May 30, 2011 Issue

One of the great things about art is the way it can redeem the discarded, the outmoded, the obsolete. Think of Joseph Cornell and the way he made assemblages out of what he called ephemera. As Charles Simic says, in his great essay on Cornell called “The Image Hunter” (The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2002; included in Simic’s 2006 collection Memory Piano):

If he [Cornell] had not eventually figured how to make original twentieth-century art out of his stashes of old movie magazines, moldy engravings, yellowed postcards, maps, guidebooks, film strips, photographs of ballet dancers, and hundreds of other items stored in shoe boxes and scrapbooks in his basement, they would have ended up at a dump or in a flea market.

I thought of Cornell when I was reading Andrea K. Scott’s “Futurism” in this week’s issue of the magazine. It’s about the artist Cory Arcangel, who uses obsolete computer equipment to generate drawings, sculptures, videos, and photographs. Scott says, “Arcangel finds an abject beauty in the way that modern technology is doomed to obsolescence.”

One of Arcangel’s best-known works is his video installation “Super Mario Clouds,” which he created, Scott says, by “taking the code to the classic 1985 Nintendo cartridge and erasing everything but the clouds, which typically drift behind the action.” In “Futurism,” Scott does a good job describing Arcangel’s art. But as I read the piece, I found myself resisting it. Arcangel’s virtual bowlers, pixellated clouds, YouTube clips of cats jumping on pianos, Photoshop-gradient photographs, etc., just don’t work for me. I wonder if they work for Scott. Nowhere in her piece does the word “pleasure” occur, unless you count “gloriously cheesy,” which is her description of a website that Arcangel has developed. As an art critic, Scott is nothing if not sensual. Her “Critic’s Notebook” pieces are filled with sensual, tactile description and expressions of pleasure. That’s what I like about them. I recall her ravishing review of the Lynda Benglis show at New Museum (“Making a Splash,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011), in which she said, “It was a knotty time to make art, and Bengalis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic.” I devour description like that. “Futurism” is almost completely devoid of it. The reason, I think, is that Arcangel’s work didn’t sufficiently excite Scott’s considerable descriptive power.

Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball,” is also in this week’s issue. It’s about New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It’s a fascinating story and Toobin tells it very well. One aspect of it troubles me. Toobin shows that the complaint lodged against Wilpon by bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard contains a false accusation. Picard alleges that Wilpon and his partner, Saul Katz, were warned by their financial manager, Peter Stamos, that Madoff was “too good to be true.” But, according to Toobin, Picard knew when he made this allegation that Stamos actually said the opposite. Toobin says:

There is something troubling, however, about the way the Picard complaint portrays Stamos as the Cassandra of the Madoff scandal—the person whose persistent warnings were ignored by Wilpon and Katz. Wilpon’s lawyers at Davis Polk discovered that Stamos had given a deposition during Picard’s investigation, and the transcript gives a very different picture of Stamos’s state of mind from that portrayed in Picard’s complaint. “I’m embarrassed to say that I said to Mr. Katz on a number of occasions that my assumption is that Mr. Madoff is . . . among the most honest and honorable men that we will ever meet,” Stamos testified. “And number two, that he is perhaps one of the—my assumption is he’s perhaps one of the best hedge fund managers in modern times. . . . All the way to the time when the fraud was discovered, I had the same conclusion.” In fact, it appears that no one in the Stamos firm had any words of warning about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme until after his fraud was discovered.

To me this is damning evidence against Picard. He’s making an accusation against Wilpon that he knows is false. It would seem to me to be grounds for dismissal of the complaint against Wilpon and for discipline proceedings against Picard. Curiously – and this is the part that bothers me – Toobin not only shrinks from drawing this conclusion, he also appears to rationalize Picard’s wrongful action. Toobin says:

Complaints in civil cases are designed to be argumentative documents, but Picard’s words about Stamos seem typical of an approach that seems to find malevolent intent in virtually everything Wilpon and Katz did.

But surely Picard’s words are more than just “argumentative”; they’re blatantly false! I find it hard to accept that the court would allow Picard to get away with such an underhanded tactic. I wish that Toobin, instead of trying to excuse Picard’s action as “typical,” had forcefully condemned it. In his failure to do so, he mars what is otherwise a consummate piece of journalism.