Even The Best Minds Have Their Bad Days

 
“WHEN GENIUS BOMBS (1995)”
by Joel Achenbach

[This column by Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach was posted on “Achenblog,” the writer’s blog on the Post website, on 24 January 2013.  It’s an extension of a shorter version that ran in the print edition on 16 April 1995 in the “Sunday Arts” section.  Achenbach’s thesis is that “Geniuses mess up too.  This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.”  He provides examples of bad art by the world’s masters as evidence of this.]

(I posted about half of this piece some years ago on this blog, and will now paste in the whole thing. Titled “When Genius Bombs,” the story originally ran 4/16/1995 in the Sunday Arts section, which at that time was under the stewardship of [David James] Von Drehle [b. 1961; Washington Post arts editor, 1994-95]. Though the references to Bill Clinton [William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946); 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001] date the piece a little, and I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way today — it’s painfully glib, and where are the footnotes??? — I think in general it holds up well and has the redeeming quality of being essentially right about the nature of genius.)

Scene IV. Another part of the forest.

Enter DEMETRIUS and CHIRON, with LAVINIA, ravished; her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out.

Dem. So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and revish’d thee.

Chi. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

Dem. See, how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.

Chi. Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.

Dem. She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks . . .

That’s “Titus Andronicus” [Act 2, Scene 4; written between 1588 and 1593]. It’s by [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], early in his career, in his “Pulp Fiction” [1994 crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963)] phase.

The basic plot is, everyone stabs and rapes and mutilates everyone else while speaking in verse, and then they all die. Lavinia’s may be the worst speaking role in the history of the stage. Character development is not the play’s strength. At the beginning of the play Titus Andronicus is a cruel warmonger; by the end, he’s exactly the same, a cruel warmonger.

Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee;

[Kills Lavinia].

And, with thy shame, thy father’s sorrow die!

For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, “Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.”

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” [thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606] and this crappy thing?

[Secretariat (1970-89) was a champion thoroughbred racehorse who was the ninth winner of the American Triple Crown (1973), setting and still holding the fastest time record in all three of its constituent races (Kentucky Derby in May, Preakness Stakes in May, Belmont Stakes in June). The first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, his record-breaking, 31-length victory at Belmont is often considered the greatest event in horse racing history. The horse’s margin of victory and winning time (2′24″) are records that still stand.]

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad [Ludwig van] Beethoven [1770-1827; German composer and pianist]. There are failed [Pablo] Picassos [1881-1973; Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer]. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein [1879-1955; German-born theoretical physicist; best known for developing the theory of relativity]. Duke Ellington [1899-1974; jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra] would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles [1915-85; director, actor, writer, producer, and magician; known for his innovative work in film, radio, and theater] made both the instant classic “Citizen Kane” [1941; RKO Radio Pictures; often called the greatest film ever made] and the instant trivia answer “The Lady From Shanghai” [1947 film noir; Columbia Pictures; considered a disaster in America when released but now regarded as a classic of film noir].

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner [1813-83; German composer, theater director, essayist, and conductor] doesn’t mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian. Leon Botstein [b. 1946; Swiss-born American conductor, educator, historical musicologist, and scholar], a composer and president of Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], says of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial March” [1876], “It’s a dog. He did it for the money.”

[Wagner’s Centennia March (sometimes American Centennial March) was commissioned by the city of Philadelphia, site of the Centennial Exhibition (10 May-10 November 1876), the first world’s fair to be held in the United States, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The commission, for which Wagner was paid $5,000—a huge sum at the time, worth $150,000 in 2025—was recommended by Theodore Thomas (1835-1905; German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator; founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), a great Wagnerian advocate who was very disappointed with the work when it arrived. According to some sources, the composer quipped to friends that the best thing about the march was the fee he received for writing it.]

The Beatles [English rock band formed in Liverpool; 1960-70; widely regarded as the most influential band in Western popular music]: geniuses, right? Explain, then, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” [1968]. Explain “Run for Your Life” [1965].

You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl.
Hide your head in the sand, little girl.
If I catch you with another man, that’s the end-ah, little girl.

“Even outstanding people have phenomenal failures. That’s why so many people don’t achieve success, because the first time they fail they think they can’t be successful,” says Dean Keith Simonton [b. 1948; Distinguished Professor Emeritus; known for research in the fields of genius, creativity, leadership, and aesthetics], a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and author of “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why” [Guilford Press, 1994]. In his book he writes, “Creative geniuses stumble; they trip; they make horrible mistakes. Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures.”

Genius is a romanticized form of intelligence and talent. We like to imagine that genius emerges from the artist like perspiration, dripping all over the place. When the reputation of a creative genius reaches a certain point — the super-genius status of a Leonardo [da Vinci (1452-1519); Italian polymath of the Renaissance; painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect] or a Shakespeare or a Beethoven — there is a natural tendency among scholars to save every sketch, note, letter, scribble, coffee stain and discarded hankie from the hand of the Great One. John Lennon [1940-80; English singer-songwriter, musician, and activist; founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles; songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney (b. 1942; English singer, songwriter, and musician; played bass guitar and piano, and sang lead vocals with the Beatles; one of the most successful composers and performers ever) is the most successful in history] wrote some short stories; they were promptly labeled “Joycean” [characteristic of the writing of James Joyce (1882-1941; Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic); in a style employing innovative verbal style, often involving stream-of-consciousness, complex language, and experimental techniques] by admiring critics.

Over time the master artist takes on the character of a superbeing, a cartoon genius. A piano is to [Franz] Liszt [1811-86; Romantic-period Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher] as a hammer is to Thor, God of Thunder. We can imagine Beethoven composing by day and solving baffling murders by night.

The problem here is not that geniuses are overrated. If anything, the intellectual fashion is anti-genius, anti-masterpiece. There are academic circles in which it is considered daft to believe that some individuals are smarter and better and more talented than others. Suggest such a thing and people will look at you like you’re an imbecile.

The problem with “genius” is that it doesn’t give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time. [Unless, of course, they’re Jackson Pollock (1912-56; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing household paint onto a horizontal surface; see "Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” [4 March 2016]) or Morris Louis (1912-62; one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting; his signature method was pouring diluted acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas; see “Morris Louis” [15 February 2010]). ~Rick]

Picasso would paint something, look at it — at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso — and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn’t good enough.

W. H. Auden [1907-73; British-American poet] once said, “The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.”

Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.

Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they’re without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.

But if geniuses can fail, then perhaps there is hope that the converse is true: That the mediocre minds of the world, due to luck, courage, or the random distribution of quality, are not immune to spasms of greatness.

Picasso’s Fakes

There’s an anecdote about Picasso, possibly apocryphal, that illustrates the phenomenon. An art dealer was trying to sell a painting by Picasso to a potential buyer. The buyer said he wasn’t sure of its authenticity, and wanted the artist himself to vouch for it. Picasso was summoned. He looked at the painting and said it was a fake. The buyer left. The dealer was perplexed. He turned to Picasso and said, “Didn’t you tell me yourself that you painted it?” “I did,” said Picasso. “I often paint fakes.”

That’s the standard response of many scholars when faced with something lousy by a great master. Can’t be real, they say. Gotta be by someone else. Often the only reason to doubt the authenticity of the work is simply that it’s not so hot. It’s just unacceptably mediocre.

For example, desperate scholars have occasionally argued that Shakespeare didn’t write “Titus Andronicus,” or that he had a collaborator. Shakespeare himself never put his name on any published version — he surely knew it was dreck [Yiddish for ‘crap,’ ‘junk,’ ‘trash,’ from Dreck, German for ‘dirt’]. His contemporaries gave him authorial credit, but that did not squelch the theory that it was, at the very least, a collaboration, and the “bad parts” have been blamed on some knucklehead named George Peele [1556-96; English translator, poet, and dramatist]. But in 1943 the scholar Hereward T. Price [1880-1964; born in Madagascar; English author and professor of English at the University of Michigan], after poring over all the evidence and theories, wrote [in “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (42.1)], “We must conclude, however regretfully, that Shakespeare was the author of ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

Mistakes and errors are integral to the process of creation. As the poet James Fenton [b. 1949; English poet, journalist, and literary critic] said in a recent lecture at Oxford, the text of which was reprinted in the New York Review of Books [42.5 (23 March 1995)], “For a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.”

George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950; Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist] talked about the “field theory” of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

[The novels: Immaturity (1879), a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England; The Irrational Knot (1880), a critique of conventional marriage; Love Among the Artists (1881), an exploration of themes of romance, artistic integrity, and socio-political commentary; Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), an indictment of society; An Unsocial Socialist (1883), the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism.]

Shaw believed in productivity — just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes [1943-2022], a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw’s attitude was that “you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece.”

Geniuses work hard. They’re prodigious. They can’t stop themselves from churning out work. Thomas Edison [1847-1931] couldn’t stop inventing. Joyce Carol Oates [b. 1938] can’t stop writing. Shaw published 55 plays. Milton Avery [1885-1965] spewed paintings by the museum-load; when asked how he got inspiration, he said by going to the studio every day.

The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. “Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain,” says Howard Gardner [b. 1943; developmental psychologist], a professor of education at Harvard. “People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it’s not the case that every idea is a good idea.”

Here’s a bad idea: “Wellington’s Victory.”

Beethoven composed it [in 1813] to celebrate a British victory over an army commanded by Joseph Bonaparte [1768-1844; French statesman, lawyer, and diplomat], Napoleon’s [1769-1821] brother. It is often compared unfavorably to another piece of bombast, the “1812 Overture” [1880] by [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky [1840-93; Russian composer]. Jim Svejda [b. 1947; music commentator and critic], in “The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire” [Prima Publishing, 1988], says, “As if it weren’t bad enough losing most of his army to the Russian winter and then getting mauled at Waterloo, poor Napoleon . . . also had to have his nose rubbed in it by two of history’s supreme masterpieces of musical schlock [Yiddish: something of cheap or inferior quality; junk]: Tchaikovsky’s refined and tasteful 1812 Overture and this embarrassing garbage by Beethoven.”

One need not buy it to listen to it. You can go to the Library of Congress, to the Music Division.

”‘Wellington’s Victory’ doesn’t quite work at the gut level,” concedes Sam Brylawski, a recorded-sound specialist, as he fills out the request slip. “But it’s not like listening to someone in the basement on an out-of-tune guitar.”

The request slip goes to a person at a desk. Somewhere, unseen, a record album is pulled and dusted. After about 10 minutes the album jacket, minus the album, appears, enclosed in plastic, on a dumbwaiter. The person at the desk says into a telephone, “The listener is ready.” From the other end of the line, someone decrees that you go into listening booth No. 9.

In the booth you punch a button labeled “Talk.” A voice says hello. You say you’re ready to listen. A moment later, “Wellington’s Victory” has begun.

You hear drums in the distance, faint.

They get louder. Faster. Then they get much louder and much faster. The army is approaching.

Trumpets! Or maybe bugles. They are bugling with great fanfare.

Then: Flutes, gentle, chirpy, happy, a Yankee Doodle sort of thing, like what you’d imagine a fife-and-drum outfit playing, and then some loud strings, and then an army approaches from another direction, with more drums and trumpets and a little fussy-personage music with a triangle tinkling in the background, and finally the battle royal explodes, with cannon noises and gunshots, the drums pounding, trumpets blaring, the room almost shaking with banging and whanging and thudding and thumping. If they could play it in Sensurround, you’d get injured.

Someone had the temerity to write a bad review of the piece as soon as it came out. Beethoven was incensed. He wrote a note in the margin of the review:

“You wretched scoundrel! What I excrete is better than anything you could ever think up!”

(Of course he didn’t really write “excrete.” He wrote in German. And he used a word that made the point much more graphically.)

[The offending review of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory was by Gottfried Weber (1779-1839; German music theorist, musician, and composer), and appeared in the German music magazine Cäcilia (which Weber founded) in 1825.

[Beethoven’s marginal reply in German was, according to my search: Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist besser, als was du je gedacht. That translates, more literally than Achenbach’s rendering, as ‘Oh you pathetic wretch, what I shit is better than what you ever thought of.’ (Scheissen is the German verb ‘to shit.’ Now you know.)]

Crossing Genres

Leonardo da Vinci notwithstanding, genius usually doesn’t carry over from one genre to another. Harold Bloom [1930-2019; literary critic] says, “[Miguel de] Cervantes [1547?-1616; Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists] was a disaster on the stage. He wrote very bad stage plays, like the ‘Siege of Numancia’ [sic: ‘Numantia’; ca, 1582]. It’s his most famous play. It failed. Badly.”

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare [sic: Poincaré; 1854-1912; French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science] could not add. He wrote, “I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake.”

Even within a masterpiece there can be a flub — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” [1884 in Britain; 1885 in the U.S.] may be the greatest American novel ever written, but in the final few chapters Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears, and there’s a tortured sequence where Tom tries to engineer the liberation of the slave Jim even though Jim isn’t locked up and they could all just walk away. Tom thinks it must be a dramatic liberation. Huck sort of tags along. Unfortunately it’s too late to edit that part out.

Brilliant minds screw up for all sorts of extra-artistic reasons. Maybe they are doing something just for the money. Maybe they’re sick. Maybe they’re no longer sick — some scholars think Edvard Munch [1863-1944; Norwegian painter] (“The Scream” [1893]) lost his edge after he had psychiatric treatment, says J. Carter Brown [1934-2002], former director of the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.].

Another problem is overreaching. That’s what happened to Einstein. He was a very smart man. Indeed he may have been the smartest human being on the planet in his day. But he could also be, relatively speaking, a moron.

In the first two decades of the century Einstein was on a roll like the scientific world hadn’t seen since Isaac Newton [1643-1727; English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author]. Einstein discerned, through thought experiments, that the universe obeyed fantastic principles of relativity, and that Newtonian physics, while valid, was still only an approximation of reality. He enveloped Newtonian physics in his new theory of relativity, which we would explain here if we knew anything about it other than clocks move slowly in really fast spaceships.

He followed the special theory of relativity with something even more intellectually astonishing: The general theory. Special, then general.

Then he tried to do something bigger. He wanted a unified field theory. This would be a theory that somehow linked gravitation with electromagnetism. That was the bridge too far. Eight decades later it still hasn’t been done. In his mad quest Einstein refused to accept many of the new orthodoxies of quantum mechanics. He thought the universe was fundamentally deterministic — that one thing followed another in a predictable fashion. His colleagues said nuh-uh. The universe is probabilistic, they said. Can’t be sure of anything.

“He was very uncomfortable with the Uncertainty Principle,” says Frank Wilczek [b. 1951; theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Nobel laureate (Physics, 2004)], a professor of natural science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Einstein worked for several decades. Wilczek has frequent reason to think of Einstein — he lives in Einstein’s house on Mercer Street. “It is a pity that he might have made further great discoveries if he had taken quantum mechanics to heart. As great as he was, he certainly could have done better in those last 35 years.”

[The Uncertainty Principle, first introduced in 1927 by German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), is a core concept in quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. In simple terms, it states that you cannot know both the exact position and momentum (speed and direction) of a particle at the same time. The more accurately you know one, the less accurately you can know the other. This isn’t due to limitations of our measuring equipment, but rather a fundamental property of nature at the quantum level, according to the theory.]

One can understand Einstein’s instinct, though. He believed in himself. He did the special, he did the general, why not the unified? He knew there was something more out there, a mystery at the fundament of creation, and it would have been unnaural not to seek to solve it.

You start reconfiguring the universe, it’s hard to stop.

One Chair

Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: “The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They’re always trying to make a masterpiece, they’re always trying to do something wonderful.”

Rosenthal sits surrounded by Rothkos [Mark Rothko (1903-70); Russian-born American abstract painter]. They are big, bold canvases, abstract, a visual language not everyone can understand, but which Rosenthal finds profoundly moving, like listening to magnificent music.

He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist’s studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. “There’s only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I’m sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt’s time, it’d be the same thing. There’d be one chair.”

Robert Sternberg [b. 1949; psychologist and psychometrician (scientist who studies the measurement of people’s knowledge, intelligence, skills, and abilities)], a Yale psychologist and co-author of “Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity” [Free Press, 1995] says creativity has three aspects:

1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. “In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They’re large-volume producers. But you don’t even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don’t hear about the junk,” says Sternberg.

Creative ideas can be applied in unlikely places. Sternberg cites the example of a 3M [formerly the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company] engineer who was trying to make a strong adhesive. He screwed up and made a weak adhesive. So then he asked himself: Of what use might a weak adhesive be? This led him to invent Post-It notes.

2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson [1865-1959; art historian specializing in the Renaissance] used to say: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday.”

3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it. This is the part of creative genius where someone like Madonna [b. 1958; pop singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress] excels.

Sternberg mentions Bill Clinton as a political genius who hasn’t mastered all three of these steps. Clinton is most adept at steps 1 and 3. He synthesizes boatloads of ideas, and in the right forum he’s a smooth salesman, bordering on slick. But he doesn’t self-select very well. “His good ideas get lost in the klunkers,” says Sternberg.

They Can’t Help It

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can’t plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

“Breakthrough is not when you want it, it’s not when you expect it. It’s a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough.”

And what causes the constant activity? It’s not money. It’s not glory. It’s an “inner necessity,” he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you’ll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

“Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you’ll never make the breakthrough,” he says. “The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It’s the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It’s a form of madness.”

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can’t stand to be anything else.

Shakespeare wrote 24 masterpieces, by Harold Bloom’s count. Almost his entire output appeared in a 20-year period. At his peak he managed 13 plays in seven years. They weren’t too shabby: “Much Ado About Nothing” [1598-99], “Henry V” [1598-99], “Julius Caesar” [1599-1600], “As You Like It” [1599-1600], “Twelfth Night” [1599-1600], “Hamlet” [1600-01], “Merry Wives of Windsor” [1600-01], “Troilus and Cressida” [1601-02], “All’s Well That Ends Well” [1602-03], “Measure for Measure” [1604-05], “Othello” [1604-05], “King Lear” [1605-06], and “Macbeth” [1605-06]. As a general rule, when a creator creates most, the creator creates best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940; novelist, essayist, and short story writer] experienced the flip side of that rule. His first novel, “This Side of Paradise” [1920], established him as a popular, promising novelist. He soon wrote another novel [The Beautiful and Damned (1922)] and then a couple of years later came his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” [1925]. Then he began to struggle. “Gatsby” was hard to follow. He began a book called “Tender Is the Night” but couldn’t finish it. Years passed. He drank a lot. He dithered. He partied with his expatriate friends in France. Still he didn’t finish the book. His wife had a nervous breakdown. Finally after eight years of labor he completed it [1934]. The novel has some terrific parts. It also has some parts that are cringe-inducing.

Linda Patterson Miller, a professor of English at Penn State, says, “I keep going back to that book, ‘Tender Is the Night,’ thinking it’s got to be better than it is.”

She cites one passage as particularly horrible. It’s when Dick Diver returns to his hotel with the young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. Diver is married. His wife, Nicole, is sleeping nearby. But he and Hoyt are infatuated with each other. They go into Hoyt’s room.

“When you smile — ” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late — she came up close against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it — I never expected to — I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

Prof. Miller says, “It’s absolutely childish and embarrassing to read.”

Fitzgerald wound up going to Hollywood to write screenplays — artistic death. Meanwhile he cranked out short stories for magazines. Did it for the money. Drank. Drank some more. Died young [44].

It’s a sad story. But the most creative minds know better than anyone else the difference between a “Gatsby” and a “Tender Is the Night,” between a “Titus Andronicus” and an “Othello.” Genius recognizes itself, and its counterfeit.

In his notebook, Fitzgerald jotted down his thoughts on seeing his brilliance dissolve into mediocrity:

I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high . . . because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in . . .

April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paintbox.

[Joel Achenbach reports on science and health.  He joined the Washington Post in 1990 as a feature writer in the Style section.  In 2005, he joined the Sunday magazine, writing features and a weekly humor column, and started the newsroom’s first blog, “Achenblog.”  He was part of the team that produced a series of stories about the opioid epidemic that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 2020.

[In 1999, Simon & Schuster published his examination of the scientific and cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life, Captured by Aliens.  His 2004 book, The Grand Idea (Simon & Schuster), described George Washington’s plans to bind the young nation together through commerce along the Potomac River.  His 2011 book A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea (Simon & Schuster) told the story of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and how the blown-out well was finally plugged.]

New York City: Unbearable Yet Irresistible

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

[Many people, New Yorkers or not, remember the iconic Daily News front-page, banner headline on 30 October 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”  (Frank Van Riper’s article about President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail the city out of its financial crisis started on page 3, but the head, accompanying a photo of our only unelected president, screamed out alone on page 1.)

[Well, these days, there’s some of that feeling making the rounds in the Big Apple again.  So, about a month ago, the New York Times ran a piece on the mixed feelings about the nation’s largest city held by many of its own residents.  It seemed like an interesting addition to my sometime series, “A Helluva Town,” so I’m posting it for you ROTters who wonder how we denizens of that city on the right coast that pretty much floats in the Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey are coping.]

”LIFE IN A CONFOUNDING METROPOLIS”
by John Leland and Dodai Stewart 

[Leland and Stewart’s wide-ranging article ran in the New York Times of 22 June 2025 in the “Metropolitan” Section.]

Heading into the June 24 primary for mayor, New Yorkers say their city is in trouble. In four recent surveys, majorities said that the quality of life was fair or poor, that they were afraid to ride the subway at night, that housing and child care were unaffordable, and that city government and the public schools were dysfunctional.

[New York City’s 2025 mayoral primary election was a solely Democratic affair. Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa (b. 1954; radio talk show host and founder and chief executive officer of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit crime prevention organization) ran unopposed and automatically secured the Republican nomination. He was the Republican nominee for the 2021 election, losing to Democratic nominee Eric Adams (b. 1960; former police officer, Borough President of Brooklyn [2014-21], and New York State Senator [2007-13]).

[Adams, the incumbent mayor and former Democrat, didn’t run in the primary, choosing instead to run for re-election as an independent in the general election. In a major upset, Zohran Mamdani (b. 1991), a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary, defeating former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (b. 1957; lawyer and politician; son of former governor Mario Cuomo [1932-2015; in office from 1975 to 1978]) by 12 percentage points. Cuomo served as Governor of New York from 2011 until his resignation in 2021.

[Also in the race were Brad Lander (b. 1969), New York City Comptroller; Adrienne Adams (b. 1960), Speaker of the New York City Council; Scott Stringer (b. 1960), former New York City Comptroller; Michael Blake (b. 1982), former New York Assemblyman; Selma Bartholomew (birthdate unknown), educator, and Paperboy Prince (b. 1993), artist and perennial candidate.

[Those who will be on the ballot this fall are:

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee
Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor, running as an independent
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, running as an independent
Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor, also running as an independent

 [Election Day is scheduled for 4 November 2025.]

Yet on a muggy evening in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, that pessimism was nowhere to be found. A skateboard ramp the size of a dollar van had been erected on the cobblestone street outside an art gallery, and skateboarders showed off tricks as onlookers with tattoos, baggy pants and stylish scarves shouted encouragement.

[The venue was Gallery 23 on Little West 12th Street; the exhibit was Harold Hunter ’97, 5-9 June 2025. Hunter (1974-2006) was, as Leland and Stewart note below, a professional skateboarder and actor who had appeared in Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids. The photos were by Jonathan Mannion (b. 1970).]

Inside the exhibition space, a very “if you know, you know” collection of New Yorkers — graffiti artists, skaters, photographers, musicians — mingled, hugged and laughed in front of huge photographs of a deceased actor slash skateboard legend who was being honored. As the D.J. played a mix of old-school hip-hop and Brazilian lounge music, two bartenders mixed bespoke cocktails made from a small batch spirit splashed with a lime-and-yuzu soda. It certainly didn’t feel like a scene from a city in crisis.

[Yuzu soda is a carbonated beverage featuring yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that has a unique flavor profile often described as a blend of grapefruit, lemon, and tangerine.]

New York, which was hit hard as the country’s epicenter of the Covid pandemic, remains a beacon for people across the country and the world, a destination for immigrants, artists, entrepreneurs and business scions. Watchful outsiders and New Yorkers themselves anxiously question whether the city is “back” from the troubles of recent years. And every New Yorker could have a different answer about what a comeback looks like — what the city should be, and what it is right now.

“From where I’m sitting, it looks pretty good,” said Lloyd Blankfein [b. 1954], who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and went on to run Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 2018. He compared the city today with the one of the late 1970s, when the Son of Sam serial killer terrorized locals [1975-77] and the city was on the verge of default [1975-85].

“If you had no perspective for the long view, you’d think we were in the depths of crisis,” Mr. Blankfein said. “If you take the long view of New York, it’s a straight line going up.”

The data paint a mixed picture. Subway crime is down, but the number of people in homeless shelters remains way above what it was just a few years ago. Broadway revenues smashed records this season, but one in four New Yorkers lived in poverty as of 2023, nearly double the national average.

[The 2024-25 Broadway season was a record-breaking year for revenue, reaching $1.89 billion in grosses. This surpasses the previous record of 2018-2019 season, which brought in $1.83 billion.]

In one survey, by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, 80 percent said the city was heading in the wrong direction, and 58 percent said they seriously considered moving out.

Unemployment is down from its pandemic peak, but only one in three workers in New York has a “good job” — one offering a living wage, health insurance and safe working conditions. Housing costs are astronomical — but for some people, no problem.

“People are buying,” said Penny Toepfer, a broker with more than 25 years of experience in luxury real estate. She pointed to the new Armani Residences building that opened on Madison Avenue in the fall of 2024, where apartments range from $8 million to $32 million. “It sold out,” she said.

It’s a very good time to be a broker, she said. “We’re making money. We are making money! I’m talking about big, big money.”

How the city looks, and what you want from the next mayor, depend in part on your place in the food chain, said John Mollenkopf [b. 1946; political scientist and sociologist], director of the Center for Urban Research. Though many parts of the city look fully recovered from the pandemic, the rebound has been uneven.

“One reason it is hard for those of us in upper-middle-class occupations and neighborhoods to understand this is that conditions are objectively much better in our places but that working class and poor neighborhoods are still feeling quite a bit of stress,” Mr. Mollenkopf said.

When New Yorkers emerged from their homes after the worst of Covid, Mr. Mollenkopf said, they saw a city that seemed to have slipped its reins: bicyclists flouting all traffic laws, commuters jumping turnstiles, public drinking and pot smoking, emotionally disturbed people ranting at passers-by. “There was this feeling that the city was out of control,” he said.

Valerie Iovino runs the Facebook group Moms of the Upper East Side, where 35,000 members discuss all aspects of raising children in New York. She grew up in the neighborhood and is now raising her 10-year-old daughter there.

She said she doesn’t consider the city to be in crisis currently. But if you’d asked her a year or two ago, she might have said it was. Restaurants were closing early, everyone was stressed, there were constant protests and, she said, “a very bad rat problem.”

But lately, she has felt a shift, with new businesses opening, a reduction in rats, and restaurant trash in bins, instead of on the street. She was out at 10 p.m. one night and restaurants were packed. “The city, it’s starting to be fun again,” she said. “I mean, it’s not fun like it was in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But it’s fun.”

Still, affordability, especially where families are concerned, is often top of mind for her and her fellow mothers.

“Child care is prohibitively expensive for a lot of families,” Ms. Iovino said. “And that’s why a lot of people move out of the city.”

She also pointed to some basic quality-of-life issues that she described as “lingering”: “The mental health crisis on the street, with the unhoused,” she said. “There have to be services for people who need them.” Meanwhile, her daughter’s chief complaint is “the obstacle course of dog poop.”

A few miles north of Ms. Iovino, in the South Bronx neighborhood where Pablo Muriel works as a high school dean, there are also signs of fresh development, including new high-rises. But they only add to his students’ and their parents’ feeling that they’ve been cheated. “They were promised law and order,” Mr. Muriel said. What they got was families having to double up in public housing, working two or three jobs, and a view of new buildings that are near them but not for them.

“They don’t feel that they count,” Mr. Muriel said. “A lot of them feel that society has given up on them.”

Many students have not caught up developmentally from the Covid lockdown, when schools were closed fully or partially for 18 months, Mr. Muriel said. “I have 14-year-old kids that catch tantrums as an 8-year-old, something that I never experienced before,” he said.

The city’s stresses — economic, emotional, political — come together in the subway, where a fraying infrastructure meets a surging mental health crisis. “You can’t ride the subway without at least one homeless person in your car, acting disturbing,” said Stan Lawson, a train operator for 11 years. In a survey by the Citizens Budget Commission, only 22 percent of New Yorkers said they felt safe on the subway at night.

Lately, Mr. Lawson’s work has been made even more stressful by young people surfing the trains or pulling the emergency brake. “When a conductor goes to investigate, they’ll break into the conductor’s cab and steal the bag, take the keys,” he said.

He is now contemplating the previously unthinkable: moving out of New York. “It feels like staying here is not going to be something I want to do later on,” he said.

Ting Ting, 30, a content creator and native New Yorker who lives in Flushing, Queens, also has a problem with the subway: The 7 train always seems to be under construction, and it’s way too hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn. “It’s like that empty chunk on the subway map that no one cares about,” she said.

But she said that cellphone videos of negative incidents on streets and subway create an exaggerated feeling of chaos, whereas positive aspects of living in the city don’t blow up on social media. “There are more good things in New York than bad things,” she said. And even if the subway doesn’t improve, she’s not leaving. “I have traveled to other places,” she said. “I just don’t think I can live anywhere but New York.”

Gregory Purnell, who cuts hair at the confluence of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, in Brooklyn, knows where to take the city’s pulse. “Black barber shops are the internet of the ’hood,” he said, shaving a palm leaf into the back of a client’s head. “You go there and find out what’s going on, who’s who, this and that.”

At his shop, an unmarked door beneath two clattering elevated train lines, customers pay what they can — sometimes nothing. Mr. Purnell, 50, gives free haircuts at homeless shelters and said he sees people’s struggles but also a recent movement to create small-scale, affordable outlets — basement house parties, sober bars, vegan kitchens.

“So, little things are popping up around the city where it feels a little more underground or not as promoted,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more D.I.Y.”

Often the city’s vibrancy and its struggles live on the same blocks. Think the downtown arts boom of the ’70s, when artists and galleries reclaimed abandoned buildings of SoHo [Lower Manhattan], or hip-hop, which bloomed in a devastated South Bronx. Fast-forward to South Richmond Hill, Queens, near Kennedy Airport, where Sikh men in colorful turbans stroll through Little Guyana and new arrivals from Trinidad add a calypso beat to Little Punjab.

This churn of immigration and diversity has long been New York’s secret sauce, said Ric Burns [b. 1955; collaborated with brother Ken Burns (b. 1953) on The Civil War (1990); New York: A Documentary Film (1999-2003)], now filming a follow-up to his documentary series “New York.” As these values have come under fire in Washington, Mr. Burns said he sees New Yorkers defending them more ardently, in the same way that many embraced the city during the economic collapse of the ’70s.

[New York is a series of eight two-hour episodes. The project in progress may be episodes 9 and 10, “The Future of Cities (2000-2025),” which, according to Wikipedia, will be “A dramatic and compelling consideration of the forces that have transformed New York at the start of the 21st century: the most stunning era of growth and change, challenge and opportunity since the events of September 11th, and since the New York series’ last look at the city as a whole. The release date(s) is/are yet to be determined.]

“The forces of history are on the side of urban places,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be incredible conflict, and that’s deeply upsetting to consider, and we’re right in the middle of that. But I don’t know historians who see a bleak future for New York, even in the middle of the crises that have been going on.”

Today, entrepreneurs like Alex Kwan and Mahmoud Aldeen embody this overlay of hustle and anxiety. Both 37 and friends from Pennsylvania, they run a pair of halal Asian food trucks in Queens and Manhattan called Terry and Yaki.

“The mood I see is hesitant, shaky,” Mr. Kwan said. Their employees are worried about their immigration status, and customers are sometimes sharing a $12 plate of food. “If I had a family, I would move out,” he said. “But for business, there’s no better place than New York City.”

Yet he lamented a change in the city’s mood, from the community spirit and mutual aid that arose out of Covid to a harder edge today. “It’s a little less caring about your neighbor and a little bit more caring about myself,” he said.

For all the hand-wringing about artists being priced out of New York, applications for the fine arts program at Pratt Institute [Brooklyn] are up, said Jane South [British-American; b. 1965, Manchester, England; known for large-scale installations, mixed media constructions, and fabric wall pieces], chairwoman of the department [appointed Chair of Fine Arts in 2017].

She has noticed pop-up art shows in apartments, or students forming collectives after graduation. “They generate opportunities for themselves, for others,” Ms. South said. “There’s a tremendous amount of that going on.”

Which is not to say everything is perfect. There’s the lack of affordable housing and affordable art studio space. “But in times of crisis,” Ms. South said, “art helps us make meaning when meaning feels unstable. We bear witness, we record the moment.”

And, of course, Ms. South has heard “New York is dead” before. “When I came here in 1989, that’s what people were saying: ‘Oh, you should have been here in the ’70s.’”

Ada Calhoun [b. 1976], author of the book “St. Marks Is Dead” [W. W. Norton & Company, 2015], about the often declared demise of her East Village neighborhood, has spent much of her life debunking such reports. St. Marks Place, like the rest of the city, isn’t what it once was, but it never is.

[St. Mark’s Place is a three-block stretch of East 8th Street from 3rd Avenue east to Avenue A, named for the nearby St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street at Second Avenue. West of 3rd Avenue and east of Avenue B (the street is interrupted between Avenues A and B by Tompkins Square Park) the street reverts to the designation East 8th Street. 

[The Episcopal St. Mark's Church sits on the site of a family chapel built in 1660 by Peter (Petrus) Stuyvesant (c. 1610-72), governor of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664. Stuyvesant is buried beneath the chapel.]

“People in 1811 said the grid ruined the city, and it’s never going to be good again,” she said. “And they’ve always been wrong.” [Manhattan’s rectangular grid street plan was conceived in 1811 and implemented over the succeeding 60 years.]

She’s glad that her son’s East Village is safer than the one she grew up in. The musicians and struggling artists may be gone, priced out to Bushwick [Brooklyn] or Ridgewood [Queens], but there’s a new very indie bookstore and gallery [Village Works] on St. Marks where people hang out until 1 a.m.

“When people are like, ‘New York’s not that good’ — compared to what?” she said. “Oh, other places can be more livable, if you really care about the school district, or you care about comfort. But nothing is the same as New York.”

Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.

[John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for the New York Times.

[Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.

[Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York.  He’s been a photojournalist for more than 25 years.]

Art, Disability, and Technology

 

[We’ve heard a good deal lately about the dangers to the performing arts posed by artificial intelligence (see “‘Entertainment in the Age of AI’” from SAG-AFTRA [22 August 2022]; “‘Use of artificial intelligence generates questions about the future of art’’ by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet [7 March 2023]; “2023 Writers Guild Strike” [1 June 2023]; “‘AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly’” by Justine Bateman [4 June 2023]; “‘The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City’” by Stefanos Chen [25 July 2023]; “‘The Playwright in the Age of AI’” by Jeffrey Goldberg [7 March 2025].)

[It’s high time, I think, that we hear a little about the benefits of AI to theater and its kin.  Below is a report by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour about an extraordinary opera that uses AI and other technology to bring voices (literally) to the stage that otherwise wouldn’t be heard.] 

“OPERA USES AI TO GIVE PEOPLE
WITH NON-VERBAL DISABILITIES A VOICE”
by- Jeffrey Brown and Simon Epstein 

[Below is the transcript of Jeffrey Brown’s segment on PBS News Hour about Sensorium Ex, the new opera by Paola Prestini and Brenda Shaughnessy, which aired on 10 July 2025.

[The title Sensorium Ex isn’t explained anywhere I could find.  It clearly refers to the opera’s exploration of the human sensory experience and its potential expansion through technology and AI.  

[The word ‘sensorium’ refers to the sensory apparatus of the body or the seat of sensation.  ‘Ex’ seems to signify an expansion or extension of this sensory experience, hinting at the opera’s futuristic setting and themes of artificial intelligence and virtual representation.]

Amna Nawaz, “PBS News Hour” Co-Anchor: At an Omaha, Nebraska festival this summer [Common Senses Festival, 10-25 May 2025; the opera débuted on 22-25 May], new work explores the intersection of art, disability, and technology, asking questions like, who has a voice and who gets to be heard?

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on this unusual undertaking for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

(Singing: “A bird is made to sing.”)

Jeffrey Brown: A mother sings to her disabled son of her love and hopes for him, but there is danger threatening.

(Singing: “If we say we belong to CORP [an evil corporation out to harvest the son’s DNA].”)

Jeffrey Brown: And, together, they decide to flee. We’re in a dystopian future world, though perhaps not so very different from our own, in which artificial intelligence is being used to create what? Some new kind of life.

The opera titled “Sensorium Ex” is both art and advocacy, aimed at giving new voice and opportunities to the disabled, using A.I. to benefit, rather than harm, and changing the world of opera itself.

Composer Paola Prestini, “Sensorium Ex”: I’m very interested in how art can open up new avenues, and that’s what I felt like “Sensorium” did.

Jeffrey Brown: In this case new avenues to?

Paola Prestini: To listen more deeply and to create more welcoming spaces for folks who express themselves differently and who have different disabilities.

Brenda Shaughnessy, Librettist, “Sensorium Ex”: Say "Paola."

Jeffrey Brown: Prestini’s collaborator, poet Brenda Shaughnessy [most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)], wrote the libretto and grounded it in her lived experience as the mother of a disabled child.

Brenda Shaughnessy: What do you hear?

Jeffrey Brown: Her son, Cal, now age 18, seen here at 12 listening to music by Prestini played by her [i.e., Prestini’s] husband, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler.

Shaughnessy, who’d never written for an opera before, says this work was deeply personal and often painful, but, for her, necessary.

Brenda Shaughnessy: Nonverbal, nonambulatory. Kids like him don’t get to be part of anything. In a way, I wrote him into the opera because I wanted him to get to be part of the mix, get to be — get to do something, get to be the hero of a story, get to be — be heard.

(Singing: “You belong, too.”)

Jeffrey Brown: And that became the essence of this project, who has a voice and who is heard. Prestini and Shaughnessy were determined to make the answer “Everyone” by creating a work for a cast and crew that included some with disabilities such as cerebral palsy, autism, and blindness, writing and composing a story of a mother called Mem, sung by Hailey McAvoy, and her disabled son named Kitsune.

Brenda Shaughnessy: Kitsune’s voice is central to the opera. You can’t — it can’t be sidelined. It’s in the score. It’s the music. It’s in the tech. It’s in the plot.

Jeffrey Brown: But if opera is all about the voice, how to write for those thought to have none?

Paola Prestini: It’s like writing for a person who you love, but the instrument doesn’t exist yet. And so the challenge that we had was, well, how do we amplify the voice that this person does have? Because there are nonverbal ways in which you communicate. And then how do we find, if you will, a deeper expression to the communication device that this actor would use?

Jeffrey Brown: One of the two actors playing Kitsune, 23-year-old Jakob Jordan, who is himself nonverbal, but has a new way of communicating.

Jakob Jordan, Actor (through A.I. voice): For the first 22 years of my life, I felt like a witness to a crime that would happen over and over again. My thoughts were being held hostage inside my head while the wrong words were impersonating me, tricking everyone to believe I was much simpler than I am.

Jeffrey Brown: Jakob was diagnosed as a toddler with autism and apraxia, a neurological condition in which his body and speech don’t respond to the signals sent from his brain.

Here’s how he puts it, along with a bit of his characteristic sense of humor.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): Basically, my body does not listen to the commands I give it. I may want to ask my friend if he saw that cute girl walk by, but my speaking voice gets stuck in loops, talking about airports or dumb songs and a small variety of other repetitive topics.

It also affects my whole body.

Jeffrey Brown: Only in the last two years came a breakthrough, when he learned to type words with a trained communication partner. When he finishes his sentence, it comes out in an electronic voice.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): I caught the acting bug.

Jeffrey Brown: But in our interview, for which we sent questions ahead of time so he could consider and type responses, we heard more of Jakob’s actual voice.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): Nothing compares to getting to express myself purposefully with the voice I was born with.

Jeffrey Brown: Brought to life through Sensorium A.I., a partnership between the opera’s creative team and NYU’s Ability Project, a research lab in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to the intersection of disability and technology.

Luke DuBois is an NYU [New York University] professor, engineer and researcher and himself a composer and musician. He first recorded the sounds Jakob can and does make.

R. Luke DuBois, NYU Professor: So we have got recordings of Jakob just doing his thing.

Jakob Jordan: (Inaudible)

[nb: What Jordan said wasn’t precisely inaudible. He could be heard well enough, but what he said was indecipherable. That’s what DuBois meant by “speech like that,” below.]

R. Luke DuBois: Right? So he’s very expressive. Some of it is whistles. Some of it is singing. Some of it is speech like that. And what the system does is, it takes that recording and infers from it the physical body that made it.

Jeffrey Brown: Infers . . .

R. Luke DuBois: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . means you’re creating his — sense of his body and therefore sense of his voice.

R. Luke DuBois: Exactly. And so what I can do is, I can take a phrase like, “I would like to go sailing tomorrow,” have it cranked through. And then what you would end up with is, you would end up with a recording.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I would like to go sailing tomorrow.

R. Luke DuBois: Right? And it sounds like Jakob.

Jeffrey Brown: DuBois and the team use sensors that allow Jakob to control his speech . . .

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I would like to go sailing tomorrow.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . and, depending on how he moves his hand, give it a kind of expressiveness of pitch and pace. [Jordan manipulates the speech device’s sound by moving his hand much the way a thereminist plays his instrument.]

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I was never lost.

Jeffrey Brown: Amazing stuff. And it was created specially for and incorporated into the opera, making this a story about the potential evils of A.I., while using its benefits. And this is open-source technology, publicly available for anyone to take to the next step.

R. Luke DuBois: I want this in the hands of everyone who needs it. I have been talking to all sorts of speech researchers all over the country in the last couple years. And they’re all looking at really interesting different angles on this thing. So it’s going to be cool, man. It’s going to be cool what happens next.

Jeffrey Brown: Composer Paola Prestini hopes her work will receive more productions and, offering a blueprint for the future, give new opportunities to those with disabilities wanting to be part of her art form.

Paola Prestini: Create the system and understanding that, yes, it’s a challenge, but these are the ways. And you just do it one step at a time and you get there. All of a sudden, you get the complexity of human life represented on stage.

And that’s why we do what we do. It’s not just a mirror to society. It’s also a pathway to a better way.

Jeffrey Brown: And poet and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy sees the opera and its technology opening avenues for many, including her son.

Brenda Shaughnessy: It’s not enough, in my opinion, for Cal to just sort of sit there on the sidelines not getting to participate in anything. It’s not enough for anybody to just sort of be there disconnected.

What I want is for a kid, a disabled kid, a nonverbal kid, to see this and suddenly say, not just, oh, I could be in an opera, I could maybe be an actor, maybe I could play Kitsune one day. But I also want that kid to say, there I am. I exist.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): I see it.

Jeffrey Brown: It took Jakob Jordan about a minute to type his answer when I asked what it was like to perform on stage in Omaha earlier this summer. His answer was worth any wait.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): It was the most fulfilling experience of my life.

(Cheering)

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York. [Paola Prestini lives in Brooklyn.]

[After the segment, News Hour put up an on-screen text that informed viewers, "An estimated 5 million people in the U.S. and 97 million globally have conditions that limit their ability to communicate using speech alone."  It seemed to be a statistic from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, Maryland.

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent, he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Simon Epstein is a multiple Emmy Award-winning producer.  Simon’s long-form productions include three historical retrospectives on the District of Columbia for public television, and the public affairs specials American War Generals, and The Last Days of Osama bin Laden for the National Geographic Channel.  Simon’s work also appears nationally on Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, A&E, and the History Channel, as well as a number of international broadcast outlets.]

[In addition to the posts I listed above, which all speak about artificial intelligence in regard to the performing arts, I also posted a collection of articles that predate AI, but concern computers and theater in the pre-AI days.  For those interested in the pre-history of AI-infused theater and film, see “Theater and Computers” (5 December 2009), “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021), and “Computers and Actors, Part 2” (7 October 2021).]

Can Art Be A Crime?

 

[In December 2002, just as New York City was bracing for a transit strike that was called for four days hence, 37 black boxes labeled "FEAR" were found in the Union Square subway station.  The discovery caused significant concern and drew public attention—in a New York-sort of way: people were disturbed, suggested theories of the boxes’ origin, and went about their business—which, in a subway station, meant going someplace or coming back from someplace.

[Aside from the looming strike threat—New York City without public transportation is hell, believe me—we were just over a year past the 9/11 attack; it was fresh in everyone’s memory.

[Now, I live near Union Square and the station, which is under the park at 14th Street and 4th Avenue/Park Avenue South, is one of the city’s busiest.  It’s the station I use most of the four that are near my apartment—though I didn’t happen to have been in it that day.  I do remember the incident reported below, however.] 

“37 BLACK BOXES LABELED ‘FEAR’
CAUSE COMMOTION IN THE SUBWAY”
by Robert F. Worth and William K. Rashbaum 

[The article below was the first I read about the mysterious boxes in “my” subway station.  It ran in the New York Times on 12 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]) while the story behind the discovery was still a puzzle.]

There were 37 cardboard boxes in all – some spray-painted black, some wrapped in black electrical tape, all of them inscribed in white block lettering with a single word: fear.

At some point yesterday morning [Wednesday, 11 December] the mysterious boxes were affixed to the walls and girders of the Union Square subway station in Lower Manhattan. Within minutes, in a city long on edge, there was concern that they contained bombs or presented other dangers. The police were alerted, the station and its surrounding area was evacuated, and passing trains were barred from stopping at Union Square, one of the city’s busiest stations.

After hours of investigation, and the delicate, ultimately uneventful opening of the boxes, the police said they believed that the episode was a stunt but did not know its origin or intent. One possible explanation, investigators said, was that transit workers, who have authorized a strike for 12:01 a.m. Monday [16 December], were somehow behind the prank.

A union spokesman denied that transit workers had had anything to do with the boxes.

Stunt or not, in a city with terror in the back of its mind and rumors of possible wildcat actions by the transit workers’ union, the bizarre boxes seemed to crystallize a host of anxieties, and generated panicky speculation among those who stood waiting above ground to hear what they contained.

“You have to wonder,” said Bob Lamb, 57, as he stood in a frigid rain and stared at the crowd of police officers guarding the subway entrance on the southwest corner of Union Square. “It seems suspicious so close to the strike date, but nowadays I guess this kind of thing is becoming routine.”

A police sergeant first noticed one of the boxes about 10:45 a.m., near a stairwell leading to a lower platform in the station, the authorities said. As he was examining it, a subway rider told him that there were others.

The boxes were about 16 by 20 inches, and about two inches high, the police said. Some were duct-taped to the station walls, some attached to pillars near the edge of the platforms and others scattered elsewhere, including under a bench.

The station was shut down, and subway riders and employees were evacuated. The police bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit were called in, and they examined each of the boxes, swabbing them for hazardous materials and dusting them for fingerprints before the station was reopened in the early afternoon, the police said.

Police officials said they had no hard evidence indicating who was behind the event. One official said, however, that detectives thought there was “probably a pretty good chance that it’s strike-related.”

Another police official also pointed out that Union Square was the frequent site of antiwar protests and other acts of civil disobedience.

And a third official said a review of videotape recordings from a camera in the sprawling station failed to shed light on the incident.

A transit union official rejected any suggestion that workers were responsible. “Transit workers have never been involved in anything remotely like that, and for people to speculate on that is irresponsible,” said Ed Watt, the secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.

In Union Square, though, there was no shortage of people who said they suspected the transit workers.

“It’s probably the transit people,” said Amy Kalt, who was selling scarves and other clothing at one of the square’s market kiosks yesterday.

Others were more sanguine, observing that the city has its share of apolitical pranksters and attention-seekers. “It’s probably nothing,” one pedestrian, Jane Comfort, said as she hurried off toward another subway station. “I’m a good conspiracy theory person, but it didn’t occur to me that this was about the strike.”

And to some visitors from abroad, the incident said much about New York’s relative inexperience with mysterious threats, terrorist or otherwise.

“In Tel Aviv, we get these things all the time,” said Guy Grossman, a graduate student in philosophy who is spending a month in New York. “If it’s a bomb, the robot removes it in five minutes. You have a lot to learn here.”

[In December 2002, New York City averted a potentially crippling transit strike when the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a tentative contract agreement.  The strike, which would have halted subway and bus service for millions of commuters, was averted after negotiators "stopped the clock" and continued talks.  An agreement was reached late on 16 December, avoiding the shutdown.

[Robert F. Worth became a New York Times reporter at the metropolitan desk in 2000. He was the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006, and the Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011.  He’s also contributed to the New York Review of Books and he’s the author of Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

[William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer for the New York Times, covering municipal and political corruption, the courts, and broader law enforcement topics in New York.  He writes investigative stories and news articles.]

*  *  *  *
“AN UNUSUALLY ARRESTING ART PROJECT”
Melanie Lefkowitz 

[The following article, revealing the perpetrator of the Black Box Mystery, ran in the Queens edition of Newsday (Melville, Long Island, NY) on 17 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert’s public-art assignment earned him an A.

A Class A misdemeanor charge, that is.

Boisvert, a freshman at the School [of] Visual Arts, turned himself in yesterday on charges he scattered 37 small black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” in the Union Square subway station Wednesday [11 December], just as worries about a transit workers’ strike were reaching a crescendo.

[SVA, a private for-profit art school, has facilities in both the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's west side, and the ‘Gramercy Park neighborhood, on the east side.  The east side campus is less than a ten-block straight shot south to Union Square.  Chelsea’s a little farther, but only a one-mile/20-minute walk.]

The incident touched off jitters across the city, suspicion that disgruntled transit workers or even terrorists could have been involved, and the evacuation of the transit hub for more than five hours.

But Boisvert’s lawyer said the 25-year-old student only intended to observe the public’s reaction to his project, and wasn’t even aware of the potential transit strike when he planned it.

“It’s an innocent art project that went unfortunately awry, to say the least,” said Boisvert’s lawyer, William Stampur. “It was done in the morning rush hour in full view of hundreds if not thousands of people walking by – it wasn’t done in any surreptitious fashion.”

Boisvert was awaiting arraignment last night on charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, officials said.

Boisvert, who is from Michigan, has lived in New York for only three months. He allegedly taped the boxes to walls, pillars and benches throughout the station. A friend who was helping him carry the two bags of boxes will not face charges, police said.

The stunt was part of a class assignment to display art in a public place, police said. Stampur said that Boisvert hung up the boxes, went to class to make his presentation and was planning to return to the station to retrieve his work when he found out the subway stop had been evacuated.

“If it weren’t so serious it would be jocular,” Stampur said.

A spokesman for the school did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Police described Boisvert as “clueless,” not malicious.

“This was not a publicity-seeking stunt in any way, shape or form,” Stampur said.

[Before Melanie Lefkowitz left journalism to enter academia, she was a newspaper reporter for 20 years, and her work has been published in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Post, among other publications.  She taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.]

*  *  *  *
“ART STUDENT’S PROJECT ON ‘FEAR’
BECOMES A LESSON IN THE LAW”
by Kevin Flynn 

[Kevin Flynn’s report ran in the New York Times of 17 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Clinton Boisvert’s assignment for his Foundation Sculpture class, according to the police, was to situate art in a specific place, not to create alarm in the subway system.

But Mr. Boisvert, a college student at the School of Visual Arts, succeeded in the latter, if not the former, last week when he taped 37 black cardboard boxes inscribed with the word “Fear” in the Union Square subway station, according to investigators.

After seeing the disruption his project had caused, Mr. Boisvert contacted a lawyer. And yesterday morning, he surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on a charge of reckless endangerment, a spokeswoman said.

[Formally, there’s no such office as the Manhattan district attorney.  Manhattan is the name of the borough, a city division.  The DA is a state job (which, by the way, is why it doesn’t have term limits, as all city positions do) and the incumbent’s jurisdiction is the County of New York—which covers the same ground as the Borough of Manhattan but is a state division.  (The other four boroughs are also counties, and two of them, like Manhattan, have two names.)]

“The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said. “He did not seem to know the ramifications his art project would have.”

When the mysterious boxes showed up last Wednesday, taped to the girders and walls in the Lower Manhattan station, they raised the sort of wide-open questions that authorities in a city still anxious about terrorism do not enjoy answering. Were they some kind of bomb canisters? Or a threat from a union member contemplating a transit strike? Or simply an artsy stunt?

The station was shut for hours while the bomb squad examined each box, dusted for fingerprints and checked for hazardous materials. When the station reopened, many subway riders just shrugged. But the Transport Workers Union had to labor to dissociate itself from an incident that some riders mistook for a bit of intimidation.

“No one at the school understood that he was going to do something that was of that radical a nature,” said Adam Eisenstat, a spokesman for the college.

Mr. Boisvert, 25, in his first year at the school, had submitted a proposal to do a different project for the class, but apparently changed his mind, Mr. Eisenstat said. “He chose to make the city, the subway, the topical events, his canvas,” he said. But Mr. Boisvert was trying to mark the tension, not create it, Mr. Eisenstat said. “The tension is at a level that I think he never realized,” he said.

William Stampur, Mr. Boisvert’s lawyer, said his client had arrived in New York only three months ago from Michigan and had not even been aware that a transit strike was being contemplated. Mr. Stampur described the boxes as an innocent art project that had been erected during the morning rush when hundreds of people were passing by. “It was done methodically and in open view,” he said.

As a result, he said, Mr. Boisvert did not anticipate that others would view it as mysterious and frightening. “He feels so bad,” Mr. Stampur said.

Reckless endangerment is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum term of a year in jail upon conviction. A friend who helped Mr. Boisvert arrange the boxes is not likely to be charged because his role was minimal, the police said.

Mr. Boisvert was waiting in a Manhattan holding cell last night for arraignment, and missed one of his final exams, Mr. Stampur said. Mr. Eisenstat said it was unclear just how the subway project would be graded.

[Kevin Flynn is an editor with the New York Times and the co-author (with Jim Dwyer) of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers New York (Times Books, 2005).  His work as an investigative editor helped earn the Times numerous awards, including a 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  He served as the police bureau chief of the newspaper from 1998 to 2002, when he became investigations editor for the newspaper’s Metro desk.  He’s currently investigations editor for the paper's Culture desk.  He’s also the editor of The New York Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat (Sterling Books, 2017).]

*  *  *  *
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK:
IN NEW YORK, ART IS CRIME,
AND CRIME BECOMES ART”
by Michael Kimmelman 

[This news story was published in the New York Times on 18 December 2002 (Sec. E [“The Arts”]).]

By strange coincidence, New York City’s crime rate was reported yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000 residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but (thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the word “Fear” on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who surrendered Monday [16 December] to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.

So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from Michigan, to keep up the city’s gritty reputation for crime. At least New York can still take pride, as the nation’s cultural capital, that even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.

First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. “The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said on Monday, demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s, people might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s, a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist.

[The term “Son of Sam” refers to David Berkowitz (b. 1953), a serial killer who terrorized New York City between 1975 and 1977, leading to possibly the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. His crimes involved the shooting or stabbing of six individuals and the wounding of eleven others. He also became known as the “.44 Caliber Killer” due to his weapon of choice, a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver. Berkowitz also sent letters to the press and police, taunting them and signing them as “Son of Sam,” a name derived from his claim that he was taking orders from a demon that resided in his neighbor’s dog, named 

[Berkowitz appeared calm in court on 8 May 1978, and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. On 12 June 1978, he was sentenced to a 25-years-to-life term in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively. Berkowitz became eligible for parole in 2003, but remains incarcerated in upstate New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. His next parole hearing is scheduled for May 2026.]

Mr. Boisvert couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing “fear” were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 – to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that’s art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remark, which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.”

[Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, acknowledged as one of the most important, but also controversial, composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He’s known for his work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.]

Mr. Boisvert’s inspiration was evidently Keith Haring [1958-90; pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture; studied at SVA], who made his reputation in the 1980’s drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces in subway stations [including, coincidentally, Union Square Station]. He was a graffiti artist, which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn’t meant to be a prank. She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was intended to get people talking, she said.

Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but he mentioned nothing about “fear.” He said he wanted a dance floor. She thought he was planning a performance.

Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. “It was my last class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done, and his was the last project before the break at 2 o’clock that afternoon,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He put out snapshots he had taken around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He said he had painted the word ‘Fear’ on them.

“We were all saying, ‘Wow, how interesting,’ but I looked at him when it dawned on me. I said, ‘Clinton, you didn’t leave them there, did you?’ One of the other students then said the trains were no longer stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat. I said, ‘Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your project?’ He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen.”

Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert consulted a lawyer.

He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.

A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as he caused straphangers.

[Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and urban design.  He’s reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]

*  *  *  *
“LETTERS: TEACHERS SHARE BLAME”
by Louis Torres 

[The letter below pertaining to the guerrilla artist, Clinton Boisvert, was printed in the Queens edition of Newsday (Merrick, Long Island, NY) on 21 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert is the hapless student who planted 37 black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” at the Union Square subway station. If he is found guilty of the misdemeanor of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct [“An Unusually Arresting Art Project,” News, Dec. 17], his teachers at the School of Visual Arts should certainly be held responsible for brainwashing him into thinking that something like stenciled boxes displayed in a public place would be considered “art.” He probably thought they would give him an A for originality for the place he picked! They still might.

Louis Torres
Manhattan

*  *  *  *
“WARNING: ART AHEAD”
by Lenore Skenazy 

[Lenore Skenazy’s column in the Daily News (New York City) ran on 22 December 2002.]

Whatever happened to the plain old pursuit of beauty?

The artist had a great idea: He would put some suspicious packages in the subway to get people thinking about bombs, terrorism and maybe even deeper stuff, like a change in the balance of power. Cool!

But this was not 11 days ago here in New York. This was 1994, in the London tube. And the artist, Brooklynite Gregory Green, took one crucial precaution: He put up plaques to explain his project, which had been approved in advance by the subway authorities.

[Gregory Green (b. 1959) is active in New York, where he also lives. Green is known for sculptor-assemblage. He creates conceptual pieces that suggest explosive devices, such as pipe bombs neatly packed into briefcases or hollowed out books with nuclear warheads. His purpose is to stimulate creative thought about freedom and personal responsibility. As for the installation connected to the London Underground, it may be related to a work called Suitcase Bomb #10 (London) (1994) which was part of a series that seems to have been exhibited in London, but I was unable to connect it specifically to the Underground.]

That way, nobody had to shut the station for five hours.

Here in New York, Clinton Boisvert would have done well to follow that model. Instead, he placed 38 black boxes [sic; all other reports said there were 37 boxes] labeled “FEAR” around the Union Square subway station Dec. 11. After the cops dismantled the packages, they set out to find a suspect described as “artsy” by a commuter who’d seen him.

The profiling worked. Even as police were seeking, presumably, a guy with a goatee, black clothes and a tattoo, they got lucky when School of Visual Arts freshman Boisvert – goatee and black coat, yes, tattoo status unknown – turned himself in.

Apparently he had no idea his boxes would cause such a commotion. “He’d have to live in a black box to be that dumb,” opined a colleague.

Whether or not he intended to create havoc, I leave to the judge. But clearly he did intend to create art, and that is just as disturbing.

His sculpture class assignment had been to put a piece of art in a specific place and watch the public’s reaction.

That’s pretty broad. If he had placed 38 wads of gum on the subway floor, would that have been any different? How about 38 papier-maché rats? Or condoms?

My guess is, all would have been equally acceptable in class, because almost anything gets to call itself art today.

Beautiful pictures and stunning sculptures? Those are so old hat that sometimes it seems artists are running in the opposite direction, just to be considered legit.

Why can’t they go back to the simple pursuit of beauty? “I don’t think you can go back to anything,” says Dave Tourje [b. 1960], an artist in Southern California. “The only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”

Forward to “FEAR” boxes. Great. “One of the functions of art is to be on the edge of what is permissible,” says James Yood, a professor of art theory at Northwestern University. Provoking the middle class, he explains, is a time-honored artistic pursuit.

That pursuit has lead [sic] to such gross attention grabbers as Andres Serrano’s [b. 1950] “Piss Christ” [1987] – a crucifix hung in a jar of pee – and the infamous dung-covered Madonna [The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) by Chris Ofili (b. 1968)] at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” show [2 October 1999-9 January 2000].

[Both Piss Christ and The Holy Virgin Mary are mentioned prominently in my posts “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” (4 January 2012).

[I also recommend having a look at “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater” (4 and 8 January 2010)—I think Skenazy should have as well—which discuss the art philosopher’s ideas about beauty. Langer’s theories are also discussed in “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” (2 October 2017). The ideas of Langer (1895-1985) crop up many times in posts on this blog.]

But Yood points out that even Michelangelo [1475-1564; Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter] provoked the public in his day: His “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel was criticized for too much nudity, and parts were soon painted over.

[The reference to Yood didn’t connect. I assume Skenazy means the Israeli rock band, but I couldn’t find any reference associated with them concerning Michelangelo.]

“The first person who did a painting about something that wasn’t a religious subject was considered bizarre,” adds Carol Oster, a Manhattan sculptor. So were such groundbreakers as the now-loved Impressionists, and the wacky Dadaists, whose claim to fame was placing a urinal in an art gallery. After that, it was anything goes [see my report on Dada (20 February 2010), the 2006 exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City].

Some of that anything is disturbing, but, indeed, does make a point. Those “Suspicious Looking Objects” in London, for instance, were part of Green’s 10-year exploration of power. His bomb-centric art was trying to make people aware of how easily our world could change if a person or group embraced terrorism. Rather prescient.

The difference between Green and the “FEAR” boxes is that Green identified his work as art. He wanted people to think about issues, not about dying on the way home.

Setting out to simply upset people is not art. It’s self-indulgence. The art world has too much of that already.

[Lenore Skenazy is an author, speaker, and syndicated columnist.  She’s known for her advocacy of free-range parenting and her work with the organization Let Grow.  She was a columnist for the New York Daily News for 14 years.  Skenazy has written for various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Mad Magazine, and the New York Sun, and has given lectures at venues like Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House.]

*  *  *  *
“METRO BRIEFING: NEW YORK: MANHATTAN:
ARREST IN SUBWAY INCIDENT”
Al Baker 

[This short notice was part of a regular column in the New York Times on 31 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Under heightened alert to inspect unidentified packages that may conceal bombs, the police arrested a woman yesterday for placing four cardboard boxes in the Union Square subway station. The incident follows a similar one on Dec. 11, when the same station was evacuated after 37 boxes labeled “Fear” were placed there. The black boxes taped inside the station yesterday were labeled “Fear Art.” Cleaners in the station reported seeing the woman, Ani Weinstein, 26, of East Chatham, N.Y., placing the boxes there. When she was arrested, she had 10 more boxes, the police said. Ms. Weinstein was accused of reckless endangerment and other violations. The police said there was no evidence that the incidents were linked.

[Al Baker was a reporter on the Metro staff of the New York Times for close to 20 years beginning in 2000.  He was a police reporter and the police bureau chief, covered education, Long Island and Westchester County, and was the Albany Statehouse correspondent, among other roles.  Baker also wrote for Newsday and the New York Daily News.

[Clinton Boisvert was initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Lawyer Stampur got that dismissed, leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct.  He was given a ticket, fined, and ordered to fulfill six days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb squad.

[He got up early and did manual labor from the back of a dump truck.  Boisvert thus paid his debt to society.]