Herb and Dorothy part I

I just finished watching Herb and Dorothy, a charming documentary released last year from the director Megumi Sasaki who had spent the last twenty years in New York cultivating a production company with roots in independent journalism. This informs the straightforward, unbiased presentation of Herb and Dorothy Vogel as an elderly couple living in a small New York city apartment impregnated with Minimal, Conceptual, and Modern art. The Vogel's story comes as a refreshingly purist approach to art collecting; if a piece moves them, they buy it. But only to display within their one bedroom shoebox apartment.



What Sasaki meant to create (via her interview with Elston Gunn) was an alternate view of the Vogels (as opposed to their media coverage in the 80s and 90s) as unlikely philanthropists, but it fails in its attempt to convey what Sasaki calls the "much more profound message in Herb and Dorothy's story" but repackages the precedented years of media coverage and speculation prior to the official documentary. Overall, Herb and Dorothy was sweet yet unaffecting. I may be being a little cold hearted here, but I felt the movie was reduntant and didn't say anything aside from what I could find on wikipedia. 2 out of 5 best Chuck Close anecdote.

The Vogels' supposed magic eye for worthwhile artworks brought me to question the idea of taste and the value thereof. So I took to reading Edmund Burke's On Taste, although against my better judgement. I made it 6 paragraphs in and was so annoyed by his assumptions I quit reading. I didn't really learn anything about taste or the absurd rules and regulations Burke asserts it has. I left it more confused and enraged than when I started. Burke claims that taste, along with the senses, imagination, and judgement, can be quantified and logically reduced to a common denominator among all humanity. I disagree. Taste is not definable or reducible to universal exactitude. As Postmodernity has taught us, meaning and truth are never attainable as they are infinitely deferred. I agree. In terms of the Vogels, the volatility and meaning of taste is equally illusive. Their passively simple "because we like it" articulations of their buying motives leaves us to question and wonder. Their lack of verbal articulation about visual art alludes to an unspoken understanding of the artist and idiosyncratic appreciation of the artwork. Is this what artists want of their patrons, admirers, or consorts? As an art historian in training, I'd like to know some day, but doubt I ever will.