Day at the DIA

I finally made it to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the Rembrandt exhibit, and it was so very, very worth it. It was a once-in-a-lifetime collection, and they are considered masterpieces for a reason.

It was a nice day trip for my mom and me, as neither of us have been to the museum in years. It was crowded, mostly around the exhibit, and we bought tickets for eleven o'clock. I'm happy to see how many people have been drawn in by this attraction, so much so that the DIA has extended their weekend hours to ten at night. They let groups in an hour at a time, and it takes about that long to get through it all.

We had an hour before our group, so we checked out the rest of the second floor, where most of the art I'm interested in can be found. The first piece I was taken by was this Madonna and Child by Sassoferrato. The web version gives you a little of the sense of dimension and color, but standing in front of it is mind-blowing. It glows, positively glows. It looks like you could reach in and feel the bright fabrics. Four hundred years later it looks freshly dried. It's located in the Promenade outside the Renaissance rooms.

A little further down the hall is Rivera Court which houses the panel murals Diego Rivera did in the 1930s depicting Detroit's auto industry. Unlike any of the other art at the DIA, this wasn't brought from anywhere. Rivera completed this opus in less than a year right here in the middle of the museum. This is the mural's home, a high, open court with his bright symbolism on all four walls. I probably saw this once a year when we took field trips in school, but I think it takes an adult appreciation for history and labor to really take it in.

Past that is the "modern" collection of European art, a tantalizing assortment of the biggest names of the nineteenth century. The DIA has an impressive Van Gogh collection, consisting of The Diggers, Bank of the Oise and Auvers, a venerable portrait of Postman Roulin, and what I think is the best of all his self-portraits. I'm probably biased, but of all the self-portraits I've seen online or in books, I find it both the most attractive visually and the most expressive in the eyes.

So after all this we got in line for the Rembrandt exhibit. They let people in in a controlled flow, sort of, and when you get in they give you a neat digital audio tour device. There are numbers next to a lot of the pieces and you just punch in the number and hit play to hear the commentary on that piece. One cool thing is that a lot of them featured my old art professor, Dr. Shelley Perlove. She's the one who taught me about Rembrandt in the first place.

We looked at the sketches and etchings first, as an appetizer. The paintings, of course, are the main course. Did I mention it was crowded? It was crowded. I was sharing my personal space with about four people at a time, but like I said it was worth it. All along one wall were studies of the same model he used for Jesus. The effect of looking at one after another gave the impression of a series of photos of a subject in motion. You can only get that with such an exhibit with all these pieces brought together.

The two big stars of the show shared a wall at the end of the hall in the portraits room. The first I studied was Rembrandt's Head of Christ (more like upper body of Christ). It was the same model as the other portraits, but it's like he took all he learned from doing those and amplified everything into this one impossibly deep painting. Physically it is small, but you only notice that approaching. Once you're looking at it, it's huge. Christ is portrayed as contemplative, approachable, and clearly has a lot on his mind. This isn't the traditional European Jesus, he's darker and his hair is a little kinky and he looks like a man who knows his mission is costly and difficult. It's beautiful. The Supper at Emmaus is a masterpiece of light. You can really tell it's been cleaned for this exhibit. There's no film or grit anywhere on it. It's pristine looking. And, since it's after the Resurrection, Jesus has a much more peaceful expression as he's encircled by an unearthly light.

 The exhibit is there until February 12th. I'll say it again, it was worth it. Worth the measly cost, worth the line, worth the crowd (these are fellow people who appreciate an event like this, after all), heck it was even worth almost crashing into the bales of hay somebody dumped on I-94 on our way there.

Rembrandt in Detroit

This is a big deal.

Back in the day, sitting in art history class, I always sat up a little straighter when Rembrandt popped up on ye olde overhead projector. After suffering through units on French Impressionism that made me hate water lilies, and for a time the French, here was some damn ART. Rembrandt did gritty reboots centuries before Christopher Nolan was born.

And now, for the first time since the 1930s, one of Rembrandt's masterpieces, The Supper at Emmaus, is on U.S. soil and on the wall at the Detroit Institute of Arts as part of a new exhibition running through February called Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus. There are about five dozen works from the master and his students, primarily etchings and drawings, but the stars of the show are The Supper and the portrait Head of Jesus

The Supper at Emmaus, on loan from a little outfit you might know as the Louvre, was recently cleaned by meticulous French people, making up for their water lilies. They removed seven layers of varnish, meaning that the painting on display is, for the first time in centuries, able to be seen as it was intended by Rembrandt.

Go here for more info and for a coupon saving you $6 off admittance, which is only $16 as is.

Dubious Things People Say About the Casey Anthony Verdict

This post isn't really about Casey Anthony's guilt or not-guilt, though it may come up incidentally it's not my focal point. No, this is about some of the things that I've seen pundits and random people say or write about the verdict. Things that are beginning to drive me nuts.

From newprotest.org

• "We have to respect the verdict."  No, not really. The word people are looking for is "accept." We have to accept the verdict as the final word, but even the final word can be ridiculed, disrespected, second-guessed, etc. Court rulings, jury decisions, and legislative action all have to be accepted and, where applicable, followed, but there is nothing requiring any of us to respect something that we think is wrong. Which brings us to:
• "We have to respect the jury."  Putting twelve people in a jury box does not bestow upon them unassailable wisdom. I understand that some pundits have to say this because they're officers of the court, but I'm not. Juries aren't magic and the scary thing none of those pundits want to admit about our system is that juries can be both shallow and ignorant. Think back to the jury selection for this trial. I heard multiple jurors say they had never considered the death penalty before. Really? Never? I can understand not having a position on it, but never considered it before? I have to truly question a person who can make it well into adulthood without giving any thought to a major, hot-button issue of our time. That tells me that there are parts of their brains still in the factory shrink wrap, complete with that new-brain smell. Which made what happened far from a big surprise:
• "The jury did their job." I'm not so sure about that. Day after day we heard from people inside the courtroom who reported that the jury wasn't taking many notes, to the extent that a bunch of them just left their notebooks behind when they went to deliberate. I guess they all have some kind of super-memories or something, but if it were me deciding on a matter of life and death that was based in large part on technical testimony from expert witnesses, I might have jotted a couple things down. At other times they were reported to look bored and didn't look at the people speaking. But, hell, it's just evidence, right? What's coming out from the jurors who are speaking illustrates that they didn't need no stinkin' evidence, because they had suspicions, mostly about a guy with no evidence whatsoever against him. Again, new brain smell. They also didn't seem to do their jobs in the sense that they didn't heed court orders. It was about halfway through the trial that they asked to examine an item, which meant they were already discussing the case in clear violation of the admonitions they all swore to abide by (curiously, they didn't again ask to see any evidence...when they were actually supposed to, I mean). And several have apparently stated they didn't understand the lesser charges they had the option of going with, while others abandoned their initial votes that favored manslaughter. In short, it didn't seem like these people were terribly interested in being jurors ('can we wrap this up I have a cruise to catch!'), though a number of them seem pretty interested in the payoffs coming to them. So no, I don't have to respect them, at all. 
• "The media convicted Casey." I think the people saying this had their arguments all ready to roll for a guilty verdict. They're the same people saying Casey couldn't get a fair trial. So how'd she get acquitted? There are legitimate points to make about media and court cases, but if anything this trial shows that even under intense media coverage that allegedly sways to one side, a defendant can indeed be found not guilty.
• "I'd rather a (hundred/thousand) guilty people go free than one innocent person be falsely imprisoned!"  While that's a nice sentiment, meant to convey the idea that our system favors the defendant to the extent that sometimes one will slip through the cracks, it just doesn't translate to the real world at all. Our system can, and does, both, letting guilty people go free and falsely imprisoning innocent people. There is nothing about Casey Anthony being acquitted that will keep an innocent person from being found guilty. They are not causally related in any way. As I pointed out above, no one likes to admit it but juries act capriciously. Even if they didn't, reasonable doubt is not a concrete standard. And even if you had a perfect jury pool who understood reasonable doubt, there would still be overzealous prosecutors and incompetent defense lawyers. People may be right when they say that we have the best justice system in the world, but we also know for a fact that we have locked up lots of innocent people, and we rightly suspect that many of the not-at-all-innocent are released to walk the streets.
• "Take THAT Nancy Grace!" Finally, there is an ill-defined but tangible sense in many comments about the verdict that make it sound like a victory over the forces of cable news media. Whatever you think about Nancy Grace or anyone else on television talking about this trial, they most certainly haven't lost anything here. Their ratings are probably bigger with a not-guilty verdict than they would have been with a guilty verdict. I've also seen it expressed in regards to Jeff Ashton for smiling behind his hand. The people who feel this misplaced vindication are usually the first ones to point out that this was a real trial and not a thing to be entertained by, complaining rightly or wrongly about the circus atmosphere surrounding it, yet they abandon that high ground to partake in schadenfreude at seeing a TV host they don't like reacting to the verdict. Go figure. I guess everyone finds something to like at a circus, don't they?

Random Observations on the Casey Anthony Trial

*Casey Anthony has apparently modeled her life on that Seinfeld episode where George is trying to bluff his dead fiance's parents into buying his story about owning a house in the Hamptons. The best part of the episode involves George telling them--as he's driving them to the house he doesn't have--how he's got horses there, named "...Snoopy and...Prickly Pete." While we were laughing, Casey was taking notes: If you're going to lie, lie big and stick to it. Then she underlined that, five times.

*Leonard Padilla's office looks like he turned on the Home Shopping Channel and said, "Fuck it, whatever's on, that's what I'm buying to decorate my place with," and it happened to be time for the knife show. Not the modern civilized knife show, the old one where they sold huge rainbow-handled hunks of Pakistani steel named The Destructinator and MegaKnife 2.

*I'd check that courthouse's HVAC system for Legionnaire's Disease. I haven't heard people in court hacking so much since State of Ohio vs. SARS.

*In the time it takes for an attorney at the podium to call up and send a digital item to the witness and jury, which often involves blank stares and several people gathering around to troubleshoot the system, they could have just handed people hard copies of the same material. It's like Skyping with someone in the next room.

*There's something grimly amusing, but irritating, about a lawyer who clearly enjoys his new found celebrity accusing witnesses of testifying for fame and money. Forget that congressman, wait till Jose Baez's cell phone pics leak out.

*Casey Anthony is constantly making a duck face like she's wearing a mouth guard. Maybe pretending to cry is really stressful on your teeth or something.

*I never figured a guy who spends a large portion of his time around decomposing bodies would strike me as charming, but Arpad Vass made for both a good and entertaining witness. Go figure.