Editor’s Letter: The Art of the Matter

On the subject of art, you’ve heard the skeptic standing in front of, say, an Alexander Liberman “Circle Painting,” ponder, “Well, I know what I like. But is it art?” Or is it just a circle that a Montessori geometry teacher may have rendered in oil on canvas with a protractor for a brush? When is a urinal a urinal, and not a Duchamp “readymade,” and so on?

Tom Wolfe had plenty to say on this matter in his 1975 treatise The Painted Word, with criticism of the hallowed gallery and museum world that still resonates today. Referring to the over-intellectualization of modern art, Wolfe wrote, “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction,” making the art world Picassoblue
in the face. “The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”

Posed with the mission to conceive a mostly “arts” issue, we thought, shouldn’t every issue be an arts issue in the sum of its parts? Art isn’t paintings and sculptures and drawing and mixed media, exclusively (although it’s a good start, and we’re for all of them). It’s the canvas of popular culture we’ve been traversing and refining with each pound of tree flesh we send out monthly.

In this issue, there’s the art of comedy (Steve Coogan, who sends up the world of the stage in his new film Hamlet 2). There is the art of the “oral history,” where, elsewhere in these pages, Associate Editor Nick Haramis celebrates the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, by talking to many of his equally illustrious friends and cohorts.

At its best, fashion is art, and our anti-jazz-hands story inspired by Bob Fosse’s 1969 film debut, Sweet Charity, rises to the occasion. It is showtime, spot on. As does our accessories piece inspired by those fabled “key parties” from the swinging ’70s, when the Bicentennial year of 1976 stood for multiple sex partners, often “liberating” thy neighbor’s wife.

Just to ensure that we still are patrons of the conventional arts, we’ve included our own BlackBook gallery of up-and-comers—although, true to our belief that intuition, not schooling, can still get you “there,” one of our subjects (who paints guns and roses) has owned and operated a BBQ juke joint in Manhattan’s meat district for the past decade.

And there is our cover subject, America Ferrera, a self-styled artist and work of art if there be. See her beauty and hear her candidness on page 50.

This is my adieu. I’m appropriating a Rosenquist in my airport hangar as we speak in Lantana, Florida, while pulling a Schnabel à la Guernica on a friend’s courtyard Henry Moore. Say hello to Ray Rogers, our former Features Editor, who will be more than ably taking over the pop culture and style gallery, alongside Creative Director Bryan Erickson. You’re in good hands. They both collect serial killers’ art. And anything rendered in velvet or clamshells.