James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Another Four-part Blog For Halloween and After

Details

Created on Tuesday, 06 November 2012 06:03

Written by James Cahill

 Another Four-part Blog For Halloween and After

Part 1: Follow-up on song published at end of previous blog: I printed out there the song, set to the tune of the Major General’s song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” composed for my colleague and friend David Keightley’s 80^th birthday celebratory dinner last Saturday evening. And I mentioned what a pleasure it is to devise the tri-syllabic rhymes that the song demands. Thinking about that took me back nearly seventy years to the time when I was in basic training in the Army, at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and expressed some of my negative feelings about what the Army (quite deliberately and necessarily) does to young men, penning some lines for a similar song, never finished, to be sung to the same tune. They are, like so much else of my literary past, in the CYCTIE (Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera) on this website under Writings of JC. But I will print them below to make them more easily accessible, while still recommending the CYCTIE to all who love funny verses and rhymes as I did and do. (Try reading just the “Sudden and Gradual Limericks” that make up the first item in it.) Here are the lines I wrote:

I am the very model of a modern U.S. fighting man,

I know a lot, although I'm not a thinking or a writing man;

I know the gory side of war, but little of the tactical,

My education's very short, and hor-i-bul-ly practical--

They feed me scientifically with vitamins and minerals,

They feed me just as well, they say, as four- and five-star ginerals,

I know the way to hide a truck by parking it below a tree,

And when I speak of Brownings I am not discussing poetry—

The trouble with all this is that I'm nothing but a war machine,

I steadily improve as I become less man and more machine—

(Unfinished. The “Browning” is of course the automatic rifle of that name, which we were being taught to aim and fire.)

Part 2: A Really New Scam! Long ago, I think it was in the 1970s, I received as a professor a longish letter (still sent by old-fashioned “snail” mail) from people announcing a grand conference--in Hong Kong, I think it was--on some all-embracing topic, to be held on a “non-participating basis”--you didn’t have to come, you just submitted your paper. I don’t recall details but assume that it would somehow be “read” there; and later they would publish a volume or volumes with all the papers. I wrote back congratulating them (ironically) on having invented what seemed to me a really new scam. “We send you our papers, pay you to publish them, then you sell the resulting volume(s) to libraries all over, as well as to the participants themselves--really the first truly original scam I’ve heard of for a long time!” It could have had a place in a book I was fond of then titled “The Big Con,” a book you should find and read it you haven’t already. (It was the basis for the memorable Newman/Redford film “The Sting,” which added Scott Joplin music as soundtrack at a time when it wasn’t widely known, and everybody went home with “The Entertainer” rag playing hauntingly over & over in her/his head and desperately wanting to hear it again--) Now, in an age when so much of what comes to us on the internet or in emails is a scam of some kind, this kind of academic-publication scam has reappeared and proliferated to become one of the frequent types. The “Conference” for which one is invited to submit abstracts and papers is now held, typically, at some place one hasn’t heard of (and is highly unlikely to go to) in Turkey, and the “publication” will be (needless to say) on the web. Great reduction in trouble and cost for the organizers, a kind of “publication” that can be cited in one’s bibliography for those foolish enough to take part. In this digital age, the lines between honest enterprise and scam, between some kind of reality and a sham existence out there in cyberspace, joins so much of the rest of our culture--including a lot of what’s being produced and reviewed as “art”--in a realm of semi-existence, non-corporeal evocations, quick comings-and-goings (with the goings usually more to be welcomed than the comings.) On the other hand, I will continue to try to call attention to worthwhile internet postings that I Iearn about, such as the following.

- Part 3: New Internet Posting of Meiren Prints: My friend Christer von der Burg, founder and president of the Muban Foundation in London that collects and studies Chinese woodblock printing, has begun to post on a new website some very interesting popular prints, made in Suzhou in the second half of the 18^th century, representing beautiful women with children, some of them from his own collection and others from a castle in France (!). You will find them at: http://chiwoopri.wordpress.com/

He writes me, in response to a query of mine, that it’s OK to announce these on my own website, and send my readers/viewers to them, giving away the true identity of Mr. Chiwoopri (surname Nesedblocknt). The story he tells is fascinating, and the prints of some importance both for popular printmaking and for the big topic of Images of Women in Chinese Painting (and Printing). And I have a very minor role in his story, as the person who first noticed two of them hanging framed in the window of a Madison Avenue dealer’s shop and let him know about them. Julia White and I are not including prints in our forthcoming exhibition of meiren hua or beautiful-woman paintings, and the colors of these popular prints are so fugitive that it wouldn’t be good to expose them to light for a long time anyway. So go to this new website and enjoy them in large color reproductions, and read what Christer writes about them.

- Part 4: Latest News on “Riverbank”: It Appears In Shanghai, while Cahill Paragraphs About It Fail To Appear In Shanghai! The exhibition of “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting in U.S. Museums” that has just opened at the Shanghai Museum is made up of old and fine paintings--all except one--you guessed it, “Riverbank,” which is there again, no doubt looking as out-of-place as it did when it hung (was hanged?) in the National Palace Museum in Taipei alongside the great works of Fan Kuan, Guo Xi, and Li Tang. One begins to suspect a project, which we can call: Age and Importance Gained By Association. But wait! That’s not all! (as hucksters say on TV). A great story! As noted in previous blogs, I wrote an article to accompany the exhibition, as I did for the one two years ago in the same museum on early Chinese paintings from Japanese museums, and again it was to be published in the volume of essays presented at the opening symposium (which of course I can’t attend)--but also, just before the exhibition opens, in a big Shanghai newspaper, where it could be read by those going to the exhibition before or after they went. I agreed to requests from my contact at the Shanghai Museum, and also from an old friend who was acting as go-between, that the Dongfang Caobao (“Eastern Morning Post”) print it on the day before the exhibition opening. I told one of my correspondents about this, and he wrote back, after looking, that it wasn’t there--instead, what he found (and sent me to, with a website reference) was a page announcing papers to be delivered at the opening, including--surprise!--one by Wen Fong about why “Riverbank” is a fine antique painting, and not by Mr. Zhang. He associates it with a genuinely old Dong Yuan-style painting, the “Wintry Groves” in the old Kurokawa Collection in Ashiya, and sees them as earlier and later within the artist’s career! You can find it, if you want to, at:

http://www.dfdaily.com/html/8759/2012/10/29/886719.shtml

So, I wrote my contact Lea at the Shanghai Museum, and also a colleague who was there: What happened to my article? And I got the news:  it was published in the newspaper, but not conspicuously--rather, tucked away where one is less likely to look. And, big surprise! It doesn’t appear completely, but only the opening pages--the whole was, they decided, too long to print there. My earlier essay, which they printed whole, was 21 typed English pages; this one was 29 typed English pages. And of these 29, they published only (the Chinese translation of) eight pages, stopping just short of--you guessed it--the long paragraphs I wrote about “Riverbank.”  (The part that was printed can be found, in Chinese, at: http://www.dfdaily.com/html/1170/2012/10/28/886313.shtml.)

The complete article, in both English and Chinese, will be published in the volume that contains also the papers given at the opening symposium; but this, I fear, may appear only after the exhibition has closed. So all the notes on the individual paintings that I wrote to provide viewers of the exhibition with more information about them and hints on what to look at in them, etc., may not be accessible to them while the paintings are there for them to see. A real loss; and for what reason? Because my article this time was 29 (English) pages, where the earlier one was 21--“too long” to be published in the daily paper ahead of the opening, to be read by everybody interested--only nine (English) pages printed there this time, stopping just short of “Riverbank”…

Am I old and foolish, to suspect that something akin to suppression occurred? Maybe--I’ve given the facts here, you can judge for yourselves. We are working to get the rest published soon--success or failure will be reported below. (I am writing this while being interrupted by costumed children ringing my doorbell to get their trick-or-treat candy.)

Later (10 PM): A reassuring email from my Shanghai Museum contact Lea, bless her, informs me that the book containing my essay in full will be printed and for sale in the gallery outside the exhibition and elsewhere while the show is still on; I was wrong in assuming that it would be published only after it’s over. She assures me that it will be bought and used by a lot of people. (Later: it’s selling so fast they are having trouble keeping it in stock.)  Also that the full essay will appear in Dongfang Caobao. So all the time I spent in gathering information about the paintings and writing out my views on them (and the views of others) wasn’t wasted, I feel much better. The trick-or-treaters have come and taken all the candy-bars I had for them, and I’ll go off to bed and read and sleep for a while.

Yours, James Cahill (October 31^st, Halloween! And whose face would I carve in my pumpkin, were I carving a pumpkin, and had I the representational--portraiture--skills to do it? You guessed it!)

Still Later: Before I could post the above, the latest issue of Orientations magazine arrived, devoted to the Shanghai Museum’s sixtieth anniversary and its great exhibition. I haven’t read much in it yet, but have skimmed the article by Mike Hearn about the Met’s loans, ending with--you guessed it--That Painting, which he writes of as having a  “distinguished pedigree.” Augh! He must know that it has no pedigree at all, no plausible provenance, only that silly story about how Xu Beihong bought it from an unspecified source in some far-south place where no old paintings were ever found before, showed it to nobody for years, then gave it to his friend Zhang Daqian in return for a painting that he liked by Jin Nong (whose works are worth many times less.) And then Zhang didn’t show it to anybody for years either, until--and so forth. And as I wrote one of my correspondents about that “provenance,” “If you can believe that, I’ve got some great pre-Song paintings I’ll sell you.” To repeat once more my summation: If, in the field of European painting, a work ascribed to a little-understood old master in a style never seen before were to turn up in the hands of known master-forger, with no plausible provenance, no documentation, it would be laughed off the scene. Why are we in Chinese painting studies so gullible?

Also in this Orientations issue is an interview with Shan Guolin, longtime curator of Chinese paintings at the Shanghai Museum, in which Shan, once my good friend, now evidently appointed an Honorary Princetonian, writes that Professor James Cahill misjudged Riverbank because he “compared it with some Northern Song paintings and forgeries of Dong Yuan made by Zhang Daqian, and believed the painting showed similarities with Zhang’s technique. However, he did not talk about brush and ink, which are the crucial factors for Chinese painting.” Augh again! Has ever greater nonsense, and greater non-truth, been written? In the “Indictment in Fourteen Counts” that I delivered at the Met’s 1999 “Authenticity” symposium, an essay that has been published everywhere (including in  Chinese), Count 5 is: “Brushwork, or lack of it,” a long section in which I used some eight slide comparisons, details of “Riverbank” alongside those of truly old paintings, to illustrate my argument: that Zhang Daqian cleverly avoided conspicuous brushwork, visible brushstrokes, to satisfy the traditional Chinese connoisseur’s belief that these early paintings showed no brushwork of the kind that later paintings typically display. And I showed in the comparisons how Riverbank’s no-brushstroke drawing differed in important ways from that seen in genuinely old paintings. Shan knew this; why did he state such an obvious untruth? (Rhetorical question.)

And Later Still: News from Shanghai at last; a long email from my younger colleague Liu Heping, who was there delivering a paper himself, about the symposium. Too long to recount here. One whole session, the first, devoted to pro-Riverbank papers, including the one by Wen Fong (delivered by someone else) accepting that awkwardly-pasted-in “signature” and placing the work within the oeuvre of Dong Yuan (!)--how my old friend Mr. Zhang must be chuckling in the afterlife to see his handiwork so successfully duping so many people! Nobody involved in this session gave a paper recognizing it for what it really is. None of the paper-givers belong, it would appear, among those with good eyes and a good knowledge of early Chinese landscape style, all of whom have quickly seen through it--Hironobu Kohara, Sherman Lee, Rick Vinograd, Harrie Vanderstappen--and all of whom (quite independently of each other) ended up calling it a modern pastiche, which is what it is. And what it must eventually be universally recognized as being--there’s no way it can be accepted, in the end, as anything else, because you can’t, as the saying goes, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Although old Mr. Zhang was adept at making silk somethings, not purses but paintings that enriched his own purse, out of the sow’s ears of artificially darkened and ripped silk. Some of these still hang on museum walls.

Yours again, James Cahill, this time writing on November 5^th. Some time after tomorrow we will learn whether we are governed by a best-we-can-hope-for administration or a disastrous one. If the latter, what? I can’t join those people who say they will move to Canada if Romney-Ryan win; my house there has been sold. Maybe I’ll join a movement for having Northern California, perhaps along with Oregon and Washington, secede from the union to form a new country called Nocalorwash? (But that sounds like a merger of a no-cal drink company with a carwash.)

This Week’s Blog will be another series of short ones.

Details

Created on Saturday, 27 October 2012 04:59

Written by James Cahill

This Week’s Blog will be another series of short ones.

First, Halloween. It’s coming soon; how can I respond? By referring readers who haven’t read last year’s Halloween blog, or want to read it again or look at the picture, to my blog for 10/30/2011: use the newly-installed old-blog-finder just to the left of this, go to that date, admire the photo: a newspaper photo of my daughter Sarah at the age of four standing beside a Jack Pumpkinhead figure--this appeared on the front page of the Washington Post way back, and she saved it. The brief text with it introduces her as the daughter of one James Cahill who made for his two children--the older one is Nicholas--a full-size Jack Pumpkinhead figure (those of you who don’t know who that was, go back and read The Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum) that sat outside their house on Newark Street, beside the front steps, and could wave its hand at passers-by and also talk to them. And the accompanying story in my blog tells how at last I brought it to life. You can’t believe that? Go back and read the story, it’s true; Nick and Sarah can testify to that.

My publications in Chinese. I don’t publish much of anything in English any more--too much fuss about getting publication permissions for illustrations, dealing with editors (other than Naomi Richard, who was my ideal editor but who has retired) and other annoyances that I can’t tolerate in my old age,. But my books continue to appear in Chinese translation, mostly published by Sanlian Press in Beijing, and continue to be best-sellers--Gao Juhan (myself) is much more famous there than James Cahill (whose books are mostly out of print) is here. Most recently, a book about Chinese paintings of gardens that I co-authored with two young Chinese collaborators--I told the story of this before--has been raising a stir, mostly positive; and another of my older books, the Reischauer Lectures delivered at Harvard and published as The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan, is about to appear in Chinese. My contact at Sanlian has sent me a picture of the book, quite handsome. And these books are produced at surprisingly low costs. Tell your Chinese friends, or read them yourself if that’s one of your languages. I have recommended strongly to Sanlian that they publish an English-language version of the garden paintings book, and they hope to do that, so I may still see one more book by me (and two others) appear in English.

Another important exhibition at the Shanghai Museum is about to open, this time made up of early Chinese paintings from U.S. museums: the Boston M.F.A., the Met in New York, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. (The other great early collection in the U.S., the Freer in D.C., is prohibited from lending by the provisions of Freer’s will.)  For last year’s show I wrote a longish essay for the catalog about Japanese collecting of early Chinese paintings--readable here in English as CLP  197--relating how Chinese paintings came to Japan in three “waves”: early, middle (Edo period), and late (early 20^th century.) (A certain person has written that he plans to organize an exhibition featuring these “three waves,” and when I asked whether my writing would be cited, he said he didn’t need to, since this was “common knowledge.” News to me, because when I wrote about the middle period in my 1985 article “Phases and Modes in the Transmission of Ming-Ch’ing Painting Styles to Edo Period Japan,” I found no previous useful published research on this matter and had to do it myself--besides relying on Japanese informants credited in my article. We will see how he handles this matter in his exhibition catalog.) Anyway: for this year’s big Shanghai  Museum show, which opens soon, I’ve written another, even longer article titled “Early Chinese Paintings in U.S. Museums: An Insider’s View”; this will again be published in the catalog, I assume in both English and Chinese, and will also appear here as another CLP--watch for it. The Chinese text will be published first, I learn, in the Book Review section of a big Shanghai newspaper called the Daofang Zaobao on October 28^th. I’m sorry that I’m no longer able to travel, and so won’t see the exhibition--although of course I’ve seen all the paintings (I believe) long ago, it would be a pleasure to view them again in this new setting, with some added, I assume, from Chinese collections--that, at least, was what happened last year. I’ve written my editor-translator contact at the Shanghai Museum asking that she try to persuade the compilers of the catalog not to follow the common present-day Chinese practice of reproducing old paintings on silk in what they believe to be an “honest” way, showing them as really look now--a process that too often produces rectangles of dark brown in which no image can be seen. (I recently ordered two new books on Chinese paintings in P.R.C. collections, and found them filled with “reproductions” of that kind. Down with honesty!)

Responses to my dismissals of conceptual artists as clever-idea people: they have predictably been met with wonderment: can anyone really be so backward in his ideas about art? So I am a hold-over, joining such notables as the late Sir Ernst Gombrich but totally out of touch with younger art-lovers. Just to be clear; am I advocating that they be banned? Of course not--I’m not for banning much of anything that doesn’t really harm people, as these mostly don’t. They are just a bore, and huge consumers of money and gallery space that could be better used. If I advocate anything at all, it would be that we collectively adopt the recommendation (previously cited on this website and elsewhere) of the late Princeton musicologist Edward Cone, whom I got to know when he spent a semester on our Berkeley campus as Ernest Bloch Lecturer, delivering the lectures published as The Composer's Voice. He later wrote an article--which I think was published in The American Scholar for Autumn 1977, Vol. 46 No. 4--in which he proposed that the art world could be greatly bettered and relieved of much nonsense if artists and composers were forced to present their works without having them designated as art, or as serious music—so that they would have to make it on their own, to be received, experienced, and judged as other events and objects might be. John Cage's famous However-long-it-is composition, in which the audience gazes at the pianist doing nothing for a long stretch of near-silence (only ambient noise), would be recognized as a total bore, as would many performance pieces and uninteresting objects or installations.

Is there really still another way I can bring Zhang Daqian into my  blogs? You might think that I’ve exhausted every possible way; but no, there is still another. One of my Facebook friends found an old picture, looking mysteriously real but too like a Chinese painting to be quite believable, of a Chinese noble-scholar figure holding a staff and seated under a pine tree, gazing upward, and backed by a landscape equally beyond belief. She and others were (quite properly) marveling at it, wondering how it could possibly have been produced, what wonderland it depicted, how they could find it and go there; I served as the beastly balloon-puncturer, informing them that it was a composite photograph made by a certain Long Chin-San who had a photographic studio in Taipei and specialized in making mysteriously real-looking composite photographs like this one, often featuring Zhang Daqian as the lofty-minded scholar (how old Zhang must have enjoyed the irony of that!) Zhang sometimes adopted the same traditional persona in real photographs, for instance positioning himself against the old Monterey cypress trees at Point Lobos while he lived nearby. (These are the trees that I took my seminar on the Ming master Wen Zhengming down to see, since Wen often painted similar trees--and we stayed overnight in Zhang Daqian’s house, courtesy of his daughter Sing who was in my seminar.) I will reproduce two pictures: the composite work by Long Chin-San and a real photo of Zhang that I recently found somewhere.

And that concludes today’s blog, except that I will append to it a song I have written for the 80^th birthday celebration for my old friend David Keightley, which will take place this coming Friday, October 26^th. David and I used to make up a pair, performing at Center for Chinese Studies New Year’s parties, retirement parties for colleagues, etc., singing funny songs we composed--new words, that is, to familiar tunes. For my own retirement celebration in May 1994, David composed and sang a new text for the Major General’s Song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, beginning: “He is the very model of a Chinese painting specialist.” Now I have, in retaliation so to speak, composed one that Cyril Birch and I will sing at David’s retirement dinner. I worked long and hard on it, coming up with tricky three-syllable rhymes like those Gilbert used. So that song, which by the time this is printed will have been performed at the dinner, can be read below. So, Happy Eightieth David, Happy Halloween everybody else, from James Cahill!

He is the very model of the Chinese antiquarian,

He knows where folks of ancient Shang and Zhou did all their buryin’

He reads archaic script as it’s inscribed on bones and tortoise shells,

Writes articles that carry the explosive power of mortar shells--

Deciphering inscriptions that are written out on scapulae,

He tells his adversaries “You should cancel all that crap you lie,”

He knows what made north China’s slopes so loessian and terracy

(Thinks: terracy, terracy--then looks up:)

And countered K. C. Chang with all his shamanistic heresy!

(Chorus:: And countered K.C. Chang with all his shamanistic… etc.)

His book about Shang China and its Time, Space, and Community

Is not a work that anyone can challenge with impunity

For ancient China’s worshippin’, its writin’ and its buryin’

He is the very model of a Chinese antiquarian!

(Chorus repeat: For ancient China’s … )

He wrote a learned paper on why all the swords have disappeared

There were no explanations of this matter until his appeared

He wrote a weighty book about the sources of Shang history

And Neolithic women who for others were a mystery--

And every New Year’s day he led a group of us on bicycles

Traversing Tilden Park like highly animated icycles,

He’s been official welcomer for visiting celebrities

(pause to think: celebrities, celebrities… Then looks up:)

From places far away as Karakorum  and the Hebrides!

(Repeat: From places far away as …)

He worked to get a seminar for Cahill’s art historians

A building we had longed for since the time of the Victorians

A new East Asian Library to study in and tarry in,

The funds for which were gathered by our Chinese antiquarian

(Repeat: A new East Asian Library to study in .. .etc.)

Final Quatrain:

We’ll sing another song, old friend, though it may be more cursory

When once again we gather for your hundredth anniversary

For all your learned writings, both profound and adversarian,

You are the very model of a Chinese antiquarian!  (repeat)

Yet Another Blog About Art and Artists

Details

Created on Monday, 15 October 2012 08:35

Written by James Cahill

Yet Another Blog About Art and Artists

CAHILL GREAT TRUTHS NUMBER TEN.  What, you don’t remember what the other nine were? Go back and find them in my complete written works! What, you can’t because my written works aren’t orderly? But that’s one of the Truths: ORDER AND NEATNESS OFTEN WORK AGAINST QUALITY AND INTEREST. Enough of that; on to Great Truth no. 10:

THOSE WHO CAN PAINT AND DO IT WELL, PAINT. THOSE WHO CAN SCULPT AND DO IT WELL, SCULPT. THOSE WHO CAN COMPOSE MUSIC THAT PEOPLE WANT TO LISTEN TO, COMPOSE MUSIC. THOSE WHO CAN’T DO THESE THINGS, OR HAVEN’T THE PATIENCE TO DO THEM WELL, THINK UP CLEVER IDEAS INSTEAD.

Good examples of Clever Ideas people: Marcel Duchamps, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Aii Weiwei (Ceramic sunflower seeds? Copies of old bronze animal heads? All produced by studio craftsmen?) With Warhol it reportedly wasn’t even his own Clever Idea: he went to a gallery owner proposing to make enlarged comic-strip panels, but she told him that that was already being done by Roy Lichtenstein; why don’t you, she suggested, make enlarged commercial images? And so the Brillo Box and the Campbell’s Soup Can were born--along with a cult following, crazy “authenticity” problems, and a foundation.)

A  NYTimes Arts Section front-page  article (September 30^th, 2012), with large pictures of the artist and his works, is about a certain Wade Guyton who says he “never really enjoyed drawing or life classes” (he should have been told “All right, Mr. Guyton, we’ll  train you as a carpenter or plumber”) and would “rather sit in front of the TV or play video games.” He has programmed his computer and printer so that they print colored stripes on big sheets of paper (presumably while he is watching TV), and he exhibits these as his works of art. And behold! Here he is (with those sheets of colored stripes, decorative at best) on the front page of the NYTimes Arts Section! (A once-rewarding publication that now offers us less and less about what I consider to be art--which is still being produced by real artists, if only one looks for it.)

Later: Wade Guyton was given another NYTimes Arts Section front-page review on October 5^th, with a work that looks slightly more interesting--big dots added to the stripes. But it’s still done by his computer, not by his hand. And the Weekend Arts section in today’s Times (Friday, Oct. 12^th) gives half its front page, and more inside, to a review of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C., with big color pictures of ceramic crabs (made, needless to say, by his studio assistants), big, simple ceramic pots simply painted in bright colors, and photos of him dropping and smashing a valuable Han urn--another of his “works of art.” And the reviewer, bless her, acknowledges that the objects in the show “suggest that he doesn’t make great art as much as makes great use . . . of the role of the artist as public intellectual and social conscience.” I would rather say: he’s not so good at making art as he is at self-promotion. Is that another symptom of the age we live in? Skilful presentation wins out over substance? As in last night’s Biden-Ryan debate, or last week’s Obama-Romney one--the speakers-of-truth were judged as losing, the glib tellers-of-lies as winning. It’s clear from the brief biography of Ai Weiwei in this article that he owes much of his prominence to having had a famous father--a big advantage for any youth in China--and enjoyed benefits that turned him into “an ambitious young man who very much intended to be somebody.” As for his art works: the ceramic sunflower seeds were intended to be walked on, but gave off a dust that harmed the walkers’ lungs, so that they had to be swept into a pile that the gallery visitors could gaze at. Forget about great--is it even interesting art? You or I could have thought up a “work” that better repays a viewer’s attention. Admirable as a dissident, small potatoes as an artist, really great at self-promotion.

A promotional catalog for a forthcoming auction in Beijing of Chinese paintings and works of art brings further evidence of what I think of as Cahill’s Great Miscalculations. I was showing one painting in it to my helper and telling her about my engagement with the artist and his move into a new manner of painting, and she laughed and said “That’s a good story.” So here it is, even though it repeats things I’ve written before. It’s about--you guessed it--Zhang Daqian. I had written an essay for the catalog for his big 1963 exhibition in New York, an essay he liked and often reprinted--and he gave me and my then-wife each a painting, of kinds we requested, in lieu of payment. Then came the time, in the later 1960s, when he moved into a new manner of painting that began with large splashes of ink and heavy blue and green pigment onto the paper; to this he would add a minimum of fine drawing to turn the splashes into a kind of picture. (In the work reproduced in the auction volume, done in 1967, it was a big ink-and-colors splash with a few simply-drawn buildings at the top and some drawing below that turned the bottom of the splash into cliffs.) Zhang sent his son to ask me whether I would write another essay for the catalog of an exhibition of these new paintings of his. And I was faced with an ethical dilemma: I knew that this new manner, or style, was largely a response to his heavy loss of vision--he had glaucoma--which made fine drawing difficult for him, so that he turned to a style that required much less of it. And I didn’t feel I could honestly write the essay without mentioning that; and since that would harm his reputation by revealing the real motivation behind this move into the new style, which I didn’t want to do, I declined as politely as I could.  Zhang was disappointed, and I was sorry about that, too; but I kept my integrity. Now I see one of these paintings--not even one of the best--coming up for auction, and the estimated price is:  RMB 18.000.000 to 21,000,000, or two-to-three million dollars. So: I could have had several of them, and if I had kept them, I would be a multi-millionaire. But instead I kept my integrity. A very contemporary choice: so many of our multi-millionaires have got that way by sacrificing their integrity, buying and closing out companies with great losses of jobs, exploiting anomalies in the housing market and leaving people homeless, selling bad investments to naïve small investors, and the like. Would I rather have my integrity than a few million dollars? Not a real choice, today, and I’m glad I’m not faced with it--I might very well go the wrong way.

James Cahill, October 12^th, 2012