RIP JHU posted on January 28th, 2009

John Updike died this morning. He was seventy-six years old, and full of cancer.

“At the end of two weeks of inspecting church walls and holy images, I thought to cleanse my palate, as it were, by visiting the Venice Biennale. My wife declined to waste her precious time on modern trash. Alone, a dazed and footsore pilgrim, I made my way from one pavilion to another, exposing myself to artificial fog and upside-down dandelions in the Belgian pavilion, unintelligible whispers and showers of magenta dust in the American, a room of electronic numbers in the Japanese, and in the Russian pavilion photographs taken by a chimpanzee and abstract paintings brushed by trained elephants. Everywhere, abrasive irony and nihilism. The Germans mounted huge videos of nothing much happening, and the Slovaks hundreds of tattoos, with an apparently sincere offer to needle any of the designs into a visitor’s skin at appointed hours. A deafening, enraged roar of racing automobiles and stacks of painted tires filled the Danish pavilion; the French had actually dismantled the floor of their exhibit hall, a solid oak structure dating back to 1912, and showed its fragments under a grate, ten feet down. The French also incorporated several utterly white rooms, along whose surfaces of blazing vacuity floated the specks of my aging vitreous humors. It was an innocent little nation - Uruguay, South Korea - that exhibited something, in used woods or nacreous sequins, that reminded one of art in the old sense, which prevailed until about 1965, of a physical object amenable to being housed and contemplated. The desire to shock the hardened art connoisseur into some kind of response had become veritably frantic; there was hardly an inch of the void, of disgust, of scorn left to expose, in this age of post-faith. Only the vegetation and the other spectators at the Biennale - generally young, drifting hand in hand from one calculated, not infrequently obscene affront to another - belonged to a world I wanted to be in, a world I could recognize to be continuous with the world of my childhood.”

-from The Future of Faith, The New Yorker, November 29, 1999.