Culture – Splendid Isolation

Enough With The Bananas

January 3, 2025 Kim du Toit Fine Art, Resistance, Two-Minute Hate

Over at Intellectual Takeout, John Horvat talks about bananas on walls:

My reasoning centers on a recent event in New York City in which the renowned Sotheby’s auction house sold a 2019 art piece dubbed “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan. The work consisted of a fresh banana duct-taped to the wall.

The bidding started at $800,000, and within five minutes, the item sold for $5.2 million plus auction house fees, which came to a total of $6.2 million. The new owner is Chinese-born crypto-businessman Justin Sun.

The actual banana cost thirty-five cents when bought in the morning at an Upper East Side fruit stand. The new owner will get a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions should he want to replace the banana before it rots. Mr. Sun has already announced that he will eat the original banana “as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”

Commenting after the sale, Billy Cox, a Miami art dealer with his own copy of “Comedian,” says the work is something of historical importance that comes only “once or twice a century.”

Uh huh. Like the paint-splattered “art” of Jackson Pollock, to describe this as “art” at all, let alone something of “historical importance”, is to underline the folly of the so-called cultural elites and their absurd mania for post-modernist deconstructivism.

We are living in a society where certain liberal sectors inhabit an alternative reality where thirty-five-cent bananas are handled as multimillion-dollar works of art. The problem is that they want to force everyone else in society to believe their madness.

“Pull the other one” would be the obvious rejoinder. But Horvat takes it further:

The first are those who do not want to see the absurdity of the banana on the wall and dogmatize that it is art. They create their own reality and impose it on the nation.

The second group consists of those tired of being told a banana taped to the wall is art. They long to live in a world where art is art and bananas are bananas.

In the [2024] election, some of the latter group said, “Enough is enough.”

This reaction was not against a single banana on one wall.

You see, there is [also] the banana that claims a man is a woman and a woman is a man. Other bananas claim that people can choose their pronouns, pornography in libraries is literature, or that it is just fine for men to compete with women in sports. We are told drag queen story hours are suitable for children, after-school Satan Clubs are educational and it is not a human baby but a clump of cells.

It is all part of a vast banana extravaganza that we are asked to admire and make believe is the blueprint for a dream society.

Quite right. There’s only one thing to do when faced with these bananas:

yup. Dip them in boiling oil.

Renaissance Man

December 21, 2024 Kim du Toit Architecture, Beauty, Classic Beauty, Culture, Fine Art

What do you call a man who was a professor of Architecture at Turin University, photographer, writer, skier, inventor of engines and designer of race cars, acrobatic pilot and mountaineer? Carlo Mollino.

I have to say that I’m not enamored of his exterior architecture designs — there’s way too much Gropius and not enough Athens, never mind art nouveau;

…although not all the time:

His interiors are a little too Scandi and not enough Edwardian:

…although his Teatro Regio in Turin is incredible:

…from the inside; the outside?

…and of his furniture we will not speak.

(Follow the link above for a full exposition of all these, and more.)

But how can you not enjoy his design of something as mundane as a bus?

And then there was his Basiluro race car, which at Le Mans 1955 (yes, that Le Mans race) managed to reach 135mph with a 750cc engine (!) until it was forced off the track into a ditch by a Jaguar:

However, it was Mollino’s photography which first caught my attention (guess why):

And my favorite:

His ultimate expression was this statement:

“Humans matter only insomuch as they contribute to a historic process; outside of history, humans are nothing.”

And Carlo Mollino sure left his mark on the historical process, in so many fields. Che uomo!

That 50s Thing

November 23, 2024 Kim du Toit Culture, Lifestyle

It is no secret among my Readers (especially those of long standing) that when it comes to decades. I have a soft spot for the 1950s.

It happens to be the decade of my birth (1954), and of course my memories of that time are scattered and few, but there’s a feeling about that era that has resonated with me pretty much all my life.

Now I understand that most people have a hankering for earlier times — “I wish I’d lived in the [x] period!” — and it’s brilliantly satirized by Woody Allen in his Midnight In Paris movie, where a modern-day young writer is transported back to what many consider one of the golden ages and places of writing and the arts: Paris of the 1930s, where Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others of that ilk are the celebrities du jour, and the many soirees at Gertrude Stein’s apartment host them plus other luminaries such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Luis Buñel. Of course, to our young protagonist, this seems to be the best time to be alive and writing, or being creative in any field. Then he meets a young woman — a struggling fashion designer — and when the two of them are magically transported back to fin-de-siècle Paris, she astonishes him by saying that she, a creature of the 1930s, would want to live in that time and not the 1930s, because she would perhaps be more successfu lback then rather than in the age of Coco Chanel.

So I’m aware of that longing, and I understand its pitfalls when it comes to talking about the 1950s as my beau ideal. Indeed, several Readers have taken me to task, outlining the many evils and perils of the 1950s — the relatively poor medicines available (compared to our modern ones), endemic racism, Puritanical social mores and so on.

And yes, I know that the technology, such as it was, was certainly inferior to ours today, whether it be telephones, cars, medicine or whatever. Nobody would want to go back to that, for sure.

But that’s not the root of my nostalgia.

Let’s just look at a few images of 50s-as-golden-age art to illustrate my point:

Note the simplicity of life thus portrayed: a family hunting outing, a picnic for two, and a family picnic.

I’ve written about the 1950s over the years, and here are a couple examples thereof:

I have no idea, for example, how to lower the cost of living to, say, 1950s-era levels where a family of four can live in a reasonably-modest dwelling, own one or two inexpensive cars, have enough to eat, and afford to give the kids a decent education — all on one salary, at a stable place of employment. In order to get there, we’d have to make drastic changes to our national way of life, changes that I’m pretty sure that nobody would want to make.

As a comment to Cappy’s excellent take on returning to the 1950s:

Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as Cappy points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great: patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on.

And:

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves. To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own past, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving. Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

So yes: go ahead and laugh at my nostalgia, mock my preference for times gone by, and point out all the things that were wrong with the 1950s.

With all that said, though, I still insist that there was a whole about the 1950s that wasn’t shit: the culture, the fact that the lines between right and wrong were a lot less blurred, and the roles of the man and woman a lot better defined — and we were all the better for it.

I won’t even talk about the cars…

Not much wrong there, either.

Quote Of The Day

August 19, 2024 Kim du Toit Fine Art, QOTD

“Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens.” — Roger Kimball

By all means, read the whole essay.

Fresh Wallpaper

August 3, 2024 Kim du Toit Fine Art

I’ve been in a Ferrari State Of Mind recently — no idea why, it’s just there — so for the past two weeks my laptop’s wallpaper has been this one:

Yup, it’s Alan Fearnley again.

Anyway, I decided to make change, but the Scuderia thing was still strong, so:

“Why do you keep me waiting, cara mia?”
“Just two more minutes, I promise.”

I love this picture.

The Sweetness Of Doing Nothing

July 20, 2024 Kim du Toit Fine Art

…or Il Dolce Far Niente, as the Italians would have it — and why not? it’s about as Italian an attitude as one can get, where there’s an alternative to being busy.

I consider myself something of an expert on the activity, because for example nothing spells “vacation” better than lying on one’s back, emptying the mind of, well, everything and just looking at the sky. I can and have done that many times in my life, and only some vestigial Protestant work-ethic guilt keeps me at all busy.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

Instead, I want to point you to English artist John William Godward, who exemplifies to me the late-Victorian art movement that bypassed the strict Puritanism of the era, simply by virtue of the fact that one could show the naked or semi-naked female form without censure, provided that it was couched, so to speak, in some kind of Classical allegory. (“Venus In The Mirror”, for example, has been used as an artistic fig leaf for centuries.)

Well, Godward’s family didn’t much care for this attitude, and when he went to live in Italy with one of his models, they pretty much erased all memory of him out of their lives (literally; they cut him out of all family photographs; and as such, there are apparently no photos of him in existence). Anyway, they wanted him gone out of their lives, and he granted their wish by committing suicide at age 61.

Godward is famous for his painting entitled Il Dolce Far Niente, and in fact used it as a theme for a great many of his later works. Here’s the first:

And a few other examples in the same vein:

I love that he captures the feeling of dreamy indolence of a summer’s day in Italy — note the classical clothing and setting of each — along with a subtle underplay of eroticism. (In turn-of-the-century Britain, by the way, there would have been nothing at all “subtle” about it, hence the scandal.)

Of course, he didn’t stop there. Still in that disguise of Classicism, here are a couple more daring visions: