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Chicago Tribune
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: AC/DC and the underrated art of doing the same thing forever
Angus Young, the AC/DC guitarist who still dresses in the round cap and short pants of an Australian schoolboy (despite turning 70 in March), once gave an amazing response to a frequent criticism about his band: People say AC/DC, founded in Sydney in 1973 (and playing a sold-out show at Soldier Field on Saturday), have been making the same album, and writing the same song, , for the past 52 years. Since 1975, they've made 17 studio albums and every single one, to the non-metal head, casual listener and plenty of fans, sounds just like every other one. So sometime in the '80s, when they still had only a dozen records, Young told a reporter he was 'sick to death' of critics who say they have made 11 albums 'that sound exactly the same — in fact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.' That's the healthiest thing a metal band ever said. There's freedom, and a profound understanding of craft, in repetition. I admire artists who do one thing again and again with little variety, sidling up to a proverbial lunch counter and proudly ordering the same sandwich every day without deliberation. I don't mean the Warhols of the world espousing commodification, and or someone like Martin Scorsese who merely made a lot of gangster films. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean — artists who repeat, and repeat, and repeat. There may be variation in there, but that would only be evident to a connoisseur. Also, I don't include the cynical artist who recycles endlessly without intending to repeat. Mark Rothko, the great abstract painter who made countless 'color fields' that could be described as soft hues arranged into blurry rectangles, arranged rectangles in many ways. But what's moving about Rothko's rectangles is the commitment. He died three years before AC/DC formed. He had more of a thing for Schubert than Australian metal. But if they found themselves at the same table at a wedding, Angus Young and Mark Rothko could have bonded. That sounds like a cool table. Also seated there is the Ramones — whose shows were one 60-minute punk squall broken by shouts of Since this is a large table (please don't ask who the Ramones, Mark Rothko and AC/DC would know in common to be invited to the same wedding), seat Agatha Christie there, too. Picking over their rubbery chickens, they'd recognize a shared philosophy: Insanity is not always doing one thing over and over, and expecting different results. Doing one thing can mean refinement, even appreciation. Christie likely wrote at least one mystery without a dead body in a train, steamship, boarding school or coastal mansion, without the usual suspects or a tweedy inspector, but I don't want to read it. She was so devoted to one thing, for 50 years, that reading enough Christie and identifying the mechanics that make it all interesting, and not the killer, is the fun part. These are one-track minds. These are artists who rarely wander, and somehow both artist and audience never seem to care. Adoringly so. To say both like a good formula doesn't capture this intense bond. You get a feeling both parties are tucked beneath a warm blanket. There's no more disappointment here than realizing that waves keep coming, and coming. Knowing that behind every swell is always another is soothing. But when is it just lazy? My mind immediately goes to decades of 'Friday the 13th' movies in which a masked killer hunts countless variations of the same teenagers in the first movie, only allowing for a tweak here or there: killer in 3D, killer in New York City, killer in space. Why are those lifeless while, say, the latest Steven Soderbergh crime movie 'Black Bag,' as effortless and familiar as any Soderbergh crime flick from two decades ago, is still satisfying? Because Soderbergh is playing variations on a theme, a style or a structure, appearing to surprise himself that he can stretch it as far as he does. As serial killer franchises go (and there are good ones), the 'Friday the 13th' franchise was never that curious about itself. Comparatively, AC/DC, which nobody would accuse of being curious, can still get your blood surging because they still locate something exciting in two chords. At that wedding table, I imagine Young pulls out his cell phone and Christie peeks over and notices that his home screen is one of Monet's countless haystacks, and she smiles knowingly. An artist who repeats over and over again and rarely bores is the artist who is always seeing, unwilling to move on until they explore an idea completely — maybe for a lifetime. It's as if they have been locked into a long conversation with the idea itself. Pick up nearly any big multi-disc jazz reissue and you hear this playing out in real time, with the same musicians picking over one or two songs again and again, sometimes with inaudible differences. Jim Nutt, the Chicago Imagist, now 86, made so many paintings of female heads, it's like its own genre. Woody Allen, for years on end, seemed to shoot the same movie about the same characters having the same tics in the same city (New York City), you could have been fooled into thinking he was the most well-adjusted filmmaker ever. Part of the genius of blues and country artists is in the million ways they say only a few things. There's a new Lana Del Rey song with a funny line warily bemoaning: 'All these country singers / And their lonely rides to Houston.' Part of the joke is that Lana Del Rey herself is the AC/DC of contemporary pop stars — thrillingly so. is her thing. Some might say her only thing. Her songs rarely go beyond a light gallup, her tone is always breathy and lush. My daughter groans whenever I ask Siri to play Lana; it's like I'm calling up the same song once again. Yet I don't hear any boredom in Lana Del Rey's sound. She is so thoroughly exploring the limits of contemporary ballads, you hang on every digression or alteration — a fast electronic hiccup, a touch of Ennio Morricone twang. The other day, I was talking to Chicago artist Theaster Gates and asked why he repeats himself so often, especially with his pottery. He mentioned growing up in a Baptist church where the pastor would riff on a single Bible verse for hours. He thinks of his own repetition as meditating on a single thought, or like a marker he carries through life: the Pledge of Allegiance, he said, means one thing when you're 6, but something else when you're 16, and another thing entirely if you fight in a war. We put a premium on artists who can't sit still, who show endless range and seem to switch hit every time at bat. David Bowie, for instance, is our contemporary ideal of an artist who refused to rest on laurels and do one thing well. Bowie, like Prince, like Bob Dylan, gravitated to change with an almost evolutionary fear — if you don't adapt, eventually you become irrelevant and get eaten. But the artist who repeats obsessively leans into a different truism: If every work of art is made up of only a handful of fresh thoughts, then what matters is . Every R.L. Stine 'Goosebumps' book is only slightly different than any other. Characters in novels by Haruki Murakami — who refers to his own repetition as meditation — make a lot of omelettes and listen to a lot of jazz. John Irving's characters get visited by bears. Alfred Hitchcock — who once remade his own film ('The Man Who Knew Too Much') — never met a mistaken identity he wouldn't explore. Elin Hilderbrand likes unease in paradise. John Carpenter has made too many variations on 'Rio Bravo' to count. I have never been able to distinguish between Jackson Pollock's splatters. The amazing Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an extension of the Kohler Arts Center, is several floors of psychosis and artists who, oh, decide to paint only skulls or sculpt clay into only religious figures. I love that, not despite the predictability but of it. I insist I want variety in everything — eating, visiting, etc. — and yet one of the best feelings is seeing a well-trodden trail in a dense forest. Plenty of consumer studies bear this out: We say we long for new experiences but don't mind the same thing again and again. If you love something enough, you tend to change alongside it; if you're lucky, you notice those changes every time you return. AC/DC only ever sounds like AC/DC, and in a world being upended, that's a form of life insurance. Listening to their early stuff now, I hear cave men with guitars, but with the newer songs, rock stars with private jets, though really it's one long thump and always should be. Crunch, thump, hell, blood, thump, back in black, high voltage, crunch, live wire, thump, let there be rock — . For those about to rock, I salute you.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Child accidentally damages $50 million Rothko at Dutch museum
A Mark Rothko painting thought to be worth tens of millions of dollars is undergoing restoration after a child accidentally damaged the artwork at a museum in the Netherlands. 'Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' sustained some visible scratches when a child brushed against the abstract painting at the Depot, a public storage area of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In the Depot, much of the art is displayed similarly to how it would in a gallery without traditional exhibition protections. The Depot is currently showing highlights of its vast collection as the main museum undergoes renovations. 'It happened because a child, in an unsupervised moment, touched the lower part of the work. There was no intent. This was not vandalism,' museum spokesperson Vincent Cardinaal told ABC News. The painting has since been moved to the museum's conservation lab. Cardinaal said the restoration process was expected to be successful and that the painting would be able to be displayed in the future. The museum did not release images of the damage, further description or estimates of repair costs. A vandal who wrote on another Rothko piece at the Tate Modern in London caused about $250,000 in damages that cost 18 months to repair. 'Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' has never been auctioned but it's estimated to be worth between $50 and $60 million. 'Untitled, 1968' — another of Rothko's 'color field' paintings — sold for $23.9 million at Sotheby's in 2023. The Dutch museum acquired the piece in 1970 after Rothko's death. _____
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Yahoo
Iconic, $56 Million Abstract Painting Damaged by Child
Think twice about taking children to a museum housing expensive art. Scratch that, maybe just leave them at home. That's arguably the moral of the story after a child reportedly damaged a Mark Rothko painting worth a whopping $56 million. The damage happened at the famed Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. According to the BBC, a museum spokesperson said it's considering the "next steps" to repair the American painter's 1960 abstract Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8 painting. Those "next steps" includes searching for a conservation expert in the country and abroad. A Dutch outlet reported that the damage occurred during an "unguarded moment." As far as the painting's damage, a spokesperson told the BBC that the damage is "superficial," and that "small scratches are visible in the unvarnished paint layer in the lower part of the painting."It's worth noting that a conservationist reportedly said that the painting in question is "particularly susceptible to damage." The painting had been hanging in the museum's Depot, which is a publicly accessible storage facility next to the main museum, as part of an exhibition displaying the gallery's favorite collection. The museum is optimistic that the painting will be on display again, but fixing the damage will be difficult because "Rothko's mixture of pigments and resins and glues were quite complex." This incident is eerily reminiscent to another Rothko painting that was intentionally damaged in 2012, when a man defaced a 1958 painting with graffiti. The man apologized for his action, but he was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison. During the trial, prosecutors said it would cost more than $266,000 to repair the damage, and it took conservators 18 months to repair the damage.
New York Post
30-04-2025
- General
- New York Post
Child damages $56M Mark Rothko painting in Dutch museum
A kid in the Netherlands damaged a Mark Rothko painting worth roughly $56 million after he 'scratched' it at a Dutch museum, officials said. The child, who hasn't been identified, managed to deface the American painter's 1960 abstract artwork during a visit to the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam. 'The painting 'Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' by Mark Rothko has sustained superficial damage after a child touched the painting when it was on display,' the museum said in a statement. A Mark Rothko painting worth roughly $56 million was damaged by a child during a visit to the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam. Getty Images 'As a result, small scratches are visible in the unvarnished paint layer in the lower part of the painting.' The centerpiece painting has since been removed from display. 'Conservation expertise has been sought in the Netherlands and abroad,' a museum spokesperson said. 'We are currently researching the next steps for the treatment of the painting. We expect that the work will be able to be shown again in the future.' It wasn't immediately clear how much the repairs would cost. The museum also declined to reveal who might be expected to foot the bill.
The Independent
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Child damages Rothko painting worth more than £42m at museum
A Mark Rothko painting, "Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8," estimated to be worth £42.5 million, was damaged at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A child caused "small scratches" to the lower part of the painting, which was described as 'superficial damage'. The museum is assessing the damage and planning restoration, but has not released images or cost estimates. Unrelated acts of vandalism against artworks, including a 2012 defacement of a different Rothko painting and recent attacks on paintings at London's National Gallery, prompted the gallery to ban liquids. The museum expects the Rothko painting to be displayed again in the future. Rothko painting worth more than £42m damaged by child visiting gallery
