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1/27/12

Art Review Visionaries, Charmers and Demons By KEN JOHNSON

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Art Review

Visionaries, Charmers and Demons


By KEN JOHNSON

Published: January 26, 2012
The near death of the American Folk Art Museum was one of the more alarming events in the New York art world last year. So it is heartening to see this irreplaceable institution rising from the grave with “Jubilation/Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined,” a wonderful exhibition of works from the permanent collection.
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Jubiliation/Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined A figure made of bottle tops at the American Museum of Folk Art.
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Marino Auriti's “Encyclopedic Palace of the World,” a model for a building that would house examples of human ingenuity.
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A Mexican Day of the Dead figure with a backstrap loom, made in the 1950s.
Having escaped the ugly 53rd Street tomb of a building it inhabited from 2001 to 2011, the museum has reoccupied its old space near Lincoln Center. It is not a lovely place for displaying art, but is not so self-important as to trump what matters: It’s the collection, stupid!
Organized by Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s curator, the show samples all the varieties of artistic expression under the institution’s purview, from traditional genres like portraits and quilts; sculptures made of bottle caps and similarly curious materials; and otherworldly fantasies drawn and painted by so-called Outsiders.
The show includes works by famous visionaries like Henry Darger and Adolf Wölfli and Martín Ramírez, whose boldly linear drawing of two trains running along cliffs and into tunnels is as mysterious as it is stylish. But the beauty of the museum’s approach to art is that it focuses on singularly striking objects rather than on academically certified reputations or institutionalized versions of art history.
You have probably never heard of Marino Auriti, but you won’t soon forget his “Encyclopedic Palace of the World.” An Italian immigrant and auto body mechanic who lived in Pennsylvania, Auriti created this 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story, stepped-back cylindrical skyscraper he proposal for the Washington Mall in the 1950s. He wanted it to exhibit examples of human ingenuity from the wheel to the space satellite. Neatly made of metal, wood, plastic and celluloid, mostly in shades of gray and white, the model is an inspiring monument to eccentric grandiosity.
At the opposite end of the size spectrum are two miniature ship’s figureheads carved from cherry wood by an unknown 19th-century artisan, probably from Salem, Mass. One represents a mermaid, the other a woman proudly blowing a trumpet. At once robust and exquisitely delicate, they will make your hands itch to pick them up and fondle them.
Nearby is another, funkier miniature — a tramp-art-style baby-grand piano by an unidentified late-19th-century craftsman. Made of darkly stained wood with chip-carved decoration, this knee-high, nonplayable instrument has a sculptural presence bigger than its diminutive size.
A number of three-dimensional works favor the demonic. Made of painted wood by a Mexican artist in the 1950s, a frightening yet comical Day of the Dead skeleton with long, wild black hair operating a backstrap loom would make a fine prop for a grisly horror movie. With an ominously grinning dark face painted onto a bulbous form at the center of a radiating tree root, “Faces of Africa II” by Bessie Harvey from 1994 exudes a devilish menace.
There are celestial beings too. The angelic winged and trumpet-blowing figure of Fame in a swirling dress graces a weather vane made of zinc and copper from around 1890. In “Aurora,” a watercolor by an early-19th-century New Englander, an angel in a gold dress rides in a red carriage with gold stars pulled by a pair of eagles over a decidedly cooler land and seascape. The leap between down-to-earth sobriety and the zany neo-Classical vision speaks volumes about psychic tensions roiling the Puritan soul of America.
There are plenty of people to behold too, though they often appear less than fully natural. The early American portrait painter Sheldon Peck might have been aiming for strict realism in his double portrait of David and Catherine Stolp Crane (around 1854) stiffly seated in their spare parlor, but their oddly doll-like heads make them resemble weirdly inanimate, oversize puppets. A watercolor by an unknown Baltimore artist portrays a woman named Mrs. Keyser holding a yellow cat in her lap. Her extravagantly lacy bonnet and collar and billowing black dress create a formally dynamic, Cubist-like setting for her enigmatic, generically pretty face.
A small, finely worked painting by James Bard, the artist best known for portraits of mid-19th-century steamboats, pictures a man and his enormous horse in rigid profile. You feel something of what horses once meant to people. Today it would be a man and his car.
Twentieth-century influences are muted over all; this is mostly a show of antique Americana. But there are a few artists who ventured into abstraction with Modernist spirit. One was Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, whose two-foot-square painting from 1958 suggests a gaseous explosion in outer space. Von Bruenchenhein also made hundreds of erotic photographs of his wife in exotic, skin-revealing costumes, three of which are here. They prompt an intriguing question: Is there such a thing as folk or Outsider photography, and if so, what would earn it such a designation?
While Von Bruenchenhein considered himself a great artist and wanted the world to know it, another abstract painter, Eugene Andolsek, produced thousands of jewel-like, dazzlingly complex compositions in ink on paper during his lifetime — 1921-2008 — and never sought to exhibit them. The three here are among the most beautiful works in the show.
Might there be other offbeat isolates like Andolsek out there producing art of similarly astounding originality? Or will the Web so thoroughly connect and homogenize the minds of everyone that his kind of idiosyncratic genius will trend toward extinction? These are questions that the rejuvenated museum might fruitfully explore in the future.
“Jubilation/Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined” continues through Sept. 2 at the American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street, (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org.
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1/22/12

Fresh Stuff From Hyuro in Valencia | Wooster Collective

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  • January 11, 2012
  • Posted by Marc

Fresh Stuff From Hyuro in Valencia

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A street in the Soho secFresh Stuff From Hyuro in Valencia | Wooster Collective
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Mitt's misery, in a word: Bain - POLITICO.com Print View

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Mitt's misery, in a word: Bain
By: Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman
January 22, 2012 06:40 PM EST

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The verdict is in: Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital problem is real.

Of all the forces that converged to doom Romney in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, none may be as disconcerting for Republicans as the attacks on Romney’s private equity work – an offensive that caught Romney off-guard and triggered a damaging conversation about his vast personal wealth.

Even as Romney blasted his assailants – Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and a pro-Gingrich super PAC – as anti-capitalism, he also left sympathetic GOP elites agog with a series of missteps that bolstered the charge that he’s an out-of-touch mega-millionaire.

Rather than cheerfully giving a detailed account of his Bain career, as he sees it, Romney grumbled in one debate that it was “strange, on a stage like this with Republicans, having to describe how private equity and venture capital work.” He fumbled questions about whether he’d release his tax returns, gave shifting answers on how many jobs he’d helped create and told a crowd earlier this month that he liked being able to fire service providers.

Now, the Bain issue is front and center, wrapping up an array of Democratic and Republican criticisms of Romney in a neat, single-syllable package. And as Romney seeks to regroup from his weekend defeat, Republicans are asking: why wasn’t he better prepared to handle all this?

“As a result of his post-New Hampshire problems and the South Carolina results, Gov. Romney will get better on Bain and tighten up on taxes or he won’t be our nominee,” said Republican strategist Tucker Eskew, a veteran of South Carolina politics. “By the same perspective, Speaker Gingrich will be challenged going into Florida to defend some of the issues he hasn’t yet nailed down, like Freddie Mac. Republicans are trying to settle on our lead warrior and we aren’t there yet.”

South Carolina political hand Richard Quinn, a former John McCain and Jon Huntsman adviser, said the combination of Bain and Romney’s tax returns had voters asking: “Where has he made all this money? Where’s he got it? What’s he hiding?”

“This guy is the poster boy for the kind of campaign that Barack Obama is prepared to wage,” said Quinn, who supported Gingrich in the last days of the South Carolina race. “He started out with this brand as the flip-flopper who they don’t really trust … On top of that, the newer criticisms of him were fed by those images of him saying things like, ‘I like to fire people.’ Everybody understands it was taken out of context, but in politics context doesn’t matter.”

Romney’s camp sees the Bain debate quite differently: far from a drag on their candidate, Romney strategists contend that the former Massachusetts governor cemented his status as the pro-growth candidate in the race through his duel with Gingrich and Perry.

While South Carolina didn’t turn out as the Romney camp had hoped, they say the private equity fight leaves Gingrich on territory that will be exceedingly difficult to defend over a long GOP primary.

“As a result of the attacks, the governor emerged as the premier defender of free enterprise in a Republican primary, which is a pretty good place to be,” said Romney adviser Kevin Madden. “Grassroots conservatives and top conservative leaders all rallied to Romney’s defense. Newt’s attacks on this issue will be part of his eventual demise. Newt demonstrated both his hypocrisy and his volatility by attacking capitalism one minute and then standing there with a, ‘Who, me?’ look on his face the next.”

Romney himself framed the debate over Bain as a fight between capitalism and anti-capitalism in remarks to supporters Saturday night. Without specifically referring to Bain, Romney urged Republicans not to reward “those who pick up the weapons of the left.”

“If Republican leaders want to join this president in demonizing success and disparaging conservative values, then they’re not going to be fit to be our nominee,” Romney said.

Public polling gives only an inconclusive picture of the Bain attacks’ direct impact in South Carolina: in a POLITICO poll taken the week before the primary, only 15 percent of voters in the state said they were less likely to support Romney because of Bain. Twelve percent said Romney’s time at Bain nudged them somewhat or strongly toward voting for him.

And while there was an income gap in South Carolina exit polls – Romney fared better with upper-income voters than with lower-income voters – that’s a phenomenon that’s shown up elsewhere, before the Bain attacks occurred.

But sources also said data for at least one campaign showed the Bain attacks taking a bit of the job-creator sheen off Romney as they raised questions about his business experience and left Romney answering in hazy terms.

“It gave people pause about his chief area of strength, his business experience, which he had failed to explain beyond ‘I created 100,000 jobs,’ or ‘I had a successful career in the private sector,’” one source said.

Even in Romney’s circle, there’s a level of concern about whether the former Massachusetts governor has made it too easy for opponents to cast him as a cold, secretive Howard Hughes type. Other Republicans are privately incredulous over Romney’s awkward response to the mockery of his wealth and criticism of his private equity background.

Despite the attacks on his record, Romney has yet to give an in-depth explanation to voters – in accessible, layman’s terms – of what exactly he did as the head of Bain Capital. Beyond aligning himself with “free enterprise” in general and ticking off the names of companies Bain invested in, Romney has not made his claim to creating jobs digestible for most voters.

That’s made him vulnerable, strategists say, to being caricatured as a Gordon Gekko figure – an attack that may be less resonant among free market-loving Republicans, but that nevertheless underscores Romney’s wealth and lack of relatability.

“If attacking Romney on private equity and for paying a lower tax rate had worked, Rick Perry would have gained traction and would still be in the race,” argued one Republican operative supporting Romney, alluding to Perry’s attacks on Romney as a “vulture capitalist.”

Still, the strategist said: “The disturbing part of all of this is that these attacks were all desperate attempts by flailing candidates and yet they were enough to take Romney off his game, not because they worked, but because he was unprepared. This will prolong the inevitable and will hopefully make Romney a stronger candidate for the general, but this is a little surprising.”

It remains to be seen whether Bain Capital, per se, will continue to be a target in the GOP primary. It’s not a risk-free attack for Republicans: internal polling for multiple campaigns showed that when the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning our Future began its Bain offensive, Gingrich took a hit to his numbers along with Romney.

But the whole range of Bain-related issues – Romney’s business record, his job-creation claims and personal wealth – is especially significant because of its role in a potential general election. Democrats have signaled they intend to wage an aggressive campaign to discredit Romney on the economy. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the GOP primary was pointing the way.

“We applaud success, but his record, which he’s hung his candidacy on, of being a corporate raider, and of essentially coming into communities, devastating the local economy, shutting down plants, deliberately bankrupting companies and shipping jobs overseas is not one that voters are embracing,” the Florida congresswoman said. “I think probably the whole thing is more resonant [in a general election] than in a primary. I have to tell you, I was a little bit surprised that the Bain record is resonating in the primary, too.”

Rick Tyler, the former Gingrich spokesman and Winning Our Future strategist, said he had absolutely no doubt the Bain ads played a role in paving the way for a Newt-versus-Mitt fight in South Carolina.

“They were part of the equation. They wouldn’t have worked just on their own, but they created the opportunity for the Romney camp to make misstep after misstep. And they also created the opportunity for Newt to shine,” Tyler said. “Mitt Romney showed his weaknesses and Newt showed his strengths. We helped create the environment that allowed that to happen.”

Tyler wouldn’t say whether the ads will make another appearance in Florida – a state, like South Carolina, where Bain Capital was involved in unsuccessful business ventures.

But he noted: “There’s already lots of stories in Florida – the Miami Herald seems to be doing its job about companies in Florida that went belly-up under Bain. Maybe we inspired the media to actually dig deeper.”

Romney supporters, too, are looking to Florida’s Jan. 31 as a clearer test case on Bain, as the campaign will be fought across a wider stretch of political ground and Romney will have more time to find his footing and respond.

“I don’t think this South Carolina result is necessarily a trend about what’s working and what’s not,” said Republican wise man Charlie Black, who supports Romney. “We’ll see a lot more in Florida where you’ve got a more diverse constituency.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC

Mitt's misery, in a word: Bain - POLITICO.com Print View
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Ellsworth Kelly, Explorer of Shape, Line and Color - NYTimes.com

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True to His Abstraction

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Ellsworth Kelly in the area of his studio where he paints. More Photos »

By
Published: January 20, 2012

Spencertown, N.Y.

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ELLSWORTH KELLY’S studio here is a sprawling labyrinth of white-walled rooms, some with skylights, some with large windows looking out onto the rolling landscape. The walls are either bare or impeccably hung with a selection of Mr. Kelly’s striking painting reliefs. Everything is simple, spare and modern with one exception: at the entrance is a small mustard-yellow ladder-back chair with a multicolored woven straw seat inspired by van Gogh’s paintings of his bedroom in Arles.

“I did this in shop class in sixth grade,” Mr. Kelly said during a visit one recent wintry afternoon. “It was my first color spectrum.”

“The negative,” he went on, pointing to the spaces between the slats in the back, “is just as important as the positive.”

A classic observation coming from this 88-year-old artist, whose seven-decade career has been an unwavering exploration of shape, line and color in their purest forms. While many other artists of his generation were appropriating images of American flags or movie stars or newspaper clippings, Mr. Kelly was relentlessly immersed in abstraction: creating color spectrums and panel paintings with nothing but a giant curve or rectangle, or making drawings depicting the simple outline of a leaf.

Refusing to be labeled a Minimalist or Abstract Expressionist, he spent decades fighting for attention, while others of his generation — Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — were grabbing the spotlight.

“Ellsworth never tried to second-guess art history,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art. Yet while Mr. Kelly’s lifelong focus on abstraction in paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and prints may not have been a smart career move — there were years, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, when his work went ignored and unsold — now it appears that the tide has turned.

Abstraction is hot again, with canvases by Gerhard Richter fetching astronomical prices at auction and the recent Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was a crowd pleaser. Reflecting on the multiple exhibitions of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings that opened this month in Gagosian’s 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Kelly said: “He’s been able to get a lot of attention, making color and form stand alone. That’s something that has taken me decades.”

“Time has always been very important in my work,” he added. “Tastes have changed recently, and although abstraction has been difficult, people are more open to it now.” As a result Mr. Kelly finds himself more in demand than ever before. In July two 18-foot-high wall sculptures were installed on the facade of the American Embassy in Beijing. He is juggling several new sculpture commissions and has a full schedule of museum exhibitions, including one of his wood sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a show of black-and-white works that closes this weekend at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and reopens on March 1 at the Museum Wiesbaden. Another exhibition of prints and paintings will open this weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in June the Metropolitan Museum of Art will offer a show of his plant drawings.

Meanwhile the Chelsea art dealer Matthew Marks turned to Mr. Kelly for the opening of his first gallery in Los Angeles, a former garage in West Hollywood that has been turned into an all-white 3,500-square-foot space. Not only will it be filled with Mr. Kelly’s works, but he has transformed the facade with a black sculpture in relief along the top, inspired by a collage and a painting he did in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Ellsworth has been fearless in his commitment to the limitless possibilities of abstraction,” said James Cuno, chief executive and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, who first met Mr. Kelly in 1989 and has exhibited and commissioned his work in various museums where Mr. Cuno has been a director, including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and the Art Institute of Chicago. “With concentrated imaginative power he has made some of the most beautiful and important paintings of the Modernist era. And he is at the height of his powers, not elegiac but ecstatic, filled with the wonder of seeing the world afresh.”

Tearing around his studio in gray flannel pants and sneakers, hampered only by long tubes for the oxygen machine that he is hooked up to because of a recent lung condition — possibly caused by years of inhaling turpentine, oil paint and other materials in his studio — Mr. Kelly was animated. With an almost boyish energy and laser-sharp memory that make him seem a lot younger than his years, he spoke about his work, his recent surge of popularity and his life in this secluded hamlet in upstate New York, a few miles west of Stockbridge, Mass.

In one of the largest rooms he pointed out a brightly splattered area he called his painting wall. Unlike younger artists, including Mr. Hirst and Jeff Koons, who often direct studio assistants, Mr. Kelly creates everything with his own hand. “I wouldn’t feel right doing it any other way,” he said. “Kids do anything these days, but I’m still an old-fashioned painter. Maybe in a few years when I’m too old, I’ll need help, but what am I going to do, say to an assistant, put the yellow there?”

Mr. Kelly was staring at a group of painting reliefs — simple forms with dramatic combinations of orange and blue, dark blue and black, green and blue, black and white — that filled the adjacent walls. They were drying, each with long wood strips separating the background canvas from the colored relief panel in front. “I have to wait a week for each to dry,” he said. “Oil takes that long, sometimes longer. I don’t like acrylic because you can’t get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint the surface gets better and richer.”

Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

The actress Gwyneth Paltrow is a big fan of Mr. Kelly’s work and has been collecting his plant drawings since 1997, “as soon as I got my first paycheck,” she said in a telephone interview. “There are certain artists you have a visceral reaction to, and Ellsworth is one of them.” The two met when she was in a play in Williamstown, Mass. “He came backstage and introduced himself,” she recalled.

Mr. Kelly grew up in Oradell, N.J., the second of three sons. His father was an insurance company executive. After serving in the Army during World War II he moved to Boston, where he qualified under the G.I. Bill for tuition at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. There he studied old master painting and drawing and taught night classes in art in the Roxbury neighborhood, in exchange for room and board.

He moved to Paris in 1948 and got to know John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Surrealist artist Jean Arp and the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting effect on him.

He moved to New York in 1954, settling in a 19th-century loft on an old dock called Coenties Slip, near Wall Street. At the time artists living nearby — like Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman, Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns — were creating pioneering work that bridged Abstract Expressionist and the Pop and Minimalism of the 1960s. The Abstract painter Agnes Martin lived in the same building, and the two became close friends and exchanged ideas about their work.

During these years Mr. Kelly created single canvases of hand-drawn shapes that were different from his Paris paintings, which were mostly panels, each canvas a separate color. He also joined several powerful galleries: Betty Parsons, then Sidney Janis and later Leo Castelli. Although he got some attention, he was eclipsed by bigger stars like Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns.

In 1970 he decided to abandon the city’s flourishing art scene, putting down roots here, where he still lives with Jack Shear, a photographer. In the ensuing decades he has worked steadily, if quietly. Despite some ups and downs his art has been purchased by museums and collectors around the world. He has also had shows at numerous galleries and museums, including a giant retrospective in 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate in London and the Haus der Kunst.

Mr. Marks, who has been his dealer for 20 years, recalled that when he first began representing Mr. Kelly, a German dealer said to him: “Why did you take on Ellsworth Kelly? He’s so boring.”

“I ignored it,” Mr. Marks recalled.

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”

The facade of Mr. Marks’s new Los Angeles gallery, for instance, was inspired by ”Study for Black and White Panels,” a collage he made while living in Paris in 1954, and a painting, “Black Over White,” created in New York 12 years later. Both are predominantly white with a black bar that floats in relief on the upper portion of the all-white stucco facade.

“He’s making art as good as the art that inspired him when he was in Paris,” Mr. Storr said. Comparing him to Mr. Johns, perhaps the only other major artist of his generation who is actively working today, Mr. Storr continued: “To a great extent Jasper is a literary artist. His work is coded with secret messages. Ellsworth is purely a visual artist. With Ellsworth there is no message, just an experience.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 22, 2012, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: True to His Abstraction.
Ellsworth Kelly, Explorer of Shape, Line and Color - NYTimes.com
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G.O.P. Turns Its Focus to Florida - NYTimes.com

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Bracing for a Bitter Fight, G.O.P. Moves On to Florida

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Published: January 22, 2012

A drastically reshaped Republican presidential campaign begins anew in Florida on Sunday as the party’s establishment confronts the likelihood of an extended and bitter leadership fight and the increasing possibility that Newt Gingrich could be its nominee.

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Mr. Gingrich’s stunning victory over Mitt Romney in South Carolina on Saturday all but ensured 10 days of intense campaigning in Florida, which holds its primary on Jan. 31. Adding to the urgency: voters in Florida have already started mailing in absentee ballots.

A blitz of the television advertisements in Florida has begun, and the candidates are set to arrive there today. They face yet another nationally televised debate on Monday night in Tampa, Fla.

For some veterans in the party, Mr. Gingrich’s victory increased the very possibility that some of them fear — that the combative and volatile Mr. Gingrich with whom they had worked in Washington would become the new face of the party.

Speaking on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, Mr. Gingrich acknowledged those concerns and said he wore them as a badge of honor as he pushed forward toward the nomination. “The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” he said. “We are going to make the establishment very uncomfortable. We are going to demand real change in Washington.”

Some of Mr. Gingrich’s former colleagues have warned — often anonymously — that he cannot be trusted to lead the party, or the country. “Newt’s absolutely brilliant,” an admirer who negotiated with him in Congress told The Daily News of New York on Saturday night. “He has 100 ideas; 97 are real good, the other three will blow up the world.”

Mr. Gingrich said he was not surprised by that kind of reaction, but he dismissed it as the same kind of nervousness that some in the party’s establishment exhibited when Ronald Reagan was first running for national office. “I’m happy to be in the tradition of Ronald Reagan as the outsider who scares the Republican establishment,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And frankly, after the mess they made of things, maybe they should be shaken up pretty badly.”

Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney also did not wait to engage each other as the Florida campaign got under way. Both men appeared on Sunday morning talk shows, seeking an advantage by hammering the other’s experience and character.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Romney said that Mr. Gingrich “has some explaining to do,” among other things, about a global warming public service announcement he taped with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Romney said that despite the results in the South Carolina primary, Republican voters will not ultimately choose as a nominee “who spent 40 years in Washington as a congressman and a lobbyist.”

The former Massachusetts governor also questioned Mr. Gingrich’s “sobriety” and “steadiness.”

“He’s not as reliable a conservative leader as some people might imagine,” Mr. Romney said of Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker.

But Mr. Romney conceded that Mr. Gingrich had a “good week” politically in South Carolina, while he had not. And Mr. Romney bowed to mounting pressure from Mr. Gingrich and others to release his tax returns, saying he will do so on Tuesday.

“We made a mistake in holding off as long as we did,” Mr. Romney said, adding that the issue had become a distraction. “We’ll be putting our returns on the Internet. People can look through them.”

Mr. Gingrich said on Sunday morning that Mr. Romney’s decision is “a good thing. I commend Governor Romney for doing it.”

Having last week attacked Mr. Romney for refusing to release his taxes, Mr. Gingrich said on C-Span’s “Morning Journal” program that it was time to move on.

“As far as I’m concerned, that issue is behind us,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Gov. Christopher Christie of New Jersey, perhaps Mr. Romney’s most prominent supporter, had some very sharp words against Mr. Gingrich, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press, “I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time.”

“He was run out of the Speakership by his own party,” the governor said. “He was fined $300,000 for ethics violations. This is a guy who’s had a very difficult political career at times and that has been an embarrassment to the party. You remember these times, you were here.”

Mr. Romney appeared on Fox News and dismissed concerns that with the release of his tax returns, he might lose support when voters learn how much money he had donated to the Mormon Church. He said he had made a promise “to God” to tithe 10 percent of his income to his church.

He said voters would be “pleased with someone who made a commitment to God and followed through on the promise.”

Mr. Gingrich’s large margin of victory in South Carolina erased whatever momentum Mr. Romney might have earned from an equally large win in New Hampshire 10 days earlier. The first three contests, including the Iowa caucuses, have provided little clarity for the fractured party, handing a victory to three different candidates, with the belated recognition last week that Rick Santorum won in Iowa.

Mr. Santorum, who came in third in South Carolina but pledged to go on to Florida, continued to lash out at his rivals on Sunday, calling Mr. Romney a “moderate” and accusing Mr. Gingrich of being an erratic leader.

“That’s not a choice between a conservative and a moderate. It’s a choice between a moderate and an erratic conservative, someone who on a lot of the major issues has been just wrong,” Mr. Santorum said on the ABC News program “This Week.”

Mr. Santorum reserved especially aggressive language for Mr. Gingrich, calling him a “very high-risk candidate” who will undermine the policies of Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

But Mr. Santorum also said that Mr. Romney no longer had an aura of inevitability.

“I’ve beaten Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has beaten Mitt Romney,” Mr. Santorum said. “The idea that conservatives have to coalesce in order to beat Mitt Romney, well, that’s just not true anymore. Conservatives actually can have a choice.”

Mr. Santorum dismissed the idea that the results in South Carolina made it harder for his campaign to move forward. He said the fact that different candidates had won each of the first three states gave his candidacy a real lift.

“If you don’t like the state of the play of the race right now, just wait until the next race,” Mr. Santorum said. “And we’re going to see a completely different story. And that’s the dynamism of this race.”

But many Republican leaders held their fire immediately after Mr. Gingrich’s South Carolina victory.

Karl Rove, the former top political adviser to President George W. Bush, said on Fox News on Saturday night that Mr. Gingrich needed “to broaden this message of ‘He’s the Massachusetts moderate and I’m the conservative.’ ”

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Rove added that Mr. Gingrich’s attacks on the news media — while popular among Republican primary voters — would cause him problems with independents during a general election matchup with President Obama.

“It does create a little bit of problem with independent voters in the general election,” Mr. Rove said, noting that those voters are concerned with jobs, the economy and health care.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, indicated on Saturday night that he would remain neutral in the primary.

G.O.P. Turns Its Focus to Florida - NYTimes.com
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1/20/12

'Red Tails': If the George Lucas epic flops, are black audiences to blame?

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Entertainment

'Red Tails': If the George Lucas epic flops, are black audiences to blame?

By Adam Howard

6:00 AM on 01/20/2012

READ MORE: Red Tails, Box Office, George Lucas, Film, The Help, Black History, Tuskegee Airmen, Hollywood, Tyler Perry

'Red Tails': If the George Lucas epic flops, are black audiences to blame?

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Cuba Gooding, Jr. in 'Red Tails'

Still, the fact that major Hollywood films about black history are regrettably rare is not lost on black audiences or black directors. And there may be a sense of pride, or in some cases guilt, sufficient to motivate black audiences to turn out for the film in big numbers.

The most successful and prolific (for better or for worse) African-American director working today -- Tyler Perry -- has not only praised Red Tails, but has also warned that black audiences should support it since films of its kind may soon be "extinct".

"Please take your kids, you will enjoy it and so will they. There is a lot of action and adventure and also a great history lesson to be learned, " Perry wrote on his website recently. "George [Lucas], I just want to say, thank you for having the courage to do this," he added.

At the same time Red Tails is opening in the wake of the box office success of The Help. While that film was bolstered by a popular best selling book, a mixed race cast and a lighter tone, it did not shy away from portraying a very real part of the black experience. Whether or not it did so sufficiently -- with enough grit and darkness -- has been debated ad nauseum, but the film was a tremendous success critically and commercially.

In the same condescending fashion, in which Hollywood pundits declared the success of Bridesmaids definitive proof that women can carry R-rated comedies, The Help's popularity may be viewed as the beginning of a 'black film' renaissance. However, the bottom line is that that popular films, like The Color Purple some 27 years ago, offer audiences entertainment as well as genuine historical context.

Of course, black audiences are no more obligated to support The Help as women are obligated to see Bridesmaids. These films had mass appeal, regardless of race or gender, which explains why they became the phenomena they were.

Red Tails won't attract audiences because it was hard to finance. The film will have to deliver dramatically or it will have been all for naught. The Tuskegee Airmen's story has potential for a compelling melodrama, but if this film falls short it will be the fault of the filmmakers and no one else.

Red Tails may become a surprise word-of-mouth hit and recoup its budget, but the odds may be insurmountable for a movie that one critic called "as synthetic and dull as The Phantom Menace." In the film industry today, where film production and marketing is more expensive than ever, a big budget film lives or dies by its opening weekend. So regardless of its merits, we should know by Monday morning whether Red Tails soared or came crashing down.

'Red Tails': If the George Lucas epic flops, are black audiences to blame?
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1/18/12

Kevin Blythe Sampson and Martha Henry presentation outsider art fair 2012

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3:30PM-5PM jANUARY
Presentation: The Roots of the Spirit American Folk Art Museum exhibition
at the 2011 Venice Biennale
-Martha Henry, president,
Martha Henry Inc., Fine Art
-Kevin Sampson, artist
-Introduction by Lee Kogan, curator emerita, American Folk Art Museum
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Kevin Blythe Sampson and Martha Henry presentation outsider art fair

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Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics - The Daily Beast

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U.S. Politics

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In Newsweek Magazine

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

Gallery: Obama's Promises

OBAMA CAMPAIGN 20

Doug Mills / The New York Times-Redux

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

The Case Against Liberal Despair: Michelle Goldberg issues a reality check to those liberal activists who now despair electoral politics, Obama and the squalid compromises of governing.

Leave aside the internal incoherence—how could such an incompetent be a threat to anyone? None of this is even faintly connected to reality—and the record proves it. On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.

But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

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The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. Instead, Obama reversed Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course that eventually led to his capture and death. And when the moment for decision came, the president overruled both his secretary of state and vice president in ordering the riskiest—but most ambitious—plan on the table. He even personally ordered the extra helicopters that saved the mission. It was a triumph, not only in killing America’s primary global enemy, but in getting a massive trove of intelligence to undermine al Qaeda even further. If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted.

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels. From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.

They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.

And what have we seen? A recurring pattern. To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.

This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.

Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.

Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the culture war, while the right has accused him of a “war against religion.” He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands.

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics - The Daily Beast
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