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On Monday, the Harvard University Art Museums released a long-anticipated scientific study, performed with the cooperation of Alex Matter, of the chemical properties of three of the paintings, finding that some paints and pigments used in the works were not patented and probably not available until long after Pollock died in 1956. Alex Matter and Dr. Landau, who has conducted extensive research into the connections between Herbert Matter and Pollock, have questioned some of the findings, and Mr. Matter stressed in a statement that he believes “the authentication of works of art is still more art than science.”
The team at Harvard responded the way that scientists generally do: by saying that there is no arguing with science. Drawing an analogy to what he said were Bush administration efforts to suppress NASA information about global warming because it was politically unpalatable, Narayan Khandekar, a conservation scientist at Harvard, said in an interview that he and others who conducted the study were “absolutely sure” of their results and that quibbles about what they found struck him as disingenuous.
“I think it’s very much dismissing information because it’s inconvenient for their arguments,” he said, adding that such an approach to scholarly debate is “a little like Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness, where you’re almost there but you don’t have the whole thing.”
Dr. Landau said she did not reject science reflexively over her own experience, but added that she simply cannot reconcile the study’s findings with the other information she has collected, like a handwriting study that confirms the notes on the package were in Herbert Matter’s hands and evidence that the paintings had been corrected and retouched in a method that Pollock employed.
Residents of several neighborhoods in the New Orleans area that were hardest hit by flooding after Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over their claims that a government-built navigation channel was largely to blame, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
Successful lawsuits against the corps could result in billions of dollars in damage payments.
Since the flood, those who lived in the devastated neighborhoods near the east side of New Orleans — including the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish — have contended that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet caused much of their damage by intensifying the surge from the storm. The damage, they say, was foreseeable.
Factory Girl is Edie for Dummies
Miller, meanwhile, works very hard at her Edie. She does the voice and the laugh and the style to a T, though she never nails the ineffable, effervescent vitality. Who could? On the one hand, Edie is a walking cliché: the poor little rich girl who burned bright then burned out. On the other, shes as enigmatic as Warhol, a white-light/white-heat lightning bolt from the zeitgeist, showering the scene with giddy radiance. You need but see her in Vinyl, her Factory film debut, holding down a corner of its deep-space S&M tableau doing nothing but flicking a cigarette and bopping her head, to get her enchantment. Chief among Hickenlooper's follies is his restaging of Vinyl; I'm glad his heavy hand laid off Kitchen, one of my favorite Warhol two-reelers, in which Edie gives a charmed, hilarious performance punctuated by nonstop sneezing, the signal she's forgotten a line.
Hickenlooper makes up for it with his mutilation of Beauty #2, the richest of Warhol's cine-interrogations and the apex of Edie's underground Superstardom. Plunked on a bed with a chunk of stud named Gino, Edie submits to the offscreen questions of Chuck Wein (a clueless Jimmy Fallon), an old friend of Edie's whose crucial and controversial role in the Factory ecosystem is here glossed over. Factory Girl literalizes the rape scenario implicit in Beauty #2, escalating into the vulgar (and wildly exaggerated) spectacle of Wein forcing Gino on the distressed starlet.
wasnt edie ciao! manhattan for dummies?