Remora

Burning down the house.

Everybody knows that modernism's over, everybody knows the good guys lost -- to cite, with a small change in wording, Leonard Cohen. The abstract expressionists, and their successors, were willing and eager to do what they did for the price of the paint. The adventure, the beauty of it, the reason you'd hock your body, the reason you'd let yourself become a laughingstock at the family reunions, was that painting was dearer to you, as a painter, than heroin is to a junky. It was the stuff. Then the money came down, and at first that was all right. But money comes attached by a million spiderweb-like strings to money-men, and that isn't all right. Not eventually. American art would have been better off, in the last twenty years, if it had been traded by crack-heads and curated by homeless alkies. Alas, it was traded by Saatchi's and housed by such confidence men as 'Tom' Krens, the Guggenheim's director. Deborah Soloman's NYT Magazine story about Krens would do Hans Haacke himself proud. Unfortunately, Haacke has no sense of humor. About Solomon, one should be cautious -- her byline says that she is working on a bio of Norman Rockwell, about which LI's views are pretty clear: I would rather look at the toilet paper hanging on the roll in my bathroom than anything Norman Rockwell ever, uh, what is the word? created? And her let's-all-be-populists now ending is pretty insane -- she has just spent the entire article buzzing among money men from Cleveland, but suddenly they represent vox populi? I don't think so. But to LI's ears, the quotes in this piece are priceless. This is one of the trustees giving us his very raison d'etre:

''People who want to be socially established are attracted to the Met board, but people who want to have fun are attracted to the Guggenheim,'' says Stephen Swid, chairman of Knoll International furniture and a longtime Guggenheim trustee. ''The Museum of Modern Art has David Rockefeller, who sits down with the trustees -- $5 million, $20 million, that's what they give. You have to understand that David Rockefeller is an American icon. But we're like from the shtetl.''

Here's Peter Lewis, the chairman of the Guggenheim, in all his beefy glory:

''I buy pictures,'' Lewis protested. ''Don't call me a collector. I really don't know about art. I love creativity. I love artists, their lifestyle and attitude. How does a businessperson from Cleveland who doesn't want to read books about art connect with the art scene?'' Suddenly, with a quick apology, he removed his artificial leg and placed it across his lap, explaining he felt more comfortable that way. Asked how he lost a limb, he replied dismissively, ''Oh, just doing stupid macho things.''

Here is another wondrous quote from Lewis, explaining why Guggenheim has become, as Solomon says elsewhere in the article, parodying Malraux, a Museum with Walls only. Lewis forces us to ask: are these people real?

" 'Tom resonates more with buildings than with pictures,'' Peter Lewis told me."

Resonance should be confined to the viewing of porn, where it is appropriate. If only LI could find a similar way to fast forward through the endless reel of truly disgusting capitalists, in this, the age of the Jurrassic plutocrat!