After 4 on Wednesdays, as you may or may not know, Boston's Fine Arts Museum flings open its doors to the rabble, who can peruse the collection at no cost.   I'll let that sink in. At. No. Cost. 

If you can't afford the $15 admission, or the $75 yearly membership, this is definitely your thing.  But even if you can afford to pay, Wednesday evenings might be your thing, anyway.  There's something slightly different—a special atmosphere on Wednesdays when admission's free—that's worth checking out if you haven't yet.  It's a little funkier, a little spunkier, maybe.  I can't put my finger on it, myself, but there's something different about the MFA on Wednesday nights. 

Maybe it's all the couples on cheap dates.  Or the serious-looking young scholars pacing the galleries with hands clasped behind their backs.  Cash-strapped tourists, or local art-lovers who never miss a Wednesday night.  Free admission seems to bring the whole experience back down to earth.  

My mission this Wednesday was to get my 2007 Moleskine pocket weekly diary at the Museum bookstore.  I had looked at my local Utrecht shop, where I get my art supplies, but while they had Moleskine sketchpads and notebooks galore they didn't have the pocket diaries.  And I will not settle for less than Moleskine.  Moleskine is my religion.

I was at Best Buy last weekend helping a luddite friend of mine pick out his first cell phone, and while I was standing around waiting for him to choose between the $18 and $24 models—he was like, "I thought you said they had a $9 one, too"—I was watching how worshipful all the other customers were towards what has got to be the single most rampantly fetishized consumer product since people started wearing shoes and underwear.  (Check out Amp'd's newest RAZR spot, which makes light of this obsession with a guy basically making out with his cell.)

Underwear and shoes are necessities.  Phones are practical.  I'm not really a fetishist.  But my Moleskine is an exception.  In late 2005, I got a little over-excited and went for the daily diary—with one day per page—instead of the weekly one—with a week every two pages—with the result that I had this ginormous thing to lug around all year long:


My new pocket diary (in the bottom pic) is sinfully sleek.  Roowwwr!

The display copy was the only one left, so it turned out I got an extra ten percent off.  We were obviously meant to be together.  I won't bore you with all my new Moleskine weekly diary's many unbelievable features, but a built-in elastic closure, cloth ribbon place holder, removable 28 page address book, and expandable pocket in the back—this is just the beginning—and all for under twelve bucks. Jealous?

So Mission Accomplished, I headed to the galleries. 

There's an exhibition of paintings by Cecily Brown, which was, for me, many more misses than hits.  There were a couple of her paintings that I responded to on the gut level of color and composition (reacting to what one charmed reviewer called Brown's "gorge follows puke" aesthetic).  But although some of her "raunchier" works—"feminist" depictions of penetrating penises, for example—were not included here, her attempts to infuse her large-scale canvases with "edgy," politically-charged content became tedious.  Not only was the content pretentious, but it was in many cases an obvious attempt to mask a lack of skill when it came to composition, which is what made it distasteful.

I'm all for raunch in art and literature.  Life is raunchy and people who think of art as prim and twee are silly, with small, dried-up, dusty old souls.  The soul is sumptuous, not sumptuary.  Art should be a kick in the ass, if you haven't got balls, and literature (in the immortal words of Kafka, quoted many times here) should be "an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us."

So it's not raunch that is offensive to true art-lovers, because we already understand that art is a humanistic endeavor, and that it celebrates all aspects of human experience, often telling truths about the variety of experience that we don't have license to speak about honestly in society, to shrug off or laugh at or cry about in public.  Art, like religion, is a privileged though not a rarified realm.  Like religion, it is at its core truly catholic.   

What is offensive in art that aspires to offend us is really the bad faith it demonstrates, the breaking of a long-standing if unspoken contract that says we, the viewers, cannot really be offended, that in the realm of art we suspend that age-old practice of giving and taking offense, for a much more edifying exchange.  

We are here to be moved, to experience the other in ourselves and ourselves in the other through art.  Taking offense at what is, after all, universal and quite ordinary, would only be an impediment to our purposes.  The attempt to offend is more offensive than any ostensibly offensive matter used to carry it out.  Art is only sacred insomuch as it honors that sacred bond with its audience.    

Now, as with anything in our human experience that art depicts, there are more and less masterful depictions of rough sex, penetration, and cumshots.  Brown's pictures run the gamut.  I, myself, was infinitely more interested in her colors and compositions, in the timidity or temerity of her brush-strokes, than in her subject matter.  And while Brown herself claims that her media's the message ("I want to do something in paint that can only be done in paint") she's playing both sides when she says something like "I never thought ‘I want to take this male brush and make it mine,’" a quote highlighted on the gallery wall.

Because it's apparently supposed to add meaning or value to the art that she is (a) a female painter, and (b) a female painter of sexually-charged canvases.  In highlighting the quote above, the curators capture perfectly the spirit of bad faith in contemporary art. 

Having said all this, there were works that worked for me on a visceral level.  And watching others' approaches to viewing the paintings in the gallery was worth the price of the ticket (that's what's great about that Wednesday evening ticket price).

Once again the curators of the show came through for  us.  It's human nature to search a canvas for naughty bits if the text panel tells you they're there.  It becomes a sort of game, and at least gives you something to do while you're debating, as one young couple I encountered in the gallery was, whether one of the paintings (her untitled, 1997—a painting the aforementioned reviewer describes as "a circle jerk of bunny rabbits, grabbing at their pricks and snapping each other’s necks"—a more delicate description appeared on the text panel on the gallery wall, as I recall) is "abstract" or not.  

If he could clearly make out a body part, he argued, it was not.  And he said he could, so it was not.  She seemed to accept his criterion, though skeptical of his judgment, and stared at the picture up close for a long time before finally quietly concluding that it was, indeed, abstract, after all.

From there I took a stroll through The Romance of Modernism: Paintings and Sculpture from the Scott M. Black Collection. There were some lovely pieces here, but I want to single out Chagall's Tenderness.  Only because I was drawn to it and then into it, though it was hanging in a kind of out-of-the-way nook.  I was very moved by it at close range. 

I didn't bother reading the text panel until after I had taken it in, and then I was surprised to see that it was called Tenderness, because that's exactly what I'd been thinking it depicted.  Chagall is a magician.   The exhibition is on through May.  Great for a Wednesday night viewing.

After that I wandered somewhat aimlessly, I have to admit.  I was not captured again until I entered a gallery dedicated to works of art with some regional relevance, from an intriguing time of incredible foment on all fronts in American life and art—the second half of the 19th century.