The calf’s nose

I know that the supposed point of blogs is that they offer up-to-the-minute commentary on stuff that’s happening right now, which is why newspapers are dying and the world is ending and all, and hence, that it’s kind of pitiful to write a post about something that was in the New Yorker two weeks ago, but the thing is that until yesterday, I was convinced I would never blog this blog again. Because the other important thing I know about blogs is that they are actually completely pointless, and soon nobody will read them [does anyone read them now? –ed.], or anything else, because they’ll be too busy sending text messages from their brains or whatever.

Anyway. I read Peter Schjeldahl’s mini-review of the Met’s Courbet exhibition in the March 17th New Yorker, and it made me wish they gave out hot-shit literary prizes for pieces that are one column long and under 200 words. Because this is the loveliest writing I’ve encountered so far this year:

Edgar Degas said that looking at Gustave Courbet’s paintings made him feel as if he were being nuzzled by the wet nose of a calf. That’s an apt analogy for a tremendous Courbet retrospective that invades the Metropolitan Museum with pungencies proper to barnyards, bedrooms, and buggy dells. Courbet is the most purely forceful—because he’s forcefully impure, spitting on purity—painter of all time. (Among the Old Masters, only Tintoretto comes close.) “Realism,” his byword, describes less his method—a talented mélange of cunning and not so cunning, brazen artifices—than effects that stupefy the mind as only reality, when it overloads the senses, can. Vision is addressed, but vicarious touch and smell take delivery. Courbet’s drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towelettes. He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn’t about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show.

Fuck the man! I’m awarding a citizen’s Pulitzer! Because that is some serious knife-in-heart brio.

by Pistol Whip | 29 March 2008 | delusions of grandeur, reading | Comments