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Category: New York Post

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Frankly, that was plain rude

Don’t complain about the crassness of our president when you behave just as badly.


America, 2016, by Maurizio Cattelan, installed in a restroom at the Guggenheim.
The interesting thing wasn’t that someone sent me this story about the Guggenheim’s refusal to loan the Trumps a painting for the White House. The interesting thing was how manypeople sent it to me. Clearly it hit a nerve.
In brief, the Trumps requested the loan of Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 Landscape with Snow for use in their private living quarters. Curator Nancy Spector refused the loan because the painting has just come off tour. Had she left it at that, nobody would have raised an eyebrow.
But as a New York intellectual, Spector hates Donald Trump. She’s made no secret of it, using social media to trumpet her opinions. She has every right to do that.
La Nona Ora, by Maurizio Cattelan (1999), wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass, sold at Christie’s for $886,000.
But it was sophomoric and rude to offer the Trumps a gold toilet on behalf of the Guggenheim. (You can read her letter here.)
Why should major museums loan artwork for a politician’s private residence in the first place? Since the Johnson administration, presidents have been borrowing important works from major American museums. “It might be a friend, it might be a decorator … but it was someone designated by the president and first lady to come to the National Gallery of Art and choose work,” curator Mark Rosenthal toldNPR. “It’s very much [like] a kid in a candy store.” A list of the 47 pieces borrowed by the Obamas can be read here.
America, the toilet, is the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan and was installed for the past year in a public restroom on the Guggenheim’s fifth floor, intended for the use of visitors. Cattelan’s schtick is poking fun at the wealthy and powerful. His La Nona Ora (1999) shows Pope John Paul being struck down by a meteor. L.O.V.E. (2010) is a crippled hand giving the finger to the Milan stock exchange. This is the kind of thing some people think of as high-concept pranking. Apparently, they’ve never had teenaged sons.
The Ballad of Trotsky, 1996, by Maurizio Cattelan, sold in 2004 for $2.1 million.
America took $1 million in gold to create. What kind of artist can get his hands on that much gold? Only a wealthy one, or one with rich and adoring friends.
I usually ignore this stuff. I don’t admire it, any more than Nancy Spector admires what I do. But I believe in courtesy and decorum as the basis of a civilized society. Rudeness has become so unremarkable that even ladies who lunch feel free to do it. Lewd and crude commentary is the order of our day. But even those of us who did not support Trump in 2016 ought to respect the office of the Presidency and the White House.
Landscape with Snow, 1888, Vincent van Gogh. President Trump has been accused of having bad taste in art, but I too prefer this over Cattelan’s toilet.
Nancy Spector suffers from Groupthink, which means, sadly, that her snarkiness is going to be applauded, not condemned, in her insular little world. That doesn’t mean it will play in Peoria. While Spector’s gesture was meant as a slap at Trump, it’s felt by the people he represents.
Ironically, the crass and coarse President rose above the fray and did not deign to comment.
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Melania’s bimbo eruption

The Laborer Resting, oil on canvas, 36X48, Carol L. Douglas. This is a portrait of a sex worker.

“The Laborer Resting,” oil on canvas, 36X48, Carol L. Douglas. This is a portrait of a sex worker.
Apparently, we are seeing the end of Puritan America. Only in 2016 can a small bimbo eruption in the form of a potential First Lady’s nude, lesbian-themed photos make the cover of the New York Post.
I found the photos remarkably pedestrian. There is no hint of real sex in them, merely two women being the medium through which photographer Jarl Ale de Basseville wrote his sexual fantasies. The photos are stylized to absurdity. Many men who paint or draw the female nude either romanticize, stylize or desexualize the female form in this way. In the timeless words of women through history: “Men! What can you do?”
Saran Wrap Cynic, 20X24, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas. Saran Wrap speaks to the commodification of women.

“Saran Wrap Cynic,” 20X24, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas. Saran Wrap speaks to the commodification of women.
I spent a few years doing a body of work about misogyny and the toothlessness of the naked woman. My model, Michelle Long, is in fact a very strong, intelligent woman. I wanted to create something that spoke of the real state of women in this world, and she was game enough to work with me. Read anything else into those paintings and you’re projecting your own issues.
Perhaps this background colors my opinion about Melania Trump’s photos. However, they do speak to a bigger issue in sexual politics. Melania Trump’s dilemma was that even brilliant women have a hard time breaking out of a concrete housing block in Slovenia. A young lad from the Dominican Republic can escape poverty by utilizing his body to throw a baseball. Women don’t have that option.
This morning I was reading about a famous 19th century courtesan, Marie Duplessis. She was the inspiration for Verdi’s Violetta in La Traviata and the younger Dumas’ Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux CamĂ©lias, but her life story is hardly heroic.
Marie was, in fact, a severely-damaged party girl of a type we moderns know all too well. Born Rose-­Alphonsine Plessis, she was the daughter of impoverished Norman peasants. Her alcoholic father savagely beat her mother, who died when the girl was seven. Her father abandoned her the following year, reappearing periodically after she turned 11 to try to sell her to strangers. When she was 14, he made a deal for her with a notorious debaucher. She ended up abandoned in Paris, where she took up work as a laundress and shop-girl.
Consider the girl’s dilemma: she could continue to work six days a week, 13 hours a day for 22 francs a month, until she was destroyed by hard work. Or, she could accept an offer of a furnished flat and 3000 francs to do the one thing she had been trained for: sex.
The Servant, 36X40, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas.

“The Servant,” 36X40, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas.
Duplessis was a celebrity, thanks in part to her string of famous paramours, who including both Dumas and Franz Liszt. She in part set the Victorian standard for pale, ethereal beauty. Of course, this was tuberculosis, which killed her at age 23.
To the end, she was a frenetic party girl. Her coachman reported that “at the end she drank nothing but Champagne.”
“I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life,” she told her maid.
Non-marital sexuality is, too often, about power and influence. No, I don’t want my daughters showing up nude in the New York Post, but hopefully we have prepared them for better things than that.
I realize that sometimes it’s a fine line, but there is a difference between used and user. The latter should be censured; the former pitied.