I actually wanted to write an elaborate introduction to Holland Cotter’s article about the Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman Exhibition at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I just do not even know where to start about this article. The exhibition is certainly an event of a lifetime. I want to see it as often as only possible and I know that many people will. Why would the article have such a strange tone to it though? The language used by Mr. Cotter somehow overpowers what he would like to tell us, it seems. The entire article reads like the review of a garden party or maybe some casual conversation in a hip bar. Why is that? Is this article written like this on purpose, to attract the casual shopper, somebody who is just walking by the museum and would like to step in and have a look at some “very weird” and yet “huge” drawings by this “guy”? And then ask themselves “what planet was this guy from?”
I understand that articles written in a style of a dying art historian might not be the most inviting thing that fits to print, but to just send a writer into an exhibition and let him be seemingly impressed by the color of the walls and like this totally weird stuff, rather than by the work by Leonardo seems like a serious departure. Or am I just getting too old for this? Language evolves and it gains some ground in some areas and transforms some ground in others. Leonardo would have had his fun reading the article, I am sure. Finally somebody who sees that he did not only work a lot, no he made “studies galore”, he did not really try to grasp the proportions of a body, he drew “sexy models”. Not sure he would know what “telephone pad doodles” are, but that is quite O.K. (Because there was no O.K. before 1924.) Holland Cotter stopped short of putting emoticons in his article, but otherwise, the whole thing reads more like a blog and less like an art review article in a newspaper that claims to “look deeper.”
So what am I trying to say here? You should read the article, it is, like, totally fresh or something. And it will make you smile. Leonardo: The Eye, the Hand, the Mind. I think I will now look for Holland Cotter’s blog and ask him to write something about my stuff here. I am digging the way he writes more and more. Like, totally.