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YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB:
I AM JACK’S COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED ESSAY COLLECTION
EDITED BY READ MERCER SCHUCHARDT
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THE FIREMAN’S WIFE: A NOVEL
by JACK RIGGS
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20th-century art — Golden bars of heaven
May 29th 2008 – From The Economist print edition
The ostentation and eroticism of Gustav Klimt make him as much a painter of this century as he was of his own time, a new exhibition shows
Belvedere, Vienna
GUSTAV KLIMT was a great portrait painter whose subjects were the prosperous Viennese bourgeoisie at the start of the 20th century. His supporters were mostly young, progressive and Jewish. Together they celebrated the “ennoblement of luxury”. Now Klimt has become the flavour of this decade, not least because his work reflects another period of great prosperity in which ostentation and wealth came back in fashion. For example, a portrait from his golden period of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which is literally decorated with gold leaf and silver, is one of the costliest paintings ever sold. Ronald Lauder, a cosmetics heir and former American ambassador to Austria, is believed to have paid $135m when he bought it for his little Neue Galerie in New York in 2006.
In Britain the Tate Gallery’s Liverpool outpost has chosen Klimt for its big show while the city is the 2008 European capital of culture. This is the first, and maybe the last, major Klimt show in Britain. “It’s proved much more difficult than we expected it to be,” says Christoph Grunenberg, director of the Liverpool gallery and co-curator of the exhibition. To mount it was a bold decision that caused him sleepless nights. They were worth it.
Klimt was a leader in the revolt against the Vienna art establishment known as the Secession. The idea was to combine painting, design, architecture and music in a Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art”. The finest example is the “Beethoven Frieze” from the Secession show of 1902. Gustav Mahler provided the musical accompaniment for Klimt’s visual representation of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. A careful reconstruction of the frieze is a persuasive reason for visiting Liverpool.
It is a monumental piece on three walls, painted on heavy plasterboard, and it tells a simple story of good overcoming evil. A virtuous, gold-plated knight challenges the villainous Typhon, an ape-like figure who is fawned upon by fairly repulsive but beautifully painted women representing sickness, madness and death (Typhon’s daughters), and temptations such as lewdness, lust and excess. The style is reminiscent of the Jugendstil—or art nouveau—but the decoration comes directly from the Secession itself, for Klimt applies real gilt, coloured glass, curtain rings and mother-of-pearl as well as paint.
The last image is inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”, which is also the basis for the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. “The iconography of that climax is complex,” says Mr Grunenberg. Some critics have suggested that the naked figures of a man and woman (pictured above) surrounded by a choir of angels signify the nations of Europe coming together. It actually looks like a more human version of the same thing.
The frieze was to be destroyed at the end of the 1902 exhibition, but it was stored instead, in a shed next to a tram track where it was damaged before its restoration in the 1970s. This version was made in 1984, using Klimt’s own techniques and materials. It is a copy, but Mr Grunenberg is unapologetic: “This reproduction is absolutely justifiable because it is of such high quality.” (To see the original requires a journey to Vienna.)
The focus of the show is on Klimt, but the exhibition spreads through galleries designed to illustrate other examples of total works of art. Klimt painted the wives of clients who did up their houses with furniture and decoration made by his friends at the Wiener Werkstätte, who were, in turn, heavily influenced by the British arts and crafts movement. No detail was omitted, down to the lavatory-paper holder and the coal scuttle.
None of the works from Klimt’s golden period has travelled to Liverpool, but there are excellent examples of earlier, somewhat less extravagant domestic portraits. The last gallery in the show is titled “The World in Female Form”; it includes his Salome, high-cheeked, black-haired and utterly ruthless, and his Eve, with broad hips, chunky thighs and an expectant smile. In a small room off this gallery are examples of his easy, realistic eroticism. Klimt himself appears in various photographs, wearing a smock and a pointed beard. Although he lived with his mother and two sisters throughout his adult life, when he died there were 14 outstanding paternity suits against him, which might explain his Mephistophelean smile.
Jennie Shortridge’s BIRD GIRL, the evocative story of an Iraq vet raising his daughter in the wild, and the policewoman instructed to arrest them who instead risks everything to help them escape, to Claire Zion at NAL, for publication in Fall 2009, by Jody Rein at Jody Rein Books (NA).
The long tail is the life span of a book after the initial sales are slowing down.
The Harvard Business Review has a long essay from business school professor Anita Elberse that contrasts long tail theory with the rise of blockbusters, coming to somewhat different conclusions than Chris Anderson (or perhaps simply reinforcing Anderson’s own assertion that producers don’t make big profits from the tail, only dominant aggregators): “If you are a producer, you have pressing decisions to make about product development and marketing investments. If you are a retailer, you must decide how broad an assortment to stock and whether to guide customers toward obscure selections that may yield higher margins. In either case, your choices will vary dramatically depending on which theory you subscribe to. You won’t make the right calls unless you understand how online channels are actually changing markets.”
She further concludes: “Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail. In sales of both videos and recorded music—in many ways the perfect products to test the long-tail theory—we see that hits are and probably will remain dominant. That is the reality that should inform retailers as they struggle to offer their customers a satisfying assortment cost-efficiently. And it’s the unavoidable challenge to producers. The companies that will prosper are the ones most capable of capitalizing on individual best sellers.”
Part of the intro: “in a typical year, Grand Central Publishing…spotlights just two ‘make’ books, one fiction and one nonfiction, for which the company’s publisher is willing, in her words, to ‘pull out all the stops.’ In the fall of 2007 those books were David Baldacci’s Stone Cold and Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (and So Can You!). The effects of this strategy show up in sales figures and profits. Whereas the 61 hardcover titles Grand Central put on its 2006 front list, on average, incurred costs of $650,000 and earned gross profits of just under $100,000, a wide range of numbers contributed to those averages. Grand Central’s most heavily marketed title incurred costs of $7 million and achieved net sales of just under $12 million, for a gross profit of nearly $5 million—50 times the average.”
Anderson’s blog provides some of his own quick takes on the journal article.
Harvard
Anderson blog
Joan Aiken’s THE SERIAL GARDEN: The Complete Armitage Family Stories, the first complete collection of the beloved Armitage stories - including four new, unpublished stories; including introductions from Joan Aiken’s daughter, Lizza Aiken, and Garth Nix, to Gavin Grant at Big Mouth House, in a nice deal, for publication in October 2008, by Charles Schlessiger at Brandt & Hochman(NA)
Jesse Bering’s UNDER GOD’S SKIN: The Hidden Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life, examining how people’s everyday thoughts, behaviors and emotions betray a default tendency to reason as though God were deeply invested in their public lives and secret affairs, and describing the author’s research that provides some of the first evidence for the ‘naturalness’ of beliefs in signs, omens and the afterlife, to Angela von der Lippe at Norton, at auction, for publication in Spring 2010, by Peter Tallack at Science Factory (NA).
Loyalty experts, Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy’s THE LOYALTY CURE: The Prescription for Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life, on the challenges we face in understanding the role of loyalty in all aspects of our lives, why loyalty is disintegrating all around us, and what the benefits are in getting it right, to Glenn Yeffeth at BenBella Books, by Michael Ebeling and Kristina Holmes at Ebeling and Associates.
Erica Perl’s FOLLOWING THE NAIL, in which a fifteen-year old’s attempt to spend her summer hiding from her life with a job at a vintage clothing store is foiled by two manipulative girls and one strange boy whose secret makes her wonder if she picked the right people to trust, and WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU ORANGE JUICE, to Erin Clarke at Knopf Children’s, in a nice deal, for publication in Spring 2010, by Carrie Hannigan at Russell & Volkening (NA).
Holly Nicole Hoxter’s debut, ON THE VERGE, in which a seventeen-year-old girl’s world is turned upside down when her mother’s suicide brings the older sister she never knew back into her life, and they have to work together to raise their 5-year-old autistic brother, to Jill Santopolo at Laura Geringer Books, by Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger (world).
Jack Higgins’ two more books for teens, co-written with screenwriter and Doctor Who author Justin Richards, SHARP SHOT, the third in the series continuing the adventures of the teenage Chance twins, venturing to the deserts of the Middle East as an assassination attempt threatens international relations and a buried secret of the first Gulf War comes explosively to light, again to Gillie Russell and Nick Lake at Harper UK Children’s, by Ed Victor at Ed Victor Ltd. (with Nancy Miles representing Richards).