notes

Remember Anne Baxter in ‘All About Eve’? Broadly drawn by Joseph Mankiewicz, but probably not much of an exaggeration. Still and all, Bette Davis never looked better, albeit with the deft touch of Edith Head.

Face it, Los Angeles is an industry town, and if I have to specify what industry for any of my 20 or so readers, all that can be said is you are being obtuse. The benefit charity, as mentioned in an earlier blog, is PS Arts. Great work they do, bringing arts education to school districts that no longer have the ability to fund it. For the LA Show, though, what’s great is the number of high profile types that find the charity one of their favorites, and, it is promised, will attend at least the preview party for the LA Show. Diane Keaton and Angelica Huston are supporters and will attend the preview. They are right up there in the Anne Baxter/Bette Davis category, and no one I would rather have a chance to scope out.

What’s worth noting is that, amongst the screen stars, are the celebrity interior designers. Certainly, with the proliferation of shelter and lifestyle publications, not to mention the TV channels devoted to home, designers achieve about as much exposure as participants in reality shows. That remark is going to cost me, for in terms of quotient of taste, designers and reality show victims present a study in opposites- extreme opposites. As well, the work performed by the best designers always outlasts the fifteen minutes of fame for the ‘American Idol’ types. As I think about it, I wish Simon Cowell’s star would set. Presumably, Simon Cowell is a favorite amongst those who would find perplexing the best work of celebrity interior designer Kelly Wearstler.

We are in the throws of last minute preparation for the Los Angeles Antiques Show. As I think about it, ‘throws’ is a pretty good choice of words, as, given the arguments Keith and I have over the design of the booth, we would throw things at each other- merely to emphasize a point of disagreement, of course- but most of our furniture pieces are too large, and we are too old, to easily heave them across at each other.

That said, we are always looking for the balance of scale that is both impressive, yet with a selection of pieces that together form, in the resulting design, something greater than the sum of the parts. We don’t want one single signature piece diminishing the remaining contents. Neither do we want so many objects in the booth that the sheer mass is overwhelming. Selling opportunity, yes, and we do want plenty of goods on hand to sell, but we are, as you may have noted in previous blogs, selling a look, as well, and we want to make sure that the booth, above all, can be clearly seen as an outstation branch of Chappell & McCullar.

Still, what we have is often purchased solely with the desire to impress, and, as above, we want to be sure to have some furniture of good scale. We used to look down our noses at those purchases made just to impress. But, clearly, the desire for conspicuous display is so basic to the human organism, we can’t just sniff at it. We all want to be noticed, and if not in our person, then in our possessions- which are, of course, an adjunct of ourselves.

We’ve just returned from a trip to Honolulu, and are just at the moment very much in mind of Iolani Palace, built in the 1880’s as a sort of a Beaux-art vision of  a Medici palazzo. Sounds disparaging, but actually, I like the building very much.  The building of Iolani Palace nearly bankrupted the Hawaiian kingdom and probably hastened the monarchy’s demise. Still, King Kalakaua felt it was imperative to achieve some sort of parity, despite his remote location, with European monarchs, so Iolani Palace was erected. With all that, the king’s awareness of the wider world and European socialization certainly have more to do with the style of the building than with the fact of its construction.

Iolani Palace was constructed roughly 100 years from the European discovery of the Hawaiian chain in 1778. Although in modest political turmoil at the time, with each major island governed by a king and his court of nobles who were occasionally at war with each other, there was little social unrest. Indeed, society throughout Hawaii was rigorously organized with established rules, both religious and municipal, and social constraints one violated at great personal peril. Society was highly stratified, with the nobility clearly identified by how they dressed, comported themselves, and the overall manner in which they lived- including style of habitation. The last time Captain Cook failed to respect the local nobility in Kealakekua, Hawaii- well, it was the last time he did anything before he departed this mortal coil.

Without proceeding any further and betraying my limited knowledge of Hawaiian history and ethnography, my point is, conspicuous display can be seen as a typical, perhaps natural adjunct to social control, regardless of the age in which one lives. In our own age of the common man, we now often consider personal display gauche at best, and always at least motivationally suspect. But, frankly, we are all of us still in no small degree controlled by display. What has happened, though, is that we’ve replaced the grand homes of the nobility with the display of a democratically elected government. We now look on the White House, the US Capitol, and any other over-large government building in any state or city as symbols of an ordered society.

We’ve managed to take a couple of days off next week and as is our wont, we’ll be making a bee-line for Honolulu. Rest for us always involves a stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where all that’s required is to stagger from our room, out to the Royal’s beach, and then, if the mood takes us, to the Mai Tai Bar for refreshment.

Not completely inert, though, we always make a point of visiting the Honolulu Academy of Arts, in my opinion one of the best survey art museums of its size anywhere in the world. A Mecca for world art, particularly from Asia, it has fantastic European and American fine and decorative arts collections, as well, including wonderful 20th century pieces. On our last visit in late November last year, we were thrilled to see the exhibit curated by architect Dean Sakamoto and devoted to the late Vladimir Ossipoff, arguably Hawaii’s premier architect. Trained in the early 1930’s at the University of California in the Beaux Arts tradition that yielded such leading lights as Julia Morgan, Ossipoff adapted his style over the years, particularly in his residential commissions in Honolulu. As the exhibition makes manifest, Ossipoff emerged from an academic Vitruvianism in his effort to seek and refine a Hawaiian vernacular for the 20th century, and, in the process, designing some remarkable homes. As it has been 10 years since his death, the Ossipoff exhibition might be considered overdue. It is my view that it is well timed, in that, nearly a generation after the completion of what are arguably his most important commissions in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it’s worth looking at how well these buildings, stylistically, have held up. Pardon the cliché, but good design possesses a timelessness that, naturally, cannot be assessed without the passing of sufficient time.

Speaking of timelessness, the buildings of the Honolulu Academy of Arts are very much worth a look. Designed by New York architect Bertram Goodhue and completed in 1927, the museum’s original corpus consists of a series of white stucco and double pitch tile roofed pavilions linked with walkways and courtyards- including one of the most astoundingly beautiful small gardens I’ve ever seen. Given Ossipoff’s close association with the Academy, he was doubtless both impressed and influenced by this building, and it’s worth considering to what extent the Academy buildings formed at least part of the matrix upon which was built, for a number of architects, the rudiments of a Hawaiian vernacular style.

It’s surprising how much discussion my blogs have engendered about the object composition of the Los Angeles Antiques Show. As my partner Keith McCullar will gleefully point out, I am prone to error. In this case, given how many people have responded, my earlier estimation numbering my loyal readers at 10 or so was a mistake: I now believe I have at least 20.

The latest blast centers on a discussion of photography, a feature in the upcoming show, and specifically a consideration of photography as art. As long as art has existed as a conscious construct, critical debate has attended it. I think about the notion of paragone that waxed and waned throughout the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy, weighing whether painting or sculpture was the superior art form. Not until the astonishing mid 17th century speaking likenesses of Bernini, who, with his bel composto blended into his vivified sculpture the subtle gradations of color and narrative content, both formerly the sole province of painting, did the debate die out. Maybe it just grew tiresome.

More recently, Clement Greenberg in the 1950’s prominently sought to establish a notion of what was appropriate, and defining, for an art form. Greenberg argued that, with the advent of photography, figurative painting was rendered superfluous, as painting could never do, in capturing a likeness, what photography could. In fact, Greenberg thought painting was only effective as art if a painting’s sole purpose was to declare itself as an art object. Any figurative or narrative content in a painting, features that could be better performed by other means, depleted its import. Of course, Greenberg was trying to establish a critical framework the understanding and acceptance of the new and recondite abstract expressionism, and in particular, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. It is no surprise, then, to find that, for Greenberg, the quintessential art work was that of his buddy Pollock. On the flip side, however, photography seems to have got short shrift only as a useful technical process, and not art in the same way ab-ex painting was.

Someone who moved general and critical acceptance of photography ahead significantly was Sam Wagstaff, whose aesthetic sense, as well as social prominence and length of purse, resulted in greater visibility for photography initially as a collecting genre. Like it or not, collectiblity, and cash value, are elemental features in the movement toward a place within the canon. Sounds banal, but this is important, as cash value implies demand, and demand implies acceptance- even amongst critics. And, of course, acceptance and general assent of any item of material culture as an art form is what establishes its place within the art historical canon. Wagstaff is possibly best remembered as Robert Mapplethorpe’s first patron, and much of the envelop pushing subject matter of the photographer’s work was the result of Wagstaff’s encouragement. Certainly, the in your face subject matter, together with the prominence of its exhibition, made it impossible to ignore Mapplethorpe’s work, forcing thereby its critical acknowledgement.

Frankly, certainly post-Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff, it would be pretty difficult to argue that photography hasn’t made a place for itself in the canon. Bonni Benrubi Gallery from New York will be exhibiting photography at the Los Angeles Antiques Show.

Not completely free of ego, I find it therefore gratifying when someone responds to my blog entries, even if it is to take me to task. Such has been the case with my last entry about the Los Angeles Antiques Show. Specifically, several of my 10 or so readers felt that, with the disparate types of material available at the show- period furniture, folk art, and, this year, contemporary photography- show visitors will be confused and confounded, and unable to move toward a refinement of their own taste.

The use of the word ‘taste’ in this context intrigued me, to the extent that I re-read what’s arguably the definitive essay on the subject, written by Edmund Burke in 1756. As Burke has it, taste relies not only upon (aesthetic) pleasure, but also on good judgment, which he terms ‘sensibility.’ What all of this means is that, as we commonly use the term ‘taste’  merely to differentiate what we find aesthetically appealing from those things we don’t, this reflects an incomplete understanding, and consequently inaccurate, use of the term. From time to time, we get somebody in our galleries asking for a particular item whereupon, when we point out a piece of goods that is ostensibly just the thing they are after, it will be dismissed out of hand with the phrase ‘It’s just not to my taste.’ ‘Maybe you don’t have any’ is the rejoinder that Keith McCullar and I never use but invariably repeat mentally. We are, of course, merchants, and there is some notion floating about that the customer is always right. They seldom are, of course, but we try to be nice just the same. In spite of being a bit thin skinned, we do try to expose even the casual browser to items of a kind and quality they are not used to seeing, such that, in addition to providing some aesthetic pleasure, our gallery visitors might also find their time with us a bit edifying. And that’s the basis for the development of taste- even if a body does not, prima facie, find something appealing, at least it might be seen, intellectually, as having merit.

This is why the antiques show with a wide range of objects within a number of different disciplines can work so well for the occasional and even the serious collector. While anyone can go right up to an object that a body’s particular aesthetic criteria finds appealing, the time spent to enhance one’s intellectual understanding moves a person toward the development of taste. I would suggest that this intellectual understanding may be the most important aspect of taste, as it can be developed and expanded rationally, where aesthetics are often informed by factors outside an individual’s direct control. Often, what is aesthetically appealing is something with which a person is already familiar, the phenomenon Aristotle termed ‘mimesis’. Frankly, a lot of my interest in 18th century furniture is informed by my early life in my grandmother’s house, surrounded by her mostly 18th century things. Of course, I loved my grandmother, and much aesthetic experience is bound up with emotion. How sad it would be, though, if my own taste were limited, stunted as it were, by my early aesthetic experience. On the flipside, people have an equal tendency to reject items because of negative experience. So, it seems, an awareness, and a possible containment, of the emotion associated with aesthetic appeal, and a rational movement toward, or at least giving equal time to, intellectual understanding of an object or class of objects, moves a body toward the development of taste.

All this said, the tasteful collector, and the tasteful interior designer, is probably the most eclectic, with an appreciation for a number of different types of objects and a number of styles. Does that sound like a definitive statement? With that established, I guess if you don’t go to the LA Antiques Show, you have no taste. No- I’m wrong there… If you go to the show and don’t find anything to your taste, it might possibly be because you don’t have any.