Reflecting What They Were?

National Review Online, January 12, 2019

The Velvet Underground Experience, New York City, December 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford

If you can remember the 1960s, goes that quote with many authors, you really weren’t there. I was about six when the Sixties properly got going and living somewhere where the last person to truly swing had botched a rebellion against a Tudor. So sadly, I remember those Sixties pretty well, a distant party glimpsed mainly on the telly, colorful, whimsical, and saturated with bright, shiny music — coffee-flavored kisses at Clarksville station, love is all you need, gentle people with flowers in their hair.

What I never heard was this:

Cut mouth bleeding razor’s

Forgetting the pain

Antiseptic remains cool goodbye

So you fly

To the cozy brown snow of the east

That was the Velvet Underground doing their best worst in The Black Angel’s Death Song, a torrent of words, melody, and screeching electric viola that, played once too often before puzzled audiences in Greenwich Village’s Café Bizarre, brought an abrupt end to their stint there in December of 1965. The Velvets had started taking shape the year before, but after the departure of their first drummer, an eccentric who later came to an unsatisfactory end in Nepal, assumed the form (Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker) in which, with one brief, spectacular addition, they ultimately entered rock legend. The band’s name was stolen from the title of an, uh, investigativepaperback (“a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age”) found on the sidewalk or — pick your myth — the gutter. Another early song, inspired by a book by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (yes, that Masoch), was a further sign that the Velvets were not headed for Main Street, Pleasant Valley, or Penny Lane.

Given the time, the place — New York City — and the Velvets’ direction, it is not so surprising they spun into Andy Warhol’s orbit. He became their ringmaster, handing them a chanteuse — the German-born Nico, who had trouble holding a tune — and the role as the band in a series of multi-media events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was a chance, said Warhol, “to combine music and art and films,” a Gesamtkunstwerk of a kind, if not one that Wagner would have appreciated.

The collaboration lasted longer than Warhol’s “15 minutes” (about 18 months), and — despite some entertaining reviews (Cher grumbled that their gigs would “replace nothing, except maybe suicide”); The Velvet Underground & Nico, their astonishing debut LP; some media attention; and even the approval of Marshall McLuhan — it didn’t leave the Velvets particularly famous, at least then. The album flopped.

But more than anything else, those 18 months explain why, after more than half a century, The Velvet Underground Experience, a sprawling, “immersive” exhibition, opened, after a run in Paris, in New York City this fall (it closed in December) not so far from the location of the long-vanished Café Bizarre. There are reportedly plans for it to reappear in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Most exhibitions dedicated to a band struggle to offer a new perspective on what is, primarily, an aural experience. Ancient guitars and fading posters will please only the saddest of fanboys. But when the music was part of a broader cultural moment, there are possibilities for something better, an opportunity that the curators of this show (backed by Citi, among others, a sponsor that Warhol, no foe of the dollar, would have relished) grabbed and then fumbled.

The first hint of trouble was lurking on the placard — “Welcome to America” — by the entrance to the main hall, a dreary proclamation enlivened only by a three-way fight between banality, cliché, and groupthink:

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s consumerism spread more than ever, often carrying with itself conformist and family-centered values as broadcast in the image of the Good American in the newly-booming media.

This gave rise to a provocative counter-culture of artists and thinkers, who rejected the era’s fake smiles and condemned the rigidity of a supposedly liberal society in which non-conformity was thought to be deviant and dangerous. These individuals . . . defended radically different ways of life, took alternative paths and questioned prevailing rules and taboos. All of this was embodied in the life and work of the indefatigable figurehead of the Beat Generation poets, Allen Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg. Not again. On one side, the sound of the sage of the East Village reading America, and on the other, a selection of film footage designed to contrast vintage blandness with uncomfortable truth and vintage woke. That the consumer society was infinitely more revolutionary than some bearded “prophet” bemoaning materialism (a commonplace nuisance for thousands of years) went unnoticed, an error Warhol never made.

But that “provocative counter-culture” was indeed flourishing — and self-aware. One reason the Velvets took their name was the “underground” in the book’s title. They also defined themselves by reference to where they were — downtown Manhattan. Rifling through a pile of words that someone had left on a laptop, the writers of the “about” section on the exhibition’s website expanded on the latter:

This was where experimental musicians, underground filmmakers, taboo-busting poets and young people challenging the diktats of the heterosexual norm all converged. In this unique context, the verses of the Beat poets the audacious harmonics of La Monte Young and the experimentation of underground cinema would rub off on Lou Reed and John Cale before they brought the Velvet Underground to life. At the intersection of pop culture and the avant-garde, conceptual art and tribal beats, juvenile shenanigans and the most sophisticated of theories.

Juvenile shenanigans! The most sophisticated of theories!

The convergence was real enough. Classically trained John Cale, the band’s viola player (and much, much more), was involved with New York’s avant-garde music scene. It was an experimental filmmaker, Barbara Rubin, who introduced the Velvets to Warhol. The exhibition managed to convey an impression of this world with photographs of a grubby East Village, the band, their associates, and long-forgotten happenings — among them an 18-hour piano recital and a performance featuring wet paint, sausages, raw fish, and writhing. For all the typos, overwriting (“music that was both schizophrenic and fluid”), hyperbole, malapropisms, chaotic grammar, and, on at least one occasion, chaotic chronology, the various displays gave a useful sense of who was doing what. Some films from that milieu were on continuous loop. Watching Peyote Queen with only Anacin to hand is, I now know, a mistake. Behind a closed door promising X-rated material was Rubin’s Christmas on Earth, a movie (filmed in Cale’s apartment) that used to bear a less misleading title. Step away from Google, people.

The Velvet Underground Experience, both conceptually and literally, revolved around the band’s Warhol connection. Visitors could lie back on silvery cushions, a nod to the décor of Warhol’s studio, the Factory, in a wood-framed central space and stare at multi-screen projections — another mid-Sixties fad — of mini-documentaries made for the exhibition as well as of original footage of the Velvets and other Factory denizens. The band was shown performing or (filmed with the paradoxically passive voyeurism the Factory had made its own) just doing not so very much. Other spots elsewhere were dedicated to the band and its individual members. But gazing up at those images was the best way to understand the magic — often a dark magic — of Warhol’s universe and the role that the Velvets filled within it.

In another room, more footage, this time dedicated to Nico (Christa Päffgen), tall and blonde with a Warholian remoteness. Nico had been an actress, a model, and a Marianne Faithfull in more ways than one, and had previously recorded a bouncy pop song on which a friendly Rolling Stone had played. Warhol calculated that she would add glamor to a foursome that rarely looked better than down at heel. He was right. Her contributions — including three deceptively dulcet counterpoints to some of the more obviously harsher moments on an album where her apartness was underlined in its title — The Velvet Underground & Nico — were some of the most memorable in the band’s history. But clashing egos and Nico’s uncertain relationship with the clock ensured that her history with the Velvets didn’t last long.

The other members of the band received their due too, and so did the albums that followed the break with Warhol and their breaks with each other. There were fewer artifacts than might have been expected, although this sad boy enjoyed seeing two copies of the first album’s original cover — one signed by the band and another where some wicked soul had peeled the notorious banana. This shortfall was in line with this exhibition’s somewhat slapdash quality, which extended beyond carelessly written materials to encompass a gift shop that combined a scarcity of anything that anyone might want to buy (Edie Sedgwick iPhone covers, anyone?) with prices ensuring that they would not even be tempted. Maybe the organizers thought that the Velvets’ brand was enough of a lure, and maybe they were right.

That said, there was just enough, other than nostalgia, to merit a visit by more dedicated fans, notably those films from the Factory. And there was one marvel: a short, animated documentary in which Tony Jannelli (one of the two directors) recalled the bewildered and appalled reaction when the Velvets played at his New Jersey high school. Any visitors unfamiliar with the Velvets’ music (not many, I reckon: Most attendees I saw were north of forty) might have wondered what all the fuss was about. But not only newbies would have been taken aback by the claim, made in a section dedicated to the band’s ‘legacy’, that the “spirit and range of their New York City rock” eventually “won over the entire planet”. They talk of nothing else in Pyongyang.

How much the Velvets influenced the way things were going and how much they merely anticipated what was already on the way is impossible to know. Where they were, perhaps, at their most innovative was lyrically. This was not so much for their matter-of-act descriptions of drug use. There had been popular songs on that topic (sometimes camouflaged) decades back. So, in I’m Waiting for The Man the Velvets sang of a junkie (“sick and dirty, more dead than alive”) traveling “up to Lexington, one, two, five” to meet a (heroin) dealer, but thirty years before there was this about a weed, er, retailer from Stuff Smith And His Onyx Club Boys:

Where’s the man with the jive?

There is a man from way up town

Who will take away your blues

And any time the man comes round we like to spread the news

What was new was the Velvet Underground’s treatment of characters from subcultures that had been largely invisible in pop music, such as the transvestites whose orgy goes so wrong in Sister Ray (sailors, a murder, heroin, the police at the door, could happen to anyone), subcultures they simultaneously mythologized and helped usher into some sort of mainstream.

Musically, the Velvet Underground may have been at the cutting edge, but other bands were also beginning to blend pop, rock, and avant-garde. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was not the first light show. What distinguished the Velvets was not their sales (lamentable at the time) but that they were, if only briefly, very, very good. People in the next city this exhibition is destined to visit who don’t know much about the band but are curious about their work should give The Velvet Underground Experience a miss. They should immerse themselves instead in the first three albums (forget the fourth, Loaded, whatever critics may say): The Velvet Underground & Nico, its successor, White Light/White Heat, with its madcap amphetamine rush, and finally the quieter and strangely unsettling The Velvet Underground. Then they should scour YouTube for footage of the Factory at its peak. If they do all that, they will learn more and spend less.

Imagining the Chairman

Art and China's Revolution

National Review, November 3, 2008

Park Avenue, New York City, September 2008  © Andrew Stuttaford

The sculpture (by Sui Jianguo) squats, a weird piece of a whole that was never made, on a median bisecting one of the more affluent slices of Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s of a distinctive, very distinctive, jacket, nothing more, but it’s oddly bulky, as if the colossus who once wore it were, impossibly, somewhere within. And because the shape and the cut of that jacket are so distinctive, the onlooker is encouraged to fill it with his own image of the only individual (out of hundreds of millions once clothed in such garments) it could possibly represent.

He’s a man (“monster” is too easy an alibi for you and for me) whose deeds heaped further disgrace on an already savage century, yet who now finds himself with a place in the collective imagination that is strangely, and disquietingly, ambivalent. If, on the other hand, you’re just puzzled by the sight of an oversized piece of metal tailoring in the middle of Park Avenue, glance across at the building that houses the Asia Society. A banner emblazoned with Chairman Mao — ah, that’s whose jacket it is — flutters, advertising the society’s latest exhibition. Art and China’s Revolution is a remarkable collection (it runs until January 11) of works dating mainly from the first three decades of the People’s Republic. To see it is to be left in little doubt about the nature of the man in that jacket.

And that’s probably why the Chinese government refused to lend art to this show. The party’s authority is still meant to flow, somehow, from Mao. To admit too much of the past would be awkward. “Thirty percent wrong, 70 percent right” and leave it at that. The killer’s corpse belongs in a criminal’s grave, but rests instead, honored, cherished, embalmed in chemicals and lies, housed on a Tiananmen Square defaced by his image and wrapped in his myth. The state that Mao made has mutated in ways that the People’s Liberator would have detested, but when that increasingly prosperous people buys once-undreamt-of consumer goods they do so with currency carrying the picture of the dictator who consigned 30 million, 40 million, 50 million, who knows, of their compatriots to their deaths: blood money of a sort.

With so much cruelty to choose from, it’s difficult to identify the moment when Mao’s long despotism reached its appalling nadir, but there is something about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that makes, to use the official euphemism, its “ten-year turbulence” (roughly 1966–76) a repulsively unique period in Chinese history. Far fewer perished (perhaps somewhere between 500,000 and a million; others reckon far more) than in the course of some of Communist China’s earlier horrors, but the scale of its ambitions were more total, and their implications more sinister, than anything seen before or (outside the Khmer Rouge’s copycat Kampuchea) since. Yes, it’s true that the early years of the Soviet revolution were marked by a similar belief that the very essence of man could be refashioned, but, with the exception of the onslaught against religion, the attempts of the Bolshevik intelligentsia to turn millennial delusion into quotidian reality did not survive the ascendancy of Stalin, a cynic who saw a return to cultural conservatism as a way of buttressing his power.

The no-less-cynical Mao took the opposite tack, inciting a revolution from below (“bombard the headquarters”) to eliminate any possible opposition within a leadership increasingly concerned that the Great Helmsman was steering their regime onto the rocks. To the tough Communist apparatchiks at the top of the Chinese party, a charnel-house was, within limits, perfectly acceptable; a mad house was not. Mao appealed over their heads to the educated and semi-educated young with a manipulative rhetoric that combined a dramatic rejection of the past (destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs) with the promise of permanent revolution (“to rebel is justified”) and ecstatic mayhem (“be violent”) in one intoxicating, exhilarating mix. The result was a hysterical spasm that devastated an already-ruined nation and, in its wildest extremes, looked to complete the transformation (zaosheng yundong) of the Chairman into the living god he was so clearly already becoming. Communism had, for all practical purposes, always been a religion, just never quite so openly.

Like all religions Maoism boasted an iconography, an iconography that is at the heart of the Asia Society show. We see traditional Chinese inkwork superseded by more “modern” painting in oil, its ancient subtleties replaced by the heavy (if occasionally wonderfully executed) didacticism of imported Soviet-style socialist realism. The arrival of the Cultural Revolution is summoned up by a series of fierce woodblock prints (often, interestingly, in the red, white, and black of Hitler’s swastika flag; those colors do the tyrant’s work so well), urgent, violent, inflammatory, deranged, the paper trail of a nation spinning, and being spun, into the abyss: Smash the Cultural Ministry! Smash the Dog Head of Soviet Revisionists! Smash. Struggle. Destroy. Obliterate. Even buildings were not spared: Seventy percent of Peking’s officially designated “places of historical and cultural interest” were destroyed in the frenzy.

Socialist realism meanwhile merged with, in Mao’s approving words, “revolutionary romanticism,” “red, bright, and shining” depictions of a dream world (sometimes almost literally so; check out Zheng Shengtian, Zhou Ruiwen, and Xu Junxuan’s Man’s Whole World is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River), that was, in truth, nightmare, lie, and something far, far stranger still. And as the Red Guards rose and darkness fell, images of that dream, and instructions on how to dream it, were repeated again and again across all media, from paintings, posters, and photography, to opera, to song, to “loyalty dance,” to film, and, most definitely, to the exclusion of everything else. Again and again and again: On some estimates 2.2 billion “official” portraits of Mao were reproduced in one format or another during these years. The print runs of the Christ-Mao of Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1969) are thought to have amounted to 900 million alone. Mao, always Mao: “The world’s red sun” was the focal point of the paintings in which he appeared, glowing with an inner light, an unmistakable hint of the divine reinforced by mists, mountaintops, and suggestions of the miraculous.

And as icons tend to do, these materials offer their viewers a glimpse of an alternative, fantastic reality, in this case a heaven right here on earth. Many are undeniably, if eerily, beautiful. To their credit, the exhibition’s curators supplement them with commentary (as well as some extraordinary, and long-hidden, photography from that era by Li Zhensheng) that leaves little room for ambiguity about what these artworks both represent and disguise. Despite this, the Asia Society’s gift shop still sells bits and pieces of Maoist junk, revolutionary tote bags, enameled portraits of the great man, and a stack of Little Red Books. That’s equivalent to selling Nazi paraphernalia at a museum show dedicated to the art of the Third Reich, but, as is generally the case when it comes to insulting the memory of the victims of Communism, few seem to care: Mao killed millions and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

The realization that those uncounted tens of millions of Chinese dead do not count for very much is reinforced by the presence in the Asia Society’s foyers of a group of Qu Guangci’s identical stainless-steel statues of Mao. Simultaneously clueless, knowing, and saturated in a borrowed pop-cultural sensibility, these works wink at atrocity. And they are not alone in doing so. They are reminders of the way that China’s younger generation of artists has appropriated Maoist imagery for its own purposes, sometimes satirical, sometimes antic, and sometimes serious, but almost always with an eye on the marketplace. That they find buyers in China is evidence of a country in denial about its past. That they find buyers in London, Paris, and New York reveals something almost as bad, a West where too many are willing to use somebody else’s revolution as a means of self-expression — at a comfortable distance, of course.

To own the latest Maoist pastiche by Wang Guangyi may merely be a matter of status, a refreshingly vulgar assertion of both wealth and (less obviously) taste. Too often, however, it is accompanied by the stale stink of radical chic, a noxious whiff of ’68 that conjures up memories of Berkeley, the Sorbonne, and Western students “carrying pictures,” as the Beatles so acidly sang, “of Chairman Mao.” But to do so was, usually, no more than exhibitionism, less gesture of support for the Cultural Revolution than fashion statement, a painless public proclamation of modish rebelliousness, trendy utopianism, and the hidden self-loathing that lurked within the notion that the West had to look beyond itself for authenticity (whatever that meant). It wasn’t about Mao. It was about “me.” And all those deaths, repressions, and wrecked lives, oh, safely offstage.

They still are.

False Dawn

Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935

The New  York Sun, November, 1, 2007

The disparate, jostling artistic movements grouped together and loosely labeled as "modernist" may have been gathering pace before 1914, but it was the moral, spiritual, and physical devastation left by four years of war that allowed them to play such a prominent role within the cultural avant-garde of what remained of Europe.

"Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935" is a fascinating, striking, and intellectually ambitious exhibition now showing at the New York Public Library. It attempts to demonstrate that the agenda and the aesthetics of modernism had a key part to play in the identity that the nascent states (from Estonia in the north to the future Yugoslavia in the south) that had emerged from the wreckage of the empires destroyed by the war were both trying to create for themselves and, no less critically, project to the outside world. It's an interesting argument, and it gives the library an ideal opportunity to showcase art — in this case, a selection of illustrations and other design work, primarily drawn from periodicals, pamphlets, and other published material — that fully deserves a wider audience.

But while it may be an interesting argument, it's based on a questionable premise. If there was one thing these new countries did not lack, it was a sense of identity. Theirs was frequently focused on a supposed reconnection with their dominant ethnicities' sometimes distant, usually suppressed, and often concocted, past. Its roots lay in the romanticism of the national "revivals" that spread across Europe in the 19th century. Insofar as it found artistic expression in the 1920s and, particularly, the 1930s, it was predominantly backward-looking, a matter more of flaxen-haired peasants and völkisch fantasy than modernist innovation. This is hinted at in only a few pieces, and then only indirectly. These include the pastiche medievalism of a poster produced for a trade fair in Lwów, and two beautifully stylized Bulgarian landscapes by Sirak Skitnik and Dechko Uzunov, who each attempt to reconcile more modern artistic ideas with folk tradition and the imagery of the homeland — attempts typical of this time and these regions.

This ought not come as a surprise, but may. These countries were less of a backwater than half a century of Cold War isolation would later suggest. Modernity did not pass its artists by, but it normally owed more to the playful geometries of Art Deco than to the hectoring Constructivist/Suprematist abstraction that essentially defines this show. Deco was a style with closer links to Hollywood than to Moscow, to commerce than to nation, but it's better representative of this epoch than a modernism more focused on leftist (or, if you prefer, "progressive") ideology. That may explain why, with exceptions (most notably, and most delectably, a sly, characteristically erotic nude by Latvia's Sigismunds Vidbergs), there are so few allusions to Art Deco in this show.

Rather than trying to endow the works on display with a wider political significance than they may actually deserve given the historical realities of their era, it's better to consider them on their own terms, and in all their intriguing artistic (if not ideological) variety. Modernism was a Bauhaus with many mansions. Thus we see outstanding expressionist pyrotechnics, especially two covers, frenetic and fine, designed for the Polish periodical Zdrój, trickster Dadaist typography from Slovenia, some leaden surrealist clichés from Czechoslovakia, and much, much more.

Predictably enough, given the emphasis on Constructivism, El Lissitzky makes several appearances (for some of this period he managed to live a comfortable distance away from the Soviet experiment he was so enthusiastically touting). These include the most directly propagandist item on show, a volume produced for visitors to the USSR's pavilion at the 1928 International Press Exhibition, complete with hammer, sickle, and a willingness to wrap mass murder in the slickest of packages. In other pieces on display, Lissitzky's politics are less overtly signaled, but these works remain what they were always intended to be: undeniably brilliant advertising for an allegedly radiant future.

A similar philosophical subtext — one less concerned with shaping a sense of nationality than in finding new ways to destroy it — can be detected in a good number of the other pieces on view. As it happened, however, old ways of doing this still worked all too well. Within a decade or so, almost all these new nations again found themselves devastated, but in a very traditional manner. They fell prey to rampaging armies, invading from the east, west, or both. Their borders were reduced to abstractions as complete as anything you will see at this show. The consequences were anything but. Until January 27 (42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, 212-593-7730).

A Magical Mystery Tour

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era

The New York Sun, June 7, 2007

At one time or another, most of us have gone through that gray-faced morning routine: the shameful stumble through the shambles of a living room reduced to a wasteland of empty bottles, dirty glasses, and elusive memories, you know how it goes. The night before had been fun, you think, you hope, but what was it, exactly, that had happened?

And so it was with that starburst we call "the '60s." For a few brief, blinding moments, there was illumination, chaos, and destruction, sometimes creative, sometimes not, sometimes fun, sometimes not. When it all ended, we were left with the paradox of a world transformed, but little recollection of what had taken place, or why. As the saying goes, "If you can remember anything about the '60s, you weren't really there."

Now, 40 years on — 40 years after the sublime "Sergeant Pepper," 40 years after grubby Haight-Ashbury — the Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era." The exhibition is a botanical garden planted with flower power's best: posters, paintings, film, photography, album covers, crazed architectural blueprints, various installations that I cannot begin to describe, and other madcap cultural detritus all designed to place psychedelia within its wider intellectual framework. That this show's organizers have found a degree of coherence within the acme of exactly the opposite is no small achievement, but anyone hoping for a broader history of the 1960s will be disappointed. To the extent that larger historical themes can be detected, it is only as muffled echo or fun-house reflection, a presence barely visible through the fog of narcissism, self-congratulation, and intoxication that did so much to define artistic expression in those times.

The show itself is entertaining, playful, informative, visually striking, and comes glowing with a nostalgic enchantment guaranteed to delight many more than just those ancient enough to have spent three muddy, magic days at Max Yasgur's farm. The psychedelic moment may have been just that, but its afterlife lingered on. Even when that, too, had faded away, the symbols of the summer of love were quickly repackaged as nostalgia. You no longer have to have lived through the 1960s to miss them. The average age of the large crowd at the Whitney the Saturday that I came to gawp was well below 50, and many of those younger visitors, I reckoned, had been drawn there by more than just morbid, malicious fascination with boomer folly.

What's perhaps most interesting about this exhibition is the way that, implicitly more than explicitly, it ties psychedelia to what had come before. If this was an avantgarde, it was one with its eyes fixed firmly on the past. Superficially, this was simply a question of style. The curves of psychedelic illustration owe an obvious debt to the sinuous twists and seductive sexual suggestion of Art Nouveau, but the homage to earlier times, or at least, an imagined version of earlier times, ran far deeper than that.

Across the Atlantic, English psychedelia referred back constantly to the lost whimsy of the Victorian nursery, while back home, the vanished Arcadia seemed to have been located somewhere between late wigwam and early Klondike. As for "Sergeant Pepper," arguably psychedelia's most enduring monument, it came saturated in the sounds and sights of the prelapsarian, pre-1914 music hall, and packaged in a sleeve (naturally, it's on display at the Whitney) that famously mixed fanboy enthusiasm with hallucinatory historical eclecticism.

To harp on the past in this way is to suggest a profound discontent with the present, and, despite the prosperity of the mid-1960s, discontent there was. The psychedelic experiment aimed to derail the rationalism that was widely (if inaccurately) believed to lie at the heart of 20th century war, oppression, and alienation. The acid colors and ecstatic twirls of psychedelic art were an act of revolt against the clean lines, clarity, and stripped-down aestheticism of modernism. If the words on posters, such as those for the Fillmores (East or West) that make up a central part of this exhibit, were often barely decipherable, that was the idea.

The irony is that not much of this was particularly novel. For instance, it's a shame that there is little at the Whitney to suggest that an attachment to Eastern religion, concocted or real, fanatic or dilettante, had been a staple of a counterculture steeped in the rejection of reason for nearly a century before the Maharishi made monkeys out of Beatles. As for all those happenings (the Whitney has Jud Yalkut's film of "Kusama's Self Obliteration" as one notably entertaining specimen), it would have been instructive to note that there was nothing about them that would have shocked the salons of silver age Saint Petersburg.

What was different was the extent to which this particular celebration by the Western art world of the ecstatic, the irrational, and the Dionysian was first fueled by drugs (to furnish the vision) and technological know-how (to realize it), and then nourished by affluence and sped-up by mass media into the arms of popular culture and the maw of big business. The intelligentsia had found an audience for their games far beyond the salon, an audience that had trouble even spelling the word "Dionysian" but knew a good party when it saw one.

Despite a regrettably small section dedicated to Andy Warhol, chilly and prescient, an examination of the aftermath of the psychedelic explosion turns out to be largely beyond the scope of this show. The visitor is left with only insinuations of disaster, hints of disillusion, and suggestions of astonishing change, mere scraps of a fascinating story that the Whitney doesn't really attempt to tell. That's frustrating, but it shouldn't deter you from turning up and tuning in to what is a remarkable exhibition. Feed your head.

A Nation Safe for Autocracy

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, August 2000 © Andrew Stuttaford

Much as blood and soil may help, it takes more to make a nation than a happy coincidence of genes and real estate. Today's nation-states are, whatever they may claim, purpose-built, as artificial as they are organic. Many may now have developed a genuine sense of self, but that identity is often rooted in myth as much as history, in fantasy as much as fact, and in forgetfulness as much as memory.

Nowhere is that more the case than in those states where the past is as awkward as geography is inconvenient. Imperial Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, was an emerging power of jumbled ethnicities, shifting borders and a culture uncertain whether its dominant influence was Byzantium, the Mongols, "Europe" or, more prosaically, distance, backwardness, and poverty.

It was frustration over Russia's failure to adapt to modernity that led Peter the Great to turn westward in the early 1700s. Unfortunately for his successors, as the West itself evolved in a more democratic direction, it became increasingly obvious that the course set by Peter, modernization on Western lines, must in the end lead to some dilution of Romanov control. The liberal Decembrist rising against the incoming Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 may have failed — the new emperor brushed it aside with the traditional handful of executions and Siberian exile all 'round — but it was a clear sign of trouble to come.

If autocratic rule was to survive, Peter's idea of a westernized Russia had, Nicholas understood, to be replaced with something more congenial to absolute monarchy. This, in a sense, is where the New York Public Library comes into the picture. Its Wachenheim Gallery is currently featuring a fascinating exhibit dedicated to the work and impact of Fedor Solntsev (1801–92), an artist who made a significant contribution to Nicholas's new project, the fabrication of a notion of a nation safe for autocracy. The exhibition is small (it's confined to just one room), but its implications are not. The idea of an exotic, ageless Muscovy, distinct from, and morally superior to, the rest of Europe has shaped both Russia's history and its perception of itself up to the present day. Besides, the show's almost ecclesiastical setting — hushed, intense, and darkened, presumably to protect some of the artwork — is not inappropriate to showcase a man recruited by a tsar who liked to sum up his own vision of Russia with three nouns: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality."

Operating at the intersection of ethnography, archaeology, art, and propaganda, Solntsev traveled throughout Russia's ancient heartland recording the artifacts, architecture, and costumes he saw there. He then used their images to build up a picture of the country's past that, with diligent editing, could be shown to have been the story of one people, united around church and monarchy. Just a few years before, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the influential nationalist historian, had written that poets, sculptors, and painters could contribute to the creation of patriotic feeling. Solntsev proved Karamzin's point, and helped make the tsar's too. This was underlined by Nicholas's decision to fund the publication of "Antiquities of the Russian State" (1849–53), six volumes showing Solntsev's depictions (some are on display in this show) of the medieval artifacts that could be found in Moscow's Kremlin. Recently invented chromolithography meant that this skilled draughtsman's careful, almost photographic images could be disseminated in vivid color throughout the empire they were designed to promote.

Those six volumes represented the high point of Solntsev's career. His royal patron died in 1855. "Costume of the Russian State," a series of watercolors painted over the course of three decades and designed to show the traditional clothing worn in different parts of the tsars' domain, never found a publisher. By the end of his impressively long life, Solntsev was, in the view of the organizers of this exhibition, somewhat passé, a verdict that only appeared to be reinforced by the triumph of the Bolsheviks, barely 25 years later, and (it seemed) their irreparable break with the past. Less than two decades after the revolution, the cash-strapped Soviet government sold some of Solntsev's works to the New York Public Library. Like history itself, they were thought to be disposable.

But the real story is more complex than that. As is partly acknowledged by the exhibition's inclusion of designs by Natalia Goncharova for a production of "The Firebird" in the 1920s, Solntsev's influence on the arts, and the artistic interpretation, of Russia, was immensely important until, and beyond, a revolution that has, in this respect, proved to be little more than an interruption. By the 1930s, Russian nationalism, snarling and spiky, was back. The familiar iconography of onion domes, benign autocrats, and happy peasants reappeared shortly afterwards, along with the distinctively styled "Old Russian" design that accompanied it. It still flourishes today, nurtured by political support, fashionable taste, and genuine popular demand.

The fake, in short, has become real.

Mean Girl

National Review Online, May 25, 2007

New York City, May 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

It was Friday night in New York City. I’d already drunk a couple of beers, so now was a good time for a quick rummage around inside Paris Hilton. I wasn't the first to do so, no, not even that evening, but what the hell? She didn't mind. Her eyes were closed, her face angular and serene, her back arched in almost Mannerist contortion, and her legs, ah her legs; they were akimbo, long, smooth, and inviting. I did, however, take the precaution of putting on a pair of slightly grubby white gloves before, well...

Well, since you ask, before carefully removing Ms. Hilton’s small intestine and toying, toying most gingerly, with her uterus.

I should explain. This wasn’t the real Paris, and shame, shame on any of you who thought otherwise. This was a facsimile, a rendering, or, more accurately, a tableau mort, showing her corpse, bare but for a tiara, cold, dead hands still clinging to cell-phone and martini glass. And as if this was not already enough to bring cheer to the stoniest of souls, the ensemble was completed by a forlorn Tinkerbell, the lap-dog and diarist, tiara-capped head (yes, hers too) a portrait of pathos, as she pranced and danced by the body of her fallen mistress.

According to the management of Capla Kesting Fine Art, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, gallery where the ruins of Paris are now on display, the whole spectacle is an “interactive Public Service Announcement… designed to warn teenagers of the hazards of underage drinking.” Interactive? Yup, those teenagers-at-risk can perform an “autopsy” on the heiress or, at least, monkey around with her innards. The purported, and that’s the word, purpose is to give these youngsters “an empathetic view of drunk driving tragedy from the coroner’s perspective.” Scared straight, that sort of thing. This autopsy, lacking any hint of dignity, respect, or decorum (trust me on this), symbolizes the final destination of the DUI driver, and was, it is claimed, designed to strip away any hint of cool from Paris’s hard-partying ways. If you believe that, I have a collection of Hilton-designed pet wear to sell you.

Always quick to check out an empress’ new clothes, the Fug Girls, the Cagney and Lacey of the Internet’s fashion police, were among the first to point out that if this sculpture was meant to highlight how drunk-driving can really mess a gal up, it might be a touch counterproductive. “Paris herself,” they explained,”would probably take one look at the installation and drawl, "Dude, I look great. DUI death is hot." They have a point.

The man behind the autopsy, Daniel Edwards, was in the gallery that Friday evening. Surrounded by the goatees, cropped hair, and black tees of a typical Williamsburg soiree, he was a genial figure, beaming, and gleaming in the finest white suit/beard/long mane combo to be unleashed on the planet since that day John Lennon strode out across Abbey Road. I asked him just how serious he really was about his, uh, message. If I were a ruthless undercover reporter, I’d tell you what he replied. But I’m not (we were just having a nice chat), and I won’t. Let’s just say that the likeable Edwards is a man with a sly sense of humor.

Those wishing to understand what Edwards is trying to achieve should look instead at his recent oeuvre. It mumbles for itself. True, the sculptor’s (sadly premature) deathbed portrait of Fidel Castro was something of a misstep, but a casting of “Suri Cruise’s poop,” a bust of a highly eroticized Hillary Rodham Clinton and, perhaps most famously, a statue of Britney Spears giving birth, not to mention that Hilton cadaver, all suggest a master prankster at work.

It’s an impression that is only reinforced by the press releases that accompany the unveiling of each project. Pompous, humorless, and as self-satisfied as they are self-important, they come across as pitch-perfect satires of the stifling piety of the scolds, nags, and busybodies now tormenting this once free country. If dead Paris can be a “warning” of the dangers of DUI (and, yes, yes, before mad MADD e-mail me with angry reproaches, I know that drunk driving is a bad thing), then Edwards’s Britney is no less plausible as a monument to the singer’s decision (as it then appeared) to put motherhood ahead of career.

Frankly, Edwards should charge admission. A buck’s a buck, Dan, and it would add a little more Barnum & Bailey to installations designed, I reckon, to be a part of the celebrity circus they simultaneously critique. Or something.

Still, it’s impossible not to be struck by the macabre coincidence that the Williamsburg autopsy is not the only image of a dead or dying Hilton out there in the marketplace. On the same day that Paris’s guts were opened up for inspection in Brooklyn, Californians were given the chance to take a peek at a “poignant” and “relevant” depiction of the poor girl’s suicide. A press release from the Venice Contemporary Gallery gave the details:

Artist Jason Maynard’s sculpture, entitled "SuicideSocialite," is the final piece in his 10-year exploration of the cultural relevance and symbolic reference to candy. The sculpture of Paris Hilton depicts the heiress sprawled out on a chez lounge with her wrists slit and candy spewing out of her veins…the piece takes on the guise of neither the moral high ground, nor the role of a public service announcement. In reality, this sculpture speaks more of Maynard's masterful portrayal of the pinnacle of modern day mob mentality's ability to build higher and higher pedestals for their celebrity objects to sit - for the pleasure of seeing them fall.

If we ignore the tortured prose, questionable spelling (chez lounge?), and the candy, there’s no doubt that Maynard has a point. Whenever a celebrity stumbles, there’s a crowd out there ready to peer, to leer, and to cheer. That’s particularly true when that pratfallen celebrity is Paris Hilton. She may not be the nicest of people, and she has certainly brought her current legal troubles upon herself, but, after witnessing the rejoicing, the vitriol, and the sermonizing that swirl around her eagerly anticipated imprisonment, I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for the inmate-in-waiting. Libertarian blogger Lew Rockwell went a little far when appearing (vaguely) to compare Hilton’s coming Calvary with that of Christ’s, but his thinking was as least charitable. The same cannot be said of all those who seem to have forgotten that the star of One Night in Paris ranks rather low in the evildoer hierarchy, a Martha Stewart more than a Madame Mao.

And incarceration alone is not punishment enough to satisfy the baying, self-righteous mob, sweaty, and prurient, that has surged from couch, blog, suburb, and trailer park to demand what it sees as justice. They want Paris to serve hard time, prison-movie style, and a frenzied media is just egging them on. To take just one example, on the cover of its May 21st issue, Star magazine promised exciting details of “Paris’ Prison Hell,” complete with “Lesbian gangs,” “Group Showers,” “Strip Searches,” and “Filthy Bedding.” While it’s good to see the disgraceful conditions that prevail in California’s penal system getting an airing, I doubt that was the motive behind the decision to package the story in quite the way that the Star (and many others) have chosen to do.

Matters reached their squalid climax (so far) thanks to the efforts of the dreadful Joe Arpaio. He’s the publicity hound who doubles up as a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona: tents, prisoners in pink underwear eating bologna sandwiches, you know the guy. True to form, he jumped onto the tumbril, offering to host Paris in his desert Guantanamo, an offer that might well, it was speculated, include a stint in a chain gang. Blonde in shackles!

Mercifully, Arpaio’s offer was declined. Hilton, it now turns out, will likely only serve about half her 45-day sentence, and will do so in a unit reserved for those thought to be at risk from their fellow inmates. That this should be necessary is more an indictment of prison conditions than an expression of any particular privilege, but the news has still come as a severe disappointment to far, far too many people

That it does is, in part, a reflection of the very peculiar nature of Paris Hilton’s celebrity. I wish I could say that, in the words of the old joke, she had risen without trace. The reverse is true. Her spoor is everywhere. Since first lurching into view in the early 2000s, she has dazzled the populace and thrilled the media with cubic-zirconia glamour and undeniably genuine sleaze.

Normally, wannabes aiming for the big time hope to do so on the back of talent, looks, achievement, or, at the very least, a winning personality, but Hilton has built her fame — and made quite a bit of cash — on the basis of no obvious achievements, looks that are far from Jolie and a public persona that is dim-witted, bitchy, arrogant, and spoiled.

What she does have is a remarkable talent for self-promotion. In taking advantage of the desperate need of the now web-driven media for content, any content, however tacky, no, preferably tacky, she has served herself up as spectacle for those on whom she so obviously looks down. And it’s worked. “There is,” said Oscar Wilde, “only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” and talk, talk, talk, about Paris Hilton we do. If nothing else, this article is evidence of that. As some sort of experiment, the Associated Press tried to avoid publishing anything about her for a few days. In so doing they only added to her fame. She has become an object of fascination, derision, obsession, and, God help us, emulation. And that’s not going to change any time soon. Resistance, AP, is futile.

But if she’s become an icon — and she has — America’s sweetheart, she’s not. There’s something too joyless about her pursuit of pleasure, something too Heather about her pursuit of prestige and, despite occasional Horatia Alger moments, something too Gekko about her pursuit of loot. Sure, her antics are sporadically entertaining, gossip’s equivalent of a five-alarm fire, a really good train wreck, or a particularly bloody bullfight, but we also watch her as phenomenon as much as person. And as we do, we not only use her as a device to proclaim our own cleverness, moral superiority and apple pie niceness, but also, I suspect, as a symbol of, and a scapegoat for, the real excesses and imagined emptiness of this new gilded age. Put all these elements together and we can begin to understand why those grotesque depictions of her dead and dying — unthinkable, probably, in the case of any other celebrity — cause no complaint.

But that’s still no reason to put her on the chain gang.

Never Forget

The New York Sun, December 22, 2005

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

In the end, perhaps, communism will be remembered not so much for what it left behind as for what it didn't. The decades of totalitarian rule annihilated cultures, brutalized civilizations, and crushed the hopes of generations. These were the plague years, a time of slaughter on a scale never seen before: The authoritative "Black Book of Communism" (1999) puts the death toll at around 100 million, and the tally of those who passed through the Gulag, the Lao Gai, and other lesser-known hells exceeds that.

While these horrors are generally acknowledged, it is grudgingly and tacitly; there has been no Soviet Nuremberg and has never been a proper reckoning. Wander today through the cities of the old communist bloc, and there is an uneasy sense that something is not quite right. It's even there in the architecture, haunting those buildings that have managed to hang on since the time before the red flag flew. Often now beautifully restored, they stand isolated and incongruous amid the stained concrete of communism and the gimcrack glitter of the cut-and-paste capitalism that followed. Elderly, elegant mourners at a slapdash, shabby funeral, these relics are quiet, reproachful reminders of the way of life annihilated by the builders of the radiant future. They are hints of a tragedy that deserves far more explicit commemoration.

In Russia itself, now presided over by a former secret policeman, recognition of the crimes of the past is a sporadic, compromised, and listless affair. Here and there, the determined visitor can certainly find an exhibit, a statue, a tumbledown camp barracks, but these are mere scraps of mourning, an insult to the dead, apallingly compounded by the current government's nostalgia for the communist era. Earlier this fall, a bust of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, the mass murderer who founded the Cheka - what became the KGB - was reinstalled in front of the Interior Ministry building in Moscow. He was being honored, one police spokesman said, for his work with orphans and street children. How nice.

Outside Russia, matters are often more straightforward. Communism can be portrayed, sometimes not quite accurately, as something imposed, some thing foreign. Thus newly freed Latvia was among the first to establish an occupation museum, while in Lithuania the cells of the Vilnius KGB were quickly opened up to give their dank, depressing glimpse of atrocity. In many other parts of the fallen empire, too, there are memorials, museums, archives, each designed to extract something, anything, from the wreckage of history.

It's a measure of the Kremlin's reach that one of these museums is located in an old, shabby wooden house, tucked away in a corner of Ulan Bator (Ulaanbataar), the capital of faraway Mongolia.And it's a measure of its nature that what's found inside is a record of cruelty that Genghis himself would have appreciated. The house once belonged to Peljidiin Genden, a Mongolian prime minister executed in Moscow on Stalin's orders in November 1937. (Genden's successor was to meet the same fate in the same city, just four years later.) Russia's Bolsheviks may have played a critical part in bolstering Mongolia's independence from China in the struggles of 1920-21, but within a short time, Mongolian self-determination was reduced to a lethal and contemptuously transparent sham.

In the 1920s and 1930s this nation at the ends of the earth found itself subjected to the prescriptions, psychoses, and millennial fantasies of a gang of revolutionary despots thousands of miles to the west. Class enemies had to be eliminated, the kulak threat dealt with, and agriculture collectivized. In Mongolia at that time, class enemies in the usual sense were few and far between, no capitalists were to be found, kulaks were inconveniently scarce, and collectivization would destroy a pastoral, nomadic culture that had endured for thousands of years. No matter.The plan had to be fulfilled. And it was.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

A large, angry painting on the first floor of Genden's house shows just how. It's a series of vignettes - part Bosch, part Bayeux - painted against a characteristic landscape of high plains and bright blue sky. In each, soldiers in the flat caps and jackboots of another country's revolution are shown, at times in unbearable detail, beating, shooting, interrogating, raping. A monastery is ablaze. A ger (a Mongolian yurt) is ran sacked. Death comes from hatchet, firing squad, or bullet in the back of the head. Bodies are left unburied, a feast for the vultures that wait. It is no surprise to be told that the artist's father perished during those years.The old order had little with which it could defend itself against the rage of the state. Weapons used in uprisings against the authorities are displayed in a glass case: pikes, some swords, a few old rifles and pistols; not much use,really,against machine guns, artillery, and tanks.

Elsewhere, the typical detritus of communist rule is on display: copies of long-forgotten edicts, photographs of long-forgotten trials, and, as always in such exhibits, the images of those who disappeared into the 100 million. Sometimes these are mug shots of the newly arrested - shock, terror, resignation. On other occasions the victims are recorded in earlier life, in a smart suit, at a conference, resplendent in the robes of a Buddhist priest - unaware of what fate had in store.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The centerpiece of the Genden house is a waxwork tableau of an interrogation. An officer in the security forces sits facing a prisoner. The interrogator's face is harsh and unforgiving. The prisoner is slumped in his chair, head bowed. Skulls on display upstairs demonstrate where such interrogations often led. They were uncovered during the excavation of a ravine near Ulan Bator two or three years ago. In all, the remains of around 1,000 people were found, just a small portion of the tens of thousands butchered or imprisoned at this time. Buddhist monks were a particular target. In August 1938 one Soviet "adviser" wrote happily that "the top ecclesiastics had been eliminated" and that most of the country's temples had been reduced to "ash heaps." There are good reasons why Ulan Bator is today a formulaically drab Soviet city.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The dictatorship fell in 1990, taking with it the statue of Stalin that had, incredibly, remained outside the national library until then (it later reappeared in a disco), but the murderous Georgian's local surrogate, Marshal Choibalsan, still preens on his plinth outside Ulan Bator's university, inspiring the youth of Mongolia to who knows what. Choibalsan's Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, scrubbed, buffed, and brought tactfully up to date, is prominent in the country's government.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

Still, Mongolia has made a better job of coming to terms with the realities of communism than most. Even here in the United States, the country that patiently, marvelously, and miraculously wore down the evil empire, the crimes of communism's past are regularly played down in a way that, if it were those of the Third Reich that were under discussion, would rightly be condemned.

And communism was never just a foreign scourge, irrelevant to those fortunate enough to live on this side of the Atlantic.Thousands of Americans died fighting the Cold War's hot wars in Southeast Asia, Korea, or the more shadowy conflicts elsewhere. Millions of others either fled the execution chambers and concentration camps of the Great Utopia or had family members who managed the same feat, if they were lucky, or found themselves trapped, or worse, if they were not.

Defeating this system was an American triumph. That it took so long was an American tragedy.Yet it is a part of the past that many in this country seem oddly unwilling either to acknowledge or, even, to understand. So, for example, the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established by Congress as long ago as 1993, but it's only now that construction has started in Washington, D.C., on the memorial it has commissioned, a 10-foot bronze replica of the statue to democracy that so briefly graced Tiananmen Square. And it's a second-best solution. Plans for a $100 million museum similar to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have long since been abandoned: The necessary funds could not be raised.

A dollar for each of the dead was, it seems, too much to ask.

Ghosts in The Machine: Spooky looks at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Perfect Medium

National Review Online, October 31, 2005

I'm not altogether sure that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking its new, entertaining, and utterly charming exhibition dedicated to photography and the occult, entirely seriously. At the launch party for "The Perfect Medium" last month, giggling guests sipped smoke-shrouded potions to woo-woo-woo Theremin tunes, as vast projected images of the séances of a century ago shimmered silver-and-gray against the walls of a great hall that could just, just for a moment, have been in Transylvania. Up beyond the sweep of the Met's Norma Desmond staircase, a cheery crowd thronged past antique photographs of spirits, charlatans, and strange, vaguely unsettling, effluvia. As I peered closely, and myopically, at a mess of tweed and ectoplasm, there was a sudden, startling "boo" in my ear, and a pretty girl who had crept up behind me ran off laughing. As I said, unsettling. As I said, charming.

Unfortunately, the exhibition's catalog is, as such volumes have to be, straight-faced, straight-laced, and saturated in the oddball orthodoxies of the contemporary intelligentsia. With truth, these days, relative, and all opinions valid, it would be too much to expect an establishment such as the Met to say boo to a ghost and it doesn't. In the catalog's foreword the museum's director admits that "controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted," but he is quick to stress how "the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical. The curators present the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity."

Fair, if cowardly, enough, but a chapter entitled "Photography and The Occult" sinks into po-mo ooze: "The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside...the authors' [Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit] position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form...To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, or truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today," something, quite frankly, which does not reflect well on the arena of photography discourse today. Still, if you want a nice snapshot of how postmodernism can be the handmaiden of superstition, there it is. Standing up for evidence, logic and reason is somehow "Manichean", no more valid than the witless embrace of conjuring tricks, disembodied voices and things that go bump in the night. It's a world, um "arena," where proof and truth are reduced to "rhetoric," and, thus, are no more than a debating device stripped of any real meaning.

Thankfully the exhibition, principally dedicated to photographs of the spooky from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is itself free of such idiocies. The images are indeed allowed to stand "on their own terms" and, on their own terms, they fall straight down. They are, quite obviously bogus, balderdash, and baloney, slices of sepia stupidity that are magnificent proof of our species' wonderful curiosity and embarrassing evidence of its hopeless credulity. They were also very much the creations of their own time. After over a century of manipulated images, vanishing commissars and Hollywood magic, we are better at understanding that photography's depiction of reality can often be no more reliable than a half-heard rumor or a whispered campfire tale. One hundred forty years or so ago, we were more trusting in technology, more prepared to believe that the camera could not lie.

And we were wrong to do so. On even a moment's inspection the Met's ghosts, sprites, emanations, and fairies are as ramshackle as they are ridiculous, but all too often they did the trick. The work of the depressingly influential William Mumler, an American photographer operating in the 1860s and 1870s, may include a spectral Abraham Lincoln with his hands resting on the shoulders of Mumler's most famous client, the bereft and crazy Mary Todd Lincoln, but, like the rest of his eerie oeuvre, this insult to John Wilkes Booth was based on crude double exposure (or a variant thereof). Nevertheless, the career of the phantoms' paparazzo flourished for a decade or so, even surviving a trial for fraud (he was acquitted).

Or take a look at the once famous photographs of the Cottingley fairies (1917-20), absurd pictures of wee fey folk frolicking with some schoolgirls in England's Yorkshire countryside. Once you have stopped laughing, ask yourself just why, exactly, the fairies resemble illustrations from magazines. Well, it's elementary, my dear Watson, that's what they were (one of the girls finally confessed in 1981), but to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who dedicated an entire book (The Coming of The Fairies) to the topic, and to many other believers, these fraudulent fairies were the real, fluttering, deal. Fairies were, explained Conan Doyle, a butterfly/human mix, a technically awkward combination that even the great Holmes might have found to be a three-pipe problem.

To be fair, by the 1920s, the possibilities of photographic fakery were no secret to the informed, but this made no difference to Sir Arthur, a convinced spiritualist who was to receive his reward by returning, like Holmes, from the dead (within six hours of his death, the author had popped up in England, moving on later to Vancouver, Paris, New York, Milan and, as ectoplasm, in Winnipeg). Conan Doyle believed what he wanted to believe, and so did his fellow-believers. Photographs could confirm them in their faith, but never overthrow it.

That's a recurrent theme of this exhibition. Yes, back then people were more inclined to give photographs the benefit of the doubt, but again and again we are shown pictures that were demonstrated at the time to be fake, something that did remarkably little to shake the conviction of many spiritualists that the dear departed were just a snapshot away. Even the obvious crudities and photographic inconsistencies could be, and were, explained as a deliberate device of the spirits—apparently they wanted to appear as cut-outs, illustrations, and blurs.

And it wasn't only photographers who egged the susceptible on. The idea that some gifted individual can act as an intermediary between the living and the dead is an idea as old as imbecility, but, after the dramatic appearance of New York State's rapping and tapping Fox sisters in the 1840s, the Victorian era saw a flowering of mediums, only too ready to impress the credulous with mumbo jumbo, materializations, mutterings, Native-American spirit guides (some things never change), transfigurations, grimaces, and tidings from beyond. Some were in it for the money, others for the attention, and a few, poor souls, may have actually believed in what they were doing.

The Met's show includes a fine selection dedicated to those mediums at work. Tables soar, chairs take flight, men in old-fashioned suits levitate, apparitions appear, and ghostly light flashes between outstretched hands. Most striking of all are the visions of ectoplasm snaking out of mouths, nostrils, and other orifices quite unmentionable on a respectable website. These grubby pieces of cotton, giblets, and who knows what were a messy but logical development, manufactured miracles for what was, in essence, a manufactured religion. Like the photographs, like dead Walter's mysterious thumbprint (don't ask), they were evidence. The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe—and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

Oh yes, "Happy Halloween," one and all...