Word: elton
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...without the whips and chains, which means the Mapplethorpe of laser-cut male torsos and tulips that loom before you like stage-lit pachyderms. These pictures were not collected by the inebriated stage floozy we used to know and love. They bear the mark of the studious Sir Elton John, a man buying things in the cold light of the morning after. Even the sex here is stately. Don't look for anything hairy or louche. It's mostly neatly muscled male torsos by Horst, Mapplethorpe or Herb Ritts. The models have abs more tightly organized than Elton...
What's unbuckled, in places, is the melancholy, which may be the emotional default mode of a man who has buried good friends--Gianni Versace, Princess Diana--and lost others to AIDS. The Elton John who wrote Daniel, with its baffled yearning, is the one who loves the blue-tinted male nudes of John Dugdale, with their Victorian grief. The somber undercurrent is plain even in Andres Serrano's vivid crimson circle in a rectangle of bright yellow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a pool of blood...
...Museum of Art in Atlanta is doing with John's photographs, until Jan. 28. However much exhibits like this may be a public service, they are also a venerable form of donor courtship. It's fair to say that the trustees of the High wouldn't mind if Sir Elton were to will them every bit of this collection someday. (They must hold their breath every time he tells the press how much he would love to see a photography museum established in London.) But if they covet his holdings, who can blame them? This is a collection few museums...
Scratch a collector, and you find a pack rat who likes to play librarian. As a teenager Elton bought rock records extravagantly, then organized them with Prussian efficiency, filing them by record label and catalog number. With early stardom he loaded up on the usual blunder acquisitions of new-money collectors. (What was it exactly that baby boomers saw in Art Nouveau posters and Tiffany lamps?) Most of that he sold off some years ago in the mental and physical housecleaning that accompanied his decision to stop drinking. Then he went to lunch in France, somebody showed him some prints...
...find it again in the flagrant comedies of Tracey Moffatt's Something More series, scenes staged for the camera, where bored babes get very fed up with Nowheresville, Australia. At the High's satellite galleries at the Georgia-Pacific Center, where there's a separate show devoted to Elton's celebrity portraits, you see it once more in the shot Andy Warhol took of himself in drag, a Halloween-in-Greenwich Village version of Joan Crawford. Actually, he looks pretty good...