By LISA W. FODERARO
NY Times Published: September 29, 2010

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted musician who was sweet and shy.

“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr. Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was very friendly and had very good potential.”

The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.

At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility” campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over our queer bodies!”

It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.

But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”

And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr. Clementi was gay.

A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject of gossip in the dormitory.

Mr. Clementi’s family issued a statement on Wednesday confirming the suicide and pledging cooperation with the criminal investigation. “Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician,” the statement read. “The family is heartbroken beyond words.”

The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Mr. Clementi posted a note on his Facebook page the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Friends and strangers have turned the page into a memorial.

Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump off the bridge just before 9 p.m. on Sept. 22, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s identification, Mr. Browne said.

The police said Wednesday night that they had found the body of a young man in the Hudson north of the bridge and were trying to identify it.

Officials at Ridgewood High School, where Mr. Clementi graduated in June, last week alerted parents of current students that his family had reported him missing and encouraged students to take advantage of counseling at the school.

The timing of the news was almost uncanny, coinciding with the start of “Project Civility” at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Long in the planning, the campaign will involve panel discussions, lectures, workshops and other events to raise awareness about the importance of respect, compassion and courtesy in everyday interactions.

Events scheduled for this fall include a workshop for students and administrators on residential life on campus and a panel discussion titled “Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior.”

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.” At the kickoff event for the civility campaign, Mr. McCormick made an oblique reference to the case, saying, “It is more clear than ever that we need strongly to reassert our call for civility and responsibility for each other.”

Mr. Ravi was freed on $25,000 bail, and Ms. Wei was released on her own recognizance. The lawyer for Mr. Ravi, Steven D. Altman, declined to comment on the accusations. A phone message left at the offices of Ms. Wei’s lawyer was not returned.

Some students on the Busch campus in Piscataway seemed dazed by the turn of events, remembering their last glimpse of Mr. Clementi. Thomas Jung, 19, shared a music stand with Mr. Clementi in the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra.

On Wednesday afternoon, hours before Mr. Clementi’s death, the two rehearsed works by Berlioz and Beethoven. “He loved music,” Mr. Jung said. “He was very dedicated. I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong.”

Through November 5

gerhard sengerner berlin

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: September 28, 2010

There are actually two Tea Party movements in America today: one you’ve read about that is not that important and one you’ve not read about that could become really important if the right politician understood how to tap into it.

The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government and the deficit, is what I’d actually call the “Tea Kettle movement” — because all it’s doing is letting off steam.

That is not to say that the energy behind it is not authentic (it clearly is) or that it won’t be electorally impactful (it clearly might be). But affecting elections and affecting America’s future are two different things. Based on all I’ve heard from this movement, it feels to me like it’s all steam and no engine. It has no plan to restore America to greatness.

The Tea Kettle movement can’t have a positive impact on the country because it has both misdiagnosed America’s main problem and hasn’t even offered a credible solution for the problem it has identified. How can you take a movement seriously that says it wants to cut government spending by billions of dollars but won’t identify the specific defense programs, Social Security, Medicare or other services it’s ready to cut — let alone explain how this will make us more competitive and grow the economy?

And how can you take seriously a movement that sat largely silent while the Bush administration launched two wars and a new entitlement, Medicare prescription drugs — while cutting taxes — but is now, suddenly, mad as hell about the deficit and won’t take it anymore from President Obama? Say what? Where were you folks for eight years?

The issues that upset the Tea Kettle movement — debt and bloated government — are actually symptoms of our real problem, not causes. They are symptoms of a country in a state of incremental decline and losing its competitive edge, because our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis.

The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot: a leader who is more interested in fighting for his country than his party. Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again. And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.

Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.

Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world — and create good jobs here in the process. Without that, we can’t afford the health care or defense we need.

This is the plan the real Tea Party wants from its president. To implement it would require us to actually raise some taxes — on, say, gasoline — and cut others — like payroll taxes and corporate taxes. It would require us to overhaul our immigration laws so we can better control our borders, let in more knowledge workers and retain those skilled foreigners going to college here. And it would require us to reduce some services — like Social Security — while expanding others, like education and research for a 21st-century economy.

In other words, it will require a very smart, subtle and focused plan to use our now diminishing resources in the most efficient way possible to get back to our core competency. That is the only long-term solution to our problem — to grow our way out of debt with American workers who are more empowered and educated to compete.

Any Tea Party that says the simple answer is just shrinking government and slashing taxes might be able to tip the midterm elections in its direction. But it can’t tip America in the right direction. There is a Tea Party for that, but it’s still waiting for a leader.

Pitzer College

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: September 27, 2010

Atherton, Calif.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what good government looks like: government that disciplines itself but looks to the long term; government that inspires trust; government that promotes social mobility without busting the budget.

That kind of government existed for decades right here in California. Between 1911 and the ’60s, California had a series of governors — like Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — who were pro-market and pro-business, but also progressive reformers.

They rode a great wave of prosperity, and people flocked to the Golden State, but they used the fruits of that prosperity in a disciplined way to lay the groundwork for even more growth. They built an outstanding school and university system. They started a series of gigantic public works projects that today are seen as engineering miracles. These included monumental water projects, harbors and ports, the sprawling highway system and even mental health facilities.

They disdained partisanship. They continually reorganized government to make it more businesslike and cost effective. “Thus,” the historian Kevin Starr has written, “California progressivism contained within itself both liberal and conservative impulses, as judged by the standards of today.”

Most important, California progressives focused on the middle class. By the end of these years, California enjoyed the highest living standards in the country. The core of the state’s strength was in the suburbs. Between 1945 and 1950 alone, the San Fernando Valley doubled in population. In one 12-month period, between 1959 and 1960, Valley residents applied for 6,000 swimming pool permits.

In fits and starts, California’s progressive model has been abandoned. The state’s current economic decline and political stagnation is a result of that abandonment. Now California government has all the dysfunctions that mark national government, but at a more advanced stage.

Both parties helped kill off California’s pro-market progressivism. Some assaults came from the left. First, there was the growing power of the public sector employee unions. These unions began lobbying for richer salaries and pensions. That, of course, is their job. But in the 1970s, governors started caving in. Money that could have gone into development went into prison guard benefits. Infrastructure spending, for example, has dropped from 20 percent of the state budget to 3 percent.

Then there was the growing power of the environmental movement. In the 1960s, environmental groups protested against the excesses of the infrastructure boom. Many of their complaints were absolutely legitimate. But over the years, environmental concern transmogrified into a “small is beautiful” ideology. A new cadre of activists arose — hostile to suburbia, skeptical of capitalism and eager to impose greater regulations and costs on small businesses.

As Joel Kotkin of Chapman University has pointed out, the interests of the affluent class along the coasts began to crowd out the interests of the middle-class suburbanites and agricultural workers further inland. “The result,” he writes, “is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.”

Another assault on California progressivism came from the right. Conservatives refused to acknowledge the public sector’s role in creating the state’s prosperity. With Proposition 13 and other measures that cut taxes, they cut off revenue and pushed through structural reforms, making it hard for future administrations to raise funds. Many on the right became unwilling to think creatively about using government to promote prosperity.

The result is a state in crisis. Eighty-two percent of Californians say they believe their state is heading in the wrong direction, according to this week’s University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times survey. State growth has lagged behind national growth. Unemployment is at 12.4 percent statewide and at catastrophic levels in the Central Valley. More people are leaving California for Oklahoma and Texas than came here during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Tom Joad is giving up.

Meanwhile, the political set is an embarrassment. As jobs disappear, legislators are fixated on transgender rights and deals for lobbyists. Legislators are polarized and gridlocked. The pension system is $300 billion in the red, and the state hops from one fiscal crisis to the next.

The answer is to return to the tradition of pro-market progressivism that built modern California in the first place. Except this time, it can’t be about building up the ’50s-style suburbs. It needs to focus on supporting the immigrant entrepreneurs, averting state bankruptcy and unleashing the industrial and agricultural base.

The antigovernment conservatives and the unions have built institutions and bases of support. The heirs to the pro-market progressive tradition have not. What’s needed is not a revolution, but a restoration and a modernization of what California once had.

October 1st 2010 – December 11th 2010
Opening reception
on Friday, October 1st
7:00 – 9:00 pm

Daniel Buchholz Berlin

USC ROSKI MFA Lecture Series: Thomas Lawson

September 29, 2010
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Lecture Forum
3001 S. Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Thomas Lawson is Dean of the School of Art at CalArts. An artist with a diverse, project-driven output, he has exhibited paintings at MetroPictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London, David Kordansky Gallery and LA>Artforum, Flash Art, and Afterall, and an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2005 by JRP/Ringier.

From 1979 until 1992 he, along with Susan Morgan, published and edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an irregular publication by and about younger artists interested in the relationship between art and life. An anthology of REAL LIFE Magazine, was published by Primary Information, NY, in 2007. He has also curated various exhibitions of younger artists for such venues as Artists Space and P.S.1 in New York and the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles, and was a co-selector of the British Art Show in 1995. In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship he has received three Artist Fellowships from the NEA, project support from Art Matters, Inc., and Visual Arts Projects, and a residency fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

USC ROSKI

John Pawson’s Monastery of Novy Dvur, Czech Republic. Photograph: Stefan Dold

Rowan Moore
The Guardian UK
September 19, 2010

Last week I wrote on the subject of mateyness in British architecture. This week I must return, as my subject is John Pawson. A major exhibition of Pawson’s work opens this week at the Design Museum, which institution has also hired Pawson to design its planned premises in the old Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. Pawson is a good and old friend of the Design Museum’s director Deyan Sudjic.

Of course, it would be ridiculous if such a friendship meant that Pawson was barred from either exhibiting or designing the new museum. But the choice of Pawson is troubling because it seems part of a pattern. In recent years the Design Museum has presented work by Javier Mariscal, Jan Kaplický, Dieter Rams, David Chipperfield, Paul Smith, Ettore Sottsass, Richard Rogers and John Pawson. All featured on the front cover of Blueprint magazine in the 1980s and early 90s, when Sudjic was editor.

All are important designers and architects deserving of Design Museum exhibitions, and taken one by one the decision to show each can be justified. There have also been other shows, but the preponderance of old cover stars adds up to a conservative trend that leaves too little space for a wider, richer range of contemporary architecture and design. As a result, the Design Museum feels less lively and essential than it should.

All of which is a shame, and not only because I am myself a mate of Sudjic, who once filled this column. It is also a shame because it would be good to write a review of Pawson’s work, without a painful preamble.

Pawson, now 61, is the architect both blessed and cursed by the label “minimalist”. He emerged in the 80s, in a time of postmodern gaudiness, classical revivalism and collapsed faith in the ideas of modernist architecture. He was a breath of fresh air, removing superfluity from interiors so that you could better appreciate their qualities of light, proportion and material. Lines were almost always straight, corners right-angled, finishes white, black, grey or natural.

Amid the restraint and austerity there would be the luxury of stuff, such as the veins of marble or the grain of wood. Projects would often include an adventure in procurement, such as a wonderful piece of stone found on an Italian mountain, hewn into a bath and craned into a west London terrace, the sweat and drama of which would be belied by the calm of the finished space. Such adventures continue: the Design Museum installation will include a table of 13m-long boards, the sliced-up trunk of a specially chosen tree from a sustainably managed German forest, and inserted by crane into the building.

Pawson arrived from outside the usual channels of architectural apprenticeship. He never completed his studies, and never worked for another architectural practice, but only for the designer Shiro Kuramata, whom Pawson discovered in his 20s when drifting through Japan. His first work, a flat for his then girlfriend Hester van Royen, already showed what would be his distinctive style, and immediately got him published. His inspirations included the art of Donald Judd, and his early fans included the writer Bruce Chatwin. “It seemed to me the notes were almost perfect,” he wrote of the van Royen flat. “I walked around the walls, watching its planes, shadows and proportions in a state of near elation.”

Chatwin, says Pawson, would turn up early and unannounced at the Pawson-van Royen home, demand breakfast and then proceed to read aloud from his as yet unpublished Songlines, in order to test his writing on the space and the audience. He commissioned a home himself, and he was an early example of many charismatic clients Pawson would attract, including Calvin Klein and the Studio 54 creator turned hotelier and residential property developer, Ian Schrager. A big part of Pawson’s work, like the craning and hewing subdued and inexplicit, is social, and about the characters who inhabit it.

It’s striking that men so louche should be drawn to seemingly monastic work, but not in the end surprising. A Pawson space offers a higher form of hedonism which, like snow in a sauna, heightens the senses. He is himself no monk, nor is he the kind of cold-eyed fanatic his architecture might suggest. He is charming, as he pads round a room full of finely crafted models, softly spoken and soft-shoed, boyish-looking, almost sleepy in his manner.

All of which exposes him to the criticism that he is a society decorator, rather than a real architect, which means that his monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, a complex for real, live, self-denying monks, acquires special significance. It would in any case have been the most important project of all, for an architect in love with the 12th-century abbey of Le Thoronet in Provence, ever since Chatwin introduced it to him. But , built like Le Thoronet for the Cistercian order, and slowly developed since 1999 out of a baroque manor house, shows that Pawson can build, in three dimensions and in a serious cause.

Now Pawson is building like never before, with 27 projects at different stages of design and construction, and he is loosening his style. His love of the orthogonal, which like 1980s dance moves once verged on the robotic, is relaxing into less pure angles. Some brighter, rougher surfaces are entering his repertoire.

His projects are mostly houses, with some more ecclesiastical work. The sites are spectacular, whether in Yorkshire, Okinawa, the Alentejo, Beverly Hills, rural California, Margaux, the Hamptons, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Gloucestershire, the rooftops of Manhattan or the Belgian North Sea resort of Knokke. Or Kew Gardens, where Pawson designed a sinuous bridge called the Sackler Crossing. Or wherever the sleek sloop he designed, called Almost Nothing, happens to sail. As Pawson says, not wrongly and not modestly: “I get the choicest positions in the world.”

His work is therefore a sort of ultra-tourism, a consummation of the secret affinity between static architecture and travel, where both are about place and escape. View, like the marble and wood, becomes another dimension of luxury. Pawson’s architecture also creates another kind of escape, into a space where it seems possible to be both mystical and material, both monk and CK sensualist. With their bareness, Pawson’s spaces offer the fantasy of freedom from ownership, for people who own too much.

Not all Pawson’s work is for the rich and famous. There are the monks, and some of the houses are for people who are not loaded. He is pleased to be designing a place, the new Design Museum, that has a public role, although this doesn’t seem essential to him. He mostly seems to enjoy just doing his thing.

There is much that doesn’t concern him greatly, including social purpose and sustainability. He is not especially of the moment: for Sudjic his interest is “that he is not part of the usual architectural tribal system”. He compares him to other architects who were “untrained and on the edge”, like the Mexican Luis Barragán.

Pawson is a good and distinctive architect, who gets things made beautifully, and his role in changing the direction of design in the 1980s is significant. He is, along with a few dozen others, a fitting and interesting subject for a Design Museum show. I just wish there were a clear and compelling reason for exhibiting him, rather than another out of this few dozen, beyond the director’s admiration.

via

Plain Space

Thanks to Gerry Beckley

“Secret Traveler Navigator”

Opening Reception September 30, 6-9 pm

UCI Room Gallery

Room with Chairs and Factory
2002-2008

Wood, iron, rubber, painted polyester, painted ceramic, panited canvas, unpainted canvas, painted wig, chair, offset print on paper. 125 3/16 x 94 1/2 x 159 7/16 in. (318 x 240 x 405 cm). Image courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

Parallel Occurrences / Documented Assignments

Opens September 25

Hammer Museum

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 23, 2010

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.

And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.

So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The director Jean-Luc Godard recently told a cultural magazine that “there is no such thing as intellectual property.”

By ERIC PFANNER
NY Times Published: September 21, 2010

PARIS — A Frenchman convicted of copyright theft for illegally downloading thousands of songs on the Internet has found an unlikely patron: a famous film director.

The director Jean-Luc Godard recently told a cultural magazine that “there is no such thing as intellectual property.”

Jean-Luc Godard, the 79-year-old director of movies like “Breathless” and “Alphaville,” has come to the support of James Climent, a photographer who faces a fine of 20,000 euros ($26,520) for violating musical copyrights.

Mr. Climent, who lives in Barjac, a picturesque old town of artists and organic farmers in the Gard region of southern France, wants to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The highest French court rejected his last appeal in June, siding with music royalty collection agencies that brought the complaints against Mr. Climent five years ago.

Mr. Climent said Mr. Godard this month donated 1,000 euros to his fund, helping him get him more than halfway toward the 5,000 euros he needs for legal fees and other costs of taking his case to the European Court.

While Mr. Godard’s views on intellectual property are widely shared on the libertarian fringes of the Internet, they might seem surprising coming from a director who, under French law, retains editorial control over his work and derives financial benefit from it.

Yet Mr. Godard, a pioneer of the New Wave of French cinema in the 1960s, whose films skewered the conventions of bourgeois society, clearly still delights in provoking the establishment, even if it could cost him money.

Mr. Godard’s support for Mr. Climent comes as the debate over file-sharing is growing ever more politically charged in France.

Mr. Climent was convicted under longstanding copyright legislation. But now the authorities are ready to begin enforcement of a tough new law, under which the Internet connections of persistent pirates could be suspended.

“Downloading is a citizen’s right,” Mr. Climent said. “Even if there is only a small chance, there is a chance that a favorable judgment could change the laws across Europe.”

Mr. Godard has yet to comment publicly on Mr. Climent’s case, but he laid out the rationale for his opposition to French copyright rules in a recent interview with the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, in which he declared, “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

“Copyright really isn’t feasible,” Mr. Godard said. “An author has no rights. I have no rights. I have only duties.”

Mr. Godard could not be reached, but an associate, who insisted on anonymity because the director had not authorized him to speak, confirmed the donation. Mr. Godard, the associate said, wanted to make a “symbolic” gesture to draw attention to what he described as Mr. Climent’s plight.

In addition to the money, Mr. Climent said he had received a handwritten note that included a picture of a model sailboat and the valediction, “Surcouf, Jean-Luc Godard” — referring to Robert Surcouf, a maritime pirate of the French Revolutionary era.

Mr. Godard’s support for Mr. Climent reflects some unusual twists in the debate over piracy in France, where digital sales of media content from authorized, licensed services have been far slower to take hold than in the United States.

The conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has championed tough measures to strengthen intellectual property enforcement. His efforts have been fiercely resisted by the opposition Socialists, which poses a bit of a paradox since they are traditionally the party with closer links to the cultural establishment.

The centerpiece of Mr. Sarkozy’s crackdown on piracy is the so-called graduated response law, under which people who share digital songs, films or other media content could face the suspension of their Internet connections if they ignore repeated warnings to quit.

The first e-mailed warnings will be sent to people accused of piracy within days, according to the government agency set up to administer the law.

It could be many months, however, until the government’s resolve to disconnect people from the Internet is actually tested; more than a year can pass before people accused sharing files will receive their final warning, notifying them that they may be taken to court.

To have a chance of a hearing at the high court in Strasbourg, Mr. Climent must file suit there by the end of the year. European high court cases can drag on for years.

Nicolas Gallon, Mr. Climent’s lawyer, acknowledged that Mr. Climent’s chances of victory were slim, given the series of judgments against him in France.

“In all honesty, it will be very difficult,” said Mr. Gallon, who has previously represented other counterculture figures, like the French anti-globalization campaigner José Bové. “We are not very optimistic. But we have to take this debate as far as we can.”

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: September 21, 2010

To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children — one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian — getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

That is how they see us.

For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”

I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.

Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.

“How can you compete with a country that is run like a company?” an Indian entrepreneur at the forum asked me of China. He then answered his own question: For democracy to be effective and deliver the policies and infrastructure our societies need requires the political center to be focused, united and energized. That means electing candidates who will do what is right for the country not just for their ideological wing or whoever comes with the biggest bag of money. For democracies to address big problems — and that’s all we have these days — requires a lot of people pulling in the same direction, and that is precisely what we’re lacking.

“We are not ready to act on our strength,” said my Indian friend, “so we’re waiting for them [the Chinese] to fail on their weakness.”

Will they? The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty. Yet China also has regular rotations of power at the top and a strong record of promoting on merit, so the average senior official is quite competent. Listening to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China tick off growth statistics in his speech here had the feel of a soulless corporate earnings report. Yet he has detailed plans for his people’s betterment, from universities to high-speed rail, and he’s delivering on them.

Orville Schell of the Asia Society, one of America’s best China watchers, who was with me in Tianjin, put it perfectly: “Because we have recently begun to find ourselves so unable to get things done, we tend to look with a certain overidealistic yearning when it comes to China. We see what they have done and project onto them something we miss, fearfully miss, in ourselves” — that “can-do,” “get-it-done,” “everyone-pull-together,” “whatever-it-takes” attitude that built our highways, dams and put a man on the moon.

“These were hallmarks of our childhood culture,” said Schell. “But now we view our country turning into the opposite, even as we see China becoming animated by these same kinds of energies. I don’t idealize China’s system of government. I don’t want to live in an authoritarian system. But I do feel compelled to look at China in an objective way and acknowledge the successes of this system.” That doesn’t mean advocating that we become like China. It means being alive to the challenge we are up against and even finding ways to cooperate with China. “The very retro notion that we are undisputedly still No. 1,” added Schell, “is extremely dangerous.”

Zevende Linnen Doos
1971
115 x 150 x 25 cm
acrylic and dispersion paint on canvas on wooden framework

Through October 9

ZENO X

Sara VanDerBeek, “Tremé School Window” 2009

By CAROL KINO
NY Times Published: September 14, 2010

WHEN the photographer Sara VanDerBeek was growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s, she yearned for the vanished art world of 1960s New York, in which her father, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, had played an important role. Mr. VanDerBeek, who died when Sara was 7, had collaborated with artists like Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham, and worked with Bell Labs to create some of the first computer animations. Before and after his death, Ms. VanDerBeek said, friends from the old days often visited and talked about the excitement and experimentation of that time.

Mr. VanDerBeek’s first wife, Johanna, was a regular. An artist herself, she had participated in his films and in performance events, and “still has a paper dress and bra that Rauschenberg had printed for one of them,” Ms. VanDerBeek recalled. “She would always tell us stories about their life in New York and the artists and the scene.”

A hunger to reanimate that long gone scene helped lead Ms. VanDerBeek, 33, into the project that first made her name, the Guild & Greyshkul gallery in SoHo, which she founded and ran with her younger brother and a friend from 2003 to 2009. It was celebrated for nurturing young artists and providing a creative gathering spot that seemed a welcome antidote to the rampant commercialism of the time.

And some sort of hunger or longing also seems central to Ms. VanDerBeek’s own work, which she began showing seriously four years ago. It’s especially evident in the installation of about 30 photographs made this year that appear in her first solo museum exhibition, “To Think of Time,” which just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and runs through Dec. 5.

Some works in the show depict three-dimensional still-life assemblages that she builds in her studio. In “We Will Become Silhouettes” two plaster casts of Ms. VanDerBeek’s face suggest a double-sided death mask, while “Blue Caryatid at Dusk” makes a pint-size Brancusi-esque column look like an outsize funerary monument.

Others show architectural details, like the close-ups of decaying windows and foundations she encountered on a recent trip to New Orleans. And many of the most poignant found their source in Ms. VanDerBeek’s childhood home in Baltimore, now up for sale. The show opens with “Blue Eclipse,” a photograph of a photograph of the 1969 lunar eclipse that she discovered while cleaning out the basement, and closes with a grouping that includes an enigmatic image of light falling through the house’s windows onto a wall.

Ms. VanDerBeek came to New York in 1994 to attend Cooper Union, her father’s alma mater. After graduation she worked in London as a commercial photographer for three years, shooting subjects like artfully composed stacks of toilet paper for the grocery chain ASDA. “There was a lot of tabletop work,” she said, “which somehow translates into these still lifes that I am doing now.” In her off hours she roamed East London, taking photographs of Brutalist postwar apartment blocks, which fascinated her, she said, because of “a disparity between the idealism of the architecture and the reality of living there.”

After returning to New York in 2001 Ms. VanDerBeek became interested in another sort of melancholic streetscape, the makeshift memorials that sprang up throughout the city after 9/11. The idea of making pictures of structures similarly studded with photographs and mementos began to infiltrate her imagination.

In 2003 she and her brother, Johannes VanDerBeek, opened Guild & Greyshkul with the artist Anya Kielar, another Cooper Union student. They wanted to provide a locus for their friends from school, inspired by their “idealistic view of the art world of my father’s generation,” Ms. VanDerBeek said. “We saw among our peer group a similar need to gather and show.”

Until the gallery closed, it advanced many careers, including those of Ernesto Caivano, known for intricate drawings, and Mariah Robertson, whose photographs were included in the last “Greater New York” show at MoMA P.S. 1. And in 2008 they reintroduced Stan VanDerBeek to the art world by giving him a well-received retrospective. Ms. VanDerBeek and her brother now manage his estate.

At the same time Ms. VanDerBeek was making her own work. While producing the pictures for her first solo show, “Mirror in the Sky,” at d’Amelio Terras in 2006, she thought back to those impromptu Sept. 11 mementos mori, she said, and “the whole tradition of holding onto images of people and things that have been lost.” Many depict photographs and other objects suspended from metal structures that apparently float in space, as in “A Reoccurring Pattern,” for which Ms. VanDerBeek collaged magazine photographs, bits of fabric, her own family snapshots and other talismans against a chain-link fence.

Ms. VanDerBeek said that she saw the layering in those photographs as being similar to “the way our mind organizes our memories, at different depths, one superimposed over the other, and constantly shifting.” The resulting works, with their Dada and Surrealist overtones, struck a chord and curators began visiting her studio in the gallery basement.

One was Eva Respini of MoMA, who put Ms. VanDerBeek’s work in the “New Photography” show there last fall. “Although Sara is a photographer, I like to think of her practice as multidisciplinary,” Ms. Respini said, because she usually makes a multimedia sculpture before taking a photograph, and is “very interested in the space of sculpture, the space of theater.” And by opening a gallery and representing her father’s estate, she added, Ms. VanDerBeek was “involved in a larger artistic dialogue.”

For MoMA Ms. VanDerBeek created an installation of four photographs based on images of Detroit, a city she regards as embodying long-term change, good and bad, rather than urban decline. Similarly her new Whitney project, loosely inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” is something of a meditation on America during a time of social transformation. And like that poet, who reshaped and expanded on his opus throughout his life, Ms. VanDerBeek’s intention was to create a project that could remain in flux. She continued tweaking every aspect of “To Think of Time” until it opened, and intends to recombine the images and add new ones over the years. “My hope is to have it grow and evolve over time,” she said.

The project also owes much to her personal history. Two years ago she and her siblings began cleaning out the family home so that their mother, Louise, who has multiple sclerosis, could move to a nursing home. As well as uncovering long-lost family mementos, like the plaster life masks her father encouraged them to make each year, they also found decades of his previously unknown work.

While their discoveries were “like sifting through history,” the process of clearing them out was “like a physical manifestation of change,” Ms. VanDerBeek said. “I hope my work is as much about the positive and inspirational aspects of change as it is about loss or melancholy.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 19, 2010

Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.

Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.

For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.

At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Untitled, 2010
Bronze
1 x 1 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches

Untitled, 2010
Bronze
5 1/4 x 4 x 5 1/4 inches

Through October 23

Anton Kern

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY TimesPublished: September 16, 2010

“Nice middle class you got here,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. “It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

O.K., he didn’t actually say that. But he might as well have, because that’s what the current confrontation over taxes amounts to. Mr. McConnell, who was self-righteously denouncing the budget deficit just the other day, now wants to blow that deficit up with big tax cuts for the rich. But he doesn’t have the votes. So he’s trying to get what he wants by pointing a gun at the heads of middle-class families, threatening to force a jump in their taxes unless he gets paid off with hugely expensive tax breaks for the wealthy.

Most discussion of the tax fight focuses either on the economics or on the politics — both of which suggest that Democrats should hang tough, for their own sakes as well as that of the country. But there’s an even bigger issue here — namely, the question of what constitutes acceptable behavior in American political life. Politics ain’t beanbag, but there’s a difference between playing hardball and engaging in outright extortion, which is what Mr. McConnell is now doing. And if he succeeds, it will set a disastrous precedent.

How did we get to this point? The proximate answer lies in the tactics the Bush administration used to push through tax cuts. The deeper answer lies in the radicalization of the Republican Party, its transformation into a movement willing to put the economy and the nation at risk for the sake of partisan victory.

So, about those tax cuts: back in 2001, the Bush administration bundled huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans with much smaller tax cuts for the middle class, then pretended that it was mainly offering tax breaks to ordinary families. Meanwhile, it circumvented Senate rules intended to prevent irresponsible fiscal actions — rules that would have forced it to find spending cuts to offset its $1.3 trillion tax cut — by putting an expiration date of Dec. 31, 2010, on the whole bill. And the witching hour is now upon us. If Congress doesn’t act, the Bush tax cuts will turn into a pumpkin at the end of this year, with tax rates reverting to Clinton-era levels.

In response, President Obama is proposing legislation that would keep tax rates essentially unchanged for 98 percent of Americans but allow rates on the richest 2 percent to rise. But Republicans are threatening to block that legislation, effectively raising taxes on the middle class, unless they get tax breaks for their wealthy friends.

That’s an extraordinary step. Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the middle class in the middle of an economic slump is a bad idea, unless the effects are offset by other job-creation programs — and Republicans are blocking those, too. So the G.O.P. is, in effect, threatening to plunge the U.S. economy back into recession unless Democrats pay up.

What kind of political party would engage in that kind of brinksmanship? The answer is the same kind of party that shut down the federal government in 1995 in an attempt to force President Bill Clinton to accept steep cuts in Medicare, and is actively discussing doing the same to Mr. Obama. So, as I said, the deeper explanation of the tax-cut fight is that it’s ultimately about a radicalized Republican Party, which accepts no limits on partisanship.

So should Democrats give in?

On the economics, the answer is a clear no. Right now, fears about budget deficits are overblown — but that doesn’t mean that we should completely ignore deficit concerns. And the G.O.P. plan would add hugely to the deficit — about $700 billion over the next decade — while doing little to help the economy. On any kind of cost-benefit analysis, this is an idea not worth considering.

And, by the way, a compromise solution — temporary tax breaks for the rich — is no better; it would cost less, but it would also do even less for the economy.

On the politics, the answer is also a clear no. Polls show that a majority of Americans are opposed to maintaining tax breaks for the rich. Beyond that, this is no time for Democrats to play it safe: if the midterm election were held today, they would lose badly. They need to highlight their differences with the G.O.P. — and it’s hard to think of a better place for them to take a stand than on the issue of big giveaways to Wall Street and corporate C.E.O.’s.

But what’s even more important is the principle of the thing. Threats to punish innocent bystanders unless your political rivals give you what you want have no legitimate place in democratic politics. Giving in to such threats would be an economic and political mistake, but more important, it would be morally wrong — and it would encourage more such threats in the future.

It’s time for Democrats to take a stand, and say no to G.O.P. blackmail.

New Works in Bronze and Steel
Through October 23

David Zwirner

Marc Valasella for The Los Angeles Times

Patrick Goldstein
September 13, 2010
The Los Angeles Times

Werner Herzog is perhaps the world’s most unlikely evangelist for 3-D movies. After all, he’s only seen one in his life, James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which clearly underwhelmed him. “I had to take my glasses off several times,” he told me the other day. “I felt uncomfortable seeing 3-D images nonstop. It was very difficult for my mind to follow.”

On the other hand, Herzog is perhaps the person best suited to give 3-D a much-needed jolt of artistic credibility. If the 68-year-old German filmmaker, best known for such uncompromising work as “Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and the 2005 documentary “Grizzly Man,” is willing to embrace the medium, then maybe someday it might be recognized as having some benefit beyond helping Hollywood squeeze more money out of moviegoers with sky-high ticket prices.

The true test of Herzog’s adoption will come Monday night when his new 3-D documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival. When I visited Herzog at the Dolby Lab in Burbank on Wednesday, the filmmaker was clearly a bit skittish, since he had a deadline staring him in the face and an unfinished film on his hands. He had agreed to give me an exclusive peek at nearly 30 minutes of the film, which as of Wednesday was the only completed footage from the 90-minute documentary. When I arrived at 10 a.m., Herzog’s cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, was asleep, having worked nonstop all night doing color corrections for the film.

“You’ve seen 30 minutes more of the film than I have,” said Erik Nelson, the film’s producer (and frequent Herzog collaborator), who has bankrolled the film along with the History Channel, which owns the television rights to the film. Nelson and Herzog are taking the project to Toronto in hopes of finding a theatrical distributor. “Werner is really out of his comfort zone here. He’s been figuring things out as we went along — there’s a lot of go-for-broke technology getting tried out for the first time.” To make things even more nerve-racking, the film is debuting Monday at the festival’s brand-new Bell Lightbox center, which has never screened a 3-D movie before.

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” takes us on a visually striking journey back in time, 32,000 years to be exact, to view the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave art in the South of France, which was discovered in 1994 and represents perhaps the earliest known visions of mankind. Until now, no one had been able to document the art on the cave walls, since only a select few scientists have been allowed inside the caves. Judith Thurman, whose New Yorker article triggered Nelson’s interest in the film, wasn’t allowed inside — her piece was based on photos and interviews.

As it turns out, when Nelson approached Herzog about doing the film, he was preaching to the converted. As a boy in Germany, Herzog had been mesmerized by a book about cave paintings that he saw in a store window. Practically penniless, he got a job as a tennis ball boy to earn enough money to buy the book. “I’d sneak into the store every week to make sure no one had bought it,” he explained. “After six months, I had enough money to pay for it. The deep amazement it inspired in me is with me to this day. I remember a shudder of awe possessing me as I opened its pages.”

If you’re a fan of Herzog’s documentaries, which are often narrated by the filmmaker, you know that this is how he talks all the time. His language is full of gravely described omens and portents, as if he were living in the time of Wagner or Edgar Allan Poe. Happily, his observations are often laced with sly humor. At one point in his new film, one of the cave specialists Herzog interviews reveals that when he was younger he’d performed in the circus. “What were you, if I may ask?” Herzog says. “A lion tamer?”

As luck would have it, one of the biggest fans of Herzog’s work was the French minister of culture, who after meeting with the filmmaker and offering fulsome praise for his work, gave him the green light to film inside the cave this spring. To make everyone feel comfortable about the arrangement, Herzog volunteered to serve as an employee of the ministry. “I proposed that they pay me one Euro and I even volunteered to pay the tax on that Euro in Germany,” he said. “So I really delivered the movie for free to France.”

The logistics for the shoot were complex. Herzog’s access was limited to four hours a day for six days. Once his four-person crew was inside the cave, they couldn’t leave a narrow 2-foot wide walkway installed to preserve the damp floor of the cave. Herzog had to use lighting that didn’t emit any heat. “It wasn’t caprice,” he says. “In one of the other historic caves, the exhalations of tourists’ breath caused mold, which forced the government to shut down any access. Still, it was a challenge. We were shooting in three dimensions, but we could only move in one dimension, since you couldn’t step around anyone without leaving the walkway.”

The crew — a cinematographer, sound man, assistant and Herzog, who worked the lights — could only bring in whatever equipment they could carry in their hands. The 3-D cameras were largely assembled inside the cave. “We have very little time, very little light and very few tools,” he explained. “So we essentially built this very complex apparatus inside the cave, with no support from the outside, since the doors were always closed behind us to preserve the cave’s atmosphere.”

As the film reveals, what Herzog found inside was astounding.

The cave drawings, made largely with charcoal and some ochre, are sleek, supple and surprisingly modern. The drawings of bison hug the contours of the cave, a bulge in the rock serving as the animal’s hump. Woolly mammoths are depicted in eight different phases, as if they were frames in an animated film.

For Herzog, 3-D was the perfect tool to capture the drawings, since after all, the cave that held the drawings was akin to a modern-day theater or gallery where primitive people could view, by torchlight, this mysterious new form of art. “Once you see the cave with your own eyes, you realize it had to be filmed in 3-D,” Herzog says. “I’ve never used the process in the 58 films I made before and I have no plans to do it ever again, but it was important to capture the intentions of the painters. Once you saw the crazy niches and bulges and rock pendants in the walls, it was obvious it had to be in 3-D.”

In other words, Herzog is only a temporary convert to the 3-D cause. To him, the technology is far more constricting than liberating. “We shouldn’t ever have a romantic comedy in 3-D, because we, the audience, have an emotional approach to the storytelling which leaves open lot of narrative possibilities,” he explained. “You wonder as you watch — will the young man and the woman find each other? Fall in love? We start to fantasize, which you could never do in 3-D, where you would be in the handcuffs of the technological effects. With cinema, your fantasies should always be free.”

Herzog shrewdly realized that with 3-D, sometimes less is more. He says that when they began the shoot, he told his cinematographer to underplay the effects. “I said, ‘Let’s deal with 3-D as if we had 30 or 40 years of history behind us. We should be completely casual, as if we weren’t trying to impress everyone with the scope of it.’” Of course, nothing is ever casual with Herzog. Judging from the portions of the film I saw, he has offered us a ringside seat to gaze upon the beginning of man’s exploration of art. And he has even made a great case for 3-D, since if there were ever a movie that encouraged us to let our fantasies run free, it would be “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

Thanks to Nate Lentz