, she was certainly never as famous again.
One of her most intense personal relationships was with the poet Frank O’Hara. Though he was gay, she once said that their bond was more intense than any she ever had with a straight guy. O’Hara died in the summer of 1966 when he was hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island. On his gravestone today there are some lines of his poetry. “Grace /to be born and live as variously as possible”. Those words are supposed to have been written for her, and maybe they could be her epitaph, too, for a painter who went her own way, even if sometimes that took her to the margins.
