Sprezzatura

Posted on May 31, 2010 by kmazz

Reading Robert Calasso’s “Tiepolo Pink” this week, I was encouraged to give some thought to that very Italian quality, sprezzatura.  Calasso uses it as a conceit, or a prism through which to view the entire body of work by the painter, something I for one had never considered doing.

“For those looking for an example of sprezzatura, no one is likely to be more convincing than Tiepolo, who for a lifetime did his utmost to conceal, behind his blinding speed of execution, the subtly aberrant nature of his subjects to the point that he succeeded in having his most daring and enigmatic works, the Scherzi, passed off as facile amusements…Even when meanings gather densely in his images with brazen insolence, Tiepolo never abandons the air of someone who does things ‘without effort and almost without thinking.”

Calasso seems to believe that sprezzatura in art died with Tiepolo.  Maybe so, but sprezzatura is alive and well in daily life in Tiepolo’s home country. It is the art of being artful without breaking a sweat, a perpetual nonchalance in all things. It is why you never see Italians running to cross the street even when cars are bearing down on them. Or why they never show up for an appointment, be it for business or travel, or to meet with their children’s teachers, earlier than that nanosecond when the clock strikes. It is Italian children in the playground who never show the slightest trace of dirt on their well-turned out outfits. Or, most irritatingly, it is why Italians walk ahead of any queue to get to the front of the line as if they were so entitled, and get away with it. It’s the opposite of Lady GaGa, Basquiat, Marina Abramowicz or Al Pacino and there’s hardly any place for it anywhere in the world anymore except in Italy.  It is the essential “Made In Italy” and inimitable, even by the Chinese.

However free from care sprezzatura may seem,  behind this graceful facade is a mountain of work and  a lifetime of obedience to unwritten rules. Rules one absorbs by osmosis, by the village’s collective rebuke if one trips up and strays outside the confines of behavior, or by squeals of mean children who are so sensitive to figura, or face.

The finished product is enchanting, but to attain it there is a price and most of us will not pay it.  Instead, we’ll admire it as we would a priceless work of art.

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The ending

Posted on January 25, 2010 by kmazz

One winter night among friends recently the unthinkable was spoken: it is quite possible the last 50 years or so in the West have been an anomaly in the history of humankind, not to be repeated in our or our children’s lifetimes. In other words, it’s been a long time since pinching pennies was a way of life with all its attendant squalor.  It’s literally been ages since we didn’t take for granted pleasures like regular travel, trucked-in food and daily hot showers.

It wasn’t just the financial system breakdown that fed our thinking. The threat of climate change, violent clashes between cultures, natural disasters, poor leaders and our inability to rely on what have become  ungovernable states were among other things to consider.

I have to admit to a subsequent high level of anxiety that had me up early in the morning pondering the imponderable. It didn’t help that the Haiti earthquake devastated the island and that here we were able to venture out in January without coats.

What are the historical precedents for life without the well being we’ve come to expect?  They aren’t encouraging; lots of warfare, centuries of Dark Ages, most people trading some form of enslavement for security while remaining poor, dirty and hungry, minds trapped in an abysmal, debasing ignorance.  But surely 20th century progress could not be breached to an extent that humans would relive the distant past to that extent?  Maybe we’ll just be driving over more potholes and cutting back to basic cable service.

After all, we have the Internet, community has our back, the artisanal movement has made us more resourceful, the US has an intelligent President again, greed is over.

But the reality is that it is difficult for those of us so privileged to bring to mind what that life could really be like.  Luckily there are enough people who have lived through collapse to advise us. One such collapse gurus is Dimitry Orlov, survivor of the demise of the Soviet Union. After hearing his account, I crossed a rubicon of the mind. Suddenly I could imagine life after a collapse a lot more clearly. You really don’t want to go there.  But perhaps you must. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that I might want to buy a gun.

Some artists already have imagined this kind of scenario and beyond. This fictional diary by Helen Simpson is set in 2040 as ecological systems perish and people are left to fend for themselves. The protagonist describes each descent into a gradually deeper and deeper level of hell, until she is left irrevocably altered and traumatized, alone and wandering with no sense of tomorrow.  Unlike some heroes of recent apocalyptic entertainment, she doesn’t have anyone to live for except herself and it may not be enough.

At times of change artists and intellectuals can act as bellwethers, freeing us to talk about ideas that remain under the surface, taboo, unspeakable. Witness the role of the early German expressionists prior to WWI. While statesmen were earnestly assuring citizens of Europe that war was not on the horizon, they seemed to know momentum existed for a devastating conflict.  Can our advanced civilization write a new page for the history books?

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Musings on Bloomsday

Posted on June 16, 2009 by kmazz

Joyce abbott17Today is Bloomsday, the date of Leopold Bloom’s meanderings and musings through Dublin as created by James Joyce in the great 20th century novel, “Ulysses.”

I’ve been revisiting some of my youthful passions lately — France, European painting, foreign art films, hours spent daydreaming over a world atlas — and Joyce is one of them. In fact, during my college years I was one of those irritating Joyce fanatics. I threw a birthday party for Joyce one Groundhog Day (Joyce was proud of the association with this iconic rodent).

During that period, I made a visit to relatives in Trieste, where Joyce spent 11 tumultuous, penurious years writing the novel before decamping for Paris and fame.  He also perfected his mastery of Italian and the Triestine dialect there, made friends among the multi-cultural polyglots of the former Austian-Hungarian port city who deeply influenced his thinking about his main themes, language and exile, and began a lifelong indulgence in crisp white wines. Imagine my delight when I found myself walking down one of the stone staircases built against the city’s many steep hills and noticed the plaque at the end marking it as the “Scala James Joyce.” (The city later ignominiously renamed the staircase something more nationalistic and bland.)

Imagine my further delight when I spotted a copy of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus’ book in an aunt’s library.  Stanislaus followed James to Trieste and settled in for the rest of life, becoming an English teacher at the university. Said aunt had studied with him. I was TWO DEGREES REMOVED. That night before bed I looked out the window and saw my first shooting star.  (Remember: this was during my youth.)

Language and exile: two themes that have been in constant play in my own life and probably underscored my attraction to Joyce.  I’ve lived through countless moves on four continents and my parents were immigrants.  But of course, that’s true for so many people.  Maybe that’s the abiding allure of the story of Joyce, how we relate to his experience of exile and the fact that in the end it resulted not in misery but a new art and the opening of a new frontier of the mind.

For my entire adult life I’ve been engulfed in radical changes. It’s a blessing and curse, no? But what it has had the potential to do is exile old ways of thinking, and create opportunity for continuous enlightenment. I’m still getting there.

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Ciao Firenze

Posted on May 17, 2009 by kmazz

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It’s like an overgrowth of algae, too much of a good thing. An infestation of indestructible pests. A herd of Michelango fans. A party of gelato seekers.  A siege of shoppers.

What they miss in descending on Florence in droves is any idea of the pleasures Italy’s Renaissance capital used to offer as an experience, one for which I suffer a desperate nostalgia.

The great works of art were seen in a context that is forever gone. The living city that was Florence then has been transformed into an open air museum, with many commercial enterprises complicit in crassly merchandising a unique artistic heritage. Instead of small family owned shops specializing in artisanal goods circling the Duomo, there is a crowded gelateria every few steps, a “typical Tuscan” trattoria betraying its true intent in its bland, watered down table wine, and the ubiquitous tourist mart selling obsence renderings of the David and other useless knick knacks. You can’t orient yourself along the streets, each one notable for its historic landmarks, because of the crowds blocking sightlines, scarring the views like the graffitti defacing the buildings themselves.

Yes, it is a very good thing for travelers that the churches and museums are now open for more hours in a day, even if the price of entry is higher. Yes, it remains important to go, just once or twice, if you love art and want to add to your personal catalog of important works seen.  But Florence today, despite its rightful prosperity, has been deprived of what is ineffable, immeasurably valuable, and probably irretrievable.  It is what used to cause visitors to return again and again. I’m referring to its core — the unmerchandisable authentic Tuscan-ness.  It was expressed in Florence’s pride in being the safeguard of treasures, in its heritage as a center of craft, its ability — developed over centuries! — to suggest to visitors the meaningful rituals of a human-centered daily life, in its unstated curatorial role as an arbiter of balance in all things, and the assurance that its local culture held values of relevance to their nation and the world.

Sad to say, it is as much my fault as theirs. How many times have I gone? Countless. Before Ryan Air’s one euro flights brought the sun-starved northern European masses to Italy on every day of the year and destroyed the concept of “off season”,  I enjoyed a rather elite status when I visited Florence. However, I liked it the way it was, without asking for more gelato or a less frustrating bureaucracy at the museum board.  The shortcomings made up a fair price to pay to be able to take a desultory stroll, that would inevitable yield discoveries, in the silent repose of the midday pause which today doesn’t even exist.

Today there are just too many of us. We’re a murder of tourists.

Add to that a nest of thieves. My last activity before retiring to my hotel to prepare for the next day’s flight was to hop on a city bus, where I was very professionally and cleanly robbed of my wallet.  The municipal elections are focused on issues of crime and loss of quality of life.

So I for one volunteer to no longer be part of the problem. Ciao.

(photo courtesy CiuPix, Flickr)

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The future of public relations

Posted on April 24, 2009 by kmazz

My guest post on Tom Foremski’s Silicon Valley Watcher today.

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