Art, Receptivity and Bold Face Names

 The April 24, 2022 issue of "T, The New York Times Stye Magazine," is supposed to be all about creativity, but much of it is little more than a list of Bold Face Names such as one might find in a high school newspaper. Various names one might know from one branch of the arts or another have either been persuaded or paid (I'm not sure which) to offer snippets, or as much as several paragraphs, of advice to young artists, most of whom are probably not readers of "T."

Much of the advice is, well, fairly pedestrian or predictable in nature. Glancing through it, one is tempted to conclude that a person is by nature inclined to the arts, or not. If you are, one way or another -- and it appears there are as many ways as there are artists -- persevere. 

In her introduction, "T's" chief editor, Hanya Yanagihara, made an interesting observation: "art demands a state of receptivity." While it isn't totally clear what she has in mind there -- it seems she's talking about receptivity on the part of the artist herself lest the creative process not work -- I think there is another way of looking at it.

It's a bit like the classic question: does a tree make any noise as it falls in a forest if no one is there to hear it? (I'm sure science would claim to be able to answer that one definitively, but that's not what I have in mind.)  Rather, the question is: if a person creates a work of art and there is no receptivity on the part of the public, is it really art?

All too often, it seems, money is a proxy for validation. If a book, or painting, sells, it's valid. If it doesn't, well perhaps that proves it's "worthless" not just as an article of commerce, but in terms of its aesthetic qualities as well.  Then, of course, there are the storied artists ignored or rejected in their lifetimes, only to be acclaimed after their deaths at which point others manage to reap the monetary rewards. 

"No one's opinion about you or your art should matter more than your own," intones Ms Yanagihara -- a little homily if ever there was one. In one reading, it could be viewed as profound (if commonplace) wisdom. On the other, it could be viewed as another way of believing "it's all about me" -- one of the curses of contemporary life.

Then Ms Yanagihara goes on to assert: "You have to finish at some point. The people who get published aren't necessarily the most brilliant writers. The ones who get published are the ones who complete their work." 

While some clearly recognizable form of completion suitable for an article of commerce is no doubt essential in that context, such isn't the case if commercial success isn't required.

In the case of aesthetics alone, a creative endeavor is finished when the intent of the artist has been realized  -- or if that word calls into question "just who is an artist? -- the intent of the creator. Hopefully the creator will then experience a sense of satisfaction whether "receptivity" rears its head or not.

"Art is created in front of the easel, but it's just as often made while gardening or waiting for the subway or sitting on a park bench," Ms Yanagihara said. If so, there is arguably no need for her issue of Bold Face Names, except, of course, as a vehicle for glossy, expensive ads for Canali suits and Rolex watches. Just the thing for young artists.

More on the Tension Between Art and Political Correctness

The New York Times rehashed the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth on Feb. 3, 2022, using the transfer of a couple of small islands off the coast of Maine from Wyeth family foundations to Colby College as an excuse. 

 One paragraph in particular jumped out at me.

 "In a 2017 assessment of his paintings of Black people in the Brandywine Valley, the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw questioned the power imbalance in his representation of race, and also pointed out that in a handful of paintings he had darkened the skin tone of his white model, Helga Testorf, a Chadds Ford neighbor who posed for him in secret for more than a decade." 

 “His nude images of black women embody the power imbalance that characterized interracial interactions in the Brandywine Valley throughout the 20th century,” Shaw wrote in 2017, arguing that the “subordinate positions (of his models) as poor, black and working class enabled the artist to exert a great deal of control over how he imaged them on paper or canvas.” 

 To Ms. Shaw, the New York Times said, the visual representation of race in Wyeth’s work raised the question of how much leeway white artists should have in depicting subjects of another race. Is all fair in the name of art?

 The "power imbalance," and just what leeway artists (presumably not just those who are white) should have in depicting subjects of another race? What's at issue here is political correctness and cultural misappropriation. Sound familiar? 

 One wonders, should we go back through the history of Western art, identifying all the painting where an artist had some sort of "power imbalance" over a subject and/or where he or she depicted someone of a different race or culture and burn them? Or should we continue to evaluate them first and foremost on aesthetic considerations? We are, after all, talking about art.

 To be fair to Ms Shaw, the Times reported that in 2017 "she took pains to note that her work wasn’t intended to injure Wyeth’s reputation, but rather to layer it. "I love Wyeth,' she said. 'I think we can find artists to be complicated and frustrating and disappointing in some ways and still love the work.'" 

 Well, maybe Wyeth also wasn't trying to injure the Blacks depicted in his paintings, just lawyer them.

 I'll leave it up to readers to decide, but these are important issues in the current "cancel culture" mood of certain U.S. sociopolitical actors.

Self-Censorship and The Purpose of the Arts

 Back in early December 2021, the New York Times had an article entitled "Writers Tackle the Challenge of Self-Censorship" based on a discussion of the topic sponsored by PEN America, an organization founded in 1922 in support of freedom of expression.

Long considered a basic right in the U.S. as enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, free expression is under threat from both the right and the left at present with writers of all description in the firing line.

This came to mind the other day when I read in the NYT a review of a book called "Authority and Freedom, A defense of the Arts," by Jed Perl. In it, Perl argues art should be freed from the notion that to be valid, it has to address prevailing sociopolitical concerns. 

The reviewer, American composer John Adams, who has had rare success with contemporary opera -- "Nixon in China" and "Doctor Atomic" -- faulted Perl for not giving any examples of art that sacrifices aesthetic authenticity for social relevance. 

"On wonders whether the real reason for his silence here is the now-familiar threat of being cancelled," Adams said. 

I, personally, wouldn't be all that surprised since I have been pondering, in the prevailing cancel-culture, cultural-misappropriation climate, whether I need to change the race of a character in my operetta "Patricia," a work in progress (and one that in all likelihood always will be).

While I personally tend to fall into the "art-for-the-sake-of-art camp," Adams clearly doesn't.

"It's unlikely that 'Authority and Freedom' will change many artists' minds about how they view their work. They will do what they want, and many, if not most, today are ablaze with an intensity not seen since the 1930s to make their art speak truth to power, to heal what they deem the rent in our social fabric," he said.

Perhaps Adams, on his part, can provide some examples of contemporary art that has successfully healed (my emphasis) as opposed to -- say -- addressed "the rent in our social fabric."  

"If you ask them," Adams continued, "they will tell you that art that doesn't address this sense of urgency is not just out of touch with the times, it is irrelevant."

My own sense is that if an artist creates something of exceptional aesthetic value, it will far outlast creations that are first and foremost in touch with the sociopolitical currents of their times although, to be fair, there are examples over the course of history that have successfully hit both targets.

It's a Good Moment to be a Black Artist in the U.S.

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

That was the lead paragraph of an article I wrote on Oct. 15.  You can find it here.

In a similar vein, the New York Times led it's Nov. 2020 "Weekend Arts" section with an extensive write-up of Derek Fordjour, a Black artist who paints, sculpts and makes film and video.

"I'm benefiting from a moment," he told the NYT, echoing the sentiments of Ms Leigh. "I recognize that I'm an artist in society and when society goes and moves in a different direction I've still got to be rooted in what I'm doing."

Where society, as represented by the art world, is going now is in the direction of strongly promoting the work of Black artists, not necessarily unfairly in view of a certain amount of neglect if not outright discrimination in times past.  But the point is, times have changed, for the moment (as Fordjour put it)  at any rate. White privilege has been replaced by Black privilege and artists like Mr. Fordjour are clearly enjoying their recognition.

According to the NYT, Fordjour "was a market sensation in 2019" as evidenced in part by the sale of one of his paintings at auction for a price double the estimate. And, the paper noted, he was sued last March by a former New York gallery owner for not living up to an agreement allegedly made back in 2014 to deliver 20 canvases. The case, which Fordjour's attorneys are seeking to have dismissed, is still pending. But it is illustrative of the current state of demand for the artist's work.

Fordjour, now 46, had a considerable climb up to his current prominence. It took 20 years from his first stab at art school to his first museum show earlier this year at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. That followed a commission by New York's Whitney Museum to create a mural near its building. entitled Half Mast (2018). It depicts a crowd of people with some depicted as rifle targets as a commentary on violence in the U.S. against people of color.

The New York Times write-up of Fordjour was occasioned by a current show of his works, entitled "Self Must Die," at New York's Petzel Gallery. It runs through Dec. 19. At a full two and a half pages of a section that ran only 14 pages, that's definitely indicative of "the moment."

When an Artist is a Celebrity, Role Confusion Can Result

 When an artist becomes sufficiently well known, he or she acquires an additional identify: that of a celebrity and suddenly that person's persona is as important if not more important than the art.

Such appears to have happened with respect to German artist Neo Rauch, the subject of a Nov. 11, 2020 New York Times article on a topic that has gotten a lot of interest in recent years: the apparent rise of a new right wing movement in Germany.

What triggered this was an incident last spring in which a German art historian named Wolfgang Ulrich argued that Rauch was contributing to the country's right-wing drift because Rauch had made public statements criticizing political correctness. The operative word was "statements" -- as opposed to, for instance, "paintings," which is Rauch's artistic medium.

Lets think about that for a moment.  If Rauch had not become a prestigious artist thanks to the quality of his work (The New York Metropolitan Museum has given him a solo show), no one except perhaps persons in the immediate vicinity of his remarks, would have cared in the slightest what he had said. But as a celebrity, those words were another matter.

Ulrich, the art historian, seemed to realize he was walking on thin ice because, according to the NYT article, he went on to claim that Rauch's alleged right-wing sentiments were reflected in his art as well because the surrealist worlds he creates on canvas constitute refuges from "a contemporary society he hates." In other words, there is nothing obviously and explicitly right-wing within them.

In view of his contention, one wonders if Ulrich would thus conclude that every person who plays an on-line fantasy game, often taking on another identity in the process, is doing so as a means of taking similar refuge and thus has right-wing inclinations as well?  I don't think so.

Ulrich's apparent failure to be able to point to any explicitly right-wing leanings in Rauch's paintings squares with prevailing views among art critics generally. While the paintings have been interpreted as signaling a sense of alienation, they haven't been identified as pointing in any particular political direction as an alternative.

Wikipedia, for instance, quotes art historian Charlotte Mullins as saying that while the paintings suggest a narrative intent, closer scrutiny immediately presents the viewer with enigmas: "Architectural elements peter out; men in uniform from throughout history intimidate men and women from other centuries; great struggles occur but their reason is never apparent; styles change at a whim."

According to the NYT article, Rauch's work "is known internationally for paintings that blend elements of Pop Art, Surrealism and Social Realism."  They "feature dream-like groupings of figures in garish colors, assembled into horrific or comic scenes."

An example is below:

 

A couple of years ago, Rauch told a major German newspaper he objected to political correctness because it reminded him of the authoritarian regime of former Communist East Germany, where he was born. He also said everyone should be wary of the current "cancel culture" movement.

The point of all of this is: shouldn't one view the flap over Rauch's comments as more in the nature of concerns about the influences a celebrity (in our celebrity-driven culture) might have on what others think rather than anything having to do with art?

 

 

The World of Art Has Abandoned Beauty and Aesthetics

 Once upon a time, beauty was a noble virtue and a philosophic ideal as opposed to a trip-wire of political correctness. Aesthetic considerations, often refined, formal and generally acknowledged if always subject to challenge, then determined what was beautiful, what was not. And the art world was the main venue where debates over relative beauty took place.

Not so much, if at all, anymore.

"Art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live."  So said Ben Eastham, a London-based art critic in an essay entitled "The Case for Embracing Uncertainty in Art."

And, indeed, that quote is the only place in the entire, lengthy essay where the word "aesthetic" or "aesthetics" occurs. How about "beauty?"  That word doesn't occur at all.

Perhaps it all started in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp contributed a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" and entitled "Fountain" to a New York art exhibition. Whatever the genesis, matters have come a long way since then, to the point where aesthetic considerations are about the last thing an art museum is likely to consider when mounting an exhibition of contemporary works. What the works, or what the artist (since the works themselves are often incomprehensible), says about society (rarely if ever anything positive), and whether the artist can be viewed as a disadvantaged minority of one sort or another, seem to be what matters most.

In other words, the world of art is today just another extension of the world of politics and social criticism. Why does it survive as such? Well, there is still a certain mystique about the whole business and a fascination over the celebrity it can bring. In addition, there is apparently still sufficient cache in acquiring works of a known-name artist as a trophy of one's wealth and power, and perhaps even as a store of value -- if a lot more questionable than, say, owning a Monet painting.

Some will, of course, be quick to point out that social commentary or overt criticism has long figured in at least some prominent works of art (Picasso's "Guernica" for example), but almost always in the past presented in a context of aesthetic principles. That, according to Eastham, has pretty much disappeared.  If that leaves viewers puzzled as to what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, so be it, he maintains.

"Where movements have historically been defined by shared forms and subjects linked to their sponsors (church, state, merchants), the art of today can only loosely be identified by some common characteristics: it foregrounds ideas over forms and materials; borrows liberally and not always responsibly from disciplines as varied as philosophy, ecology and sociology; is preoccupied by forming connections between disparate ideas and cultures; is sceptical of received wisdoms; takes place in a globalized world; is, to quote Marshall McLuhan, “whatever you can get away with” or, to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg, “whatever I say it is.”

So where does that leave aesthetics and beauty? Out in the cold, or as we continually see, in the enveloping arms of commerce where the nobility of beauty is devalued on a daily basis.

More on Black Artists Doing Well in the U.S. at Present

 A couple of posts ago, I quoted Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh as saying how amazing it was to be a Black artist at present. My point was that, at least when it comes to the high-culture art scene, the much bandied about notion of "white privilege" appears to have been replaced, for the time being at least, by "Black privilege." In other areas of life, probably not so much.

"Mea culpa," or "it's about time," or "lots of ground to make up," or whatever.

An artist who would probably agree with Leigh is painter Sam Gilliam, a Black abstract expressionist credited with introducing draped and wrapped painted canvases in the mild 1960s.  An example can be seen below.

 

 According to a recent Wall Street Journal Magazine article,  Gilliam, now 86 years old, was for the first time represented by a New York Gallery, Pace, only last year. Apparently as a result, his art appears to be commanding significantly higher prices than before.

"This May, his 1973 "Patched Leaf" painting, for instance, sold for $905,000 against a high estimate of $500,000," the magazine article noted.

A selection of new Gilliam paintings and sculpture will be exhibited at Pace from Nov. 6 through Dec. 19, 2020.

Moreover, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC is scheduled to mount a retrospect of Gilliam's work next year.

"It's a real beautiful ending," Gilliam told the WSJ.

Gilliam is a distinguished artist with a long and productive career and appears fully deserving of wider acclaim -- and greater financial success. I bring this to the attention of readers only because there is so much commentary out there that seems to suggest nothing has changed.

The Arrival of "Black Privilege" When It Comes to the Arts

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

She's right about that. 

Even if one only reads the arts sections of major American publications episodically, one thing is crystal clear. Museums, theaters, operas, galleries, the film and television industries etc. are falling all over themselves to feature Black artists and Black subject matter.

In the last couple of years or so, we have repeatedly encountered the phrase "white privilege" -- the notion that whites are showered with benefits, thanks to a county having been founded on "systemic racism." While there may be some truth to that, there are plenty of whites who have not been at all privileged and many of them seem to have voted for Donald Trump on the view that it was time for change. Experiencing now prolonged economic stagnation or decline, they see immigrants and minorities as a threat from below (fears Trump plays upon), but they also feel totally dismissed by the coastal elites who are for the most part, but not exclusively, white.

Many of these people, particularly in the Middle West, are descents of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with no money in their pockets and started their American journeys in New York garment industry sweat shops, in coal mines, in lumber camps or on hard scrabble farms. 

But back to the arts.  The pendulum is swinging and many are probably saying it's about time. Blacks in particular, but also other U.S. minority groups, of one definition or another, are finally getting their due. At the extreme of this trend is the "cancel culture" movement -- not just getting rid of statues of Confederate military heroes and removing the names of people like Woodrow Wilson and Flannery O'Connor, deemed to be unacceptably racist, from buildings, but at its extreme, dumping pretty much anything deemed to be "Eurocentric" in nature. We may be back to book burning before it's over, but maybe climate change will get us first.

There's nothing wrong with selecting Simone Leigh -- clearly a sculptor of distinction -- to represent the U.S. in Venice. Interestingly, as the Times article points out, Blacks represented the U.S. in the last two Venice Biennials as well: Martin Puryear, a sculptor in 2019, and Mark Bradford, a painter, in 2017. They also are artists of distinction, but how many points on a line does it take to make a trend, some might ask? Still lots of lost time to make up, others would say.

But as I read the arts pages and material sent to me by various opera, theater and music groups, one cannot help but wonder if, in the current environment, the race, sexual orientation, and gender of artists has a lot more to do with the prominence that they currently achieve than the works of art they produce, many of which are hailed more for sociopolitical messages than for aesthetic values.  But that's another topic. One that I have addressed before and will probably return to.

To be fair, however, aesthetic considerations are a major element in the work of Simone Leigh and her statues can be fairly evaluated on such considerations alone.   

Here's an example - a photo I took of her sculpture "Brick House" (emblematic of the character of a strong Black woman) near the north end of New York's High Line Park.

The bottom line: in at least one area of American life -- the world of high-culture arts -- "Black privilege" has arrived. As Ms Leigh put it: "how amazing to be a Black artist right now."

A Few More Thoughts About the Prevailing Climate for Art

In recent posts, I've been talking about the notion that at present (in the U.S. at any rate), the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. Pictures, music, literature, whatever -- don't stand on their own merits when it comes to critical acclaim. It's an approach, one could argue, that stands what was once the very nature and meaning of art on its head: the art in question stood on it's own. Of course one might then be interested in who created it because more works of equal or even greater beauty could be forthcoming.

Which brings me to the Oct. 10, 2020, "Arts" section of the New York Times, the lead article of which, plus a lengthy sidebar, is all about Louise Glück, an American poet, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

How did she feel about that?

 "Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn't make sense.... I come from a country that is not thought fondly of now, and I'm white, and we've had all the prizes. So it seemed unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life."

Glück, who has been writing poetry for decades and has won an array of other prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, would certainly seem to be a candidate in the Nobel tradition -- except, that in her view, reflecting the tenor of the times, her race would be a more important factor than the quality of her poetry. Well, it apparently wasn't in this case, but her comments are nonetheless revealing.

The NYT identified Glück as a poet who isn't afraid to use her work to explore cruelty. And an excerpt printed in the paper from one of her poems includes the line "I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear?"

Well, it's an interesting question these days because in the age of Political Correctness, pretty much everything or everyone that isn't downright evil is "beautiful," more or less by definition. In the article, Glück said she didn't want to be like the early American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because his poetry was too easily understood. So, who knows, perhaps that line has a double meaning.

If Glück frequents major art museums these days to see exhibitions of contemporary work, she won't be troubled by too much in the way of beauty.  That's not what it's about.

For instance, another article in the same section of the NYT, notes that a group of prominent museums recently decided to postpone a retrospective exhibition of Philip Guston's work because of the current sociopolitical climate. Guston's work contains, among other things, images of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to a joint statement by the museums, the exhibition was postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."

In other words, art these days is primarily viewed, evaluated and judged not on the basis of aesthetic considerations, but rather as just another form of politics.

Guston, by the way is white, and the main subject of the article noted above was how a group of Black trustees of American art museums have formed an alliance aimed at bringing greater diversity to such institutions. The goal, a statement quoted by the NYT  said is "to increase inclusion of Black artists, perspectives and narratives in U.S. cultural institutions by: addressing inequalities in staffing and leadership; combating marginalized communities lack of presence in exhibitions and programming; and incorporating diversity into the institution's culture."

Well, it is hard to argue that such goals don't have merit, but at the same time, one can't help wondering what, in the current climate of who the artist is matters more than the nature of the art, whether the Guston exhibition would have gone forward on schedule if the artist were Black.

Amy Sillman and the State of the World of Art

 In the preceding post, on Flannery O'Connor, I wrote the following:

"In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One need only read the arts pages of the New York Times in current times to see how that works."

To reinforce that notion, the lead article of the "Weekend Arts" section of the Oct. 9, 2020, NYT, about the painter Amy Sillman, contained the following observation by the author of the piece, Jason Farago:

"Yet the rolling crises of the past few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art."

Farago positions Sillman's abstractions -- full of ambiguities one might argue -- as a counterpoint to that trend. "I was thinking about looming," the artist said in response to the off-center, somewhat out-of-balance images that dominate her current show at Manhattan's Gladstone Gallery.  In other words, like the current U.S. presidential election, things that seem about to happen but haven't happened yet.

It's an evergreen notion so if you acquire one of these images, it won't get stale -- from that perspective, at any rate.  Bur there is no need to rush to buy a Stillman image, it would appear. Farago reports that Sillman has made "hundreds" of abstract paints during just the past 12 months.

The NYT piece also serves to illuminate another aspect of the art world that is far from new.  It's as much about celebrity as it is about imagery. The accompanying picture of Sillman herself is far larger than the pictures of her art and the only image on the front page of the Arts section.

While details of Sillman's personal life are scarce to non-existent in what one can easily read about her, some of her work appeared in a 1978 exhibit entitled "A Lesbian Show" that was curated by an artist named Harmony Hammond.

According to Art News, "the show was an energizing political statement about lesbian visibility, creating a community of artists who publicly identified as lesbian -- and risked professional discrimination by doing so."

Well, that was over 40 years ago and how times have changed!

To Sillman's credit, however, she is not riding that horse. Unlike a number of others in the art and entertainment worlds these days, she does not explain her paintings as images seen through "the lens" of her sexual orientation, or gender, or race, or whatever. Rather, she talks, in the NYT piece and elsewhere, rather refreshingly as to how they fit into the history of art.

More On The Topic of Art and Clarity

In my previous post, I talked about how clarity can be the enemy of art, or perhaps more accurately the enemy of those who desire to be viewed as important artists.

This is not a new idea. Sorting through some old clippings, I came across a "Bookends" feature from the Aug. 30, 2015 issue of the New York Times weekly book review section.

Clarity Can Be An Enemy Of Art

If something can be easily understood, it can be easily dismissed, which may explain why many artists appear to get rather vague when asked to explain the genesis of their creations or what they mean.

"It means whatever it means to you," one often hears.

Cruelty and The Human Condition

My previous post reported on the latest annual "greats" issue of T, The New York Times Style Magazine,  in which one of the chosen seven was South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook.

According to T editor Hanya Yanagihara, "greats" are people who have made an impact so significant that the rest of us of us begin to categorize their field of art in terms of what came before them and what came afterward.

Art and a Pineapple

What qualifies as a work of art?

That's not a new question, but rather an ever-present one, at least since around the turn of the 20th century when non-representational, or highly distorted images, came to dominate cutting edge artistic activity and when "found objects" became viewed as equally legitimate to a work that might have taken months to create and only with great skills of one sort or another.

Now comes the celebrated case of the Pineapple, which reopens the question for, one suspects, a lot of younger people who have never previously given the issue much thought.

An Answer to a Reader of "Manhattan Morning"

In my last post about comments from readers of "Manhattan Morning," someone asked several questions that I didn't then answer. 

Here's the answer to one of them: "where did the story come from and how much of it is autobiographical?"

The Literary Genre of Fiction Set In New York City

If my novella "Manhattan Morning" fits into a literary genre, it is probably that of fiction set in New York City.

I mention that because "The Shortlist" feature of last Sunday's New York Times book review section was entitled "New York Novels." Therein, author Helen Ellis took a look at five different stories set in The Big Apple.

Before continuing, I should mention that in an earlier post, I reviewed Ellis' short story "Dead Doormen," which -- no surprise -- is also set in Manhattan. The story is part of a book of her stories entitled "American Housewife."

The books Ellis reviews are stories about sexism on Wall Street; the notion that New York is a place where anyone can come to make it big; it's tough to survive in the city, especially with student debt; New York is where people go to make art, and if you do make art there, can you also be a mom?

To be fair, the books are about a lot more than just that and those interested can read Ellis' commentary by clicking on the phrase "New York Novels" in my second paragraph, above.

In contrast, "Manhattan Morning" is about none of those things. Rather, my protagonist is merely passing through Manhattan and, with nothing in particular to do for much of one day, he takes a walk from the Warwick Hotel to Grand Central Terminal, looking at and listening to what that part of the city has to offer. Many things come to his mind as a result of the stimuli, most significantly his relationships with several women.

But he also thinks about art in the context of how it connects and interacts with society: the aesthetics of utopia; as an expression of emptions; to enhance commerce with grandeur, and as an expression of love for one's family.

At the end, a surprise encounter with yet another woman, leaves the protagonist, Dan Morrison, contemplating his future with new eyes and re-examining his values.