Free The White Album by Joan Didion

unspeakable.

    1977
     

 

     
     

    The Getty
     
     
    the place might have been commissioned by The Magic Christian . Mysteriously and rather giddily splendid, hidden in a grove of sycamores just above the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, a commemoration of high culture so immediately productive of crowds and jammed traffic that it can now be approached by appointment only, the seventeen-million-dollar villa built by the late J . Paul Getty to house his antiquities and paintings and furniture manages to strike a peculiar nerve in almost everyone who sees it . From the beginning, the Getty was said to be vulgar . The Getty was said to be “Disney . ” The Getty was even said to be Jewish, if I did not misread the subtext in “like a Beverly Hills nouveau-riche dining room” (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1974) and “gussied up like a Bel-Air dining room” (New York Times, May 28,1974) .
    The Getty seems to stir up social discomforts at levels not easily plumbed . To mention this museum in the more enlightened of those very dining rooms it is said to resemble is to invite a kind of nervous derision, as if the place were a local hoax, a perverse and deliberate affront to the understated good taste and general class of everyone at the table . The Getty’s intricately patterned marble floors and walls are “garish . ” The Getty’s illusionistic portico murals are “back lot . ” The entire building, an informed improvisation on a villa buried by mud from Vesuvius in 79 a . d . and seen again only dimly during some eighteenth-century tunneling around Herculaneum, is ritually dismissed as “inauthentic,” although what “authentic” could mean in this context is hard to say .
    Something about the place embarrasses people . The collection itself is usually referred to as “that kind of thing,” as in “not even the best of that kind of thing,” or “absolutely top-drawer if you like that kind of thing,” both of which translate “not our kind of thing . ” The Getty’s damask-lined galleries of Renaissance and Baroque paintings are distinctly that kind of thing, there being little in the modern temperament that responds immediately to popes and libertine babies, and so are the Getty’s rather unrelenting arrangements of French furniture . A Louis XV writing table tends to please the modern eye only if it has been demystified by a glass of field flowers and some silver-framed snapshots, as in a Horst photograph for Vogue . Even the Getty’s famous antiquities are pretty much that kind of thing, evoking as they do not their own period but the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rage for antiquities . The sight of a Greek head depresses many people, strikes an unliberated chord, reminds them of books in their grandmother’s parlor and of all they were supposed to learn and never did . This note of “learning” pervades the entire Getty collection . Even the handful of Impressionists acquired by Getty were recen tly removed from the public galleries, put away as irrelevant . The Getty collection is in certain ways unremittingly reproachful, and quite inaccessible to generations trained in the conviction that a museum is meant to be fun, with Calder mobiles and Barcelona chairs .
    In short the Getty is a monument to “fine art,” in the old-fashioned didactic sense, which is part of the problem people have with it . The place resists contemporary notions about what art is or should be or ever was . A museum is now supposed to kindle the untrained imagination, but this museum does not . A museum is now supposed to set the natural child in each of us free, but this museum does not . This was art acquired to teach a lesson, and there is also a lesson in the building which houses it: the Getty tells us that the past was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it . Ancient marbles were not always attractively faded and worn . Ancient marbles once appeared just as they appear here: as strident,