Frank Stella at the De Young

Best sellers are bad for you, in that you could be reading something much better, but try explaining this to people who read best sellers. They won't understand what you mean by 'better', as they think they're doing something good by reading in the first place, as opposed to watching tv or doing crossword puzzles or playing video games on the computer.

Bob Dylan is a best-seller. That's why it's so odd that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature; for Bob Dylan to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is culturally discordant and a touch more than slightly off-key. I suspect Dylan feels the same, and that this feeling explains why he didn't show up personally to accept his Nobel Prize, asking another singer, slightly less than a best-seller herself, to accept the prize on his behalf. Odd too that there are, no doubt, more than a few people who've never read a book in their lives, figuratively, but who have heard Bob Dylan's music and appreciate it for its music, have heard on tv that Bob Dylan's received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Walking around Frank Stella's paintings today at the De Young museum I kept seeing what I was seeing, as he said I would back in the late 1950's and early 1960's when he began making his paintings, saying things about them like, 'what you see is what you see.' The early paintings are fantastically dull, which is the point of them, resisting both representation and abstraction at the same time, a pretty neat trick. If you follow the chronology of Franl Stella's artistic production, as presented in the De Young show, you see Stella ageing, frantically trying to merge the two--repesentation and abstraction--in objects that are both paintings and no longer paintings. Whatever these paintings or not paintings may be--great intellectual discussions, many with literary titles, wall-mounted at times, at times bolted to the floor and the ceiling is a description that comes to my mind--you'll leave the museum seeing everything you see as a Frank Stella. You won't see this way for as long perhaps as you did when you left museum shows of Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian, but you will see Frank Stella in everything you see for at least the time it takes to drive from the De Young Museum to downtown San Francisco.

In regard to best sellers, I advise people who read them to trade them in for the classics. Start with the easily readable, and work outwards from there. If you start reading the classics now instead of the best sellers you've been reading, you'll start seeing how little the world's changed since we've been seeing it, and that the sight of it, when seen this way, is disturbing and comforting at the same time.