Nathan Lee on Gus Van Sant’s Milk, in Film Comment:
The rest makes for solid political procedural: a well-edited and handsomely staged look at how the grassroots grow. Milk is the first movie Van Sant has made about adults since Psycho (1998). And perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the biopic, like the remake, is a reflection or simulacrum of preexistent figures. Milk is clearly motivated by getting its story and message across with maximum clarity. No Béla Tarr abstractions here, no Leslie Shatz soundscapes—and no major improvement over The Times of Harvey Milk except insofar as talented movie stars enacting a colorful historical drama command attention, and this movie deserves it. It’s the straightest thing in Van Sant’s career, not unlike Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. The framing device—Milk testifying from beyond the grave—nearly feels regressive coming from a filmmaker who spent the last decade rethinking how to frame an event. Accepting Milk as prophet on top of hero, figurehead, and martyr, Van Sant has gone from meditating on inscrutable saints to something quite close to overdetermined hagiography.
But isn’t Milk, like Elephant and Last Days, another doom-laden chronicle of a death foretold?
Three dozen photographs of the artist David Altmejd at work in his studio, at The Selby.
In The Nation, Barry Schwabsky reviews Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World. An interesting passage:
One of the deepest observations in Seven Days comes not from any of the renowned artists or brooding academics Thornton has spoken to but from the collector who, when asked if he likes work by young artists, says, “I don’t necessarily like it, but I buy it.” It’s a joke, but it’s serious, and from the viewpoint of collecting it represents an advanced stage of consciousness–just as it does when an artist makes something that he doesn’t necessarily like. This was already the case at the beginning of the last century, for instance in 1905 when Gertrude and Leo Stein bought Matisse’s The Woman With the Hat, now one of the treasures of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The “nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen,” Leo called it. “I would have snatched it at once if I had not needed a few days to get over the unpleasantness.” But of course there’s a proviso: buying something before you’ve learned to like it, or making something that you haven’t yet learned to like, is not the same as buying something because someone else likes it or making the art that someone else would like you to make–though that is precisely what innumerable collectors and artists do. To detach oneself from the vagaries of the taste of one’s milieu is a considerable accomplishment. But to detach oneself from one’s own taste is much rarer. To know one’s taste and follow it represents integrity, but to know the limitations of one’s taste and aspire to circumvent it is a more refined form of integrity as well as of business acumen. A painter explains of her work, “I know it’s finished when the work feels independent of me.” A sculptor says, “I don’t necessarily love the things that I’m making…. It’s about allowing yourself to accept what you do.”
Frank Wilson, of the blog Books, Inq., launches a new column at the site When Falls the Coliseum with a consideration of Montaigne.
Caleb Crain links to and offers additional information about his entertaining review Ann Norton Greene’s Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America.
My friend Michael Ned Holte discusses artist Aaron Curry’s work in a brochure accompanying Curry’s current exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Google has scanned and made available online ten million photographs from the archives of Life magazine.
In the TLS, Ian Thomson discusses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writing: “The great filmmaker was also a writer with a distinctive voice—Rome’s.”
In American Heritage, historian Annette Gordon-Reed, National Book Award winner for The Hemingses of Monticello, asks, “Did Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson Love Each Other?” (Via NYT’s Ideas blog)
