ART AFTER SADE (NOTHING WILL COME BETWEEN US)

Just wanted to jot down these thoughts, which have been weighing on me recently:

No one is capable of producing more significant work in any discipline than what Sade Adu has contributed to the field of popular music. Listening to the six studio albums released by her band between 1984 and 2010, one is compelled as if by God to make peace with this staggering realization. All art fails miserably in comparison. In the wake of such effortless yet earth-shattering perfection there is no point to any enterprise, be it in music (popular or otherwise), art, sport, letters, business, medicine, government, religion, diplomacy, philosophy, agriculture, technology, architecture, various applied sciences, apparel design, philanthropy, web development, statistical research, climate change activism, vegetarianism, civil rights expansion, workman’s compensation, entrepreneurship, small business ownership, food blogging, appearing in films or TV, modeling, etc.

Worse than dead, painting is at the top of the pile of the pathetically unimportant. This is its rightful place, in deference to Sade’s achievement. Cynically, some take comfort in gloating over the painted art form’s embarrassment, though they fail to realize that all pursuit, activity or endeavor in any media, as a whole as well as in specific detail, withers and suffers in the shadow of Sade’s love balladry.

Presently, pop stars and songwriters working in the business perform a wholly unnecessary coda to Sade’s opus. Fans of the new stars engage at their own risk, as all are likely to one day find themselves in Hell or worse, so keep your receipts. 

Sade (discography)

Studio Albums:

Diamond Life (1984)

Promise (1985)

Stronger Than Pride (1988)

Love Deluxe (1992)

Lovers Rock (2000)

Soldier of Love (2010)

Compilation Albums:

The Best of Sade (1994)

The Ultimate Collection (2011)

Remix Albums:

Remix Deluxe (1992)

Live Albums:

Munich Concert (1984)

Lovers Live (2002)

Bring Me Home Live 2011 (2012)

BLISS CHAISE LOUNGE

“Upper classes being of their very nature withdrawn and self-confident often suppose that their personal pleasures are supported by the considered approval of mankind.”

            -Christopher Sykes

NOBLESSE OBLIGE: A READING

I sat up late last night reading Noblesse Oblige: An enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy edited by my absolute total hero Nancy Mitford. It centers around her article The English Aristocracy, a meditation on the differences between U (upper class) and Non-U (non-upper class) vocabulary. As expected, the collection ravages all the hands that have ever fed the sarcastic author, the "Queen of the Hons." Mitford gathered the seven vaguely satirical essays by different authors and all are unnecessary from any legitimate anthropological point of view, yet sometimes moving and very funny. Big thanks to my friends at Brattle Bookshop in Boston for finding it for me after quite a search. It has long been out of print.

Hidden in Mitford's half-tongue-in-cheek attempt to make linguistic account for the English upper class is a subtler set of instructions, predicated on the obvious failure of books about manners (members of the upper class have no need for etiquette instruction since they assume good manners at birth automatically, comfortably reassured in the knowledge that they are never wrong. Only middle class snobs actually make use of guidebooks). Mitford grew up an aristocrat and reached maturity without any desire to deny this fact. But Noblesse Oblige is an etiquette book nevertheless, a cunning attempt to engage in class warfare on behalf of the socialists from within the gilded walls of the privileged. Surface descriptions of how to behave graciously mask undercover instructions on how to live viciously. 

Since all of Mitford's writing is autobiographical, examples of her life avail throughout the entire oeuvre. In respect to outwitting forebears or deriding her peers, she is as saucy as ever. Essentially on display are power grabs for the endemically bored, when the only distinct precept is to amuse oneself at the expense of those you know in your heart are ridiculous, petty, dimwitted and rich.

The following passage is from Evelyn Waugh's contribution to the tome, An Open Letter to the Hon Mrs. Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) on a Very Serious Subject. In it he scolds his friend for having too much fun and inciting a riot of angry response, violent letters to editors and generalized national confusion, which actually did happen in 1955 when her original article first appeared. Near the end, he offers this apology for her more "serious" works of comic fiction:

Alertly studied, your novels reveal themselves as revolutionary tracts and here, in your essay, you speak out boldly: "Hear me, comrades. I come from the heart of the enemy's camp. You think they have lost heart for the fight. I have sat with them round their camp fires and heard them laughing. They are laughing at you. They are not beaten yet, comrades. Up and at them again."
Is that what you are really saying, Nancy? I hope you are just teasing, as I am. I hope. I wonder.

Fondest love,
Evelyn 

Isn't it beautiful? Under the guise of reprimand, Waugh cares so much for his sarcastic friend that he writes to defend her own work to her, just in case she cannot see for herself. That she might agree, yes, she is an incurable tease but overall, one of the good guys. She is surreptitious revolutionary in action, albeit somewhat leisurely action, an heroic image in her own right, an enviable position indeed. 

Mitford wrote my favorite conclusion to any book ever written, which also happens to have the best book title of any modern work of fiction, Love in a Cold Climate. Kudos if you've read it but if not, you absolutely must. I will not spoil the ending here, but to quote its best few sentences hopelessly out of context: 

"I may as well tell you, my darling, that the second big thing in my life has begun." A most sinister ray of light suddenly fell upon the future. "Oh, Cedric," I said. "Do be careful." 

A most sinister ray of light suddenly fell upon the future. The first time I read this made me deliriously happy to be disappointed and alive. The contradiction was suddenly hilariously apparent that I had to keep living in utter disagreeability, that life just never ends, there is no conclusion but perhaps I would be satisfied to know this for now: adult misbehavior pays its own way, it is its own queer reward. 

Going to and from wherever and whatever it is I do these days, I am plagued with the fear that critical estimation of Nancy's work has depreciated, defeated by the conservative good sense of middle class values or else the hysterical nonsubtleties of academic neo-liberalism. Whatever it is, a victory for boredom without even a shriek of relief. I press on half-heartedly...

OBSERVATIONAL CADMUS

Here we are meditating on this image for a while, spending some time. This is Sandy Campbell, standing in front of several drawings made of him by the legendary Paul Cadmus, who also shot this photo in New York City, 1943. I have this photo in a book called Collaboration: The Photographs of Paul Cadmus Margaret French and Jared French. A lovely look into a productive time spent in New York, Fire Island and Provincetown between these artists, lovers and friends starting in 1937 until sometime in the '50s.

I want to discuss two points. One, the most striking feature: Sandy's nudity. I have fun paying attention to nude photographs, not being over or above it. Turn your eyes toward the casual pose and the fresh skin of his face and torso. His compact shoulders, a nipple, his lips, clavicles, his left arm. Don't get so caught up and forget to notice the shirt collar included in the drawings. There's a difference being drawn between 'Art' and another, separate or obscure erotic life. The collar rendered misleads you to reveal nothing of its unfastening. 

Sex never once entered the artwork, and yet art was never without it. 

Two: this is a picture of several other pictures. With this picture-in-picture strategy the artist provides evidence of his skill in rendering a believable likeness. The photograph brings mechanical reproduction to bear on 'artistic' virtuosity. Within this arrangement, if nothing else we understand that the artist has a talent for capturing the subject with his bare hands as well as with a camera, in accord with the modern era.

What remains is difficult to describe. We can peer into the space between model (whose body we have already described) and the portraits tacked onto the studio wall. What about the ghost of the remainder, (2012-1943=69!), a relationship between artist and sitter, romantic or otherwise, gleaned from a depth of surface tension... what is being shown? Something ineffable. 

Sandy sees he's been compromised and thus takes action. Sandy slips in or out of some shadows. He operates within an area which Paul attempts to surround on all sides through the study and practice of observational drawing. Sandy moves and moves and moves. Paul's skill and facility does helpless little to prevent Sandy's comings and goings. To his delight and terror Paul is beguiled and incompleted. 

 

Sandy Campbell by Paul Cadmus, 1944.

What is the upper hand, after all?