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The Art of the Pan

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Few writers have the guts to express their hatred of particular artworks. This wasn’t always the case (read the reviews that came out when Joyce’s Ulysses appeared), but in our day, as Brian Phillips writes, taste – and the ability to defend it – seems to have died:

A kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes.

SOS has already, on this blog (though she can’t find the post), drawn your attention to one strong survivor of the death of taste – the New York Times critic Jon Pareles, who, in his review of a Sarah Brightman concert back in 2008, showed you how it’s done: How to have aesthetic judgment, and how to write about a negative response to a particular work.

Now Brightman… well… you might say she’s already obviously big-time kitsch… It’s like going after Celine Dion… And I’m inclined to agree with you. But although the target was soft, Pareles penned an exemplar of the pan, so SOS wanted you to see it.

Remember? Here are snippets, with the mean parts helpfully bolded by SOS:

… Ms. Brightman’s pop is an enchanted castle, luxurious and remote, a refuge from turbulence and untidiness. Her spectacle is meticulous; even when confetti dropped, hardly a particle landed anywhere but onstage.

… Her finale, “Running,” merged two Gustav Holst melodies with thumping pop fit for Abba: “We are running to save the save the world,” she sang, promising hope.

… Ms. Brightman proffers sweetness and light, as well as diva graciousness. Between songs she spoke in a plummy accent about the “amazing, amazing journey” of her career. Although she started out as a dancer in musical theater, now her stage movements are limited to promenading, swirling the fabric of her dresses or slowly raising her arms to acknowledge applause.

… The night’s oddity was an ominous electronic remix of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” throbbing and tinkling as Ms. Brightman, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, pedaled a (stationary) bicycle through darkness with holographic wolves looming nearby. She was rapping, “Even if you cry you won’t be heard,” and wailing, “It’s just in my mind!” It was a strange outburst, a breach amid all the plush, soothing kitsch.

Notice that killer pans aren’t this fake bitch made me puke. You want to keep hold of yourself, and of your prose — it’s much meaner that way. Colder. More analytical.

This morning, in the Times, there’s another winner. Read and learn.

Alastair Macaulay is reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. First paragraph:

Bad [First word sums up review. No shying away from negativity here. No platitudes, softeners. B.A.D.]  choreography crops up all too often, and yet nobody else today, now that Maurice Béjart and Roland Petit are no longer with us, [No longer with us.  Note the amusing disrespect here, Macaulay’s importation of pious language even as he’s clearly putting these two down.  Fun.]  makes the kind of awful ballet that is Boris Eifman’s forte. Ken Russell’s more sensationalist movies seem like models of restraint beside Mr. Eifman’s lurid, overemphatic, far-from-coherent oeuvre. Mr. Eifman flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride while he rushes headlong to commit a whole new set of artistic felonies.  [Laugh Out Loud.  The farcical image of Eifman rushing about in search of more felonies – and by the way, note Macaulay’s sly, stylish, use of alliteration: far from/forte/flaunts/felonies – is amusing, belittling, over the top verbally in the same way Eifman is over the top balletically.]

… [Eifman] is an exponent of crudely sensationalist trends that were fashionable in Europe several decades ago (Béjart and Petit were both approved by the Soviet artistic authorities in Leningrad, where Mr. Eifman began work in the 1970s) and have long been notorious elsewhere. Ballets like his two-act “Rodin” …were much easier to find 30 years ago. I had hoped the species was extinct. [I had hoped... Snooty?  Yes! ]

“Rodin” tries to give us sex, art, mania and martyrdom. Tries to. Mr. Eifman lacks the skill to depict any of these things seriously. [Lacks the skill.  Simple declarative English.  Macaulay will now go on to explain why he lacks the skill.]

Perhaps the silliest scene is one in which [Camille] Claudel, alone in her studio with a rectangular block of stone, starts sculpturing. She attacks it with both hands like a tympanist at full climax, punctuating her efforts now and then by turning to us and planting her wrist on her brow to indicate creative exhaustion, and then she recycles this series of gestures so it becomes a dance phrase. The point of the sex is to show Rodin’s manipulation of Claudel; still, the way in which he handles her groin, though unpleasant, has far more originality and artistry than the way she tackles sculpture.  [Great simile, drawn from music; and climax has a nice punny feel to it.  His exact, amusing descriptions of the dancer’s movements make clear just how pretentious and obvious and heavy-breathing it all is.  The groin-handling bit is hilarious.  Note the calm use of the word “unpleasant,” when what the critic obviously means is sickening, unwatchable.]

As for mania, “Rodin” is one of those expressionist ballets (there are examples going back to the 1930s) in which the dancers aim long, wide-eyed stares out front at the audience. (Often the head hangs plaintively on one side, to indicate psychological distress.) Most gestures are reiterated forcibly. To show disturbance of a more advanced kind, you take one hand and clutch the opposite side of your body. (Try, for example, passing your left hand behind your back to grip your right elbow. Now hold this while staring at the audience as if in misery or anger and with your head tipping to one side.) No small gestures are permitted.  [His transformation of the deep deep profundity of the performance into a Jane Fonda Video Workout is complete, and completely wonderful.]

[It] is amazing to find how indifferent Mr. Eifman is to making his story clear. The historic record of the Rodin-Claudel relationship does not always coincide with the program synopsis, and neither version helps you to decipher the stage action.

… Some artists are bad because they so obviously fail to achieve what they intend. Others are bad because what they intend is rotten in the first place. [Note the careful return to the word bad which opened the piece.  He has called it bad, explained meticulously why it’s bad, and now reiterates that it’s bad.] Mr. Eifman fits right into both categories, to a spectacular degree. And his audience loves him all the way.

 

Sarah Brightman was a huge hit too.

Margaret Soltan, March 12, 2012 8:55AM
Posted in: great writing

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