Has anyone read the Eggleston review in the New Yorker

Tuolumne said:
If you can't do this you don't understand the sentence.

/T
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Touche, but not precisely the point. I can do it, but not without either losing subtlety or making an unnecessarily longer sentence. I don't love it the way it is:

"synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots."

But it's not as laborious as... well, I don't even have it in me right now to write the paragraph it would take.
 
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Oh come on you guys, all he has done is dress up a humble observation in parade dress, frilly cuffs and a ruff. Dont let him scare you.

"Synthetic gorgousness" can be removed, its meaningless. "Flaunt" actually can go as well. Photographs do not flaunt anything.
Iconise is a ten dollar word and I havnt got change.
Its simple
- His pictures have the nonchalance of snapshots.

But the subject of this sentence - "Synthetic gorgousness" is not even a person. Synthetic gorgousness doesnt actually DO anything, make less make photographs, nonchalant snapshots or not.

This writing is like a fat patron stuffing rich food into his gob so fast he cant swallow.
 
what are some examples of eggleston's lame imitators?

btw, eggleston didn't "betray" the legacy of evans and frank. neither of them would have even called themselves "concerned" photographers. that's a whole other kettle of fish.
 
I have a BA in English, was engaged to an English professor who does crit theory (ugh), and eventually turned towards programming because I couldn't take the BS of the field anymore. I am an enemy of the high-falutin where it doesn't belong. Mark Twain is my favorite writer. But if you think:

"His pictures have the nonchalance of snapshots."

Is an accurate restating of this sentence, you did not understand the sentence. The rest of the words there are speaking explicitly to *how* his photos (in the critic's opinion) do not just have, but "flaunt" the nonchalance of snapshots. Having and flaunting are two *totally* different words, with different connotations. Equating the two is deliberate obfuscation.

And a subject of a sentence can't "do" something unless it's a person? So the atomic bomb doesn't spread fear? We're talking abstractions, here, but not difficult ones.

I don't think anyone in this thread is stupid. I just think some here buy into the fashion of anti-intellectualism instead of the substance of anti-obfuscation. Unfortunately.
 
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The New Yorker is an excellent magazine. It's simply among the best. The article is not pretentious. It's easy to read and make sense of. To disagree with this article is perfectly OK, but as has been pointed out there's an odious, infuriating anti-intellectual streak in this thread.
 
memphis said:
yes, but what everybody's missing is that the writing seems to be pretense for the sake of pretense -- I don't mind intellectualism - just do it properly.
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I'm still curious, how might you say some of the things in this article that are "pretense for the sake of pretense" without taking a paragraph or more to say something that he says in a sentence? I just don't see it. I'll go back to the example in this thread where someone replaced "flaunt" with "have"-- total bull****. Two completely different words, with utterly divergent meanings. "flaunt" wasn't pretense, it was the exact one-syllable word for what he wanted to say.
 
memphis said:
The writer's style overall reminds me of the same guy that writes the stereotypical reviews of wine in the food and dining column in many cities - Eggelston's work can be reviewed without the typical art critic snobbishness - I guess a good single word to describe my impression of the reviewer based on the writing is a Manqué... But I digress - Playboy got it right, people would rather see the pictures than read the articles.


Art Critics and Food Critics generally feel the need to be the ones to write an esoteric review of something and feel that if you don't get it or agree with them, then you're less of a human being.
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I'm going to agree with you on the general sentiments, but gently note that you still didn't address the article at hand in a specific manner.
 
can i at least complain about the excessive punctuation, or am i going to be accused of anti-intellectualism?
 
Disregarding writing style for a moment, the content of the article offered nothing new and was derivative of various other articles I've read concerning Eggleston. I sometimes wonder if the people writing these reviews have ever actually seen any of the works they report about. Reminds me of my early journalist days with a small weekly newspaper. I wrote all the sports articles and never attended a single sporting event or interviewed a single athelete. I just rewrote the articles from the daily newspaper. It didn't require much expertise but it did help if you could thickly spread the BS.
 
memphis said:
the following 3 paragraphs from Time sum up the artist and his life so much more... efficiently:

Eggleston is what you might call a bohemian of independent means, a descendant of the Mississippi Delta planter aristocracy who was also for a time the lover of Viva, the Andy Warhol superstar. Since the mid-1960s, he has lived, comfortably and at full throttle, in Memphis, Tenn.

When he comes to the door, he's in his customary Wasp regalia, a button- down cotton shirt and white suede shoes. Quantities of nicotine and bourbon have produced his voice, a liquid Southern baritone that reminds you of his friend Shelby Foote. It's a voice he dispenses in small doses. What that means is that he can stretch a sentence into next week while he deliberates on his next syllable or two.

He has lived an interesting life. At 69, Eggleston has been married to his wife Rosa for 44 years and raised three children. But his definition of wedlock has been elastic enough to permit numerous girlfriends and affairs. He has been known to shoot indoors--guns, not just pictures. There have been various run-ins with the law. And over the years, he's been the best of friends with Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's. He's also been one of the most original artists of your lifetime.
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They sum up his life but not his art.

/T
 
Two quotes from the man himself, speaking on "William Eggleston in the real world" (a very interesting little film...):

"...trouble is with pictures, photographs... it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other."

"Art, or what we call that, you can love it and appreciate it but you can't really talk about it. It doesn't make any sense."

So...

Tom
 
"synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots."
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It's really not that obscure in context.

Schjeldahl is talking about how the content of the photographs seem like the same snapshots everyone's uncle takes, and they even show off (flaunt) their seeming carelessness, but through the meticulously well executed craft of dye transfer printing, Eggleston transforms these everyday scenes into symbols (or perhaps icons) of their time and place.

There's a bit more there, which isn't needed to understand the sentence, but is interesting, if you happen to know it.

An icon in the context of Eastern Christianity is a very particular kind of symbol, because the perspective of any particular icon is always the same, no matter what the perspective of its visual context, so the icon provides a kind of window onto the plane of the divine for the viewer who is standing in the earthly plane. So to "iconize" these mundane scenes is to raise them from the level of representation to symbol in a way that provides a window onto the divine plane. They may not do it for you, but that's a separate issue from understanding what Schjeldahl is claiming.

"Synthetic gorgeousness," while simply speaking of the beauty of Eggleston's craft, also makes a nod toward the distinction between synthetic beauty and natural beauty. There's a hint of Decadentism (a movement in literature and the arts at the end of the 19th century, exemplified by J-K Huysmans' novel Against the Grain among other works) in this understanding of Eggleston. One characterization of the Decadentist movement was that it found beauty in artifice, and natural beauty in natural objects that appeared artificial, like the anthurium, a flower that looks like wax or plastic. Eggleston photographs things that stand out in their artificiality and even ugliness, but the artifice of his printing makes them beautiful, for Schjeldahl.
 
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Memphis,

That may or may not say something about the man, but doesn't say a thing about the work. I think his work is the topic, no?

Cheers,
Gary
 
David Goldfarb said:
It's really not that obscure in context.

Schjeldahl is talking about how the content of the photographs seem like the same snapshots everyone's uncle takes, and they even show off (flaunt) their seeming carelessness, but through the meticulously well executed craft of dye transfer printing, Eggleston transforms these everyday scenes into symbols (or perhaps icons) of their time and place.

There's a bit more there, which isn't needed to understand the sentence, but is interesting, if you happen to know it.

An icon in the context of Eastern Christianity is a very particular kind of symbol, because the perspective of any particular icon is always the same, no matter what the perspective of its visual context, so the icon provides a kind of window onto the plane of the divine for the viewer who is standing in the earthly plane. So to "iconize" these mundane scenes is to raise them from the level of representation to symbol in a way that provides a window onto the divine plane. They may not do it for you, but that's a separate issue from understanding what Schjeldahl is claiming.

"Synthetic gorgeousness," while simply speaking of the beauty of Eggleston's craft, also makes a nod toward the distinction between synthetic beauty and natural beauty. There's a hint of Decadentism (a movement in literature and the arts at the end of the 19th century, exemplified by J-K Huysmans' novel Against the Grain among other works) in this understanding of Eggleston. One characterization of the Decadentist movement was that it found beauty in artifice, and natural beauty in natural objects that appeared artificial, like the anthurium, a flower that looks like wax or plastic. Eggleston photographs things that stand out in their artificiality and even ugliness, but the artifice of his printing makes them beautiful, for Schjeldahl.
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That's much better. And if you think your paragraph and Schjeldahl's sentence are on a par with one another you're wrong. Yours is much better.

/T
 
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Memphis,

The work (once it is done) exists independent of the man. It succeeds or fails on its own. You don't need to understand the man's personal life to get the pictures. His reputation for being some kind of character (Barry Hannah stories come to mind) is neither here nor there for me.

Whether you like his work or not, it seems silly to imply there is nothing more to it than the printing.

I agree, Big Star is cool.

Cheers,
Gary
 
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