The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Broad Museum

Eli and Edythe Broad are billionaires (he builds houses) who collect art. Since their billion-dollar collection long ago outgrew even their array of homes, they decided to build their own museum in Los Angeles. Like the robber barons of old, or J. Paul Getty, they wish to leave their own mark on the world of art. Allow me to mark the opening of this horror by setting aside all my attempts to be positive about the world and letting out a scream of protest.

Ok, fine, the Broads (they pronounce the name Brode, should you be trapped in a conversation about them) have their taste, I have mine. Whatever. But the sort of crap they collect and are foisting on the public sums up everything I hate about contemporary art. We are talking about the people with the world's largest private collection of works by Jeff Koons, including the masterpiece above. I am going to lay my cards on the table now and take a bold stand: art should be something more than a lame joke.

The Broads started collecting around 1980, and they have mainly focused on new work. They have reached back in time to acquire some works by big name artists, but their taste in mid century art is just as awful as their taste in contemporary work. They have 42 works by Jasper Johns (above), 28 by Andy Warhol (including a soup can, of course)

and 34 by Roy Lichtenstein (above), but none by Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler or Clyfford Still.

Their taste in paintings runs toward messy junk. Rather than bold, simple images, they like things that look like walls of graffiti. Like Basquiat (above)

or Cy Twombly

or Robert Rauschenberg. Nothing by David Hockney or any of the other contemporary painters I love.

They have lots of clever photographs by people like Chuck Close, Gregory Crewdson and Cindy Sherman (above), none by any of the amazing photographers who make beautiful pictures of the world: Sebastião Salgado, Frans Lanting, Steve McCurry, Orsolya Haarberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto.

(They do have some nice flower pictures by Robert Mapplethorpe, who also did portraits of both Broads.)

They also like messy, junky art in three dimensions, by people like Bruce Nauman (above),

Kiki Smith,

and David Burden. Nothing by Andy Goldsworthy, Marc Perez, Kay Sekimachi, Santiago Caltrava, or Peter Callesen. And if you want strange, junky art, why not Kris Kuksi?

The Broads focused mainly on American art, with some British, although they do have 13 works by Anselm Kiefer. The only African artist represented is El Anatsui; there are, you know, other artists in Africa. How about Julien Sinzogan or Elias Sime? Instead they have Japanese pop culture crap by Takashi Murakami (above).

The Broads like art that is cool, with it, in the know, clever, wry, ironic. And that, it seems to me, is the sort of art that mainly dominates the contemporary art scene. Yes, there are spiritually serious artists in the top rank, notably Kiefer. And even the Broad has a few works that are beautiful, like one of Damien Hirst's butterfly windows. But in the main they shun anything that seems deep or beautiful. That, they seem to feel, is boring; if I had to express in a few words the principle on which this collection is based, it would be a terror of boredom. There must be noise, excitement, words, colors, a whole Times Square of distractions: anything but simple contemplation, simple appreciation of something lovely or arrestingly strange.

Is that the best we can do? Instead of the Gothic world's sacred architectonics, or the heroic self assertion of the Renaissance, all we have is attention deficit syndrome? Not only is this sick, it isn't even true. There is wonderful, beautiful art being made all over the world, art with spiritual intensity, demonic fervor, meditative grace, amazing beauty, eye-opening vision, political rage, a vast range of emotions all but missing from the Broad's glitzy array of expensive crap. Could we please have a museum devoted to beauty, wonder, and terror, not another temple of noise?

More Bad News for Republican Insiders

The latest NY Times/CBS News poll of likely Republican primary voters shows Trump still advancing, neurosurgeon Ben Carson rocketing into contention, and everyone else in big trouble. Jeb Bush has lost more than half of his support,and Scott Walker has slid all the way down to 2%.

One thing to note: suppose Trump eventually flames out, and Republicans realize that Hillary would eat Ben Carson for breakfast. Who is positioned to pick up the pieces? Could it be Marco Rubio in the corner, smiling in his awesome suit? He is certainly lucky enough.

Scott Walker's Plan for Workers

Kevin Drum pulls out the key passages from Scott Walker's plan to "empower" workers:

union bosses and the politicians they puppet....power to the people, not the union bosses....reduce the power of union bosses....big-government union bosses....big-government union bosses....Individuals should not have to pay union bosses....union bosses a legal monopoly over collective bargaining....mandatory dues to the union bosses....pay artificially high wages to union bosses.

flexibility, choice, and innovation in the workplace....free enterprise and workplace flexibility....flexibility to join a union or not....protect workplace flexibility....flexibility to balance work and life commitments....repeal any regulation that reduces employee flexibility....protect workplace flexibility.

So, smash the union bosses and then get rid of all those big government regulations that reduce "flexibility," things like overtime rules and minimum wages and such.

Just to let you know how I feel about Scott Walker: I would rather have Donald Trump as my president than Walker. I absolutely despise the man. He hates unions, universities, poor people, and any action the government might take to improve the lives of ordinary people; he loves rich people, sports stars, and watching the poor suffer. And he is very dangerous. The one good thing about Trump's rise is that he has pushed Walker to the sidelines, especially in Iowa, a state Walker's people thought they had to win and could win. So, go Donald. Anything to keep Walker out of power.

The Skeleton and the Tree

Archaeologists like tree-throws; I have found several sites by inspecting the soil clinging to the roots of downed trees, and one of the best sites I have worked on was found because of a tree throw that boasted three stone spear points and a large, decorated potsherd. But I never found a tree throw like this:

Interesting news from Collooney in Co. Sligo where archaeologists working for Sligo-Leitrim Archaeological Services (on behalf of the National Monuments Service) have discovered an early medieval skeleton in unusual circumstances. The body was identified earlier this year beneath a 200 year old beech tree that had blown down during a storm. Slightly bizarrely, the upper part of the skeleton was found raised in the air, within the tree’s up-turned root system, while the legs were still in the ground.

The skeleton was of a young man who died by violence some time between 1030 and 1200 CE.

From the Irish Archaeology Blog.

Yuan Dynasty Zodiac Animals, ca. 1300

From Kaikodo Gallery.

Huan Hsu, The Porcelain Thief

Huan Hsu in an American-born Chinese journalist who spent the first 25 years of his life trying to shed his Chinese ancestry and be as American as possible, "A rebellion that included working harder at sports than math and refusing to apply to Harvard." His interest in his family's Chinese past was piqued by a porcelain dish in the Seattle Art Museum. The dish was decorated with a square of 64 Chinese characters that the museum had not translated, so he asked his father what it said. It was a poem by the 18th-century Qianlong Emperor, his father told him, praising the artistry of the dish's makers at the imperial porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen. "One more thing," his father said, "Your mother's family once had some porcelain. You should ask her about it."

This chance encounter with a porcelain dish launched Hsu on a decade-long journey into his family's past. The porcelain in question belonged to Hsu's great-great-grandfather Liu Feng Shu (1867-1951), an educated man and small-time landlord in the Yangtze River town of Jiujiang. Jiujiang was the port at which porcelain from Jingdezhen was loaded onto river boats, so crates of dishes were always passing through the town. According to family stories, people who wanted to curry favor with Landlord Liu regularly gave him presents of porcelain, and he built up on impressive collection. When the Japanese advanced up the Yangtze in 1938, Liu buried the porcelain and his other valuables in his garden and fled, spending most of the war in Chongqing. He came back home in 1946 but with he civil war waging around him, the porcelain stayed buried. Some of Liu's grandchildren were Kuomintang officials, and after the Communist victory in 1949 the family was divided; some went to Taiwan or America, while others remained in China. Those who stayed in China were persecuted because of their landlord status, and of course their land was seized. A cotton mill was built over the house, and the porcelain was lost.

The Porcelain Thief (2015) describes Hsu's attempts to rediscover the lost porcelain. This takes him to China, first as an employee of his uncle's chip manufacturing company (he comes from a high-achieving family). As he slowly improves his Chinese and his knowledge of Chinese culture, he looks up his elderly relatives in China and Taiwan and talks to them about their past. He learns that the heart of his family in the war years was Landlord Liu's three granddaughters, born between 1911 and 1921. Liu was a very progressive man for his time, and he had his daughter and grand-daughters educated at the Rulison School, a girls' high school in Nanchang founded by American missionaries. At times these women all worked as teachers themselves, and their work helped keep the family fed and together. Some time in the late 1940s Liu heard one of his neighbors bemoaning the birth of a daughter; he said, "Don't regret having daughters, it was my granddaughters who helped me the most."

Hsu is ambivalent about China. He is put off by the rudeness, the shoving, the car horns, the rampant destruction of everything old and beautiful, the politics, the naked ambition to get rich at any price. But he is also attracted to the energy and sense of hope that he finds everywhere. After studiously avoiding learning anything about China in his youth, he becomes fascinated with the events through which his family lives. One of the best things about the book is that it recreates, to some extent, Hsu's initial ignorance and gradually increasing knowledge. In the twentieth century China experienced as much history in a century has anyplace ever has, and the experience of Hsu's family brings much of it to life. It is not as good a book as Jung Chang's Wild Swans, another family chronicle that I think is the best book on modern China. But I found it worth my while.

I especially enjoyed Hsu's journey to the porcelain city of Jingdezhen. My daughter Clara was born somewhere near Jingdezhen and spent part of her first year in the orphanage there. Plus, the whole place is an archaeological site, the soil full of porcelain sherds from the past thousand years. After nearly disappearing in the de-nationalization of the 1990s, porcelain is coming back in the city, which is good to know; some traditions should not die.

Chimp vs. Drone

Tushi, a chimpanzee who lives at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands, does not like drones. Amusing short video here.

That Explains a Lot

A clarifying announcement from NBC:

Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace Donald Trump as host of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’

I feel like I can place Trump more accurately now.

Roger F and the History of Swearing

When Deadwood was a big hit on television, acquaintances sometimes asked me if people really talked like that on the nineteenth-century frontier. I always said, we have no idea. We simply have no decent records of how ordinary people talked before the twentieth century. We do know that written and spoken language were different because sometimes people would use one word in print while broadly hinting that another word was intended. (E.g., the famous line that the Vice Presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.) But how much people swore, and in what contexts, is all but unknowable.

Here, though, is a nice example from the fourteenth century:

Paul Booth, a historian at Keele University in England, found three examples dating from 1310 and 1311 of a man known in legal documents as Roger Fuckebythenavel.

Booth said he believes Roger was not the bearer of a very unfortunate family name, but rather it was given to him derogatorily.

"This surname is presumably a nickname," Booth told Medievalists.net. "I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit,’ i.e., a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it."

I predict that Roger will soon have one of the most famous names in English history.

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin: Paper Architecture

It can't have been much fun to be an architect in Soviet Russia:

Restrictions on aesthetics, quality building materials, and access to skilled labor resulted in poorly designed structures void of inspiration that were practically destined to crumble. Architects with any shred of ambition were severely limited by communist bureaucracy and were often outright penalized for their ideas. Desperately seeking a creative outlet, these constrained artists and designers turned instead to paper.

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin were two creative architects who chafed under this system. So from 1978 to 1993 they carried on a project of designing fantastic structures on paper, many of which have now been published in a book. A sample here; more at This is Colossal. (Above, A Hill with a Hole.)

Villa Nautilus: Bulwark of Resistance.

Dwelling House of Winnie the Pooh in a Big Modern City.

Green University by Vo Trong Nghia Architects

Design by Vo Trong Nghia Architects for a new university campus in Saigon. I certainly find concrete modernism more bearable when it's covered with trees. I wonder, though, what upkeep of this place will be like over time. Will the trees have to be replaced when they get too big and their roots start tearing up the courtyard? But anyway I spent an hour this weekend reading architecture news sites and this was the most attractive building I saw. When is modernism finally going to die?

Anti-Americanism in Russia

Sabrina Tabernise has an interesting view of rising anti-Americanism in Russia:

During my visit, Russians were thinking about America a lot, which was a kind of compliment, but in the way of a spurned lover who keeps sending angry texts long after the breakup.

“Tell her how well we all live, how much better than in Europe and how wonderful Crimea is now,” hissed a woman in a skintight dress to someone I was interviewing. She was referring to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed last year. That of course, was the other big change I encountered.

Inside Russia, Mr. Putin’s actions in Crimea have broken friendships and split families, leaving society as divided as I have ever seen it. Politics, once everyone’s obsession, now seems like a distant land no one visits. Those who do, pay a price. Mr. Gudkov said he felt like “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany” when he opposed the Crimea annexation.

The move also caused the biggest break in relations with the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“It’s like a divorce,” said Keith Darden, a political-science professor at American University. “They are saying: ‘the relationship we had is over. We’ve had enough of your efforts to change us. We’re doing our own thing now.’ ”

He added, “But they don’t know what their own thing is.”

That's how things seem to me, anyway. Many Russians feel that they somehow lost the Cold War, and the humiliation of defeat almost always seems to create a depressed mood. The crazy ups and downs of both politics and the economy in Russia since 1990 haven't helped. All of this pressure creates a desire to lash out at something, or in some other way to change the situation and make Russia a winner again. Putin and his circle have manipulated this feeling, of course, but they are also captive to it. They want somehow to restore Russian greatness, but have only vague notions of what that might mean, beyond standing up to the U.S. in whatever way they can.

Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth

Margalit Fox is a journalist with no special knowledge of archaeology or linguistics, but she has managed to write a pretty good book about the decipherment of Linear B. The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013) tells the whole story but focuses on the contributions of American classicist Alice Kober, who did a lot of the grinding preparatory work that allowed Michael Ventris to achieve his breakthrough of 1952.

Bits of writing began to turn up as soon as archaeologists began poking into Mycenaean sites in Greece, in the 1870s. But these early inscriptions were so brief that some questioned whether they were writing at all. One of the believers was Heinrich Schliemann, which probably did not help persuade skeptics. Another was English archaeologist Arthur Evans. Evans, backed by a large personal fortune, set about collecting gemstone seals with such writing on them in the antiquities markets of Athens. The dealers told him that the best such seals came from Crete, so off to Crete Evans went.

In 1900 Evans began excavating at Knossos, the most famous pre-classical site on the island. Almost immediately, his excavators began to find tablets bearing ancient script. Within a few years Evans had hundreds of tablets, and three different writing systems: one that looked like ideograms or hieroglyphs (above), and two similar but nonetheless distinct systems of signs that Evans called Linear A and Linear B. Linear B was much the more common.

Evans set to work trying to translate the tablets. All of the tablets appeared to be bureaucratic records, mainly lists or inventories. Evans quickly worked out the numbering system, since several tablets included lists of numbers with a figure at the bottom that was clearly the total. From the number of signs, around 80, Evans deduced that the system syllabic, each sign representing a syllable. But there he stuck. He kept banging his head against the problem for the next 40 years, with little to show for it. Because he was determined to solve the problem himself, he was very grudging about sharing his tablets with other scholars; as late as 1945, only 200 of the more than 2,000 Linear B inscriptions in Evans' possession had been published.

But with those 200 inscriptions, other scholars went to work. One of them was Michael Ventris, who vowed to decipher the script at 14 after a school group of which he was a part blundered into Evans during a museum tour, and Ventris heard the great archaeologist himself say that the tablets remained a wonderful mystery. But Ventris was not from a wealthy family, so instead of a university he attended architecture school, and as is the way of human life he soon had a family to support and a career to get on with. Still, he worked on Linear B every chance he got.

Another was Alice Kober, a professor of classics at Brooklyn College. Kober was also fascinated by the script, but unlike Ventris she was a methodical, careful researcher who knew something about how unknown scripts are translated. She worked by creating a stack of note cards, eventually more than 200,000, for each character, each word, and each pair of characters, which she could sort by the position of holes punched in the cards. Using these cards she was able to make several important discoveries about the script.

First, she discovered that the language of Linear B was inflected. She realized that many of what seemed to be nouns appeared with different endings. This was a vital clue that would play a big part in the eventual decipherment. She also looked closely at the character at the start of the ending, which she called the "bridge" character. Working with these, she realized that some characters were probably the same consonant with different vowels; compare ser-vi/ser-vo in Latin.

From this insight she began to construct a grid of signs that seemed to begin with the same consonant, like this. She was also able to recognize that some of the signs must represent pure vowels, since they appeared mainly at the beginning of words.

And there, sadly, Kober left the problem; shortly after completing the third of three major articles on Linear B, she fell ill and died in 1950 at the age of 44. Fox is a big fan of Kober and very much talks up her contribution. To Fox, Kober is yet another of the hard-working but largely unknown women who have done the basic work that famous, brilliant men relied on in making their prize-winning discoveries. (Like Rosalind Franklin in the unraveling of DNA's double helix.) Fox believes that Kober was on the verge of translating Linear B in 1948, and would have done so if she had been blessed with a few more years of good health.

I rather doubt it. Kober was successful in what she did partly because she very much resisted any sort of intuitive leap or guess about the script. She hated it when people assumed that the language of the script must be this or that -- Ventris thought for more than a decade that it must be Etruscan, which Kober found ridiculous. Yet it was just such a leap, his realization that the language might be Greek, that allowed Ventris to untie the knot. Some problems can only be solved by two different kinds of people working together.

Or three, if you consider that it took an egomaniacal aristocrat to carryout the Knossos excavations in a period of civil war and then bring the attention of the world to his discoveries.

Ventris cracked the code like this: he was comparing the tablets from Crete with those from another site, Pylos, and he noticed that both sets of tablets contained three or four words that did not appear in the other set. He asked himself, what sort of word would the bureaucrats of one place write, but not those of another? Place names! So he began trying to read the words unique to Crete as place names. The names of all the Greek towns on Crete in the classical period were known, and since those names were not Greek they were presumably inherited from earlier peoples and were therefore very ancient. Here we come to a part of the story that I either never knew or forgot. I thought the decipherment of Linear B was remarkable because there was no bilingual inscription to provide clues, but this was not quite true. There was another script, the so-called Cypro-Minoan syllabary, which looked rather like Linear B. This could be read because there were Greek inscriptions from the sixth century BCE written in both Cypro-Minoan and the Greek alphabet. Cypro-Minoan (above) was not identical to Linear B, and dated to more than 600 years later. Also, many people (including Evans, Ventris and Kober) had tried to read Linear B simply by using the phonetic values of Cypro-Minoan, and had failed. But when Ventris was staring at his place names he tried inserting syllable values from Cypro-Minoan. Using one of the most similar signs in one of the names gave him __ - __ - ni __. From Kober's work he knew that the first syllable was a pure vowel, and he strongly suspected that it was a. So then he had a - __ - ni - __. This looked very like a - mi - ni - so, which is how Amnisos, the classical name for the port of Knossos, would be written in Linear B. Plugging the new values back to the grid he had inherited from Kober, he was able to recognize another place name as __ - no - so; if the first syllable was ko, he would have ko - no - so, Knossos. He was able in this way to identify all four place names from the Knossos tablets with classical towns. He then put all of the values from these place names back into the grid, which gave him values for more than twenty signs. He used the resulting values and more syllables from Cypro-Minoan to read the other words from the tablets. Amazingly, they looked like Greek. Some of the tablets including little pictures or ideograms that seemed to indicate what items were being inventoried, for example chariot wheels, shields, and horse heads. When Ventris tried to write the Greek words for these things in his primitive Linear B, he got something identical to, or much like, the actual words on the tablets. For example, the word next to some of the horse heads came out as fo -la, a Greek word cognate to our word foal.

Ventris could hardly believe that he was actually reading Linear B. In fact after announcing his discovery on BBC radio he went into a panic, thinking that maybe he was imagining things and had gotten it all wrong. Fortunately he hooked up with classicist John Chadwick, a scholar of early Greek who believed Ventris' work immediately because it fit into his own ideas about what the Greek of that period should have been like. Chadwick convinced Ventris that the decipherment was right, and together they wrote a book laying out their findings.

You may be wondering why it was such a shock that these ancient Greek tablets recorded an early form of Greek. The answer is that the scheme of Aegean history developed by Arthur Evans postulated that Minoan civilization was something radically different from the Mycenaean Greek world: much less violent, more feminine, more focused on art and trade than on war, with strange religious rituals unknown in later times. Evans associated the end of the Minoan world around 1400 BCE with the arrival of the Greeks, who must have stormed into the Mediterranean like Goths into Rome. Evans once remarked that the only thing he knew about the language of Linear B was that it could not be Greek. The discovery that Linear B did record Greek required a major rethinking of this scheme.

The work published by Ventris and Chadwick was at first very controversial. Ventris' scheme required that one Linear B sign correspond to two or more different syllables in later Greek, and critics complained that with such special pleading you could make the signs spell any language. Then a new tablet was discovered at Pylos, transliterated above. The words to the left of the drawing of a tripod cauldron read, in Ventris's Greek, Two Bronze Tripod Cauldrons. Who could argue with that?

So Ventris had done it, one of the great intellectual feats of the age. And then he moved on to other problems. One of the fascinating things about the story is that neither Ventris nor Kober had any interest in what the tablets said. All they cared about was penetrating the mystery of the script. Fortunately Fox includes a final chapter in her book showing how much has been learned about Minoan and Mycenaean society from the tablets: economics, taxation, social organization, political hierarchy, trade, the names of Gods and the gifts given to them. It is a bit disappointing that the tablets record not even a single scrap of chronicle or verse, but they are what they are, and it is amazing that we can read them.

And if you feel disappointed that all the mysteries have been solved, remember that neither Linear A nor the Minoan hieroglyphs have ever been read. Have at it.

The Colors of Anchiornis huxleyi

Back in 2010, some paleontologists announced that they had determined the colors of a Jurassic proto-bird, Anchiornis huxleyi. Working with the fossil above, they said they had identified melanosomes (pigment bodies) like those in modern bird feathers. In modern birds, the colors depend on the shapes of the melanosomes. Based on the shapes of the melanosomes, they deduced that the bird was dark gray, with white stripes on its wings and a red crest.

Like this. But some skeptics were not impressed; they said the "melanosomes" looked like bacteria to them. So another group of researchers extracted some of the little bodies in question, ground them up, and analyzed what they were made of. The results, they say, seem a lot more like chitinous melanosomes than bacteria. So maybe this color scheme is right after all. Which is an amazing thing to know about an animal that lived 161 million years ago.

Bull's Teeth

My guide made a dismissive noise. "After, before. . . these things all go back. They talk about the labyrinth of Minos, but that was nothing by comparison to this. Just some tunnels with a horn-headed fellow wandering lonely and scared and hungry. He wasn't really a bull head. You know that?"
"How do you know?"
"Teeth. Bulls and cows are ruminants. They don't eat flesh. The minotaur did."
"Hadn't thought of that."
"People don't."

--From a story in Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warnings, an ok collection with three or four good, creepy stories.