A Funny Story About Art
and a recommendation for a DIFFERENT newsletter than my own!
Grace Lavery, a newly-tenured professor at the University of Berkeley, and one of my dearest friends (she is engaged to my notoriously beloved Daniel Ortberg), told me a story that had me on the floor laughing, partly as a celebration of life?
Grace: “Nicole, who do you think painted this painting? If you had to guess?”
Nicole: “I would guess that the sad pizza was painted by the person showing it to you.”
Grace: "A reasonable enough guess! It is, however, a very bad painting by Picasso of his pet owl. He was sufficiently embarrassed to not do much of anything with it. He would later do many, many better paintings of owls.
Meanwhile this sketch was bought by the kind of American investor who has enough money to buy a Picasso, but only a very bad one, and it was eventually bequeathed by the Rosenbergs to the Emile Mathis Art Museum collection in Milwaukee.
Yesterday, while I was giving a lecture at UW-Milwaukee, I was given a tour of the (lovely!) Mathis collection by the museum’s director and curator. And they were showing me some pretty fine pieces: a lovely Jean Arp abstract; a Miro painting; a Durer lifetime print, etc., but all I could focus on was the sad pizza owl.
The art collection people are understandably embarrassed by it, because it is obviously a really bad painting that they don’t want to display, but “it’s a Picasso” so they don’t want to sell it.”
Nicole: “My great, great dream is now to be able to buy, like, the shittiest Cezanne, the worst Rothko. A Monet he sneezed on and then wiped off while the paint was still wet.”
Is it not incredible? Both the fact that we can grow and improve in our art (if not necessarily our life, Picasso had more than a few issues on that front), and also I cannot stop looking at the sad, sad pizza owl. LOOK AT HIM.
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Grace has her own Substack newsletter (I encourage you to subscribe at ONCE, though there’s plenty of free content), called The Stage Mirror, which is a glorious hodgepodge of numerous fascinating things. When asked (by me) to describe its content in a few sentences, she immediately texted me the following:
Grace: “I write about old books I like, and about trans and academic politics, and I often describe movies that I think should exist, but don’t. The newsletter is a mixture of self-righteous scholarly high-road taking and scumbag trash talk, oscillating wildly and unpredictably between the two modes. Sometimes it is Erotic* as well.”
*Grace occasionally blesses us with photos of her increasingly generous and gorgeous breasts.
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What could be more fun, honestly? I will now steal and share a post from it to tantalize you:
“Welcome To Being A Woman”
The other day, I was walking down the road and a man said “hi, I really like your sunglasses,” which is fine because they are dope, so I said “thank you” and kept walking. I hadn’t yet passed the guy so he had another go: “also I really like your shoes. Where did you get those?” That felt a bit more creepy (I swear to god he was hissing slightly on “shoes” and “those”) so I said in a slightly more forceful way “my boyfriend got them off the internet!” and kept on walking. Now he started to call after me: “you look great! So you have a boyfriend? Where are you going? Do you need a lift? What is that perfume?,” at which point I started walking faster than I had been and occasionally glancing over my shoulder. I don’t think he tried to follow me. If anything his affect seemed one of angelic bemusement. “What a sad world,” he seemed to say, “that you can’t even compliment a young woman without arousing suspicion! I’m sure it’s not like she gets a lot of compliments anyway.”
I hope I’m not overstating things if I say that, in a movie version of this scene, the dude would have been played by Jesse Plemons, by which I mean he had the broad, slightly adorable smile of someone that truly despises the way he feels around women. His rictus radiated like a cold sun. And what really struck me was that he didn’t modulate his tone in the least - he asked every question as though it were the first, though as I walked by him they became increasingly strained and quick, as though he believed that the next question was the one that would really nail it. He seemed to be operating on the assumption that he was entitled to an answer to any question he pitched me so long as it was asked politely, and that the strained politeness might (if he was careful) last until after he had fucked me, and then felt overwhelmed with guilt (at betraying either his wife or his mother; and at having banged a trans woman) and expelled and/or hurt me.
I’ve seen these things escalate quickly, and I’m obviously extremely grateful they didn’t in this case. I started texting D. at once, who was kind and protective, and encouraged me to check my six periodically until I was home, which I did. It’s such an odd mixture of feelings when these things happen to me. I feel, obviously, primarily irritated and a little scared, but also strangely proud, and perhaps slightly flattered (though less so than one might think). I feel keenly the lack of my preparation for this kind of experience. At no point in my childhood did my mother ever give me advice on how to deal with street harassers, and nor has anyone else in the meantime. Being a trans woman, you all know my take on this by now, is pretty excellent and I recommend 10/10 if you are thinking about it. But it is a bit odd nonetheless - transition discloses a desire to be seen as something that, according to plenty of people, one would never want to be seen as. And one of the strangest ways that trans women come to learn that transition works is that we are quickly moved from the cadre of protected beings into the group of targets, and are all of a sudden subject to any number of strange projections. So there are times when I experience something jarring that reminds me that my Man Card has been withdrawn from circulation, and it feels like an affront. How dare you! Don’t you know who I am? Ah, I guess you do... and that’s why you’re treating me this way. Aack!
It is in the aftermath of such moments that I am liable to hear one of the more painful slogans with which women with a lot of experience entertain/haze/welcome the new batch: “welcome to being a woman!” (The closed captioning would be sure to add “(sarcastically)” so nobody missed the tone.) It means “where the fuck were you, while we were putting up with this for the first 34 years of your life?” It is a perfectly reasonable and indeed inevitable frustration. However enthusiastic pre-existing women may be to welcome us n00bs into the fold, there must be some lingering sense of “it’s worse than you think!” Which then generates a secondary feeling that, perhaps trans women are exoticizing or fetishizing the experience of being a woman. Nor is this necessarily a mark of bad allyship. It would be quite possible to hold that to be true while also believing that, for example, trans women are women. It’s tricky. It’s like, the old hands seem to value especially those moments where the freshers experience a set-back, because those moments reveal the general ambient shittiness of an enterprise that, in general, my type are won’t to overlook in the exuberance and ebullience of transition.
One of the great shifts in trans discourse over the last few years has been the emphasis on desire as an important motivation for transition. “I want to transition” rather than “this is who I am, and have always been.” Admitting that we want to transition, we tend to hope, demystifies trans experience, so that we are able to be honest about our sense of self without committing to a metaphysics of the soul, or of “identity.” It’s been a good development, and as I’ve said I experience *wanting things* all the time in this general domain. I want to be a woman; I therefore think that being a woman is better than the alternative for me; this makes me, to be sure, a curious kind of feminist. But trans women are often accused of taking conspicuous pleasure in being women, a pleasure that is either incompatible with being a woman at all (this is the position of the TERFs, who diagnose us as perverts), or letting the side down by displaying how fun things can be (which is the position of the anxiously/partially pro-trans feminist). I’m less sure that the category of desire actually gets rid of the tricky metaphysical problems, but it does re-orient them from the present tense towards the historical and the future anterior: “I want to have been a woman,” is the real problem, and “I want the story of me to have been the story of a woman.” That’s for another post.
But female pleasure is a problem for all of us, whether or not we have been a woman all our lives or are new to it; the relief we feel when it ends - when a woman is finally sucked back into the zone of patriarchal secondariness - comes out a little too quickly. “Welcome to being a woman.” The pleasure that must be negated has a few different genres, too: whether of the exuberant/steroidal GOOP-and-pink-fur type that I tend to go for; the gothy/gutterpunky, “I’m so gloriously miserable” type; the sex-nerd… Whichever, any trans-drag type is susceptible to taking itself too literally on a moment’s notice, giving rise to the event of problematic joy, the genre-bursting blame-fest that accompanies (even, defines) any occasion of female delight.
Hence the disciplinary “welcome to being a woman,” for all its medium-intensity contempt is among other things a sincere attempt to open a line of sisterly community. Sisterly community, of course, is not incompatible with medium-intensity contempt; in a sense, it requires it. And I suppose that was all on my mind yesterday when I was reading through the Lauren Berlant profile in The New Yorker. I’m not persuaded that Berlant “predicted” the results of the 2016 election, or that it would matter much if she had. (I love this piece of hers, where she specifically says she “never thought we’d have a leader with a combover.”) But I do think that her particular way of describing the emotional and political environments in which she finds herself is immensely valuable and important. My tendency with these “welcome to being a woman” moments is to try to imagine solutions, or to push past the real conflicts and difficulties towards answers. And Berlant has answers too, and the answers are more than mere acceptance - but they begin with a bracing and thorough audit of one’s own feelings. I hope I’ll find a way to keep writing my way towards her, and to keep allowing spaces for disagreement and bad feeling to exist between trans and cis women, without letting it ruin the bonds of solidarity and empathy between the groups that both - truly, you all as well as us - need to survive.
Okay, this is Nicole again! I hope you enjoyed the pizza owl as I did. You are all wonderful people, so I imagine you never ever would.