October 18, 2011

"Except for the art supplies, there wasn’t a single thing in this room that would tell someone, 'Art is made here.'"

"It was kind of astounding. It was like Dylan was painting in a witness protection program."

Writes Richard Prince in the NYRB.
I didn’t ask a lot of things. I didn’t need to. I just enjoyed the experience. I liked a painting called La Belle Cascade because it looked to me like one of Cézanne’s Bathers. And Cézanne’s Bathers are some of my favorite works of art: The paint is nice and thin, like it’s been applied directly on the wall of a Roman emperor’s home. I’m not sure of the time they’re set in—it could be any time. And the geometry is interesting. It’s real. The lines break up the space as if he was anticipating Cubism.
Oh, really? Well, you know, speaking of geometry, did you hear about the time the geometry of innocence flesh on the bone caused Galileo’s math book to get thrown at Delilah who was sitting worthlessly alone? The tears on her cheeks were from laughter.

19 comments:

Bob_R said...

Except for all the blood and the body on the floor you would never know that a murder had been committed there.

traditionalguy said...

One suspects Dylan was living with Baez wat the time he wrote those lines. She could drive anyone into expressions that affirm they were still free.

ricpic said...

No Minnesota long nosed round eyes for Dylan, no siree, only asiatics or orientals or whatever the hell the PC term is for exotics because only exotics are worthy to the sensitive set.

Anonymous said...

Oh come on, by now the mutters about Dylan's copying of photographs as a bsis for these paintings are loud enough to hear through walls.

edutcher said...

Have to say I like the drawing in the article.

Anonymous said...

Here:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/09/is-bob-dylan-a-plagiarist.html

Ann Althouse said...

@Josh I've seen all the stuff about plagiarism: Dylan used photographs made by others, and it's very obvious. There was so much writing about that subject that I chose not to jump in. Dylan's lifted stuff in music all along. He's not even trying to make a big deal of being a painter. I couldn't get jazzed up about it, and the fact that so many people were doing the subject turned me away from it.

Ann Althouse said...

If everyone's talking about something and you wonder why I'm not...

It's like Yogi Berra once said: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

ndspinelli said...

A once in a lifetime occurrence..Dylan and Yogi in the same post! What's next, Keith Richards and Satchell Paige? Satch has many great quotes also.

Amexpat said...

Sometimes following Dylan is a bit like watching the last scene in "The Usual Suspects", where Verbal's story is revealed to be a hoax woven from random objects.

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets

cassandra lite said...

"Take a load off, Annie. They''re selling postcards of the hanging."

Sigivald said...

Is this "Dylan" some historical artistic figure?

Indigo Red said...

Early on in blogging, I thought of writing under the name Tom B. Stone.

Mumpsimus said...

"anticipating Cubism" a hundred years after the movement began is quite a trick.

Palladian said...

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while. But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues... you can tell by the way she smiles

sakredkow said...

Solzhenitsyn thought art was the antidote to violence and falsehood.

rcocean said...

Isn't Bob a Dreamboat?

Valentine Smith said...

Wow, nearly 12 hours and only 17 comments. Dylan has fallen. or, he's too too something or other.

Dylan reworked and worded a couple of Irish songs by the Clancy Bros etc—Pretty Peggy Oooooooo—the Maid of Fife, which the mick Clancys, or rather the mick Makem and his mom lifted from the Scots. Hah! What goes round comes round.

Dylan really does have or did have genius—in the Renaissance sense. A supreme marketer and channeler of culture, small c not haut, wide but not too deep, with just enough snob appeal to appeal to those unsure of the yeah, yeah, yeah of the workin' class Liverpuds. I'm convinced he has no idea what most of his lyrics mean. And still I love him.

I like the Kitchenette. Captures the Bushido and geisha spirits.

Bayoneteer said...

I remember way back in the 70's reading one of AJ Weberman's first garbology-based articles in Rolling Stone on Bob Dylan. Dylan had done a number of pen & inks of the then recently dead Jimi Hendrix and even crumbled up and mixed in with the coffee grounds and floor sweepings and other detritus I thought them remarkable. Quite apart from the market for Dylan memorabilia I thought they were good enough to print and sell. The accompanying pics of the Dylan household's trash were more memorable to me than the article itself.