By Katie Robertson and Benjamin Mullin March 17, 2025
“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker
According to the NYT Arn is “accused of making inappropriate overtures to some of the attendees and appeared intoxicated at the celebration, according to the two people, one of whom witnessed his actions.”
He was drunk and trying to kiss people.
(I’ve done that but I didn’t have a prestigious job at an institution that holds employees to the highest standard of decorum.)
So far as I know, Arn has not been accused of a crime.
Can we think about this for a minute? Arn is a great critic and there aren’t too many of them left. He loves painting! Which matters a lot to me. He’s not didactic or writing just for the art world as many critics are. Arn is sensitive to the emotion of painting—he gets it—and a lot of people and critics have forgotten that’s what it’s all about.
He’s interesting and amusing in the great tradition of the New Yorker critics. In another essay I have mourned the loss of regular art criticism in The New Yorker; the magazine doesn’t seem to think it’s relevant anymore—so sad.
Were there mitigating circumstances?
Maybe he had spent the afternoon in the Chelsea art galleries for example and that can be terribly depressing.
Or stopped first at an opening—where nobody talks about the art– often because they are afraid to—so it’s a bunch of inanities?
Or forgot he wasn’t really at a party party?
Also those French 75s are very sneaky.
It’s hard being a critic in the visual arts. If you’re honest, even gently so, the artists and galleries think you’re mean or negative and the magazines and newspapers worry about ad revenue.
The art is huge and often careless, art is used and seen as an investment asset, the art fairs have destroyed so many galleries. Google “art and money laundering”—it’s eye opening.
You have to love art and you have to be brave—it’s exhausting.
So you have a drink—”to make other people more interesting.” ( Ernest Hemingway)
How about a refresher course in consent and a stern reproach. But please don’t let him go.
Here are a few of Arn’s writings in the New Yorker and there’s a link to more below, I urge you to read them:
The Anguish of Looking at a Monet,
September 16, 2024 A review of Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision
“Camille is there in the foreground of “On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt,” from 1868. As Wullschläger notes, it’s a sloppy picture (notice the patch where the artist added his baby and then thought better of it), but also the first in which Monet attempts land’s reflection in water, one of his quintessential subjects and maybe the quintessential Impressionist subject. The river’s fidgeting surface is this painting’s real interest, but the surface refuses to play by a clear set of rules. Some bits of the reflection are long and glassy, others stubby—why? Or look at the way clouds pucker around blue sky in the lower right part of the Seine’s mirror—are they doing that because of the ripples in the water, the shape of the actual clouds, or both? We can’t know, but presumably the artist did. All of which nurtures the feeling that this picture was painted in the first person: that its maker was somebody and nobody else, sitting here and nowhere else at this time and no other.”
“His still-lifes are at once transcendent and playful, toying constantly with the laws of physics.
A certain fluted olive-oil container, like a bottle wearing a frilly white ball gown, shows up in canvas after canvas—sometimes its ribs curve left-right, as though Morandi’s interrupted it in mid-twirl, and sometimes it’s grand and pale and flanked by humbler cups. In one 1936 still-life, at Zwirner, it seems to irradiate the thin-scraped beige field behind it. Beiges, browns, putties, and grays aren’t neutral in Morandi; there’s always some fire or weightless motion to them. The objects are alive because the space is alive because the grays are alive.”
Should We View Tatlin as a Russian Constructivist or a Ukrainian?
In “Tatlin: Kyiv,” at the Ukrainian Museum, March 10, 2025
“If his life was a work of art, which genre? Tragedy is the obvious answer, but a strong case can be made for black comedy. Such horrific ironies! The man who thought realism dead was buried by it, the artist-engineer who celebrated tangible material is mainly remembered in photographs. Above all: the ship’s carpenter who aspired to help his fellow Homo sapiens devoted himself to folly after folly. (It’s unlikely that the Soviet Union could have built his tower even if it had wanted to.) He spent years at work on a flying machine called the Letatlin. And then, to top a nasty joke with a nastier one, he was deemed useless for the final twenty years of his life. Museums blackballed him for refusing to make Soviet kitsch, and by the end he was sketching portraits for money in the streets of Moscow. Eight people at most attended his funeral. What kind of art he was making for himself we don’t really know, because after he died a cleaner threw away most of what remained in his home, having deemed it useless.”
A friend suggested I should be careful about defending a person accused of “inappropriate behavior.” I hope you will write and tell me why.
—CNQ
To comment go to Letters to the Editor
“One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.” James Thurber
New York Times “New Yorker Cuts Ties.…
Jackson Arn reviews in The New Yorker
mmmmm
