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Re: Steve Martin's Lifelong Education in Art

Posted By: MACK!
Date: MON, 1/12/04, 4:50 a.m.

In Response To: Steve Martin's Lifelong Education in Art (Mike B)

Thanks for posting this!
This is really good.
DM

: I'm a big fan of comedian Steve Martin and lately have
: been reading most of what he's read. Here's an essay
: he wrote in April 2001. It's not his funniest material
: but it's not supposed to be. Just his opinion on art
: and art collecting. Thought I'd share with those
: interested...
: Mike B

: Steve Martin's Lifelong Education in Art
: By Steve Martin

: I WOULD like, for the next few paragraphs, to talk about
: myself. I know what you're thinking: how can a
: Hollywood actor, who must be continually preoccupied
: with caring for others, take time out to talk about
: himself? Because in doing so perhaps I can explain
: why, after decades of never discussing or showing my
: art collection, I have decided to exhibit it now, and
: in Las Vegas.

: Being a celebrity can cause an accidental cheapening of
: the things one holds dear. A slip of the tongue in an
: interview and it's easy for me to feel I've sold out
: some private part of my life in exchange for
: publicity. I kept silent about my art collection in an
: effort to keep something personal for myself. My
: collection was for me, friends and other interested
: people. I didn't want these works to be perceived as
: vehicles for publicity, or to be treated as commercial
: objects used to promote an "image." I wanted
: the time and privacy to be dumb about art, to be
: sentimental, to be moved by it, to misunderstand it,
: to love it, without putting a public face on my
: thoughts.

: I have collected art for more than 30 years. Recently, it
: occurred to me it was time to exhibit these few
: pictures. I can only guess why. Perhaps my
: protectiveness about art has been replaced by a
: privacy of another kind and I've found something more
: important to jealously guard. Perhaps age has allowed
: me to see things in a simpler way. Maybe I've just
: relaxed.

: I would like to tell you that I'm showing these pictures
: because I feel a need to share them with the public,
: that I can no longer hoard them away, that I can't
: continue for one more second to keep all their
: radiance to myself. I wish I could say that _ wouldn't
: I be swell? But I will tell you the real reason I have
: agreed to show these pictures in Las Vegas: it sounds
: like fun.

: I am fortunate that such an avaricious hobby can offer
: such sublimity. During the course of my art-collecting
: life, I have bought crassly and I have bought nobly. I
: have mused about art and art collecting endlessly. I
: have overthought, under- thought, acted both rashly
: and judiciously. I've blown it, goofed up, sold off
: and traded. Within seconds, I've grown to dislike a
: painting I had struggled months to acquire. I have
: stared dumbly at pictures for thousands of man-hours;
: I have been humbled in the face of pure genius.

: Some paintings I own have grown on me and continue to
: give off their magic even after years of living with
: them. This interaction with art has seriously altered
: my life. After all my gallery visits, catalog
: thumbing, auction activity and clumsy negotiation,
: this selfish little pursuit has given me two
: disproportionate gifts. One is proximity to and
: communication with a beautiful object. The other is
: friends. Smart, funny, serious and open-minded
: friends.

: Some people seem to be born with taste. Oscar Wilde. Noël
: Coward. Such individuals seem to have a natal instinct
: for objects, art, words and, dare I say, fabrics. The
: singer Andy Williams has it, minus the fabrics part.
: One day in the 60's, with no background in art
: appreciation, Andy was driving down the street in
: Chicago and peripherally saw a painting in a gallery
: window. He drove a few blocks, turned around and went
: into the gallery and made some inquiries. Never having
: heard of the artist, Andy bought the painting. It
: turned out to be a splendid example of the most
: desirable type of painting by Hans Hofmann, the
: Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher.

: But what about folks like me: born in Waco, Tex., raised
: in Orange County, Calif., never exposed to anything
: artistic -- except comedy -- before my 18th birthday?
: You may be able to slot your own story into the
: previous sentence. I'm not sure I ever acquired taste,
: but what I have acquired is a feeling for art. This
: feeling is not absolute; it is relative. It came to me
: not as a blast of intuition but through the viewing of
: hundreds of paintings, and sorting them into a vague
: and fluid hierarchy.

: Cy Twombly is a brilliant artist whose career began in
: the 1950's. His work, for the beginning art lover, can
: be extremely bewildering. Squiggles and numbers are
: spread across white or gray canvases, giving the
: effect of a child's destruction of a piece of drawing
: paper. After I saw a dozen Twomblys, several emerged
: as best, several fell into the middle and a few I
: didn't know what to do with.

: THEN, slowly, the poetry of his work began to show
: itself. Then the violence. There was sometimes
: movement in the composition, sometimes a flat
: stillness. The penciled numbers on the canvases took
: on the glow of a crazy mental doodle that seemed to
: represent the endless background noise of the mind.
: The structure of the paintings and drawings revealed
: something monumental, without there being one
: monumental thing in them. I began to appreciate how
: different Twombly's work was from anyone else's. How
: he dared to take nothing and turn it into something,
: how he spoke with no one's voice but his own.

: But none of these qualities makes a great artist; what
: makes Twombly great is that he mysteriously,
: inexplicably, made art that museums, scholars and
: collectors generally recognize as profound, and yet,
: though his work generates thousands of essay and book
: pages, no one is really able to say exactly why. Such
: experiences have confirmed my belief that one's most
: deeply entrenched taste is the acquired taste, whether
: it's for art, avocados or comedians.

: In college, I had a friend named Phil Carey who was an
: artist and introduced me to the artist's way of
: thinking, and the magic names that I would someday be
: collecting. The art world had recently been set on end
: by Warhol and Lichtenstein. The Color Field painters,
: Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis and Helen
: Frankenthaler, still had notoriety. Jasper Johns's
: intelligent pictures appealed to the brain as well as
: the eye. Pollock and de Kooning were giants, and
: Rothko stirred the somber and melancholy soul.

: These names had cachet and power. (I believe the reason I
: never merchandised my image when I became a popular
: stand- up comedian was a dim memory from these
: idealistic college days; these artists wouldn't have
: done it, and it just wasn't going to be part of my
: career. Of course, now I would look back with weird
: pride at a Steve Martin lunch box, especially after I
: found out that the Beatles had done it.)

: In 1970, though I had dabbled in antique- store
: paintings, I officially became a collector when I
: purchased an Ed Ruscha print of the famous Hollywood
: sign. It had a certain irony that I liked, and Ed was
: close with, and had collaborated with, Mason Williams,
: who was the head writer of the Smothers Brothers
: comedy hour on which I was a beginning writer. I
: bought books on all kinds of art and browsed the
: antique stores along La Cienega Boulevard.

: As I blundered my way around the art world, I came in
: contact with a dealer named Terry Delapp, who
: introduced me to 19th-century American painting, and I
: immediately fell in love with it. Easily graspable,
: the landscapes and genre paintings of the period were
: quite collectable, and I enjoyed the negotiating as
: much as the pictures themselves. Terry and I bought
: and traded through slightly sloshed eyeballs as we
: stayed up late and mooed over the glory of the
: paintings while slipping oysters Rockefeller down our
: throats. We amused ourselves by imagining the world's
: worst painting collection. Our lone entry was a
: picture we spotted in a local auction catalog:
: "Queen Victoria Viewing the Seals," and it
: was a painting of just that.

: During the next five years, I picked up information from
: Terry that has served me my entire collecting life. I
: watched as pictures were bought and sold, as deals
: were made, as paintings were examined and researched.
: I learned how to key out (tighten) sagging canvases,
: and I watched as dingy yellowed skies became eggshell
: blue as they were cleaned. I saw how an ultraviolet
: light, when waved over pictures like a magic wand,
: would reveal previously invisible overpaint,
: restoration, added signatures (curiously, the fake
: signature would appear to float over the canvas) and
: other ills that had befallen them through the years.
: Later, a varnish was invented that was opaque to
: ultraviolet light, making it less effective, teaching
: me that crime was in a technological war with crime
: prevention. But the good guys were at work, too: I was
: able to purchase through a classified ad in the back
: of an art magazine a homemade sample card of the many
: new varnishes, with a description of how they
: fluoresced under ultraviolet.

: At 24, after my stint writing for network television was
: over, and with my collecting instinct firmly in place,
: I traveled the United States performing my comedy act
: at nightclubs, colleges and folk clubs. The comedy
: boom had yet to happen and there were no comedy clubs
: to play. I worked at night, but during the day I
: haunted museums and college libraries. I learned from
: Terry the value of having one's own art library; in
: addition to its store of knowledge about art and
: artists, the use of the attributions and illustrations
: found in art books is one of the surest ways to
: separate the fake paintings from the real ones.

: I remember spotting a rare and valuable book in a
: Midwestern college _ it was Mable Dodge Luhan's early
: volume on Southwestern painting, "Taos and Its
: Artists" _ and wondering if I could smuggle it
: past the low-tech librarian. But my better judgment
: prevailed and I left it in place. This daytime study,
: along with my constant phone chats with Terry and
: Victoria Dailey, another art dealer and valuable
: friend, made me a walking catalog of 19th-century
: American painting, right down to the artists' birth
: and death dates. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little
: Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there. And I did
: quick visual checks in the local antique stores,
: hoping to find a stray Winslow Homer that somehow had
: lost its way.

: When I studied the history of philosophy in college, I
: was continually pulled forward by the next
: philosophical movement. After Descartes, it seemed
: that Hume had all the answers, then Kant, then
: Wittgenstein. I kept looking ahead to and being swept
: up by my next investigation in philosophy. This
: seduction happened in my art collecting, too. After
: the Luminists and the Hudson River school, I was
: looking at the American Impressionists, then the
: modernists, and then, helped along by the Paris-New
: York show at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1977, the
: Abstract Expressionists and further, until I came to
: the bewildering end and started to look backward in
: time, and across the Atlantic toward Europe.

: MY collecting has been guided by various philosophies,
: too. One was to collect by image: a Luminist picture
: was a Luminist picture whether it was by Kensett (a
: master) or Fortunato Arriola (an unknown but fine
: artist who, incidentally, died young, drowned at sea
: during a ship fire). Another was by name value: the
: big artists only, the ones who cut through to the
: history books and were the recipients of voluminous
: ink. Yet another was by movement: if you had a Pollock
: and a de Kooning, didn't you need the other Abstract
: Expressionists, even though you might not like all of
: them?

: Then, I came upon a remarkable philosophy: I would only
: buy paintings that dealers would die for. I had come
: to realize that the odd little picture that you dearly
: love but no one else does was essentially unsellable
: when and if the time came (Terry called them
: "cellar dwellers"). I have heard pictures
: disparaged too many times for the strangest reasons,
: "not enough teepees" being among my
: favorites. In other words, if you're buying a Salvador
: Dali it had better be surreal and not be his one
: straightforward portraits of a 1938 Dodge.

: This philosophy of collecting sounds crass, but it isn't.
: There exists a remarkable consensus among dealers and
: the art world in general about which paintings are
: desirable. There is just no argument about a painting
: that falls short (especially if you're selling), and
: there is no argument about a painting that is
: unequivocally first rate. Quality seems to be simply
: "known," though practically impossible _ and
: unnecessary _ to quantify. I found that dealers, whose
: living depends on their ability to evaluate works of
: art, often display an uncanny perception for pictures,
: and I tried to see pictures from their particular
: angle.

: I used this approach to collecting for some time, and it
: worked well. I ended up with a tightly hewn and strict
: collection of some pretty decent pictures, but
: eventually I tired. I realized that adherence to a
: particular methodology of collecting was not really
: what I was interested in or could afford. What I
: finally said to myself was this: I would like some
: nice paintings to hang on my walls, and I proceeded
: accordingly. It is curious to realize that it took a
: lifetime of collecting to reach such a simple
: conclusion.

: So this is what I have, an extremely personal group of
: pictures. And less than a reflection of one consistent
: vision or philosophy, this collection is, frankly, a
: history of what was affordable and available at the
: time. There are great pictures mixed in with good
: pictures, mixed in with oddballs, but I endorse and
: have found something worthwhile in every one of them.
: The collector and actor Vincent Price once told me a
: story about his wife Coral Brown. They were giving an
: art tour in their home, when, with a particular frown,
: a woman looked at a Diebenkorn they owned and snarled:
: "You have so many beautiful things. Why would you
: own that? What is that called?" And Coral Brown
: replied, "It's called `We Like It.' Now get
: out."

: [Endnote from the Times editor:]

: Steve Martin, the comedian and writer, is exhibiting
: works from his art collection for the first time, at
: the Bellagio in Las Vegas, starting on Saturday. The
: 28 pictures, representing most of his holdings, range
: from Georges Seurat to David Hockney to Robert Crumb.
: This article is adapted from Mr. Martin's catalog for
: the exhibition.

: * From The New York Times, April 1, 2001.

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