Gorgeous? Only Mostly.

The current exhibit at the Asian Art Museum is entitled Gorgeous, one of those pretentious adjectival titles so beloved of show organizers scrambling for a label, any label, to encompass the miscellany they have scrounged together. My sweetie wanted to see the show, so we went on a pleasant Saturday. The ticket price was reasonable. The exhibit was divided into four parts, although the sequence was not apparent without explicit guidance. I'm still not sure what the justification for the division, other than space, was. Many of the items were very beautiful, quite a few were fairly pretty, some were baffling, and a very few should not have been in an exhibit entitled Gorgeous! The statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles (the chimpanzee, not Fred Astaire's tap dance tutor) was pretty - a bit tacky and shiny, and something which the Ancien Regime would have loved. The abstract art, especially the paintings, held a tenuous position - my beloved could see no worth in them, but I had to concede that the proportions followed a pleasing geometry. The display of an iPhone offended my very sense of art - not a block carved or painted in the shape or colors of an iPhone, not one constructed or mutilated by the artist, but just an iPhone. Found art requires a context - otherwise, it's just an object! The display of an iPhone as art should also serve as an indictment of the art- and music-starved education of the millennial generation.

A different item which suffered from lack of context was the quartered pile of rubble in Room 4 of 4. If it were in the vicinity of a bombed-out building like those of Cocteau's post-World War II Orpheus, or next to Grace Cathedral when the grand stairs had been demolished, I could have deemed it art; without that context, an informational poster updating a committee on building progress would be more artistic. And then there was the urinal, well-made and clean, and by no means the ugliest thing in the exhibit. Craftmanship has become rare, but so rare that there is no difference between good design and artistic creativity? If there were an artist in this situation, it was the designer of the urinal model, not the vapid artiste who ordered it from home furnishing.

Electrifying Baptism

Here's the full story about my cell phone. On Friday, I was in my dining room, reading (aloud, per my project/new blog) my bilingual Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine. I'd gone into the kitchen and fetched a glass of water, for reading aloud is thirsty work. My cell was also on the table. I knocked over the glass, and the water flowed over my phone, the newspaper which Andrew had left on the table, and part of my Novum Testamentum. The water on the table and on the paper was easy enough to handle; the Novum Testamentum was more difficult, but I'm sure my friends and family can believe that this is not the first time I've spilled something on a book - at least it was just water. The cell phone, however, although I have dropped it multiple times, had avoid contact with liquid (again, at least it was drinking water, not toilet water), so I did what I could to take care of it. Fortunately, I had very few pictures on it, and most of the phone numbers were of family, friends, or very frequent business contacts.

One of the things I noticed on Saturday was how dependent people have become on their cell phones. I didn't know where my watch was, so the only clock I had was part of my camera. I use the bus to get around San Francisco, so I am accustomed to having something to read on my person - in this case, a pocketbook of Shakespeare's Sonnets (I didn't realize one sonnet was a complaint against lousy English weather).
Even I, however, have been using my cell phone as a calendar, alarm clock, and address book without backup. Today I pulled out my Utah Navajo Partnership 2009 Calendar from St Aidan's, Boulder, and started to reconstruct my schedule. Some have suggested additional electronic backup, but what if that malfunctions? It seems to me that pen and paper remain the most reliable way of preserving critical informantion from an electric Asphodel Fields.