But the big story on Action News (Philly TV Talk!) is the exhibition at Vienna’s Belvedere bearing his name but really celebrating a summer and fall of esthetic exaltation surrounding the 60th anniversary of 1908 of Franz Joseph’s ascension to the Hapsburg throne. It cost 50 euros and could give you a hernia if your subway connections are severe. (I recommend you book on line the Friedrich Engels Youth Hostel on the Northern rim of the city with good public transport to the South and West train stations.
It appears that the great Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann devised a super villa of smaller, expendable structures, touting “small” achievements like jewelry, house fixtures, posters—you name some minor visual genre and these Jugendstylists had hit home runs in that park as well, not just in the seminal genres of painting and sculpture. The glory was historical, but the curatorship was timely and contemporary. Soon I was weak from visual orgasms, and it wasn’t just the Upper and Lower Belvedere’s, separated by a longish hike of garden parks.
The whole damn center of Vienna has just been officially dubbed the Museum Quarter, for God’s sake. (Not that his alleged omnipotence guaranteed he could run this non-stop Merrython.)The Leopold was showing Edward Hopper, too cutely metaphysicalized with addenda which only proved the curator could really s t r e t c h a rather useless if deep sounding point.
Hopper was a mediocre draftsman with a good shtick—the lonely crowds that constitute an only apparently chummy American people. Don’t get me wrong. I relish Hooper’s quirky half-truths about my Native Land. I just resent some intellectually upwardly mobile Aussie getting mistyphysical over a very good but not too brilliant American painter. Let sleeping shtickers lie shallowly, and let some deep thinker of a critic pick on someone with the same brain size about some really deep painter. I don’t enjoy fake profundity.
And next to the numb, dumb Hopper was a fully alive Christian Schad retrospective. This pioneer “Die Neue Sachlikeit” (The New Objectivity) held a patented maneuver to neutralize some of the grosser excesses of German Expressionism. I love my Kirchner like the next bloke, but I also relish some countervailing aesthetics! Heretofore I had seen only a tiny sampler of his painterly idiolect at Aschafenberg, his hometown on the northwestern reaches of Bavaria, just south of the boundaries of Hesse and Thuringia. He’s a minor genius, but genius nonetheless!
Needless to say, such Big Things don’t just happen. As I picked up yesterday the first copy of my trial subscription to Der Standard, Austria’s best daily, I spied a half page ad toting the city’s astonishing commitment to Kultur! It was headlined WIEN HAT DAS MEHR (Vienna has MORE!) Supporting Culture is an investment in the future! And how! Its 23 million Euro budget for 2009 is 13 million more than last year.
Now it’s the canny ways that money is deployed that caught my attention: “Money for Creative Young People” had the Motto (in English) CASH FOR CULTURE: 1,000 euros for talented kids from 13 to 29, no matter they want to do artistically—Film, Musik, Kunst, Tanz, Mode, Internet, Theatre, TV or Radio. An art lending library from which you could rent any work of Arnulf Rainer for 2.50 euros. What a city! What museums! Book online a night at the Mercure (Acor) across the street from the Art School Adolf Hitler got booted out of!
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