June, 2004
My own introduction to ARTnews– beyond occasional browsing– came courtesy of the many poets who have passed through our halls. John Ashbery previously served as Executive Editor, but, perhaps the lesser known fact is that James Schuyler once held an Associate Editor post. The two poets share little in common stylistically, but both composed poems clearly informed by their nuanced, measured reviews of art for the magazine. In college, I read Schuyler’s ‘Selected Art Writings,’ in which his delicate and brief meditations on artists like Rauschenberg and Pollock particularly sparkle, and I became eager to learn more about the place that published him regularly.
One of my favorite poems of Schulyer’s (in fact, one of my favorite poems, period) deals directly with art: “Fabergé.” While Schuyler makes no direct reference to the Russian jeweler’s work, the unconventional love poem shimmers with the textures from the world of the poet’s imagination. The prose poem itself becomes a kind of art object, and, yet, its effect is ephemeral. An unidentified speaker delivers the poem in quotations that dissolve into a conversation without end, to a lover unknown. All the beautiful things to hold become too precious, too vast, or perhaps too far described to even touch:
“I keep my diamond necklace in a pond of sparking water for invisibility.
“My rubies in Algae Pond are like an alligator’s adenoids.
“My opals—the evening cloud slipped in my pocket and I felt it and vice versa.
“Out of all the cabs I didn’t take (a bit of a saver) I paved a street with gold. It was quite a short street, sort of a dollhouse cul-de-sac.
“And there are a lot of other pretties I could tell about—ivory horses carved inside bone dice; coral monkeys too tiny to touch; a piece of jade so big you might mistake it for the tundra and a length of chalcedony as long as the Alcan Highway which is the Alcan Highway. It is solidified liquid chalcedony.
“Here, just for you, is a rose made out of a real rose and the dewdrop nestled in a rosy petal that has the delicate five-o’clock-shadow fuzz—blue—is not a tear. I have nothing to cry about now I have you.”
Flipping through our archival issues, I found an article on the history of Fabergé by contributing editor Konstantin Akinsha (“The Long Odyssey of the World’s Most Expensive Eggs,” June 2004) sparked by the purchase of nine eggs for $100 million at Sotheby’s by a Russian billionaire. Reading about the loopy Peter Carl Fabergé (he often forgot people’s orders or made sketches in which two sides of an object were completely different) and the many billionaires who have lusted after his items– from Russian czars to Malcolm Forbes– only adds to the items’ idiosyncratic charm. In one particularly wonderful anecdote:
“Fabergé once received an order to produce a silver icon cover, on which was to be engraved the Lord’s Prayer. Too exhausted to write down the full text, Fabergé noted on the sketch: ‘Our Father etcetera.’ When the icon cover returned from the workshop, engraved on it was ‘Our Father etcetera.'”
The egg, however, Akinsha goes on to relate, in fact, was not an original idea, but one that Fabergé used to suit his artistic needs. When Russian royalty demanded gifts, the enigmatic design kept Fabergé’s ideas a secret: he could put whatever he wanted inside.
An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, opened November 2011, is currently on long-term view from the collection of Matilda Geddings Gray (yet another figure fascinated by the work). The mystique around Fabergé objects might lie in the contrast between their at once sumptuous facades and world-within-a-world cores. To my mind, it’s a concept Schuyler gets at much more succinctly in his poem than any analysis could. Beyond the haze of gold and gemstones, the artist has some deeper emotion to reveal. There, a rose is just a real rose flecked with a dew-drop…but it may or may not be a tear. The secret behind his declaration of “having it all” becomes elusive to the artist himself.
Art-Checker 
July 30, 2012
Child’s Play: ‘Century of the Child: Growing by Design (1900-2000)’
Courtesy MoMA (via http://centuryofthechild.tumblr.com/)
This new survey at MoMA, the first of its kind, examines the role of design in shaping the demeanor and trajectory of children living during the last century. Divided into seven chronological sections– beginning with the year Swedish social theorist and designer Ellen Key published her manifesto “Century of the Child”– the show sprawls across Europe to America and beyond. One moves seamlessly from stiff children’s uniforms of wartime Italy to the Manga-inspired outfits of 1990s Japan.
Walking through the exhibition, one can’t help but notice the sheer amount of energy poured into these microcosms, filled with specialized clothing, furniture, games, and propaganda. I was reminded of Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent piece for the New Yorker, “Spoiled Rotten” which, while focusing only on 21st century children in the U.S., deeply resonates with the MoMA show. Kolbert identifies a kind of child worship in our country that seems baffling in contrast to life in Amazonian tribes like the Matsigenka. There, children contribute to family life freely, not because of a demand or for a reward. Two anthropologists noted in their research on the tribe that “three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives.” Compare that to the section of the MoMA exhibition devoted to progressive playground designs– including one by Noguchi– which are often abandoned because of safety concerns.
Kolbert notices a growing divide between American parenting versus any other– she describes how in the book Bringing Up Bébé, an American journalist struggles with her own children amongst less coddling French mothers whose children understand the word “no.” The term “Tiger Mother” barely need be mentioned. New American parenting books and methods– mainly focusing on how to turn children into successful adults– are multitude, Kolbert writes. And while this distinction between Continental, American, and Asian childcare does not quite manifest itself in the show, which by its culmination has addressed all three with almost equal weight, it feels like a silent statement. The vast exhibition, of over 500 items from all over the world, is, after all, an American project.