BonusEp. 07 - Tamar Avishai interviews Adam Gopnik, Critic, The New Yorker

The Lonely Palette

Arts, Podcast, Art, Museum, Painting, Modern Art, Visual Arts, Art History

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There isn’t a single subject that Adam Gopnik’s prose can’t bring to life. As staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986, he has written about almost everything, including, just in the last year, Proust, gun control, the Beatles, and the Marquis de Lafayette. But it’s when he starts writing about art that things get particularly delectable: “the runny, the spilled…the lipstick-traces-left-on-the-kleenex” life and style of Helen Frankenthaler; “the paint, laid on with a palette knife, that deliciously resembles cake frosting” technique of Florine Stettheimer; “the monumental and mock-monumental that tango in the imagination” of Claes Oldenburg. And perhaps the reason why Gopnik, who has a graduate degree in art history from NYU’s Institute of Fine Art, is able to write about art with such lucidness and latitude is that he isn’t just knowledgeable about art; he adores it. The charge, the perfume, the misty spray of the orange peel that is evoked when you stand in the Arena Chapel - everything that, if you’re not careful, becoming a professional in your creative field will neutralize. We talked about being docents in large museums, how to hook your audience, how to write a poem about art, Vladimir Tatlin, Steve Martin, Stephen Sondheim, the incompatible forces that create beauty, and the noble truths of art creating and art writing: eye to hand, and I to you. Episode webpage: https://bit.ly/3COhnOp Music used: The Blue Dot Sessions, “Balti” Mandy Patinkin, “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette

Transcript

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0:00.0	We are in business. Okay, great. Go ahead. Hi. I'm Adam Gopnick. I've been a staff writer at the New Yorker for 35 years. I was the art critic of the New Yorker for almost nine years, but I still write often about art for the magazine.
0:27.2	Thank you so much for taking the time.
0:30.0	I've really wanted to have a long conversation with you about art for a while.
0:37.3	I was reading your book at the Stranger's Gate and what I was really moved by or found myself relating to really powerfully was when you talked about being a docent at MoMA and the way the
0:59.0	storytelling of art becomes the you know when I when I read your pieces in the New Yorker
1:05.8	something that I'm really struck by and something that I feel like has really informed the way that I write about
1:09.7	art is that it feels like a barrier has been taken away between art and life and life and art and that the merging of the two and kind of finding the beauty in life and also being able to talk about art in a really accessible way is a really like that's how you get people that's how you can kind of tell that story to people. And so I would just really love to let that unfurl a little bit. Talk to you. First of all, I'd love to talk about your background in art and your academic
1:46.5	background in art and why you left it and have that be the starting point for the conversation.
1:53.4	Well, first of all, I'm, all authors are
1:58.0	ecstatically happy when anybody reads them with any kind of sympathy or insight.
2:03.5	And I'm so genuinely overjoyed that you enjoyed that and did not under enjoy that chapter
2:09.9	because the one you're referencing about getting started in New York by giving these little gallery
2:16.2	lectures at the Museum of Modern Art was my favorite chapter in that book because for two reasons.
2:21.1	One because it had my favorite character Maxi Schach now who was an absolutely real person who guy who was a Sunday painter worked in the garment industry and was it set himself the task of painting the missing Van Gogh.
2:34.0	Do we call him Van Gogh, not Van Gogh.
2:36.2	But the missing Vincent of the portrait of Theo
2:42.1	that Vincent had never actually painted himself and it was such a beautiful quixotic quest and then the punchline of it all was that I discovered years later that Maxi had had a lot of money and he had opened his own museum,
2:53.7	the Shacknell Museum in Florida and retirement.
2:58.7	So I love doing that and in part because that time for me was a moment of exposure to obviously the necessity to
3:10.4	communicate to reach people with your not with so much with information about the pictures which they could get from a wall label, but with your enthusiasm, your passion for the pictures.
3:20.0	And also a reminder that people bring themselves to the pictures complete.
3:27.0	Yeah.
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