The Answer is “Guernica”. And also “Andy Warhol”.

Today is 4 July. My Mom died early in the morning on the 4th a few years ago. Dad died a couple years prior on the Summer Solstice. I toast my Dad when I can with a shot of Scotch. He drank “King William”, a low-price brand recommended by that paragon of fine food and beverages, Consumer Reports. I usually try for a snifter of Laiphroig with just a few mils of water to release the nonpolar aromatics. Dad was Dad. And good Scotch is good Scotch.

Mom drank chardonnay, better chardonnay after Dad quit drinking (total alcohol budget then going into decent wine). For a while as she aged she stretched her tolerance with spritzers, cutting the wine with seltzer and spicing it with a sliver of lemon. In her last years she turned back to full-strength chardonnay. Not much of it, but it didn’t take much by then.

I bring this up because in the course of my ritual remembrance, I recalled an argument I had with my father when I was in high school. I was addicted to the first Velvet Underground album, the one with the Warhol “peel and see” banana skin on the cover. There was some glitch in the distribution, and I had to bug the guys in the Sam Goody at the Willowbrook Mall for weeks to get a copy.

One night, Dad stayed up a little too late and walked into the communal living room in the middle of the instrumental breakdown on European Son.

Pretty much freaked him out. Got into a long, Lewis Black-style rant about “music”, and “art”, and “beauty”. “Art” was only “art” when it aspired to beauty, “music” was only “music” when it aspired to same, ergo European Son, and by extension the entire album, was neither “music” nor “art”. Dammit. “Art” is beautiful. If it’s not beautiful it’s not “art”. Dammit.

Now. My parents did a pretty good job of giving us a well-rounded education, taking advantage of proximity to New York City to get us to museums, theaters, etc. At some point when I was younger, Picasso’s Guernica--or maybe it was one of the preliminary studies--was in the Museum of Modern Art. We made a special trip to see it, and on the way received a brief parental introduction to the Spanish Civil War, the fact that Nazi Germany got to try out their newly rebuilt avian technology, and the growth of fascism in the decades between World War 1 and World War 2 as plinth on which the devastation of the latter was constructed.

Guernica.







So, while Dad ranted and raged, I knew I had the argument won. He paused for breath. I said “Guernica”. He said “what?” “Guernica. It’s a horrific vision of hell on earth under bombardment. On canvas. As in “art”” Dad’s rant was derailed momentarily until he found himself a sliver of daylight. Guernica wasn’t “art”, it was “reporting”. When reality is so ugly, “artists” become “journalists”.

Even as a dim high school student I knew this was complete bullshit and even better I knew that Dad knew it was complete bullshit. As he stomped back to his room, I left him with a parting blast. I said “Oh, and don’t forget Heironymus Bosch”. I could hear him muttering as he headed down the hall.

Example of Hieronymus Bosch
in action. They get way less
“beautiful” than this, depending
on how deep you dig into his oeuvre
(as we art Qurittiques like to
think of it).










The next day, Mom made Dad apologize and acknowledge that I was right and that “art” didn’t have to deal with “beauty” to be “art”. I think she hit him with “The Dying Gaul” and Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, which had also recently toured (the Met this time, I think) and which we had also seen. I could see Dad wasn’t really convinced, but he couldn’t find a way out of the conceptual Hav-a-Hart trap he’d set for himself.

The Dying Gaul.

Michelangelo’s Pieta.















I recalled all this because I’ve been studying the conceptual foundations of piano tuning. A number of interesting and not-too-technical books on this subject are available.

Selection of books presenting
the problems and solutions of
western musical tuning.












Oddly, the physics and mathematics of the western system of music (which is generally restricted to certain whole and half tones repeated over octaves) do not allow simple, proportional tuning of fixed-note keyboards. Specifically, by the time you tune from middle C to the highest C (which is not the highest note, for no very good reason that I can discern a couple of notes above C end the customary keyboard configuration), you end up with an error of about a quarter of a minor second (i.e. a quarter of a half tone). Which is not much, but it’s plenty for trained musicians to hear, and even, if they are paying attention, people with good hearing even if not musically inclined.

In her book The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament, Anita T. Sullivan discusses various approaches to dealing with the mathematical overrun in piano tuning. When I read this passage: “Art has to do with beauty”, I could feel myself starting to yell “Guernica!” “Heironymous Bosch!”  “The Dying Gaul!” “The Pieta!”

Oh well. Maybe Sullivan has a kid who will sort her out at some point.

And, come to think of it, if “art” is about “beauty”, what are we to make of Warhol’s work, including my favorite, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips (which is usually on display at the Hirschorn in D.C.)? Take this, Dad--”Marilyn Monroe’s Lips!”

Marilyn Monroe’s Lips.