Art Without a Frame

Think you could be a scout? If I sent you coach's videotape from a high school football game in, say 1980, would you be able to tell me which quarterback went on to be a star in the NFL and which never even made it as a college player? There's no sound, the uniforms don't provide any insight, and neither kids puts up statistics that would reveal his future stardom.

I ask this question a lot. I ask casual fans. I ask writers. I ask pro coaches and personnel guys. What's most fascinating is that the closer I get to guys that actually have to make these kinds of decisions, the less likely they are to say "yes."

It's a question that interested me as I began to work on my football book, which came out last summer. I wanted to challenged the conventional wisdom about who the great football players of all time were. If Dick Butkus is the greatest linebacker of all-time, then it ought to be obvious to anyone who watches film of his games. Maybe film doesn't exist, or doesn't tell the full story. Fair enough, but then you at least ought to be able to give me some reasons why a player was so good. Tell me what it is about Red Grange that made him stand out. Explain why Jim Otto was the best lineman of his day.

It's a question that transcends sports. We learn about great works of art in the same way. Why is the Mona Lisa a great painting? What makes "Citizen Kane" one of the most important American films? If I think it's boring, am I just too unsophisticated to understand what I'm seeing?

All of these questions point toward the same issue? To what degree is "greatness" a measure of collective opinion and to what degree is "greatness" inherent. If you watch Citizen Kane for the first time tonight, will its greatness be obvious? Or is its greatness more about familiarity? Is it great because "people" have always said it was great.

I'm not the first to raise this question. In fact, it's one of the oldest epistomological debates. Is beauty a measurable fact (as Gottfried Leibniz asserted), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

In the spring of 2007, Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten wanted to probe that ageless question in a modern setting. He convinced Grammy award winning classical violinist Joshua Bell to play at the entrance of a Washington D.C. subway station, posing as a run of the mill street performer. Bell isn't as recognizable as, say Brad Pitt, but he was a child prodigy who has, at the age of 39, becmone an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. His 2003 CD Romance of the Violin sold more than five million copies and remained at the top of classical music charts for 54 weeks. Bell's instrument was a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin, for which he had paid more than four million dollars. He played Carnegie Hall at 14. He has played for Kings and Queens. The cheap seats for one of his concerts go for around $100. Would folks walking past think he was just another busker, or would they recognize and appreciate the quality of Bell's performance?

Violinist Joshua Bell playing at the L'Enfant Plaza subway station
in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. Bell is at far left.
Full video available at Washington Post website.

Weingarten started by posing the question to Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

Slatkin was wrong.

Bell played for 45 minutes and more than a thousand people passed by. Just seven stopped to listen. The vast majority of folks didn't react at all to one of the world's greatest musicians playing a few feet away from them.

Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to music. Weingarten also interviewed one of the leading experts in the world of art.

Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or pope or Medici ever did1. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. "Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for the article.

Thoughts on Health Care

After my daughter spent a month in the hospital this spring, I have a whole new perspective on the debate raging over health care reform.

A fascinating new study helps to illustrate, the urgent need to move away from the for-profit health insurance model. According to a joint study by Harvard University and Ohio State University, sixty percent of US bankruptcies in 2007 were driven by medical bills. What's really alarming is that 75% of those folks had health insurance.

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

And why is that? Because if you do get sick and need significant treatment, odds are your policy will simply get cancelled. According to the report, a quarter of people lose their insurance coverage immediately when they suffer a disabling illness, and another quarter lose it within the first year. Insurance companies (or employers who offer their own plans) save money by dropping you if you're too expensive.

Critics of reform scream about the possibility of rationing health care under a single-payer system, but the reality is that we already have rationing. Insurance companies protect their profits by dropping folks who need expensive care, or putting artificial limits on how many days you can spend in the hospital, how many times you can visit a doctor, or even annual caps on how much they'll spend for your care. All of those things that the Fox News crowd warn us could happen under "Obama Care" are exactly the things we have right now.

Vincent and Theo

This article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of "Overlooked Gems."

Several films have been made about the life of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and most people know the broad strokes of his life’s story. Robert Altman’s 1990 film “Vincent and Theo” goes beneath the surface of a man who became a pop culture icon and probes the complex issues. Altman avoids the easy clichés of the tortured artist, focusing on the two bitter realities of the painter’s life: Vincent Van Gogh was tremendously passionate about his work, and nobody wanted to buy it. 

The film opens in 1987, where one of his most well known paintings is on the auction block. As the bids rise quickly into millions of pounds, the image shifts to a destitute Van Gogh a hundred years earlier, a young man desperate to escape the misery of his own life. Tim Roth brings a fresh perspective to the role of Van Gogh, revealing a man who is tormented by his lack of success in life, personally as much as professionally. 

Kirk Douglas portrayed Van Gogh in the more popular biopic, “Lust for Life,” but in that 1956 film, the artist’s principal influence was fellow painter Paul Gaugin. In that version of the story, Gaugin overshadowed Van Gogh in many ways, and it’s not surprising that Anthony Quinn won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal. In Altman’s version, Van Gogh’s mentor and chief supporter is his brother, Theo, a Parisian art dealer.

Theo (played by Paul Rhys) recognized his brother’s talent, encouraged him to pursue his art, helped him to meet and collaborate with the top painters of his day, but in the end, was unable to help his brother. He could never sell any of his paintings, couldn’t help him escape the self-destructive behavior of his personal life, and ultimately, couldn’t help him overcome the mental illness that led to his suicide. 

The relationship between the brothers is the core of the film. Both struggle desperately for their own measure of fulfillment, and both are raging at their own failures. In each other, they find both solace and support, but neither can help the other to overcome the obstacles that doom them to lives of unhappiness. 

As with all of Altman’s films, “Vincent and Theo” is about characters, not plot. It’s not a story of the events of their lives so much as it is an account of who these two brothers were and how they saw the world. One of the great achievements here is how Altman and cinematographer Jean Lépine show us the world the way that Van Gogh saw it. We see the mundane scenes of his life that we recognize from his paintings... his bedroom, the café at night, the church, even the countryside. It’s one thing to know the facts of a person’s life; it’s another thing altogether to feel as if you’ve inhabited his world. 

This film received only a limited theatrical release, and as of this writing has never been available on DVD. [Editor's note: the film was finally released on DVD in August 2005.] It received no award nominations and remains largely unknown, save for the occasional airing on cable television. It was a breakthrough performance for Roth, and one of the best films in Altman’s fifty-year career. Most significantly, it is a fascinating portrait of a complex and contradictory genius... and his brother the painter.

New Photos of First MLB Game in Canada

On their web site, the Archives of the city of Montreal recently posted a collection of color photos from the first home game of the Montreal Expos. That game took place on April 14, 1969, and it was the first Major League Baseball game played outside of the United States The images capture some of the game's greats, including Maury Wills, Rusty Staub, and Curt Flood. I like the photo above, which shows (from left to right) Expos manager Gene Mauch and Cardinals' players Bill White and Joe Torre. A quick look at the Retrosheet website shows that after the Expos jumped to an early 6-0 lead, the Cards came back with seven runs in the fourth inning, capped by Torre's two-run homer. The Expos tied the game on a wild pitch in the bottom of the fourth, and took the lead on an RBI single by relief pitcher Dan McGinn in the 7th, winning 8-7.

Most of the photos are from batting practice and the pregame cermonies. There are some great shots of Jarry Park, which was just supposed to be a temporary home but served as the Expos home until 1977. The text at the site is in French and the folks from the city archives haven't correctly identified some of the players in their photo captions, but the images are fantastic.

Update: I heard from Mario Robert, head of the archives, who read this blog post and accepted my offer to help identify some of the Cardinal players in the photos. Although he wasn't at that inaugural game, Mario told me an all too familiar tale of he and his schoolmates secretly listening to the game on a tranistor radio during class.

Radio Friday

Back on the radio, Friday from 7-8 pm on WHAM-1180 with Bob Matthews Bob and I will be discussing the current baseball season, and the greatest players of all time at each position. We'll also be taking phone calls.