Musings Report #50 12-9-12 Narrative and Iconography
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On the Importance of Narrative and Iconography
We just returned from a week-long self-curated tour of museums and architecturally significant houses in Los Angeles with my brother-in-law, a professor of art and sculpture at a large public research university. Our house tour included the Gehry residence (Santa Monica), the Chemosphere (Hollywood Hills), the Stahl home (West Hollywood, Case Study 22), and three Frank Lloyd Wright homes (Barnsdall, Ennis, Storer). We revisited three signature museums: Getty Center, Getty Villa and LACMA (L.A. County Museum of Art) which is comprised of six buildings. The special exhibits included one on Stanley Kubrick and others on Ken Price and Caravaggio.
Thank you to everyone who took time to email me; my apologies for the lack of replies; it usually takes me two weeks to catch up for every week away.
I ask your indulgence this week to explore a theme that has no "actionable" value but which I nonetheless think is of great importance: the central role of narrative and iconography in shaping our beliefs and understanding of the world.
Please glance at this painting and guess its era and the identity of the man.
It was painted in the early 1600s by Valentin de Boulogne, a French painter who spent most of his career in Rome and who was greatly influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic compositions and use of light. This painting is titled "Christ and the Adulteress," and I photographed it in the Getty Center museum. (Photography is allowed as long as the flash is turned off.)
The man is Jesus, and the painting depicts the critical moment of one of my favorite stories of the Bible, John 8:7. The scribes had brought an adulteress to Jesus as a test, or more correctly, as a trap, hoping his answer would enable them to bring some charge against him. The artist portrays Jesus as he "bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground." So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
The artist presents Jesus as a human facing a difficult challenge; his expression is one of uncertainty and perhaps hesitation as he grasps the complex situation. I was immediately transfixed by this painting for reasons that transcend faith; one need not be a Christian or even a theist to understand how different this Jesus is from the thousands of other portrayals of Christ as a child or Savior. Here is first and foremost a human being, beset by human emotions.
The narrative and iconography of this painting are very different from the typical iconographic portrayals of Jesus, and they open up a wide range of potential responses and levels of understanding in the viewer. Of particular interest is the artist's selection of the moment before Jesus rises and delivers his devastating reply to the hypocritical moralists, the moment of extreme tension and precariousness. This is a very human moment we can all relate to on some level.
Imagine the scene after the mob has vanished, dispersed by the truth of Jesus' words, as Jesus tells the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again." It would certainly be an equally meaningful moment, but one lacking the overtones of official threat.
The Church at various times emphasized or encouraged depictions of specific narratives and iconic moments in the Bible to shape the beliefs of those seeing the artworks, and those portrayals that strayed from the party line, so to speak, such as this painting, were kept private rather than displayed in chapels lest they instigate lines of thought that were at variance with the Status Quo.
In the secular world, we must always be alert to just this sort of shaping of our belief structure by the careful reinforcement of carefully selected narratives and iconography.
Market Musings
The financial news out of Europe and China is abysmal, despite propaganda to the contrary, and the recent "positive jobs number" offers yet more evidence (as if we didn't already have a mountain of examples) that key U.S. "data points" are manipulated to support the primary Status Quo narrative that "everything is getting better every day in every way."
Everyone knows the growth of Federal spending will slow, regardless of the posturing, just as everyone knows taxes will increase, if not via the front door of higher rates then via the back door of loopholes closed and subsidies slashed. This means there will be less borrowed money sloshing around to pump up markets and to spend on consumption. That is negative for corporate profits and stock markets.
The fiscal cliff offers a handy excuse for selling, and apparently insiders are taking the opportunity to sell sell sell. That is bearish.
I have presented a mildly bullish case here over the past month, and now that prices are rising to support/resistance, I am wondering how high the last best bullish catalyst --resolving the fiscal cliff--can push the U.S. markets. We may have to wait until January for the answer.
From Left Field
Fracking, Climate Change And What Gets Lost In The Shuffle: "natural gas will be basically used as a substitute for coal and not as a broad-based answer to our energy problems." An excellent point that cannot be over-emphasized....
The Truth About the Drug Companies By Marcia Angell, M.D. (via Ishabaka) Former Editor in Chief of "The New England Journal of Medicine" tells it like it is.
How the Rich Rule: Libertarians know the financial system is rigged. Inflation, etc.
EXPLORE THE LONDON BLITZ during 7th October 1940 to 6th June 1941: an interactive map of London that shows the bomb census from the Blitz of 1940-41. The Germans dropped a huge number of bombs on all of central London... see for yourself.
The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle (via Maoxian) "Will there be enough content providers willing to gamble on expensive programs with big stars, lavish wardrobe budgets and huge overhead — only to sell episodes online for less than a dollar?"
Young, Educated and Jobless in France (via Maoxian) "Ms. Forriez, 23, is part of a growing problem in France and other low-growth countries of Europe — the young and educated unemployed, who go from one internship to another, one short-term contract to another, but who cannot find a permanent job that gets them on the path to the taxpaying, property-owning French ideal that seemed the norm for decades."
Thanks for reading--
charles
