Adam Sachs - Inherited Disorders - Stories, Parables & Problems

The mother’s breathing is also audible, so she, too, will see an otolaryngologist.

These otolaryngology visits should hopefully shed light on what is happening to his parents’ nasal cavities.

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Ever since an evidently pivotal LSD experience in western Norway in 1971, the great Icelandic artist Karl Karlsson — until then an undistinguished landscape painter — has painted nothing but colossal canvases of two heads in conversation. Critics generally interpret the series as a long-running inquiry into the very possibility of conversation.

Although Karlsson’s earliest heads (1971–1976) seem to be involved in a genuine exchange, subsequent decades (1976–1997) saw a continual diminution in the size of their mouths. By 1998, Karlsson’s abstract interlocutors were entirely mouthless, and they remained so until 2009.

This is typically considered the most pessimistic phase of Karlsson’s career.

Since then, the mouths of his heads have been growing once more. Karlsson’s critics, collectors, and advocates cheered: it seemed that he had found new faith in the possibility of authentic human interaction. But there were signs by early 2012 that the mouths on his heads were getting a little too big, and by 2013 the mouths were clearly much too big for the heads. The mouths now take up most of the heads, and there are indications that one of the two heads — the one on the left — will actually swallow the other head, the one on the right, whole, probably as early as 2019.

It is interesting to note that Karlsson is not, as one might assume, some sort of recluse. He lives half of the year in London and is said to be exceedingly social, and a superb conversationalist.

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A famous performer, celebrated around the globe for his singing and dancing, added to the detailed rider for his most recent tour the stipulation that his father must be kept “a certain distance” from him at all times, a distance “not greater than three hundred feet and not less than thirty feet.” According to the tour rider, the performer was unable to perform if he was too close to or too far from his father, a retired postal worker. When he was too close to his father he could not dance, and when he was too far he could not sing, the rider explained. Between thirty and three hundred feet was the proper range.

This did not mean, said the rider, which the performer is rumored to have written himself, that the father should be kept a fixed distance away from him at all times, such as 165 feet. Optimally, in the hours preceding a concert, the retired postal worker should be brought closer and then taken farther away, brought closer and then taken farther away, brought closer and then taken farther away, though of course never brought closer than 30 feet or taken farther away than 300. The periodic nearness and remoteness of his father was the only way to ensure that the performer could perform to the best of his ability, according to the rider: “The oscillation of the father is critical to the success of the engagement.”

Someone from the performer’s management company leaked the tour rider to the Internet, and the performer was, predictably, ridiculed for his demands. But I’ve noticed that most of the ridicule has come from women. Men — at least in the comment threads I have seen — have been largely sympathetic, many noting their own shattering realization as adults that they could exist neither near nor far from their fathers and would spend the rest of their lives moving cyclically toward and away from them in an endless attempt to determine the ideal distance —which was probably, they knew, a chimerical concept. If they could instruct venue employees to ferry their fathers toward and away from them in a continuous oscillatory fashion, never coming too close or going too far, they absolutely would.

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For nearly his entire career, the son of the great Dutch architect Willem de Waal has had to explain (ad nauseam) that while his buildings do bear a superficial resemblance to his famous father’s buildings, they’re in fact “a foot shorter” and “feel completely different.” A careful and honest comparison of his new Arrivals Terminal at Schiphol to his father’s legendary Terminal 2 at Chicago O’Hare — two structures which a critic at De Telegraaf libelously called “identical”—would show that the son’s building is one foot shorter and just feels completely different. His Gateway Arch of Guangzhou, which has drawn comparisons to his father’s Gateway Arch of St. Louis, is actually one foot shorter than that arch, and feels completely different. His neofuturism and his heavy use of catenary curves obviously owe something to his father’s neofuturism and use of catenary curves, but in the son’s aesthetic they feel completely different, and are one foot shorter.

Yesterday, at the unveiling of his design for the Brussels Museum of Modern Art, which will be a foot shorter but otherwise identical to his father’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Waal launched into an attack on the architectural establishment, which he accused of becoming “fixated” on elements like form, color, style, light, scale, texture, material, and so forth, to the utter neglect of “feel” and “height difference.”

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The son of Salzburg’s most profound modern philosopher and the son of New York’s most brilliant modern composer, each of whom is said to be totally inept when it comes to understanding his father’s work, have refused all calls to publish the voluminous correspondence that their fathers exchanged over the course of a forty-year friendship, correspondence that scholars believe would shed a great deal of light on their intricate, elusive theories and symphonies. The philosopher’s son is worried his father comes across as mean , and the composer’s son is worried his comes across as gay .

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You think you’re learning something from someone; you always realize too late that you’re just turning into him. When you learn a little bit from someone, you’ve turned into him a little bit, and when you learn a lot from someone you’ve turned into him completely. So it was for a young artist who learned to paint by studying Modigliani, and realized deep into his study that he was only learning to paint like Modigliani. He vowed never to gaze upon another of Modigliani’s sensuous, languid, elongated faces or figures, at the risk of falling permanently under his sway.

Had he, perhaps, caught himself just in time? It was true that his own faces and figures were not especially languid or elongated, and after his first exhibition not a single critic — all of whom, incidentally, believed they’d learned from earlier critics when really they had just turned into those earlier critics — mentioned Modigliani as a possible influence.

Soon his career was thriving. Dealers, who believed they had learned from earlier dealers, not just turned into them, courted him, and collectors, who believed they had learned from earlier collectors, bid up his work. Not once was Modigliani ever alluded to in connection with his art. He was sui generis, a modern master. And, of course, he began to believe this himself. He became sanguine about the possibility of education, gave money to art schools, stressed the importance of studying past masters, and neglected to mention that when you exhaustively study an Old Master, the Old Master studies you, the first- or second-year art school student, equally exhaustively. He omitted his earlier suspicion that art museums are little more than big buildings where rectangular old men, hung on the walls by their backs, wait for young people to come stand in front of them.