Word: caravaggio
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...this is political (for in the wake of the Sindona and Calvi banking scandals, people are unsurprisingly skeptical of Vatican motives); but much of it comes from art historians of impeccable credentials, like the former mayor of Rome Giulio Carlo Argan, who holds that works like the Belvedere Torso, Caravaggio's Deposition and Leonardo's St. Jerome-all included in the exhibition-should not be exposed to the risks of travel, particularly for a show that has no scholarly purpose. But the Vatican does what it wants to do. It was determined to have an Event. If ever...
...black question mark hangs over this show. Old art cannot go anywhere by boat or train (too much jarring); to travel at all, it must fly, and nothing survives a plane crash. To take the nightmare by the ears, suppose the Caravaggio Deposition ends up distributed, in a thousand charred shreds, across a Midwestern wheat field. What then? It would put an end to international loans of major works of art, and the exhibition programs of all museums (though not necessarily art scholarship itself) would be halted or hobbled for a generation...
Nobody seeks to abolish the exchanges for serious surveys, definitive retrospectives and similar events. How one would like to see the Deposition as the climax of a Caravaggio retrospective, or the Apollo Belvedere as the focus of a show that intelligently explored the workings of the neoclassical ideal! But it is time for the international museum community to give a lot more thought to which journeys are really necessary, which shows justify great loans, and which ones are merely totemic...
Hearst/ABC 's ARTS is devoting 75 minutes to a leisurely documentary on Caravaggio. HBO and Showtime make capital out of new movies, and the nationwide "superstations" beam Greta Garbo and John Wayne to more than 25 million homes. The local independent channels thrive on TV reruns: you can catch Mary Tyler Moore every night and M-A-S-H ten times a week. On the 24-hr. Cable Health Network, a psychiatrist is either preventing or precipitating a woman's emotional collapse. On an ad hoc network formed by Mobil Oil, the Royal Shakespeare Company revives Nicholas Nickleby...
Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts...