by Steve Shapiro

A famous print ad campaign that began in the late Sixties for the fur company Blackgama featured superstars such as Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, and Judy Garland otherwise naked but for a draped fur around them, with the tag “What becomes a legend most?”  The idea that a Blackgama mink would endure, like its celebrity endorsers, runs against the primeval notion of fashion as here today, gone tomorrow.

The arts harbor a similar paradox: the need as Ezra Pound declaimed to “make it new,” like the demand that the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev gave to his Ballets Russes before each performance—“Étonne-moi!” (“Astonish me!”)—runs counter to the ingrained sense of art as promoting surprise, while equally creating work that will be viewed as a commodity. Any real artist must be a businessman, too.

Architecture looks like art, and quacks like art: but is it art? Among the arts, only architecture has a standing requirement that it first be utilitarian. The Taj Mahal, Chartres, Versailles, Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, even the Flatiron Building in New York: each building, in its own way, is a work of art; but first all of them pass muster as structures to house people, whether for secular or religious reasons.

by Steve Shapiro

It is often said that sports—at least, certain sports, such as baseball, tennis, gymnastics, and to writers like Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates, boxing—are the closest thing to art. An athlete is like a ballet dancer, if one ever saw Ricky Henderson steal a base by graceful, lithe steps; an athlete must have the prowess of an opera singer, able to use his body to perform; a true athlete knows his sport in an almost aesthetic sense, the way that the impeccable Arthur Ashe did (and today’s self-interested celebrity tennis stars do not). 

Baseball has been in the news extra this month: the passing of George Steinbrenner, the volatile owner of the New York Yankees, was coincidental with the publication of a new biography on another sports impresario, the old Kansas City A’s owner, Charlie O. Finley; and the release of a set of stamps which focus on the Negro League Baseball stars was celebrated at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, at 1616 E18th Street.

The outpouring of attention given to both the players and the owners, beyond the sports pages, is evidence of the depth to which baseball has fixed itself in the national imagination.

By Steve Shapiro

Americana begins and ends at the state line.

In Kansas, home of a higher tax base than Missouri and snowy streets that are shoveled sooner than its bordering neighbor, the impulse is to always look south; so it seems, at least, in two areas of prominence, Prairie Village and Overland Park.

Kansas City, as the younger sibling to St. Louis in making Missouri known to the rest of the country, may call itself home to Charlie Parker and Walt Disney and host the Country Club Plaza (versus Overland Park’s Town Center Plaza); yet its well-etched past—of Pendergast’s Machine and the 1968 Riot, jazz and barbecue, the American Royal and Satchel Paige—stands for a realer America, one defined by a notional sense of itself as (more than) a cowboy town as much as by its national hierarchy in the country’s history of turmoil and struggles.

Overland Park’s fiftieth anniversary celebration this year began in February and peaked earlier this May, with a luncheon and a historic homes tour. For many of us who have grown up in or near the city, however, the anniversary is less about lived history than about a kind of refracted history: Overland Park, with its faux-historic dwellings and repetitively terraced front lawns, its upper-income tax brackets and teenagers driving expensive Scandinavian cars gifted to them when turning sweet sixteen, feels more like a state of mind than a wrinkled, roughshod existence evident in Kansas City’s Hyde Park or Armour District.

Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

Ever since Marcel Duchamp found a common porcelain urinal, mischievously signed it “R. Mutt” and Alfred Stiegltz, no less, photographed it as beautifully as if it were Michelangelo’s statue of David, artists have selected everyday objects to transform into objets d’art.

The Surrealists combined suggestive everyday fare such as bottles and fur. (Man Ray’s contributions of an iron with 14 nails on its bottom where it would be used, and a metronome with a seductive eye pasted on the pendulum were two highlights.) Pop tinkers like Claes Oldenburg took on the ideal of everyday items like baseball bats and supersized them; but the subversion of ordinary objects has taken on an almost mystical approach in the art community, from Rauschenberg’s assemblages to William T. Wiley’s puzzle-sculptures to Nari Ward’s reinvention of the wheel and other household objects.

Disaster Relief: David Bates’s Katrina Paintings
Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

Disasters ask nothing of humans; catastrophe on any scale, whether natural or man-made, happens without the expected equation. The aftermath is always a realm of possibilities—some, like large-scale war, are easier to transform into art (Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings; Picasso’s “Guernica”); others, like the Hindenburg explosion or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, seem to exist as they are. No artistic response is made or available for healing. There is no rule of thumb when considering a disaster.

To the classic examples of disaster art—Goya’s etchings, Picasso’s painting—I nominate David Bates’s oeuvre, in pencil, charcoal, watercolor, photography and painting, in response to the Hurricane Katrina upheaval of 2005. Katrina’s total destruction will never be quantified; its aftershocks continue to this day. The artistic challenge for a disaster unfolding in real time, on TV and in so many other twenty-first century formats, is to make the art both timely and timeless.

Labels are misleading, except when they deal with dosages on prescriptions. Whether dealing with politics, literature or art, a label of “conservative” or “abstract” or something hung on an individual at an early age can limit both the person under scrutiny and his audience or critics. For example, what would one make of late Monet? His “Water Lilies” are hardly Impressionist, yet it would be another fifty years before the large abstract paintings would be heralded as such.

by Steve Shapiro

If the catchphrase for retail is location, location, location, the one word for the narrative arts is storytelling, storytelling, storytelling.

No matter whether it is a multi-layered historical novel like “War and Peace” or a poem by Wallace Stevens, one of our most enigmatic American poets of the twentieth century, at some level the audience expects a story and the best creative artists—Hitchcock, Updike, Edward Hopper—find a way in to a story uniquely.

The exceptions, though, can be even more thrilling: one must find one’s way into, and out of, a Jackson Pollock painting, a novel by Thomas Pynchon, or a movie by Robert Altman.

Altman was the cinema’s dreamscapist; he worked more on intuition than on a script, shaped other writers’ material (even the classic Chandler mystery “The Long Goodbye”) to his own wavelength, yet found himself king of the outcasts. Who would have thought he developed so much chutzpah from growing up in Kansas City?

Steve Shapiro

Kansas City art was once defined less by any kind of community, like the Abstract Expressionists who hung out in Greenwich Village in the Forties, than by iconic individualists: Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, for example, grand old men whose social realist styles represented, for better and for worse, the universal view of the Midwest. The Kansas City Artists Coalition, begun in 1975, by Philomene Bennett, Louis Marak, and several other painters, was revolutionary in its goal of self-governing local artists; their intent was to move beyond the establishment art collected by the Nelson-Atkins Museum, which until recently was cool toward local artists. In the thirty-plus years since, Kansas City’s art scene has developed into a citywide collective of small galleries and alternative spaces to nurture and exhibit artists.

Of the many organizations, the Belger Arts Center, located on the second floor of the Belger Building, off Walnut at 21st Street—it is impossible to miss that wonderful huge sign “BELGER Cartage Service, Inc.” as one drives down Main—is unique in its goal: while it is a private museum, still run by the Belger family, it is open to the public for exhibitions that, even with so much offered now, gain attention for their merit. As it celebrates its first ten years, the Belger is presenting a show, “Beneath the Surface: Excavating the Belger Collection,” that focuses on the Center’s particular collecting style—attending to a small group of artists, and following them over time.

By Steve Shapiro

In E.L. Doctorow’s recent novel, “Homer & Langley,” based on the homebound lives of the two Collyer brothers whose Fifth Avenue New York City brownstone became an overstuffed museum to their past—acquiring objects took on a fetishistic quality.

When they were finally found dead inside, twenty years of hoarding revealed all sorts of things, from old newspapers to a Model T automobile they had dismantled and rebuilt.

At one point, the fictional narrator admits as much, after enumerating a host of G.I. surplus equipment such as gas masks, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons and much more that found a place in their home: “artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet un-catalogued, the curating still to come.”

By Steve Shapiro

The school term is over, commencement addresses have been given—Glen Beck offered the pithy maxim “Shoot to kill”—and at the Kansas City Art Institute, the annual Flatfile group exhibition is at hand.

Housed in its adjunct H&R Block Artspace, at 43rd and Main, the 2010 show combines teachers and graduates in two-dimensional work, from past instructors such as Philomene Bennett and Anne Lindberg, to Jason Pollen, the current head of the school’s fiber department, as well as accomplished alumni like the fiber artist Debra M. Smith (1993), and Ke-Sook Lee (1982), who started late (she was a busy “housemaker”) but now shows in galleries across the country.

Recent graduates like Paul Shortt (2009), for example, are easy to spot. Shortt reproduces those ubiquitous certificates handed out at the end of term, with satiric twists (one reads, “Thanks for taking the time to view this work of art”)—if not always for their originality, then for their verve. The Art Institute is now an institution, not only locally, but nationally.

Opening in 1885, KCAI has a long list of names attached to it, from the obvious (Thomas Hart Benton, Rauschenberg) to the incidental; Walt Disney attended weekend classes as a child; the late Dennis Hopper, born in Dodge City, whose family moved to Kansas City as a teen, also took weekend classes.

Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

Before Condé Nast was a corporation, he was a man—and, as the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, his influence permeated both American and European cultures in haute couture, literature, dance, and art.

Within art’s medium, photography, which was beginning to take serious root at the turn of the modern era, quickly became the go-to art form for magazines; and when Nast’s regular staff photographer, the aristocratically named Baron Adolph de Meyer, accepted a position at Vogue’s archrival, Harper’s Bazaar, in 1923, the thirty-four-year-old Luxembourg-born Edward Steichen was invited by Nast to assume the mantle of lead photographer.

His career in fashion and in glamour magazines lasted roughly fifteen years; his subsequent careers as a photojournalist, Army consultant, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and organizer of the legendary “Family of Man” exhibition would all assume secondary importance to Steichen’s pictures taken of Garbo; of clothes by Chanel; and of models in the newest styles.

The invigorating, nostalgia-bound Nelson-Atkins exhibition, “Edward Steichen in High Fashion: The Condé Nast Years” focuses on Steichen’s greatest period, as he remade the art of fashion photography.

Reviewed by Steve Shapiro

Before such superheroes as Iron Man and Batman crowded the imagination, truly super beings, bearing the names Osiris, Isis and Horus, strode tall and mighty—and why not? Ancient Egypt in its heyday was the equivalent of Russia under Catherine I, Britain under Queen Victoria or America under, well, Truman.

Tut, Ramses II, and Amenhotep III were deities; the pharaohs combined the powers of supreme rulers both in their lifetimes and afterwards (something Dick Cheney apparently hopes to achieve). Gods of fertility and of the afterworld were as common as celebrities nowadays, with the added emphasis on their magical link between the living and the dead.

The religious practices and everyday iconography of ancient Egypt still possess the aura of the ancient realm, as discoveries of tombs, hieroglyphics, funeral offerings and daily accessories over the last several hundred years have coalesced to attract the public’s fascination in a way that ancient Roman rarely has.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum, once known primarily for its ancient Chinese collection, has been developing its collections of art and artifacts of by-gone civilizations, from Native American to Colonial America. The recently unveiled Egyptian galleries, which lead into the Near Eastern, Greek, Roman, and European galleries, have an updated feel—and a priceless two thousand three hundred year-old coffin as a greeter

KC Tribune’s founder and editor, Tom Bogdon, showed the same practical hands-on approach to publishing and journalism that had been the tradition in newspapers and magazines for hundreds of years, even as he broke new ground by entering into the digital realm. His interest in the city, like the bird’s-eye view of editors in New York and London, encompassed the daily lot of local politics, history, argument, and criticism. His final article was an arts review—his first, he admitted to me—of a local revue on the Labor movement that he felt needed to be covered. A longtime reporter, Tom believed the story came first, no matter who claimed the byline.

By Steve Shapiro

The introduction, last week, by Kansas City’s premier brewery Boulevard, of a new seasonal beer, “Boss Tom’s Golden Bock,” feels like the ghost in the machine that ruled Kansas City politics for forty-two years has come full circle.

The Pendergast Democratic machine, particularly in the form of “Boss Tom,” as he was known, is acknowledged as the most formidable political system in the country, after New York’s Tammany Hall.

Pendergast gave Harry Truman his start—after his eventual downfall via a conviction on tax evasion, and death, in early 1945, the ever-loyal Truman attended Pendergast’s funeral to much dismay––but, not to put too fine a point on it, as Henry James liked to write, nearly all of the city’s businesses were Boss Tom’s pearls and nearly as many politicians were his oysters.

Steve Shapiro

If one could determine the makeup of a theatrical production by its look, after both the extravagant and flamboyant sets of “Into the Woods” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” and the spare staging of “Palomino,” the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s set for its new drama, “Broke-ology” is, in the best sense, shabby.

This production, by an illuminating new playwright, Nathan Louis Jackson (born in Kansas City, Kansas, where his fiercely-felt domestic drama is set), reproduces a house residing in the Quindaro district: inside, an old air-conditioning unit is taped to one window, old board games fill a seen-better-days cabinet, and in the center is a sagging sofa; outside, dogs bark and the neighborhood is an unkempt collection of weeds and thugs.

The design by Meghan Raham includes a screen door, which gets a lot of action, always slamming—after a while, one waits for the noise. It turns out to be the sound of a family shutting out its possibilities.

Steve Shapiro

The news that J.D. Salinger had died, finally, at the age of ninety-one, on January 27, while not shocking in the abrupt manner of deaths such as Elvis’s or Michael Jackson’s or Heath Ledger’s, still had its J.F.K. moment. I learned of it driving home from work: on NPR I tuned into a segment about the enduring importance of “The Catcher in the Rye” and what Holden Caulfield had meant for fifty-nine years and counting to both readers and writers; I suspected the time had come—for years, I had wondered aloud what the response to Salinger’s death would be in an era where even celebrities’ fifteen minutes of fame is increasingly truncated—but not until the announcer ended with the statement did I feel that frisson of finality. At home, there were several phone messages from friends calling to mention the news; and when I Googled “Salinger” I found the Internet had, in just hours of the news, already filed several hundred items. In the age of tweets and blogs, no man, however reluctantly, is an island.