Terry Teachout's Blog, page 65

TT: Rembrandt at risk

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I offer my thoughts on the citywide financial crisis that threatens to swallow up the Detroit Institute of Arts . Here's an excerpt.

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By now, everybody in the world knows that the city of Detroit has finally filed for bankruptcy--and everybody in the art world knows that its museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, is in deep trouble.

Here's why:

• Detroit owes roughly $18 billion that it doesn't have.

• The 60,000-plus works of art in the DIA's collection are owned by the city, not the museum (as is normally the case).

• According to the Detroit Free Press, the 38 most important pieces have a market value of about $2.5 billion.

What next? Rembrandt's "The Visitation" and van Gogh's "Self-Portrait" might not wind up on the auction block. Kevyn Orr, Detroit's emergency manager, has not yet said that he plans to sell any art. Steven Rhodes, the bankruptcy judge, can't force the DIA to sell specific assets in order to settle the city's debts. Neither can Detroit's secured creditors, who have first dibs on the proceeds from any such sale. And Bill Schuette, Michigan's attorney general, claims that it's illegal for the city to sell art because the DIA is holding it in the public trust. But it's Judge Rhodes, not Mr. Schuette, who'll make that call. Every asset is up for grabs in a bankruptcy hearing--and in a town so cash-strapped that 40% of the streetlights are out and it takes an hour for the police to show up when you call 911, the pressure on Mr. Orr to gut the DIA will be brutal beyond belief.

Enter the pundits. National Review's John Fund and Bloomberg's Virginia Postrel believe that the city should start selling masterpieces. "It's hard to justify letting the current decay of Detroit worsen while so many of its assets are counted as untouchable and kept off the bankruptcy table," Mr. Fund wrote last week. Ms. Postrel agrees, adding that "the cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they've ever been in Detroit." (She'd like to see the DIA's best paintings hanging in Los Angeles or Fort Worth.)

Mr. Fund and Ms. Postrel are right-of-center commentators, but you're going to start hearing similar arguments from the left before long....

Anybody who doesn't want Detroit to sell its art must be prepared to go up against arguments much like these. What's more, the counterarguments will have to persuade locals who know how it feels to call the cops and get a busy signal. In my experience, art lovers aren't accustomed to making that kind of argument, any more than they're accustomed to living in a city without streetlights. Too many of them believe that the value of high art should be self-evident to all right-thinking people. It's not an "argument" to suggest that anyone who advocates selling off the DIA's masterpieces is an art-hating philistine....

Any argument to keep Detroit's masterpieces in Detroit has got to make sense to Detroiters who think that pensions are more important than paintings. Fortunately, such arguments do exist....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic 'ideas' and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneself lost--he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life."

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

TT: AWOL

Sorry not to have written anything beyond the usual daily postings, but I'm still out on the summer-festival road, seeing shows and writing pieces in my off hours, and I simply haven't felt like piling more work on my plate (especially since Mrs. T and I spent more than eight hours driving from New York to Niagara-on-the-Lake earlier in the week!).

You'll hear more from me soon, I promise....

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Oct. 9, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, closes Nov. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Aug. 25, nearly all performances sold out last week, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Nobody Loves You (musical, PG-13/R, closes Aug. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Big Lake Big City (comedy, PG-13/R, completely unsuitable for children, closes Aug. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, closes Aug. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• The Liar (comedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:

• Loot (black comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Weir (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Life is fired at us point blank."

José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People

BOOK

Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale, $38). The first full-length history of what happened to the Jewish classical composers who, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill, ran afoul of the Nazi regime and had their music banned. A powerfully unsettling tale of ideology run amok--and of how Hitler destroyed Austro-German musical culture by trying to ensure its supremacy for all time (TT).

MUSICAL

Nobody Loves You (Second Stage, 305 W. 43, closes Aug. 18). The Itamar Moses-Gaby Alter pop musical about reality TV and its discontents is now playing off Broadway after a successful San Diego run. It's the smartest new musical comedy to come along since The Drowsy Chaperone, a fast-moving, parody-flecked romcom that plugs into the characters' feelings without getting bogged down in sentiment (TT).

MUSEUM

Fairfield Porter: Modern American Master (Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, N.Y., ongoing). For much of his adult life, Fairfield Porter lived and painted in Southampton, and many of his paintings belong to the permanent collection of the Parrish, which is now hanging them regularly rather than sporadically in its new building. Anyone interested in the work of one of America's most insufficiently recognized modern masters, a lifelong realist who was nonetheless deeply influenced by abstract expressionism, should hasten to Water Mill and partake of this important show (TT).

TT: Snapshot

A complete performance by New York City Ballet of George Balanchine's Western Symphony, filmed for French TV in 1956 and featuring Diana Adams and Herbert Bliss, Melissa Hayden and Nicholas Magallanes, Allegra Kent and Robert Barnett, and Tanaquil LeClercq and Jacques d'Amboise. The score, conducted by Leon Barzin, is by Hershy Kay:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries."

Clifford Odets, Golden Boy