Nun Dare Call It Criticism

So it‘s actually somewhat fitting that Sister Wendy should end up surveying the Norton Simon collection. Simon was something of an eccentric outsider himself -- a self-made multimillionaire with a gift for cutting through bureaucratic inertia, whose corporate-raider-style takeover of the Pasadena Museum of Art in the early ’70s effectively dismantled the avant-garde cachet the institution had accrued over the previous decade, with its early embrace of Pop and important historical shows (including Duchamp‘s first museum retrospective). Again, some in the Art World find an easy good-guybad-guy morality in this scenario, but it’s spoiled by the inspired singularity of Simon‘s accomplishments. Possessed of a photographic memory, Simon could allegedly remember the details, down to the currency-exchange rate, of each of his more than 12,000 art acquisitions. He was a prime mover behind the founding of LACMA, and his highly personal amassment of artifacts is often cited as the greatest private collection assembled in the latter half of the 20th century.

Sister Wendy spends a good part of her new film praising Norton Simon’s adventurousness and good taste, and it is as much a portrait of the collector as it is a further exploration of her technique of art appreciation. She runs through the gamut of her familiar routines -- rhapsodizing over the eroticism of Watteau‘s precious Reclining Nude, teasing out a complex and convincing psychological narrative from Rubens’ The Holy Women at the Sepulchre, recounting the tragic biography of British abstract sculptor Barbara Hepworth, extolling the universal spirituality in statues of Buddha, Indra and Vishnu, and offering a breathtakingly subjective interpretation of Raphael‘s Madonna and Child With Book. The right to subjectivity is central to Sister Wendy’s approach: Time and again she has implied that she wants her work in television and publishing to empower people to trust their own impressions, to encounter the art in direct contemplation, unmediated by the intercessory art world priesthood -- herself included. In the midst of a prickly feminist reading of Degas‘ Waiting, though, she gives a slight hint of the depths of her exasperation. Regarding the familiar image of the doubled-over ballerina and her crowlike chaperone, she speaks for the artist. “This is the reality of the glamorous world of ballet: hard work, aches and pains, boredom.” She pauses a beat as we cut from the painting to her face, gazing directly at the camera and markedly devoid of the ironic twinkle that usually accompanies her little gibes. “Rather like the glamorous world of television.”