Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Morning everyone. Here on the gulf coast, I’m enjoying a pleasant 66° (tempered by 97% humidity), the occasional breeze, a star-filled night sky, and a later high expected in the mid 80s. In full measure, not a bad morning at all; even the strays that have come to investigate my morning’s disturbance are satisfied that this patio is not a bad place to spend a few hours before the day gains speed.
I worked with an attorney some many years ago who still calls me regularly to chat about poetry, this or that great book he recommends, or to pick my brain about the Byzantine world of international extradition. He and his partner are in Mexico City for their annual retreat and he called me a few days ago to let me know his writing is going well and to complain—again—that I wasn’t meeting him there. One thing that came up during that conversation was my reminding him of his first year out of law school. He had a different sort of approach to the practice of law and, for the most part, I really didn’t mind; in fact, back then I encouraged and fostered individuality of approach, simplicity in writing, innovation in thinking, and clarity of purpose.
But, anyway, he’s been renovating an apartment he owns there and wanted me to know how much he was enjoying the manual labor. I laughed (partly because I’m well aware of his skill level and partly because I know the work was good for his soul) and reminded him of the sticker he plastered on his office wall that I made him cover up when the funders would come through. An almost bumpersticker-sized black rectangle with bold white lettering declared: READ A FUCKING BOOK. It wasn’t that I minded the message but I explained that gluing it on the wall showed a certain disrespect for the wall and the work (mine and a host of others) that had gone into turning an old recording studio building in the New Orleans Central Business District into a rag-pile collection of non-profit law offices.
I’m not sure, but I think he finally “gets it.” There is an essential truth in good workmanship: an individual stamp of personality, a simplicity in the lines and shapes, and a palpable clarity of purpose. He is, I believe, learning to appreciate that joyous, amorphous territory that occupies the overlap of art and craft.
It was that conversation I was thinking of when I heard the news that a piece by Jeff Koons had just set a record for sale of a work of art by a living artist. Most takes on the historic event were buttressed by opinions of art dealers lamenting the grossness of the amount ($91 million) and the damage such sales have on an already muddled art market. In an Opinion piece in The New York Times yesterday, Allison Schrager notes that “Even the Rich Aren’t Rich Enough for Jeff Koons”:
The art market has a 0.01 percent problem. That much was apparent on Wednesday at the contemporary auction at Christie’s in New York, where a stainless steel rabbit by Jeff Koons sold for $91 million, setting a record price for work by a living artist. If it seems as if these sorts of records seem to be set much more often these days, it’s because they are — just last fall a David Hockney painting sold for $90.3 million, the previous record for a living artist.
My initial reaction was mixed. I thought of what good could be done with that amount of money in terms of relieving human suffering, improving the lives of many. I was simultaneously proud of an artist (any artist) forcing us to think about the value of the creative process. And I was partly conflicted about what the sale says about the art world writ small and the larger world in general. Add to this mix the fact that I.M. Pei died yesterday and the photograph of a lovely, small graphite on paper sketch of a thistle my love sent me Wednesday from her studio and you get a glimpse of a condition I struggle with when it comes to the value of that “creative process”: a process we tend to think about only when we’re faced with headlines that distract us from our jobs or hobbies, our family and friends, or just remembering to refill that prescription at the local pharmacy.
This bifurcated—or schizophrenic—approach dates back (at least in Western Civilization) to Renaissance Humanism and the revaluation of works of Greek culture and the intellectual elevation of individual creativity. There was, in a real economic sense, a shift in our approach to this specific sort of work. Artisans (painters, sculptors, builders, and masons) began to demand payment based not on the linear foot but on the basis of merit—and thus was born the differentiation between artists and artisans. Innovation itself was lauded and valued above the preservation of cultural traditions, no matter their beauty or significance. And while I have more to say on this topic than any of you have the patience for, I will say that I can appreciate the fact that my friend in Mexico City spends his mornings editing his latest novel and his afternoons and evenings laboring with plaster over wooden lathing trying desperately to remember the lessons he learned over months of working with me on a circa early 1800s creole cottage I was restoring in the Faubourg Marigny back in the latter 1980s.
The friction between everydayness and the creative urge is always present, but sometimes it takes a synchronistic flurry of events to remind us that we all are creative beings. One of the projects I’m overseeing at work is the renovation of a water treatment plant for a small community on the Mississippi River near Edgard, Louisiana. This afternoon I’m scheduled to meet with an engineer to review our work, to inspect concrete weirs and steel clarifiers and massive filters filled with layers of rock, the maze of piping that works on gravity alone. Built in the 40s by workers whose names are lost to time, it’s a marvel of ingenuity and, in small but significant ways, a monument to the very creative urge that haunts me this morning. In subtle but acute ways—the particular feel of an old weld or the look of a hand-hewn keyway—I can appreciate a thing created from nothing with only the inkling of an idea and rough sketches that smell of human will.
So, in one sense, good on Jeff Koons and his playful, introspective take on art and his ability to sucker the richest of us to place value on a lump of metal molded from the cast of a mass-produced blow-up toy. In another sense, shame on me for sometimes ignoring the beauty and value of those things around me that will never be auctioned at Christie’s but hold as much worth as a dozen stainless-steel rabbits.
Enjoy your Friday and have a wonderful weekend.
Friday’s Lagniappe
For a story of success after failure, you should go on over and read this essay in The Bitter Southerner by Wendell Brock entitled, “The Chef Who Lost His Name.”
“Last year, Israeli-born New Orleans chef Alon Shaya lost a court battle to take his last name off the James Beard Award-winning restaurant he founded and later got fired from. He came back with a compelling cookbook/memoir, two new restaurants of his own — and a whole new approach to management in the aftermath of the #metoo movement. Now he thinks losing everything was a blessing.”
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?