Goya

Spent last weekend in Manhattan, first at the Milburn on the upper West Side (our usual hotel there) and then for a couple of nights in my brother's apartment on 57 st and 11th avenue. I'm not sure what this extreme west midtown neighbourhood is called: it's too far north for Hell's Kitchen I think. At anyrate we were there to dogsit: a little pocket dog and a pitbull, though a sweet and docile pitbull. Highlight of the visit (other than seeing Nicholas (my 22 yr old son)) was the Goya exhibition at the Frick. It's quite extraordinary: especially the miniature drawings on ivory he produced at the end of his life. One of the view moments in art where an artist really does present a different way of looking at the world which combines a politics and a sense of design and an urging towards a particular kind of visual pleasure. So the viewer can say, 'this is what it means to see the world like that, from that point of view' where that point of view is aesthetic and political in a broad sense. This politics is not the politics quite of sympathy and a solidarity with the oppressed and the damaged but rather a capacity to treat the outsiders, the battered, the monstrous and grotesque as belonging to the same community as the viewer and of course the artist. This means that there is no sentimentalism in Goya nor any voyeurism—the besetting sins I think of post-revolutionary liberal art.