james lee shay

Fellow lovers of fine architecture, The Burj Dubai won't be impossible to knock down, but will require a lot more than an airliner. It has a much more "redundant" structure, meaning that should one structural part or system fail, others will step in to support the buildiing more efficiently than did the structural systems of the World Trade Center. The more or less identical WTC buildings had a structural system that included a load-bearing exterior, a few interior columns, and a concrete core, with little to replace the load-bearing abilities of other parts of the building, should there be catastrophic failure. There was, however, some unintended reduncancy: miraculously, the exteriors of the buildings unintentionally functioned as bridges over the airliner-created openings in the structures' skins, replacing for a time the load-bearing capabilities of the destroyed portion of the structure, and allowing more time to get out of the buildings. The Burj Dubai is a cluster of ovals and cylinders in plan that have much more capability to fail independently of the entire structure, if ever required. This is somewhat similar to the Sears Tower in Chicago, by the same architects, which is designed structurally as 9 vertical bundled tubes, although it does not have all the redundancy of the Burj Dubai. And the fireproofing used today is better than that of the WTC, and much harder to disjoin from the structural members. The redundant structure is, in part, why the Burj Dubai looks so "heavy", at least in its framing stage. Perhaps it will be lighter-looking once the skin goes on. It's a stupendous architectural achievement and I have liked it since first seeing the design drawings. But, for the real future in massive buildings I would recommend looking at the work of Norman Foster and other architects, who are achieving much lighter and elegant bridges and buildings. He did the "gherkin" in London, among other structures. In the August, 2007, issue of Architectural Record, America's leading architecture publication, there is an article about the world-wide resurgance of the skyscraper. In it the author writes, "Market and regulatory demands have become so perilous for skyscraper interests in the United States - epitomized by the flawed process at the WTC site - that many domestic observers and fans of the typology have given up expecting anything more than mediocrity, or what we could call the 'Miami Effect'." This is evident in some American cities. But, I don't agree with the blanket nature of the comment. In San Francisco, near where I live, there are a few fine new highrises that may be somewhat conservative - as much of San Francisco's architecture is - but that are very well done, nevertheless. And there are fine new highrises in other American cities. Santiago Calatrava's design for the Chicago Spire, a twisting and undulating form, is remarkably beautiful, the most beautiful highrise I have ever seen. It will be a wonderful exclamation mark on the skyline of Chicago, the home of the skyscraper. And, by the way, most of the highrises in Dubai are extraordinarily banal, as are almost skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, with a few exceptional stand-outs. They are cheaper-looking and generally worse architecturally than those in America. (The "America bashing" that goes into the writer's article is fueled and informed by the politics of the left, which, pretty much, are the politics of architecture critics and writers.) If you have seen the buildings of Beijing on TV while watching the Olympic marathons run through the streets you will know what I mean. On Solo there is a New Zealand architect who, for years, has decried the currrent state of architecture and longs for the days of Frank Lloyd Wright. He zealously goes after almost all modern architecture. I mention him because he seems to have positioned himself as some kind of significant objectivist commentator on architecture. His kind of completely unthinking, nose in the sand hero-worship gets in the way of many objectivists when they think about art and architecture. They long for Wright and they despise modern art, especially abstraction. (And the New Zealand writer's occasional scatological and sexual outbursts are bizarre and repellant. Is this Kiwi humor? I doubt it.) In the morning, in their showers, he and others might try singing Paul Simon's "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright" and look around at the spectacular buildings going up now. Be thankful for the great beauty Wright brought us and the marvelous innovations regarding building layout he created, and move on. Incidently, I recently had my website updated. It includes my work, as well as that of my wife, Karen, and our daughter, Genevieve. It is JamesShay.com. Jim Shay

Is that Mohammed's latest erection? Mostly paid for by American motorists. Ba'al Chatzaf

A couple of weeks ago I was spellbound by a painting by Nerdrum at the Gehry-designed Weisman Museum. Very Rembrandtish in color and brushwork. While I was there I roughly sketched the interior of the museum's face which I've heard Objectivists falsely claim has no relation to the exterior forms. I'll post scans if I can find the time to clean up the drawings a little first. J Jonathan, I'm glad you mentioned Odd Nerdrum. In the spirit of providing artists' first-hand thoughts on the debate here about the roots of modernism and the rejection of the figurative tradition as seen in 19th Century Romanticism, below is a quote in which Nerdrum traces the "problems with modernism", in his view, back to Plato, way beyond Kant. "Plato, the great-great-grandfather of Modernism, speaks with contempt of "Mimesis" - the imitation of nature. Ideas, and the one, single truth, is the only good and the only beauty, which is also what Christianity based its world view upon. Everything else is evil. Aristotle picked ""Mimesis" up from the ground and made the word shine again. For many hundreds of years, craftmanship was also a part of the concept of "Art". This is no longer the case. Only ideas count. And the predominant art world has been brutally uniform, either you go along or you are out. All the cultures existing as remains from the past have been badly treated. But, one should bear in mind that even the Renaissance grew out of such a reminiscence, almost obliterated by the authoritarian Middle Ages." So, perhaps we can trace the roots of modernism back to Plato. I think Ayn Rand would like that. Perhaps this aligns with Matus' thinking, too. As I've said here before, I'm a big fan of a lot of modernism. Jim

Matus, I read the Pollack article. I have a fascination with fakes, as well as a number of books about them. It seems the fractal analysis has spoiled the party. I was hoping they were real. A painter in NYC, Bildo is his last name, painted a fake Pollack that fooled Clem Greenberg, Pollack's champion as a critic. It sold for $8500 20 years ago. A lot less that $140M recently paid for a real one. I understand what you say about the connection between Pollack and science, as well as between Dali and science, but it's not what moves me in art. Perhaps, though, "something in the air" at the time both the science and the art were done, was shared by them. Pollack's paintings are monotonous to me. He's a mediocre colorist and his paintings never change density across their surfaces. I love some of the other abstract expressionists, though - Gorky, Kline, Still and others. Tom Wolfe analyzed their work in terms of space and decided that, when looking at them, one could imagine flying a spaceship through them. Maybe that experience could them a little less repulsive to you. It works with Kandinsky, too. I like Dali. He was a terrific painter. I wonder about the tie-ins you mention regarding science. I suppose there's something to it, but it's not at all why I like him or Pollack or anyone else. I've been to Quent Cordair twice, trying mightily to "get" it. Alas, I feel next to nothing for the art there. To me it's practically empty of the emotions I like in art. The paintings feel "contented" and sort of dreamy. They do portray a rational universe very well, I guess, although I think Mondrian did the same, only in more depth and with more excitement. I know you read the Quent Cordair paintings in ways that never occur to me. They're very well executed and do portray the values you listed as important to you. From your list and the paintings shown I now have a much better idea of where your coming from. Thanks. I can't respond to your query about listing what I like in art, but I can list who I like. Here is a very abbreviated list, beginning 32,000 years ago and going to the present. The asterisks list my top 5, if I had to pick. The cave painters of Spain, and some of them in France * The painters of the Villa of the Mysteries, in Pompeii Pierro della Francesca* Antonello(a?) da Messina Japanese screen painters circa 1500 Sanchez Cotan Degas Picasso Braque* de Chirico, 1906 to 1920 Malevich Bonnard* Morris Louis* Richard Diebenkorn Odd Nerdrum Peter Halley I'm far from N Branden's biggest fan, but I agree with him that there's a lot of emotional repression in Objectivism. I think it exists in a lot of the art some objectivists profess to love. Not in the romantic painters, so much, but definitely in the Quent Cordair work. To me, the temperature in those paintings is really cool, by and large. Perhaps you can enlighten me? As welcome an antidote as it may be to the crushing pessimism in most contemporary visual art, there's so much left out. Still, the art in the gallery is as respectful a kind of art as I have ever seen to a certain kind of goodness in humanity. Jim

Matus, you right about my "talking down" to you about art history, I suppose. Sorry about that. Honestly, though, I think that if you want to argue about abstract art and Kant effectively you need to broaden things. And in my first reply to you I mentioned the late, unlamented Victor. Your comments about car crashes, your refusal to look at Gorky or Rothko or other abstract artists, and so on, do remind me of his approach to things. With regard to creativity, I remember N Branden saying something like the following in '72 or '73: "It's not particularly difficult to have creative ideas. But, making something of your ideas is very hard." And the great architect, Mies van der Rohe, said, "I don't want to be great, I want to be good." In other words, many, many people can sit around sparking off ideas all day, like the conceptualist/dada piece in your posting, but making something of it and really building your ideas into something is the real job. And that's why Wright concentrated on the Prairie Houses for 25 long years, and Braque and Picasso worked on analytical cubism for 7 years with very little obvious variation. Jim Shay

QUOTE It cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about its product, but rather gives the rule as nature. Hence, where an author owes a product to his genius, [bold]he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such precepts as would put them in a position to produce similar products.[/bold] Do you think that Michelangelo, or Leonardo Da Vinci do not have the ‘power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically’ I’d bet Da Vinci could reproduce the Mona Lisa to 99% accuracy, and I highly doubt that Jackson Pollack could do the same with one of his works. Matus, I don't think the quote Jonathan presents has anything at all to do with copying verbatim a work of one's own. Do you think that reproducing a painting to 99% accuracy corresponds to inventing "the like at pleasure"? I hope that's not your idea of creativity. I haven't read the entire body of text this comes from, but I believe he's talking about the quality of the inspiration and other somewhat unknowable quantities that propel the creation of comparably great work, rather than making a stale copy. The real "brainstorms". In other words, neither Leonardo nor anyone else has the power to, at will, have significant thoughts of genius comparable to those that resulted in their past creations. For example, Picasso and Braque followed their great and astonishing intuitive insights taken from Cezanne for many years, creating many similar works that often looked identical ( similarly to your example) - but no big new and great ideas for many years. Objectivism's favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, went through very long periods of refining each "brainstorm", as did Mozart, Picasso and others, before having and developing new and great ideas. When are you going to drop the snide, and also cliched, references to your archnemesis, Pollack? They weaken your remarks considerably. Don't you know anyone else's work that might suffice for your denigration? Do you know anything about Rothko, for instance, or Gorky, a fabulous painter - check him out? (By the way, others who think as you do have called Mark Rothko's paintings "Buddhist tv sets". That is pretty funny! You might use that in another discussion or argument. Sort of like calling Pollack "Jack the Dripper". That's become a cliche, but not the buddhist tv bit.) When you talk about the Mona Lisa and Pollack, two monstrously big names in art history, things go a little stale and seem unimaginative to me, and I do wonder what you really know about art and have studied and thought about it. Jonathan brings an astonishing well of information to these discussions about art. Check out some of his examples. Jim Shay

Probably all of the above. I cannot stand a lot of modern classical music, but I won't lay the problems (whatever they might be) at philosophy's doorstep. Rather, at music's, first of all. You can't do it in the visual arts, either. It's a Randian kind of sleight-of-hand in which the real subject, about which she knows very little, disappears, enveloped by extensions from her philosophy, often blaming the evil Kant. You cannot lay your problems with things you don't like (and, by the way, which you know she doesn't like) so clearly outside of the primary subject matter. Her style is to disregard the real aesthetic content, history and so on of the subject and blame it all on some person or another within the realm of philosophy. Of course we are part of the philosophies of our age, and those of earlier ages. But, it's a Randian trick, I think, to ignore the subject's real content and so on, and instead concentrate almost exclusively on philosophic abstractions. Jim Shay

Jonathan, You're right! Little did I know.... It pays to know your art history if you're going to talk about it. For those who persist in tagging "evil" abstraction with Kant, or somebody else, put the shoe on the other foot. It's being assumed here by many that the horrid abstract artists are a stain on the otherwise generally "acceptable to objectivists" history of art, ala Kamli(?) and someone else. They're being connected by many to a philospher who the great aesthete Rand regarded as a monster and maker of great evil. Indeed, he was the creator of massive dry rot of the soul, or whatever - if "soul" raises your hackles. Kant equals the corruption of reason and paves the way for abstraction. Yet, art history includes masterpieces and good work by thousands of devout Christians, hopelessly befuddled into a strange kind of antilife worship of some dying guy nailed to a cross (How repulsive that image really is. Imagine a new religion worshipping sculptures of somebody strapped to a gurney or an electric chair. Repellent). And, Cimabue, Giotto and the other fathers of the spectacular Second Millennium of art were devout. Christian art has the Pieta, the Padua Chapel, and on and on and on. And they're not regarded as evil, but as beautiful, foundations of our representational art. And there's Vermeer, much beloved by hardcore objectivists, and his somewhat horrendous "Allegory of Faith." How did the fabulous Ghent Alterpiece come to be with such utterly screwed up premises? Japanese art, from early AD until the Nineteenth Century, is as they say "sublime", wonderfully composed and colored, contemplative, celebratory and so on. It's painted by artists who worshipped some fat guy sitting on a futon telling humanity that happiness is freedom from wanting anything at all. Some of the greatest bird paintings of all time, those of early dynastic Egypt, were painted by people who worshipped their gods in the guises of hippos, crocodiles and other animals. In the 20th Century, as Michael said, there's Francis Bacon, a fine figurative painter, who's idea of a good time was getting buggered and whipped by his father's stable hands. However politically correct everything is now with regard to sexuality and everything else, there has to have been something out of whack with regard to his sense of life, premises, etc. etc. This could be parsed out forever. Constable's landscapes are OK. Velazquez's portraints, even of popes, are fine, but his religious paintings (if any) must stink by virtue of their ridiculous subject matter and their horrible premises. Brunelleschi's sculpted religious work is horrendously misinformed and monstrous, but by some miracle of a split psyche, his fantastic engineering of the Duomo, even if it is home to death eaters, is an inspired work of early capitalism, paid for by running dogs such as the Medici. In other words, for some of you posters, look into your own knowledge of art history and philosophy and explain to me why the art we embrace and venerate in museums isn't filled with many awful kinds of visual expression, perhaps even more corrupt than abstraction? Why arent' there more Bosch's and late Goya's? Instead of the grumbling about abstraction that many people engage in, explain to me why this didn't happen in art history. What about the sculpted figures on cathedrals with rotting worm holes carved into their backs? Most artists we encounter in art history, from Christ's birth on, seem to have done inspired, beautiful work. In spite of Jesus, Buddha, Reverend Moon and Werner Erhard. You can't rationally say that Kant paved the way for abstraction and that Christianity, with philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and various strange credes which have affected our lives in the West, helped pave the way for great figuration. Nor can you say that great Western art arose in spite of Christianity. For centuries the only art in the West was Christian art. And the same goes, of course, for Buddhist teachings and Oriental art, and so on.

Michael, I am OK with how it is now. I sent you a couple of emails earlier while trying to straighten it out, but did not hear back. Perhaps any replies ended up in the spam folder. I'm with you regarding the false Kant/abstraction connection you talk about in your later post. But, I don't agree that what underlies cave art and a lot of other art is born out of the desire to say "look what I saw! Whaddya think?" If that's what you're saying. In the same sense that crucifixes with Jesus and other religious portrayals have deep meanings to western culture, the paintings within caves have specific meanings with regard to the animals and how they are layed out within the caves. Tremendous study has been put into trying to understand them, although no definitive answers have been reached. The clues that the paintings mean a tremendous amount with regard to ritual are great. Some of them are painted in chambers with high readings of carbon dioxide, and it's thought that the combination of the gas and the art was used to created visions. MIchael's mentioning of an objectivist speaker linking Pollack's work to his family and communism is an example of the smearing that goes on in objectivist criticism. There is no certain linkage. There are great paintings by childbeaters, alcoholic Zororastrians, repressed Nazis and so on. Nevertheless, in Pollack's case, the story becomes something like the following: "Clearly the nets and skeins within these miserable monstrosities represent the unsuccessful lurching toward concepts and precepts within the Wyoming native's deranged psyche (which was undoubtedly damaged by contact with Sioux indian savages). The space created within the paintings illustrates a lost wasteland in some kind of spatial nightmare embodying chaos, uncertainty and unchecked premises. Clearly, this is communism, circa 1937, Melinkov variation 2a. And the dripping technique in which the artist dances around the canvas splattering paint is obviously tribal, reminescent of the worst of skull-wearing savages from southeastern New Guinea (see ARI pamphlet #127; "My Years with the Passionate, but irrationally deranged, Cannibals of Port Moresby". Valliant, 1986). Everyone knows an artist should sit in a chair, bravely facing his destining embodied in paint and canvas propped up on an easel. Running dog critics, such as Clement Greenburg, are spreading filth to our children, unsettling their futures, and robbing their lives of visions of rational thought, which should be heroically portrayed in still-life paintings of decaying rutabegas, dead flowers in vases, and seashells. Our kids need stiff portraits of engineers poring over prints for spaceships. To the junkbin of history with the garbage of abstraction! We will be vindicated, sooner rather than later." Jim Shay

Jonathan, This is a good set of comparisons, well-constructed, but I can't answer the "sense of life", "metaphysical value-judgments" and other Rand-like questions by looking at an artist's art. I like both of the paintings in Michael's images. I think they're art. They move me. When I have time I'd like to say why. Both you and Michael look at this problem as artists, visually, which is the right way. I believe you're not attacking it. But, I don't like the sometimes inane pissing contests that have, from time to time, evolved here around abstract art. I mentioned to a poster on this thread that, as far as the abstraction vs. realism war in his mind goes, the battle is long over. Unless one wants to live with others on some marginalized edge, assured of never finding fulfillment, it's pointless. The dogs have barked and the caravan has passed. Jim I signed up here again differently because I got tired of fighting with the member recognition system with regard to my former name listing. It would, for an instant, open the site before closing it. I tried using the reset assembly, but it became circular, continually referring me to itself, and then rejecting the information.

I second that, sure people would have been making crap like that anyway, but Kant seemed to have laid the philosophical ground work for that nonsense to actually be accepted and revered as "Art", without his influence, people would be making it, but no one would be hanging it on walls in frames and charging admission to it. This is without a doubt the biggest "reach" I've seen on this website. I think abstract art is great, sometimes, and I don't like or believe much of what Kant wrote. I'm sure my love for abstraction is "untainted" with regard to him. And the same is true for many of my artist and nonartist friends who like abstract art. There was once a poster here who was banished for plagiarism. He wrote stuff like the above and justified it with lots of really misguided information, much of which he stole from others. What he and other write is unimportant, though, because the abstraction battle was fought and won by its proponants long ago, and the victory won't be undone. Posters on websites and objectivist "art critics" are wasting their time with regard to abstraction, and exist in some private vacuum they regard as "the real truth about godawful abstraction" or "the heroic defense of realist art against any and all philistines". Jim Shay