DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
April 21, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
In the early ’80s, I’d sometimes skip classes at Boston Latin School in order to idle at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I wasn’t interested in art — I didn’t make it, study it, or frequent other museums — but I enjoyed the Gardner’s atmosphere, much more so than the atmosphere at, say, the equally nearby Museum of Fine Arts. Unorganized by artist, era, school, or theme, the Gardner’s paintings were hung… wherever Mrs. Gardner had decided to hang them. There weren’t any plaques; it was an education-free space.
It’s not that I never visited museums. I remember standing — transfixed, in the Louvre, at age 13 — before Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Which taught me that the experience of looking at art reproduced in books pales in comparison with visiting it in person. (At the Gardner, I’d frequently visit a turbulent painting of Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee. I didn’t realize it was a Rembrandt until it was stolen.) This salutary lesson’s pernicious effect, though, was to make me unwilling to look at art in books.
I tried my hand at making art, during college and grad school… which is to say that I did a lot of cartooning-doodling in notebooks. And when I was 29, I created an assemblage — organizing 24 1970s GI Joe heads within the frame of a wooden Coca-Cola crate. But although I’d sometimes visit a gallery or museum, I remained mulishly ignorant about art and art history.
Around the time I turned 45, though, at a time when many male members of my generational cohort were discovering an obsession with door-stopper biographies and World War II documentaries, I started to get excited about… Öyvind Fahlström, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, and other high-lowbrow artists about whom Gary Panter was at that time writing so insightfully for HILOBROW. So in 2018, when a friend who worked at the Art Institute of Chicago offered to sneak me into the first major Hairy Who exhibit, I made a flying visit. I rushed to the museum from the airport, en route to a semiotics presentation I was scheduled to give elsewhere in the city — and I was floored by the exhibit! I could feel something changing in me.
Later that year, while on a trip to New York, on a whim I visited the Hilma af Klint exhibit at the Guggenheim. Floored again! This time around, I realized that there was a vital relation — something to do with mathematics, mysticism, and scientific breakthroughs — between modernist art and another topic with which I’d become fascinated in my 40s: Radium Age science fiction. After many more museum visits, and yes, after having pored over many art history books, which I now find irresistible, I’ve recently begun… connecting the dots.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | …and more!
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!