Overselling Yourself:
Open Letter to Artists
by
Joan Altabe, for Fine Art Registry®
Open Letter To Artists from an Art Critic, Part 11
You might call this cautionary tale "How Not To Talk To An Art Critic."
About a decade ago, I was interviewing the poet Allen Ginsberg and was quickly turned off by his conversation. No, it wasn’t his angry message, the kind you read in the poem that made him famous - "Howl." He spoke softly, but he sold himself hard, which was irritating in one so famous. Owing to his bizarre need to brag, I kept my notes.
Ginsberg - long extolled as a latter-day Walt Whitman and inspiration of the political protests of the '60s - talked himself up throughout a telephone interview from Brooklyn College, where he taught English. It began like this: "I'm a distinguished professor of English. It's a slot that they have for 'special professors.'"
As if anyone would doubt the special-ness of America's best-known living poet. At a recent writers' festival in Ireland, where he read his poetry for two nights to standing ovations, the demand for more was so great, he was called back for a third night. He told me this. It wasn't an answer to a question. It was Ginsberg touting Ginsberg, as if he were a beaten person stuck at the end of some line.
Seventy at the time, Ginsberg was actively sought-after. Harper Collins had just published a volume of his selected poems; Nonesuch recorded a reading of his poetry to the musical accompaniment of Philip Glass and Paul McCartney; and Gemini, a leading graphic studio, commissioned a portfolio of his lithographs made in collaboration with David Hockney and other noted artists.
One of these prints is an illustrated poem called "The Ballad of the Skeleton," which Ginsberg sang in concert. Stephen Taylor, the lead guitarist for an early rock 'n roll group, The Thugs, accompanied his performance. Yet, despite his ongoing success - Stanford University paid him $1 million not long ago for his journals, tapes, letters, even his beard clippings – (yep, he told me about that, too) - his conversation was an uninterruptible advertisement for himself, complete with name-dropping.
"I'm trying to finish my sentence," he said at one point, resisting a question I put to him during a pause. The "sentence" ran on for nearly three quarters of an hour in a style not unlike his long-breath poetry:
"I did it ('Ballad of the Skeleton') with a very interesting band for Mercury records at their request to be put out this month toward the end of the elections. It's a political song. It also had a rock 'n roll riff that went with it, so Danny Goldberg, the head of Mercury records, heard me sing it at Carnegie Hall in a Tibet House benefit, with Lenny Kaye who travels with Patty Smith and David Mansfield, who I recorded with before when I was with the Rolling Thunder tour with Dylan. So that was a kind of a hit at the Carnegie Hall Tibet House benefit, so the head of Mercury asked me to come in and record it. So I recorded it. I had played it at (London's Royal) Albert Hall. My accompanist there was Paul McCartney at a large poetry reading last year. He said if I recorded it, to send him the tape and he'd add on what he could. So we sent him the tape with 24 tracks and he added his guitar, as well as organ, drums and maracas. Then we got the tracks back from him and Philip Glass added on piano. So we have this marvelous music that will come out as a CD single by the end of the month. I'll get the first copy, and they'll be using sort of cannibalized images from the Gemini lithographs for the interior of the package. It's kind of a nice collaboration because it also has a recent photograph (of Ginsberg) by the photographer Robert Frank."
Ginsberg was mercifully brief when asked if his popularity indicated a renaissance of the '50s and '60s.
"Oh, I'm just having fun," he said without reflection, and continued with his litany of professional activity.
Moral of the story: Let your work speak for you.
— by Joan Altabe
| October 1, 2006
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