La Llorona

Two tributes to Frida Kahlo (6 July 1907 - 13 July 1954), one sung by Raphael, the other by Chavela Vargas.

America's Jazz Diplomacy Revisited

When America finds itself on the defensive on the PR front, it puts its talented -- and preferably Black -- tenth forward. During the Cold War, it sent its best jazz musicians -- Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other geniuses -- on international tours, whose photographs are now on display in the exhibition titled "Jam Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World" at the Meridian International Center.

"Louis Armstrong in Cairo in 1961," Louis Armstrong House Museum

Reviewing the exhibition, Fred Kaplan reports that "Curtis Sandberg, the curator at Meridian International, said that during the three years it took to prepare the show his staff would frequently gaze at the photos and say, 'Why aren't we doing something like this now?'"¹

But cultural power rises and falls with economic power, and American culture no longer enjoys the same edge -- the ability to combine innovation and mass appeal, drawing upon cultures of Blacks and immigrants, and market its products worldwide -- it did at the height of the Cold War.

Today jazz in America is for connoisseurs, not for masses. The largest film industry in the world is Bollywood, whose films, salacious and yet demure ("[f]ilmmakers in India are banned from glorifying drinking, drug abuse and smoking, or including scenes 'degrading or denigrating women in any manner'"), are "popular in regions where Hollywood has had only limited success, like the Middle East."² Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism could be plausibly promoted as "free enterprise painting" (in the worlds of then MOMA President Nelson Rockefeller) superior to Soviet socialist realism, but Jeff Koons and his ilk can only serve as a test of what the market bears. As for literature, even English professors would get stumped if they were asked to come up with the ten most influential American writers alive today in whom the rest of the world ought to take interest.

The only field of culture in which America truly eclipses all others may be the art of self fashioning. That's what Barack Obama is good at,³ and that's what he sells. So far, it's sold very well in America. Will the rest of the world buy it, though?

1 Fred Kaplan, "When Ambassadors Had Rhythm," New York Times, 29 June 2008. The historical facts in Kaplan's article are based on Penny M. Von Eschen's excellent research: Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Cornell UP, 1997); and Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2004). See, also, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2001).

2 Thomas Fuller, "It's Bollywood!/'They Can't Compete with Us in Emotions': Indian Movies Speak to a Global Audience," International Herald Tribune, 20 October 2000.

3 Matt Taibbi on the art of being Obama:

Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliché, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Even when Hillary announced she was running for president, she sounded like she was ordering coffee. Obama on the other hand can close his eyes and the clichés just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term bullshit artist. ("Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton," AlterNet, 14 February 2008)

John Singer Sargent at War

John Singer Sargent was born on 12 January 1856. He was an official war artist in 1918, commissioned to paint a work symbolizing cooperation between Britain and America during World War 1. A leading portraitist of high society, he was not known for his interest in politics, and yet his paintings of war allow the viewer to glimpse the Janus-faced brotherhood of warriors in class society and its political implications.

Take his "Gassed" and "Tommies Bathing."

Gassed, 1918


Tommies Bathing, 1918

It is solidarity with comrades, much more than loyalty to an abstract idea of nation or obedience to their superiors, that keeps men at war.

"He didn't have to go to Iraq. He chose to go. He wanted to be with his brothers." These are the words of the clearly distraught and heartbroken mother of Thomas, a marine recently killed in Iraq, describing her son's fatal decision to extend his enlistment in order to deploy with his unit. Of course, his family tried to convince him otherwise, but Thomas was adamant that "abandoning" his comrades as they headed into harm's way was not an option. . . . We fight, then, neither to achieve victory nor to kill an "enemy." We fight and, like Thomas, we die, because we love and could not live with the guilt and the shame of abandoning our brothers. (Camillo Mac Bica, "The Brotherhood of Warriors: The Love That Binds Us" MRZine, 19 March 2007)

In other words, the ruling class grasp what is best and noblest in men, their love for one another; mutilate it by excluding the Other -- enemy soldiers and civilians and homosexuals in their own ranks, for instance -- from men's love; and exploit it for their profit. "Gassed" reveals the physical and spiritual consequences of mutilated and exploited love; "Tommies Bathing" shows what love can be in a world without war.

Marjane Satrapi Speaks

Marjane Satrapi talks about Persepolis on Bebin.TV:

Revenge of Socialist Realism

Ken MacLeod, a superb Red science fiction writer, says in his blog: "Socialist Realist art now commands higher prices than that of the dissidents and the Western-imitative official art of perestroika. The market has taken an ironic revenge on its votaries" ("Enduring Art," The Early Days of a Better Nation, January 9, 2005). You don't believe it? Elena Borissova gives you a glimpse of appreciating market values of Socialist Realism: "Reviled for more than a generation as mere Stalinist propaganda, Socialist Realism is now firing interest among canny Western collectors. Over the last 12 months, Sotheby’s has marked up record prices for Russian paintings. One canvas by Michael Nesterov made £600,000 -- five times the reserve price" ("Art Revolution Fired by the Ghosts of Socialism," Camden New Journal, January 22, 2004). New valuations of Socialist Realist art have been made possible by new critical evaluations of it (for an overview, see Marek Bartelik, "Concerning Socialist Realism: Recent Publications on Russian Art," Art Journal, Winter 1999).

Is the boom in Socialist Realist art merely the latest fashion in the art market and criticism, an example of capitalism's voracious appetite for colonizing all things still outside the market and commodifying them as profitable novelties? In part, yes. That's not the only story, however. For instance, revaluation of Alexandr Deineka, whose art straddles the Constructivist and Socialist Realist schools, is certainly overdue:

Alexandr Deineka, "Before Descending into the Mines" (1925)

Even more conventionally Socialist Realist artists, whose works (as well as Deineka's) are currently on display at the Smithsonian’s International Gallery, created a number of remarkable pieces, expressing myriad moods of everyday Soviet life -- from bottomless grief of "Black Lake," urban loneliness of "Waiting," sensuous serenity of "Floor Polisher," to wordless longing of "Morning" -- in a wide range of styles irreducible to the proletarian heroic mode.

Nikolai M. Romadin, "Black Lake," 22 5/8 x 32 3/8, Oil on Board (1946, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)


Yuri I. Pimenov, "Waiting," 23 5/8 x 31 1/2, Oil on Canvas (1959, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)


Petr P. Konchalovski, "Floor Polisher," 66 5/8 x 55 3/4, Oil on Canvas (1946, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)


Geli Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev, "Morning," 31 1/4 x 21 1/4, Oil on Canvas (1958, a Private American Collection)

Leon Golub's Disasters of War

"Disappear You" (2001) by Leon Golub

Maureen Clare Murphy writes in The Electronic Intifada:

When I saw the images of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib, I felt as though I had already visually experienced it in the visceral work of American artist Leon Golub. In the brutal imagery of Golub’s paintings, all too familiar figures appear: gun-toting mercenaries delight in the misery of those they torture; dogs snarl and threaten boxed-in prisoners. The painting “The Black Does Not Stop the Killing,” in which a pistol-wielding military man grabbing the arm of an unseen figure is partially blocked out by black paint, reminds us that media blackouts and ignorance of international affairs don’t mean that such violence ceases to exist. ("Pictures of War: Conflicts and Dates May Change, But the Imagery and Inhumanity Stay the Same," 20 May 2004)

"Interrogation" (1981) by Leon Golub


"The Black Does Not Interrupt The Killing" (2002) by Leon Golub

"I'm not going to change our country. . . . I'm not trying to influence people as much as trying to make a record. I like the notion of reportage. I hope that in 50 or 100 years from now my work will still be telling a record of what Americans were doing in terms of force, domination, world interest. It's not a large part of history, but it's a crucial part." -- Leon Golub, qtd. in Edward J. Sozanski, "The Killing Feel," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 June 2004