Concise [ kuhn-sahys ]: Expressing or covering much in few words

First published June 11, 2020

The advice most often offered to an aspiring writer is to be concise, to use as few words as possible to convey meaning. To that end, I think we need a campaign to adopt a bunch of words from other languages. After all, English has grown largely by this process, we should simply focus our efforts in a more targeted manner.

For instance, compare these two columns:

My father’s brother ………………………. chacha
My mother’s brother ……………………. mama
My father’s sister’s husband ………….. fufa
My mother’s sister’s husband ……….. masa

English refers to all of these relatives as ‘uncle’, requiring the further elaborations in the first column if we want to be specific. Aunts and in-laws are just as neglected. The second column comes (with apologies for mis-spellings and just out-and-out mistakes) from Hindi, which also has words for my sister’s husband (jija), my husband’s brother (dewar), my wife’s brother (sala), my wife’s sister’s husband (saadu) (all simply brother-in-law in English) and so on. Which culture displays the greater devotion to family?

On the subject of family, one of my own pet peeves is that, unlike many languages, we don’t have separate words for our male and female cousins, despite having gendered terms for children, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles (but no collective noun for these last two you’ll note).

And speaking of non-gendered terms, either my wife and I can be referred to as as a Scot, but there is no equivalent term for the Irish, Welsh or English, unlike an American, Canadian, Spaniard ….

Last word on families: In common with many people, Danes have at their disposal farmor, for a paternal grandmother, and equally logical words for the other three grandparents (you can already figure them out).

Just think of the ink that would have been saved if JK Rowling had employed the Welsh word cwtch which means ‘cupboard under the stairs’. Another super handy word, this time in German, is treppenwitz – the clever comeback that only occurs to you when it’s too late. And we could avoid the ugly term ‘it is what it is’, if we had the Japanese shoganai; stoical acceptance of what cannot be changed.

Very practically, Polish has doba for a period of 24 hours, i.e. day and night. So does Dutch (etmaal) and Norwegian (døgn). Handy.

Terms that require many words to convey in English include saudade, Portuguese for an incredibly intense yearning for another person or past experience or relationship. Another great one-word emotional descriptor is the German, geborgenheit, a wonderful feeling of being at once loved, safe, cozy and warm. And how useful is razbliuto, the Russian term for the bittersweet feeling you may have for someone you once loved?

It’s really galling that once upon a time English had ‘ereyesterday’ for the day before yesterday (antier in Spanish) and ‘overmorrow’ for the day after tomorrow (prekosutrain Serbian). Why did we drop such useful words?

But most galling of all is the stubborn refusal of the English to adopt (rather than stigmatise) the perfectly logical and incredibly useful Irish ‘youse‘ for the second person plural, a word found in almost every other language. For good reason, y’all, y’all.

I’m jealous that Swedish has lagom – a Goldilocks amount; neither too little nor too big, too many nor too few, but just right. And of the Romansh minority in Switzerland who can deploy giratutona for someone who regularly changes their opinion to suit the latest fashion.

Both Sanskrit (mudita) and German (gönnen) are enriched by having a word for taking delight in the good fortune of others, the precise opposite of ‘envy’. As my friend Ian commented, ‘good to know it’s there, even if you’d never actually feel it’.

How’s this for a terrific reduction in letter count? According to Gaston Dorren (whose book ‘Lingo’ provoked this train of thought), the concept of ‘voluntary collective work on behalf of the neighbourhood’ can be reduced to talaka in Belarusian. The fascinating ‘Lingo’ avoided the fate of tsundoku, a Japanese term (and one uncomfortably close to home) meaning the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up with other unread books. This could become my wife’s new favourite word.

With a little effort we could make our books shorter, thus leaving more time for boketto, another elegant Japanese word conveying the idea of gazing, unfocused into the far distance – an activity indistinguishable from writing.

A PETITION TO RESTORE THE PYRAMIDS

I’ve gathered a few exhibits below to initiate a discussion: what are we really trying to preserve when we restore or protect a work of art or a cultural monument? Its material? Its original vision? Its impact? Or just the idea of it?

Exhibit A

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born conceptual artist. His Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of 175lbs of wrapped candies piled on the floor. Visitors are invited to take one; each evening, museum staff replenish the loss. The work represents the gradual decline of the artist’s partner Ross, who died of AIDS.

Versions of this piece exist in several major museums. None retain the original candies. So: which version was an original artwork? Is it still? Are all the versions original artworks?

The Art Institute of Chicago ‘loaned’ their version to a museum in Japan. The Japanese museum was instructed buy 175lbs of locally available wrapped candies. While the Japanese installation was on view, the Art Institute removed its version from display, implying that there is something intangible that can’t exist in two places at once. What is that?

Gonzales-Torres didn’t position any of the candies now on display. If I bought 175lbs of wrapped candies and tipped them out on my floor, do I have a museum-quality piece of contemporary art? If not, why not? Could a thief steal The Art Institute’s version?

Exhibit B

After catastrophic fires at York Minster (1984), Windsor Castle (1992), the Glasgow School of Art (2014/18), and Notre-Dame in Paris (2019), restoration teams chose to rebuild these landmarks as they were before the flames — even when some elements, like Notre-Dame’s spire, were relatively modern additions and there were loud calls to replace it with something suited to the “techniques and challenges of our era.” Conservative voices prevailed.

Exhibit C

The Royal Academy in London owns a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. It was painted, possibly in Leonardo’s lifetime by one of his students. It’s in far better condition than the original in Milan — which has been overpainted, eroded, and “restored” many times, often destructively.

The Milan mural has almost none of Leonardo’s original brushwork left. Yet it remains the object of pilgrimage and devotion — while the RA version is largely unknown.

If we wished to grasp the brilliance of Athenian sculptors and architects, should we take them to Athens, Greece or to Nashville, Tennessee, where they can see a historically accurate, full-scale replica of the original Temple of Athena, complete with decorative sculptures?

Our greatest museums proudly display beautiful marble statues from Ancient Rome. But many are mere copies of now-lost Greek bronze sculptures.

Exhibit D

Time, wind and entropy mean that, without intervention, the pyramids of Egypt will gradually vanish.

Meanwhile, visitors to the pyramids are invited to imagine (with varying degrees of success) their former grandeur.

The Proposal

So what are we trying to preserve? Where does the essence of an artwork reside?

If originality is all, we should allow everything to decay. If we care about the artist’s vision, maybe a high-resolution digital copy of the RA version should replace the faded and crumbling mural in Milan.

But if the goal is to truly communicate the incredible talents of our ancestors, perhaps modern reproductions of the Parthenon marbles should be reassembled where they belong – on the Parthenon. And imagine the pyramids at Giza, refaced and recapped in gold to show what once was.

The pyramids are a particularly vivid opportunity – there are, after all, three of them. Restore one fully, restore one as a work-in-progress demonstrating how it was built and leave one for the purists to observe as chip-by-chip it is reclaimed by the desert.

And bear in mind that, done carefully, the modern additions can be removed at any time if so desired. I’m betting few will vote for that deconstruction.

Oh, and let’s fix up the Sphinx while we’ve got the scaffolding on site.

Visionary? Vandalism? Vanity?

What do you think?

Art or ‘art’

First published July 3, 2019

25 million people visited one of London’s principal public art museums in 2017. Meanwhile, Tate Modern has become the most popular of all of London’s tourist attractions. Art in general, and modern art in particular, is extremely popular. Whether we seek something beautiful, thought-provoking or historically significant, art museums have something for every taste. Having a good museum now does for civic pride what being the home of a major abbey or cathedral once did. Where pilgrims came in their thousands to pray before a saint’s relics; now they arrive in their millions to see a painting of the saint–preferably at the moment of his or her suitably gory death.

For city fathers bent on enhancing their cultural balance sheet, a museum is their first choice. Unfortunately, the supply of Old Masters essentially dried up long ago. Fortunately, there is a solution.

The first American museum devoted explicitly to modern art was MoMA, back in 1929. Since then there has been an explosion in construction of new public art galleries, leading to a commensurate explosion in demand for content. And, no surprise, a corresponding explosion in the content supply business.

Every year, approximately 100,000 fine arts graduates are churned out from UK and US colleges alone. Extrapolating from this, perhaps 200,000 individuals[1]  every year become working artists. This is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Florence at the time when Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael were active. Every year.

To ensure that the supply of graduates continues unabated, in recent years what was previously the absolute bedrock of art education, the ability to draw, has been eliminated as a requirement for entry or graduation.

An explosion in the supply of artists and in the number of public and private galleries means either (a) since the Renaissance there has been a sudden and colossal outbreak of hitherto unrecognised artistic ability or (b) there has been a redefinition of what we mean by ‘art’ – a redefinition that has massively expanded the universe of things we consider to be works of art.

During the Renaissance, any definition of an artist would include a prerequisite of craft skills. Buildings and sculptures shouldn’t fall down, objects represented in paintings should be recognisable for what they are (even if what they are is imaginary), compositions should demonstrate a familiarity with one or other tonal system, dance moves should bear some connection to music (even if unheard) and so on.

As any requirement for craft skills has been eliminated, how then do we distinguish between ‘art’ and self-expression?

Anyone who knows me will tell you I cannot sing. But I sing in the shower, I sing in the car. So I can, in fact, sing. What is undeniable is that I lack the basic craft skills – pitch, tone, control – to be counted as a ‘singer’. In this sense, I also lack the basic skills to be an artist.

But wait. There are no skills required to be an artist, and a highly regarded one at that.

When researching for a recent book, I came across the following text, presented as an example of opaque artspeak.

“My practice examines hesitation as part of the process of decision-making, where the object is neither the object of objecthood nor the art-object. It is rather the oblique object of my intentions. …”

Quoted by Scott Naismith (abstract landscape artist)

Naturally, I had to take a look at the work of the artist in question, Jo Baer. On the art selling site artsy.net, I read the description of one of her works available as a print.

“For nearly 15 years, [Jo Baer] produced light squares edged with thin bands of color, edged, in turn, with thick black bands. The light interior and black exterior framed the color, drawing out its subtle, electric resonance.” 

By now, I could hardly wait. I went to the artist’s own site to check out her work. Here is the piece referenced by artsy.net, hanging in the University of Texas Blanton Museum of Art, with the following accompanying text.

“Her aim was to create a painting that emphasized its frontal plane in a way that would echo the wall behind it, suggesting the architectural character of the painting’s shape. … The artist has challenged the viewer to regard her minimal work, stripped of the more ingratiating aspects of painting, as absolute in its simplicity.”

(Thanks to Kent Wang, of styleforum for this.)

And here it is:

Not to be confused with:

Which hangs in the world-renowned Guggenheim Museum in New York City, or with many more subtle variants hanging in prestigious galleries around the world.

(I love the fact that the artist has stripped anything “ingratiating” from these canvases. God forbid there would be anything ‘intended to gain approval or favour’ in a serious work of modern art.)

What makes these pieces, ‘art’? Not the works themselves.

In his seminal book, ‘The Shock of the New’, renowned critic, Robert Hughes, pointed out, with reference to the infamous pile of bricks curated in the Tate Gallery by Carl André, “A Rodin in a car park is still a misplaced Rodin; Equivalent VIII  in the same lot is just bricks.” In other words, only context transforms the stacking skills of a particularly tidy bricklayer into a work of ‘art’.

This sentiment was the essence of Grayson Perry’s 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, which essentially concluded that ‘art’ is whatever a relative handful of self-selecting, mostly white males, mostly educated in the same elite fine arts schools, deem to be ‘art’. These men run the major American and British public galleries and auction houses; they are the owners of a few exceptional dealerships and one or two of them are collectors. You and I have no worthwhile opinion in the matter; only this tiny elite.

So, I submit, with Ms Baer’s works. They went from being meaningless self-expression to ‘art’ the moment a prestigious gallery owner signed her, or a public gallery curator acquired her (perhaps free, as a means of self-promotion).

After that, the art business took over. Catalogue and caption writers generated the nonsense quoted above; insecure collectors with lots of money, but no confidence in their own taste, happily leapt on the bandwagon and bought these slivers of colour rectangles with their ‘electric resonance’.

No one knows what, if anything, this work means. Indeed, the tragedy of the Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator available on Pixmaven.com is that its outputs are so incredibly similar to the meaningless text you can find in artspeak magazines, gallery notes and the like.

Does any of this matter? Not really. People who buy ‘art’ are spending disposable income that would otherwise be spent on some other consumer goods. Very little public money is spent, and that in any case, is recouped from tax revenues from tourism and VAT.

Except for one thought perhaps. If we so stretch the definition of a word such as ‘artist’, to embrace Baer, André, Van Gogh and J.M.W. Turner, does it retain any meaning?

I am reminded of a comment by my then brother-in-law, a house painter and decorator. He pointed out that comparing my singing to Frank Sinatra’s was akin to comparing himself with Michelangelo, ‘because we both paint ceilings’.

[1] Only 10% of fine arts graduates end up as working artists. Only about 20% of working artists are fine arts graduates. Conservatively, I assumed that there are 3 entrants from countries other than US/UK for every 1 from those countries.

Believe Your Own Eyes

First published February 1, 2018

Having written a little about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it’s time to turn the spotlight on another work by the Renaissance genius.

This is the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John The Baptist, formerly known as The Burlington House Cartoon. It hangs in the National Gallery in London. A cartoon is the preparatory sketch for a painting. The finished cartoon was mounted on a board and holes were pricked around the outline and key features. Chalk was then pounced through the holes to make an outline to guide the painter. This particular cartoon was never pierced and thus we know that the intended painting was never done.

 It is a very unusual pose. Mary is sitting on the lap of St Anne, her mother. She holds her son, Jesus, who is blessing the baby St John.

I assume Leonardo chose this pose as a means of representing both women in a very intimate space. I don’t think it an altogether satisfactory pose and it is telling that is was not adopted by other artists who were otherwise influenced by Leonardo.

This next Leonardo image is in the Louvre and is titled The Virgin and Child with St Anne.

Something caused Leonardo to alter his design.

According to Wikipedia, ‘This subtle yet perceptible distortion in size was utilised by Leonardo to emphasise the mother daughter relationship between the two women despite the apparent lack of visual cues to the greater age of St Anne that would otherwise identify her as the mother.’

Tortured, or what?

Meanwhile, the Economist notes, ‘A monumental Anne sits with her adult daughter perched on her lap. Mary reaches out trying to keep a grip on Jesus who is half-straddling a lamb.’ (Leonardo da Vinci’s “St Anne” 29 April 2012).

Why would Jesus be half-straddling a lamb?

St Anne does not appear in the Bible. She is mentioned in the apocryphal Gospel of James. Let’s say that she is eighteen years older than Mary. Which of the two women portrayed looks older? The foreground figure surely? And remember, this is Leonardo da Vinci, a man obsessed with drawing faces, and unbelievably proficient at doing so. If he had wanted to draw a young woman he would have. He did, lots of times.

Traditionally, Mary was young when she gave birth to Jesus, again let’s imagine seventeen or eighteen. Is there another candidate for the foreground figure? What about Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist who was thought to be beyond childbearing age when she became pregnant as a result of a miracle? Could she be the forty-something year old woman on Mary’s lap?

If she is, we can make sense of the other change, the appearance of the lamb. If the foreground woman is Elizabeth, the child could be John, who later in life would utter the words, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” [John 1:29] At the time of the scene portrayed, Jesus is yet unborn and so is represented by the lamb.

The Mysterious Mona Lisa

First posted Jan 14, 2018

‘All Visible Things‘ narrates the fictional tale of the discovery of the diaries of one Paolo del Rosso, assistant to Leonardo da Vinci. Along the way, the book also exploits the complicated saga of the Mona Lisa.

There is fairly compelling evidence that the painting in the Louvre, La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa, is not, in fact, a painting of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco, a prosperous Florentine merchant.

The Louvre Mona Lisa

It is all but certain that Leonardo da Vinci did indeed paint Lisa del Giocondo, probably around 1503. The first true art historian, Georgio Vasari, wrote, ‘Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife; and after toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished; and the work is now in the collection of King Francis of France, at Fontainebleau.’

Vasari never met Leonardo and never saw the painting. But he did meet Leonardo’s former assistant and executor, Francesco Melzi.

Further confirmation comes from a marginal note dated 1503, found as recently as 2005 in a library in Heidleberg, comparing Leonardo with the Greek painter, Apelles, noting that he was working on a painting of Lisa del Giocondo.

So far, so straightforward. However this sketch by no less an artist than Raphael, is generally accepted to be of Leonardo’s Giocondo painting, presumably after a visit to Leonardo’s studio by the younger artist, who is believed to have studied under Leonardo for a while. The Giocondo portrait inspired Raphael’s own painting, Girl with Unicorn.

Raphael sketch

But the Raphael sketch, and the subsequent painting, both have very pronounced columns on either side of the figure.

A close inspection of the Louvre Mona Lisa reveals a hint of what may be the bases of these columns. However, scientific tests have shown that the Louvre painting was never cut down, so never had visible columns.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa

The Isleworth Mona Lisa has prominent columns, but a rather boring background. Most experts believe that this image too was painted by Leonardo. This painting is increasingly known as the Earlier Mona Lisa.

Then we have the so-called nude Mona Lisas. are from the period of Leonardo and are thought to be by students in his studio, possibly with some contributions from the great man himself. At least one is attributed to Leonardo’s apprentice then assistant, Salaí.

Leonardo spent his final years in France, the honoured guest of the King. In 1517, he was visited by Cardinal Luigi of Aragon. The cardinal’s secretary, one Antonio de Beatis, recorded that Leonardo ‘showed His Lordship three paintings, one of a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici, another of St John the Baptist, and another of the Madonna and Child placed on the lap of St Anne …’

The first of these is supposed to be the Mona Lisa.

But of course, it cannot be; as Giuliano would not have commissioned a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. However, it almost certainly is the painting that hangs in the Louvre.

Like pretty much all of the Medici, Giuliano had a wife and several mistresses; almost any one of whom could be the woman in the Louvre painting.

A Milanese artist, Giovanni Lomazzo was a promising painter, until an accident robbed him of most of his sight. He became a Leonardo scholar and devotee and he also knew Francesco Melzi. Lomazzo records that Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and the Gioconda. Lomazzo was an erudite man, more than capable of distinguishing singular and plural.

Finally, there is the recent analysis of the Louvre painting by Pascal Cotte, which has revealed extensive underpaintings below the image we see. The digital reconstruction (left) approximates the hidden original, which may be no more than an evolving version of the finished work, but the lady does look considerably younger than the other versions.

To recap. The traditional theory is that Leonardo painted Lisa del Giocondo in 1503 and then, for reasons never explained, carried the painting around Italy, tinkering with it until a couple of years before his death, in France, in 1519.

But what if the image underpainting is a likeness of Lisa del Giocondo in a work that was never paid for or handed over, but was then painted over sixteen years later when Leonardo’s patron Giuliano de’ Medici asked for a portrait of his mistress? As luck would have it, Giuliano died before the painting was completed and so, once again, Leonardo failed to collect his fee. The problem I have with this theory is that we have to assume that Leonardo hauled this wooden panel from Florence to Milan and back then to Rome and then to France. Why would he do this? The conventional wisdom is that he was perfecting, not a portrait, but some idealised idea of womanhood, or motherhood, or somesuch. I find this a complete post-rationalisation, with no precedent.

What if the Giocondo portrait was in fact handed over?

It is true that there is no record of any payment from Giocondo: but at the time, Leonardo was short of cash and withdrawing funds from his bank account. He may simply not have deposited the payment. Francesco del Giocondo was a robust businessman and may well have driven a hard bargain in return for his political support. Indeed it has always been a mystery why Leonardo accepted the Giocondo commission at a time when he was turning down much more important and prestigious patrons.

If this is the case, then the Louvre painting is of whichever Florentine lady Giuliano de’ Medici wanted immortalised by Leonardo.

All in all, her smile is not Mona Lisa’s only mystery.