Julian Schnabel Loses His Shit



The Methuselan Morley Safer, who seems to be the "60 Minutes" point man for contemporary art -- remember his segment on Botero? -- mentioned the positively citric art critic Robert Hughes in the presence of incredible filmmaker but so-so painter Julian Schnabel. Bad move, bro; bad moveeee:

Why the searing animosity? Why the uncharitable reference to "bums"? From TheIndependent:

"'Schnabel is to painting', (Robert Hughes) wrote in 1987, 'what Stallone is to acting - a lurching display of oily pectorals - except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself' - a reference, perhaps, to Schnabel's famous declaration that 'I'm as close to Picasso as you are going to get in this fucking life.'"

While, generally, we agree with Hughes -- although he is dead wrong on Basquiat's discordant race against death (aka, his oeuvre) -- the disconnect between Schnabel's filmmaking and his jejune work on the canvas makes us wonder if the canvas itself is Dead.

Contemporary artists have, by and large, used the canvas for stunts and expositions of wit but no longer regard it as a medium for meaningful expressions of Eternal Things. Perhaps in a world of declining attention spans and taste-challenged Russian tycoons with empty wallspace the medium of the canvas, a frozen moment, is irrelevant. We no longer have the capacity of concentrating on The Moment in the vortex of the March of Time.

Schnabel, we cannot fail to note, excels when he "paints" on the screen, in Time, scene-by-scene (Schabel's Christ's Last Day works are useless on canvas, chilly farces at Gagosian's Beverly Hills; Schnabel's Christ's Last Day paintings are genius over the opening credits of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.") The canvas is a medium of Eternity, not of the brevity of the contemporary artist for whom God -- and, by Nietzsche's inference, all Absolutes -- is dead.

Just an observation, quite not inconceivably unfashionable.