By LAURA JACOBS

New York

‘There’s nothing traditional left in Murcia—no earrings or jewelry . . . everything is lost, nothing remains, not even a simple cap I’d hoped to find.” So wrote the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, in 1918, to his wife, Clotilde. He was traveling through Spain doing studies for the kind of commission that is an artist’s dream. Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, had asked Sorolla for a cycle of mural-size paintings representing the customs and dress of Spain’s 11 regions. Begun in 1911 and completed in 1919, the majestic, 14-panel “Vision of Spain” would be the climax of Sorolla’s career. His plaintive cri de coeur—“everything is lost”—suggests just how far-reaching and detailed his vision was. It’s an old story, this search for the vivid imprints of one’s early years. “You have to go deep into the countryside,” Sorolla wrote Clotilde.

And deep into the countryside is where “Joaquin Sorolla & the Glory of Spanish Dress,” at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, takes us. Curated by Vogue’s André Leon Talley, the show was conceived by the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who initiated the Institute’s acclaimed exhibition of last year, “Balenciaga: Spanish Master.” That exhibition demonstrated the ways in which Spain’s sartorial inheritance—the matador’s embroidered bolero, the flounces of Flamenco, the lace veils of Catholicism, the stark outerwear of shepherds—had been absorbed and abstracted into Cristóbal Balenciaga’s masterly and vastly influential Paris couture. From the 1940s to the 1960s, many a socialite’s cocktail dress was actually the silhouette of a Spanish goatherd or a Jeronymite nun, ineffably transmuted.

Bohórquez Domecq, S.L./Craig McDean/Art + Commerce

A traje de luces, or ‘suit of lights,’ from the 1950s-60s by Fermín that was once worn by the matador Antonio Ordóñez.

In this current exhibit, however, transmutation is beside the point. Going from Seville to Navarre to Castille, and so on, painting life-size studies as he went, Sorolla was all the time looking for traditional clothing, ceremonial costumes, the history-laden styles and jewelry unique to each region. He wanted to get the details exactly right, and when he found these pieces he often bought them. For the first time ever, Sorolla’s purchases are set side by side here with his painted studies. The resulting connection, as ethnographic as it is aesthetic, is captivating.

From the moment one enters the show, the relationship between form and function comes into play. So many pleats: pin pleats, cartridge pleats and gathers so fine that they read as pleats. This means volume: swaths of fabric pleating up at the neck, or over the bust, thus creating bell-shapes, tents, private homes for the body. Yes, there are corseted shapes in this exhibit, but more mysterious are the brooding, woolen capes and shrouds, which are protective, asexual—rooms, so to speak, of one’s own.

Then there is the surface embellishment—exuberant, zealous, over-the-top. It’s as if Spain is the life of the party, a land of ribbons and bows, cockades and tassels, fringe and lace, not to mention pompoms. One is struck by the correspondence between the ornate gold bullion that ornaments Spanish statues of the Virgin Mary and the same bullion that adorns the matador’s traje de luces (“suit of lights”). Feminine-masculine. Spiritual-corporeal. Where the silhouette of the Virgin is an upside-down V, rooting her to earth, the slim-hipped, broad-shouldered bullfighter is an upright V, opening to the sun and sky. What might this say to us? That the shoulders of men may uphold heaven, but the hemline of heaven brushes the earth. Indeed, the V is a triangle and in this exhibit there are triangular shapes everywhere. The Holy Trinity, it seems, is intrinsic to the metaphorical landscape of Spain.

Museo Sorolla, Madrid

‘Flamenco Dancer’ (1914) by Joaqín Sorolla

Up on the third floor of the exhibition, a panorama of recent haute couture influenced by Spanish dress calls us back to our own hunger for relevance. The most splendid of these is the wedding dress from Christian Lacroix’s final show, in 2009, which takes its inspiration from those festooned statues of the Virgin that are carried aloft through the streets of Spain. I’m not sure how many present-day brides arrive at the altar as virgins, but I don’t doubt that most feel they’re levitating in their dresses. That Mr. Lacroix chose to make this dress the last image of his farewell show attests to the power of Spain’s place as a fount of visual epiphanies.

For me, the most compelling piece in the exhibition is simpler. Downstairs, a fisherman’s shirt from the Basque country is on display. Sorolla bought it in 1912, a loose pullover made of unbleached white wool, its open neckline trimmed with black piping. The shirt had been patched with so many squares and rectangles of white wool that today it suggests Cubism in soft focus—a modern work of art. It expresses austerity, and yet that wool, the color of broken bread, makes one think of the loaves and fishes, the feeding of the multitudes, and this country’s abiding belief in miracles.

Ms. Jacobs is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she has written extensively on fashion history.

By ANNE MARIE CHAKER

Diamond Spas

A copper Japanese-style tub from Diamond Spas, with an $11,642 price tag.

The Swedish sauna, Turkish bath and Russian banya have some new competition in U.S. bathrooms: the Japanese ofuro.

Manufacturers are adapting the extra-deep soaking tub, used in Japan for a relaxing, meditative up-to-the-neck soak, for the U.S. market.

The U.S. arm of German bathroom-furnishings maker Duravit AG offers an extra-deep Japanese-inspired bath in its ‘Onto’ collection of wood-paneled bathroom sinks and vanities, designed by an Italian architect. “You have to get in it like you’re getting on a motorcycle,” says Tim Schroeder, president of the U.S. unit. “It’s a different kind of proposition” than Americans are used to. Sales of the tubs—which start at $1,500 and can climb up to $5,600—are 15% higher than expected, he says.

Requests for custom-made Japanese baths have grown as much as 30% a year over the past three years, according to Diamond Spas Inc., a Frederick, Colo., manufacturer. Prices run from $5,500 for a one-person, stainless-steel model to as much as $17,000 for a two-person copper model with accouterments including seats, a built-in heater, air jets and “mood lighting,” says marketing manager Krista Payne.

“Everyone is trying to make their bathrooms their little getaway now,” Ms. Payne says. “You see Asian influence in clean and simple lines.”

Kohler last year released the Japanese-inspired Underscore Cube. The dimensions—48 inches long, 48 inches wide and 34 inches high—suit the clean, contemporary designs that are currently popular, says Diana Schrage, a Kohler interior designer. Prices can reach as high as $5,479 with extras like a “vibracoustic” system, which plays music that bathers hear and experience as pleasant vibrations in the water.

Such bathroom bling is a far cry from the baths of traditional Japanese culture. In Japan, a person will have taken a cleansing shower, using a shower nearby, before entering the ofuro. “It’s a cherished act, to be able to sit in the bath and do nothing,” says Merry White, a professor of anthropology specializing in Japanese culture at Boston University. Family members typically take turns at an already-filled bath kept warm with a lid. In the U.S., bath water is normally slightly warmer than body temperature, which is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In Japan, baths are much warmer than that, she says.

Kohler

Kohler’s Underscore Cube

The depth and temperature make the Japanese-style bath “unbelievably comfortable,” Prof. White says.

A Japanese-style tub concentrates water on a smaller footprint than an American tub, leading some homeowners to consider them only for ground level or below. Tub makers say a contractor should determine if structural reinforcements are required if installed on upper floors.

Ford Brown, 48 and a Boulder, Colo., veterinarian, was looking for a smaller tub in order to make room for a linen closet in his bathroom. He stumbled upon a compact Japanese soaking tub, which he says has transformed him from a morning-shower person to a nightly-bath taker—sometimes enjoyed alone or sometimes with his fiancée. The copper tub boasts air jets and a faucet that pours water from the ceiling—at a cost of about $10,000. “We’ve made an evening ritual out of it,” he says.

Write to Anne Marie Chaker at anne-marie.chaker@wsj.com

The obituaries for Hilton Kramer, the celebrated art critic who died last month, all made prominent mention of his devastatingly terse appraisals of those artists and institutions whose work he found wanting. It was Mr. Kramer, for instance, who dismissed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibitions as “funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap.” But he was no less admired, if far less well known, for his powers as an advocate. Like all great critics, he knew how to praise, and his paeans to such underappreciated American modernists as Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery (whose later canvases he ranked “among the greatest paintings ever produced by an American artist”) did much to make their work more widely known.

Why, then, was this aspect of Mr. Kramer’s long career overlooked when he died? Because bad reviews always make a bigger splash than good ones. And why should this be so? Because critics tend as a general rule to do their most memorable writing about works of art that they dislike. In the words of Anton Ego, the haughty restaurant reviewer in Brad Bird’s film “Ratatouille,” they “thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”

So it is—but as any critic can tell you, it’s also harder to praise than to pan. The reason for this is that the language of abuse is vastly more vivid than the language of praise. Evelyn Waugh, who in addition to being a great novelist was a superb book reviewer, neatly summed up this problem in a 1937 essay: “There are infinite gradations of blame, a thousand fresh and pungent metaphors for detraction, the epithets of dissatisfaction seem never to stale…but the moment one finds a work which genuinely impresses and delights, there seems no article of expression other than the clichés that grin at one from every publisher’s advertisement.”

Above all, it’s inordinately difficult to use humor to praise a good work of art, whereas nothing is easier than to crack jokes about a bad one. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan was, like Mr. Kramer, a passionate enthusiast, yet it is his pans that people quote to this day, and the lines that get quoted are invariably the funny ones—very often, to be sure, because their wit is wrapped around a hard core of truth. When Mr. Tynan described T.S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion” as a “has-been, would-be masterpiece,” or wrote in a review of “Antony and Cleopatra” that Vivien Leigh “picks at the part [of Cleopatra] with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag,” you could hear the thunk of the arrow hitting the bull’s-eye.

What is easiest to do, alas, tends to get done rather more often than it should, and nothing is easier than to make fun of that which you don’t understand. The first issue of Time magazine, published in 1923, contained this review of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “To the uninitiated it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words—many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles—shaken them up in a colossal hat, laid them end to end.” A quarter-century later, an art critic for the New York World-Telegram opined that Jackson Pollock’s paintings “resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” One could easily put together an anthology of similarly uncomprehending reviews of modern masterpieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them sought to be funny at the expense of a work of art to whose originality the writer was unequal.

Once again, Anton Ego nails it: In “Ratatouille” he says that “the discovery and defense of the new” is the most valuable thing that a critic can do. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations,” he adds. “The new needs friends.” Of course it’s important for critics to explicate the permanent virtues of the classics—especially at a time when those virtues are disdained by the trendy. But the ability to spot new art of quality, and the courage to praise it in print, is an equally important part of what makes a critic great. For all the gleeful virtuosity with which he skewered the second-rate, Mr. Tynan’s claim to fame rests no less securely on the reviews in which he hailed the London premieres of such now-celebrated plays as Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.”

I close with this instructive exchange from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Says Mr. Darcy: “The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.” To which the witty Elizabeth Bennet replies, “Certainly there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good.”

Me, neither—especially when it’s new.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every other Friday. He is the author of “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared April 13, 2012, on page D10 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Criticism Is No Laughing Matter.

Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. These are the tip of an iceberg of discoveries in the still largely mysterious field of “epigenetic” epidemiology—the alteration of gene expression in ways that affect later health.

According to standard theory, genes aren’t supposed to change, so you can pass them on to generations untainted by your own mistakes. It now seems they can at least acquire marks of experience during life, affecting how much they are “expressed.”

In one study, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt and colleagues at Duke University and King’s College London looked at sequences at the tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, in 2,200 Britons born in 1994-95 and followed since birth. These telomeres contain repetitive sequences of DNA code “letters.” The number of repeats shrinks during life in everybody, as a sort of clock for biological aging.

Studies had begun to suggest that psychosocial stress can speed up that clock by eroding telomeres more rapidly, though this research mostly relied on people’s recall of maltreatment. Then Stacy Drury and colleagues at Tulane University found shorter telomeres in children who stayed in Bucharest orphanages, compared with those in foster families.

The Duke scientists have measured the effect of exposure to bullying, beating or domestic violence between the mother and her partner on telomere length between the ages of 5 and 10. Because blood samples had been taken from the Britons throughout life, it was possible to compare telomere length before and after the violence was experienced. On average, the telomeres did shrink faster in those that experienced violence than in other children.

But in some individuals they actually grew longer, so the mystery of telomeres only deepens. The next step, Dr. Moffitt told me, is to assess subjects’ later health by measuring such things as memory changes, inflammation, immune function, even tooth decay. She adds: “So wish us luck!”

Another study, published earlier this year by Audrey Tyrka of Butler Hospital, Providence, R.I., and others found that the loss of a parent or maltreatment as a child resulted in greater “methylation” of some spots near a gene tied to stress response in adulthood. Methylation, the addition of a methyl group of atoms to one DNA “letter,” tends to reduce the activity of nearby genes. The implication of the Butler study is that adults who recall maltreatment as children may have reduced activity of a key gene in the system that responds to the stress hormone cortisol. This may be linked to increased anxiety or depression.

These are early days in the study of epigenetics. Scientists are like people finding coins under lampposts but not knowing how many coins remain in the dark. Although the “methylome”—a complete map of where methylation happens in the genome—is being talked of, others caution that we still have almost no idea of both the causes and effects of most such changes, let alone other epigenetic effects like histone modification.

But supposing it does become possible to link bad early experience with bad later health, what then? Epigenetics demolishes the old—and always misleading—distinction between deterministic genes and a manipulable environment. To have your fate determined by your early experiences is not much different from having it determined by your genes, and when experience acts by changing genes, the distinction vanishes.

Yet fortunately, given medical advances, genetic determinism is not necessarily a life sentence, as those who wear glasses for shortsightedness or take growth hormone for growth problems can attest. The same will almost certainly be true for epigenetic determinism: Understanding the mechanism should bring forward possible cures.

The concept of a car that drives itself is thrilling to some, disquieting to others. But it’s no longer preposterous.

By the middle years of this decade, several auto makers could offer technology to make vehicles capable of piloting themselves under certain conditions without the direct participation of the driver.

Joe White on Lunch Break points out a few things to know about how car makers could take more of the task of driving out of a motorist’s hands. Photo: Mike Sudal.

The auto industry has intensified its research on how to link cruise control, steering, brakes and the cameras and sensors used for collision-avoidance systems into an integrated system able to guide a car safely.

Cars that can “see” the road, sense potential dangers and steer, brake and control speed automatically could ease the drudgery of stop-and-go traffic or long drives, and prevent many accidents caused by drowsy, inattentive or impaired drivers. But that optimistic view would sour if consumers came to distrust the technology’s reliability, or suspect that the real goal is to give control of their car to someone else, such as a government agency.

The autonomous car idea got a boost in 2010 when Google Inc. disclosed its effort to perfect the technology. Google’s fleet of about eight cars uses sophisticated sensors and the company’s mapping data to locate the car precisely and plot a route.

“We want to improve the quality of driving,” says Anthony Levandowski, the project manager for Google’s self-driving-car effort. Still, Google doesn’t yet know exactly “what the business model is for a return on investment,” he says.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration officials have shown interest in autonomous-driving technology and the agency is planning research to better understand the potential safety benefits. Nevada has passed a law allowing autonomous vehicles to operate on its roads, and California is considering similar legislation.

Here are five things to know about the self-driving car phenomenon:

Safety Is Just One Goal

Proponents of autonomous-car technology say that, once perfected, it will be safer and less error-prone than human drivers, and will help reduce the more than one million deaths each year world-wide related to auto wrecks.

As car makers have equipped vehicles with air bags, stability-control systems, computer-assisted antiskid brakes and more crashworthy body designs, traffic-safety regulators have shifted their focus to driver behavior—and various ways to control it. Among the risks of trying to minimize the driver’s role are that motorists will reject the technology.

Autonomous-driving backers cite other benefits. “If you free an hour of commuting time, that’s productivity,” says Nady Boules, director of the electronics and controls integration lab in General Motors Co.’s research and development department.

Google executives have talked about autonomous cars as a way to encourage car sharing, since a user could quickly and easily summon one.

Building on What’s Out There

Auto-industry officials say they will take a measured approach to introducing autonomous driving to the mass market, building on technology that’s already available and familiar.

GM’s Cadillac brand has demonstrated a feature called “Super Cruise,” which would allow a vehicle to drive itself on a highway, automatically adjusting speed, staying in a lane and avoiding other cars. That technology is still in testing, but the brand will offer models this year equipped with “driver-assist” features, such as “full range adaptive cruise control” that will slow the car to a stop if a vehicle ahead stops.

Christian Schumacher, director of engineering systems and technology for Continental AG’s North American automotive unit, says his company is working on a system it calls “Traffic Jam Assist” that would link the car’s cruise control, lane-keeping system, steering and brakes to allow the car to pilot itself at speeds below about 35 miles per hour.

Google’s approach is different, says Mr. Levandowski. “If you had the ability to invent a car from scratch today,” he says, “you would probably design it differently.” Proving the reliability of a fully autonomous system is Google’s main goal, he says.

Trust is Critical

Building a car that can drive itself won’t be enough, engineers say. The bigger challenge will be getting consumers to trust the technology.

“Are we going to let computers run our lives, and especially our cars?” Ford Motor Co. engineer Jim McBride asked, taking the point of view of customers during a discussion of robotic driving earlier this month at the University of Michigan.

Mr. McBride said customers have come to accept some driver-assistance features that effectively put computers in charge.

But he noted that human drivers, on average, will travel 70 million miles before being involved in a fatal car wreck. That’s a challenging reliability target for self-driving car systems. Google’s cars so far have logged about 200,000 miles.

Technology Isn’t the Obstacle

Liability concerns “could be an incredible barrier” to autonomous cars, says Gary Marchant, a law professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. By offering a fully self-driving car, auto makers could be assuming the risks if—or when—one of the cars gets in a serious accident.

Among the possible solutions, he says, would be legislation shielding auto makers from state liability claims, or arrangements in which car makers pay more for liability insurance, passing on the costs to car buyers with the understanding that insurers will charge them less because their self-driving cars are safer.

Dorothy Glancy a law professor at Santa Clara University in California, says legal complications make it unlikely that self-driving cars could provide independent mobility for people whose disabilities make it impossible for them to drive now. “It’s kind of an illusion that they’ll be able to drive themselves by themselves to a doctor appointment,” she says.

Saving the Romance of the Road

If every car is a pod that guides itself from Point A to Point B at a predetermined speed, on a set route, fewer people might feel the emotional tug required to spend $70,000 on a high performance luxury sedan. That’s not what car makers want.

“A car is not an appliance,” says Don Butler, vice president of Cadillac marketing. “We are not just a node in the network. I want people to enjoy the vehicle.”

Filip Brabec, product-planning manager for Audi’s U.S. operation, says the purpose of self-driving technology is to relieve the driver of mundane tasks. He says the company is working on systems that could automate driving in slow traffic, including systems that can read traffic signs. Half of the buyers of its A8 sedan already order a package of systems including radar-enabled cruise control and brakes that engage when the car senses a coming collision.

“Then, when you want to have fun and drive,” he says, “we want you to be able to drive the car.”

Write to Joseph B. White at joseph.white@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 18, 2012, on page D3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: But Can It Find the Perfect Parking Spot, Too?.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Brookline, Mass.

More than 40 years since she published her first short story, Edith Pearlman has finally been discovered by America’s literary establishment. Long admired by her peers (she has earned three O. Henry Awards as well as three appearances in the annual “Best American Short Stories”), this “national treasure” (to quote the writer Ann Patchett) has lately enjoyed the sort of recognition that seldom comes to obscure authors late in life, much less to those not backed by New York’s major publishing houses.

Last year, as if atoning for previous obtuseness, judges of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award nominated Ms. Pearlman’s collection of new and selected stories, “Binocular Vision,” as a finalist. Published by Lookout Books of North Carolina, it was the only work in the fiction category to merit that dual distinction.

“It’s like a bit of whipped cream,” Ms. Pearlman says in a tone that wants to acknowledge an honor without appearing too eager for it. “I was quite satisfied with my creative life. I’ve always had reinforcement from a small but devoted readership. This has been nice because it was so unexpected.”

Seated in the living room of her sunny apartment here, tea and cake on the glass coffee table, she is dressed in a black pantsuit. A silver necklace sets off her cropped silver hair. Like her prose, she is elegant, trim, opinionated and witty. Her husband, Chester Pearlman, a retired psychiatrist, can be heard faintly in another room practicing his viola da gamba.

Ms. Pearlman often writes about well-educated, middle-class Jewish men, women and children living in or around Boston, and she embodies all of those qualities. Like one of her heroes, John Updike, she has invented a New England suburb (his was Tarbox, hers is Godolphin) as a setting for characters.

But it would be unfair to typecast her as a regionalist, an ethnic or women’s author, or even a realist. What people do for a living matters in a number of her stories only as a reference point for action that darts off in unexpected and sometimes fantastical directions.

Only the title story of her collection, about a little girl spying on her neighbors, can be called autobiographical. (“The last scene”—in which the mother instructs the daughter about the covert world of adults—”is taken directly from life,” she admits.) Neither her Jewish female minister of health for an unnamed Latin American country (“Vaquita”), nor the couple setting up toy factories for a U.S. conglomerate in Europe (“Toy Folk”), nor her Polish refugee helping to relocate displaced European Jews around England during the Blitz (“If Love Were All”) have any basis in lived experience. Anecdotes from her large circle of friends, or news items, are often the stimulus for her imagination.

“I have a story coming out in which a woman turns into a butterfly,” she says. “Those sorts of surrealist things will be happening more often. I do like the inexplicable.”

Ms. Pearlman’s own metamorphosis as a writer has been steady, if prolonged. At Radcliffe College (English major, class of 1957), she studied with the novelist John Hawkes and wrote a story or two. There was a detour after graduation. Needing to support herself, she worked for 10 years as a computer programmer for an IBM subsidiary in Boston.

But despite her accomplishments in this emerging field, the desire to tell stories did not desert her. With prize money won in 1958 on the quiz show “Tic-Tac-Dough”, she took six months off to write. When she quit her job in 1967 to marry, her husband had an unusual proposition: He would pay her a small salary in exchange for her maintaining the house and raising their children. (They have two.) Her productivity began thereafter in earnest and has not ceased. The published Edith Pearlman catalog now numbers more than 150 stories and four volumes.

Except for a mystery abandoned many decades ago, she has never essayed a novel. Several acclaimed writers are in her opinion much better when forced into shorter forms (“A.S. Byatt should publish only stories”). She blames technology for the verbosity of contemporary fiction.

“I think the computer is a hindrance to good writing because it is so tempting to leave what you’ve written,” she argues. “If you use a typewriter”—as she does—”you must retype if you make a mistake and thus you must re-examine every word.” Her own work is a model of excision. The title story of “Binocular Vision” turns on three words of offhand dialogue.

Each of her efforts takes three or four drafts, and “very little of that first draft will appear in the final draft.” She takes away everything that she can until she finds “the statue in the slab.”

The stereotypical topics of women’s fiction—passion, impossible men, nurturing female friendship—don’t appear much in Ms. Pearlman’s work. “I have a skepticism toward romance,” she says. “I believe that decency and companionship are in the long run more important in life.”

Although the Holocaust looms in the background of many stories, the political is subsumed by the personal in the lives of her characters. Whatever oppression they suffer from commonly derives from misplaced expectations.

“I know a lot of single people who are not miserable, as society tells them they’re supposed to be. Celibates, like smokers, are pariahs. No one is going to bat for the celibates. I’ve taken on that cause.”

Her penchant for brevity has made her fastidious about her craft. Over a meal at a nearby Indian restaurant she offers her strong views on punctuation.

“I love the ellipsis at the end of a line or paragraph to indicate what is happening next is more or less simultaneous with what has just happened,” she says between bites. Fond of the semicolon (“I overdo them”), she also wishes the question mark had “a younger sister.” The phrases “doesn’t it” and “shouldn’t we” are not true questions to her ear. “I use a period for the right intonation.”

A large circle of fellow writers in the Boston area has sustained her for years. She belongs to an essay-writing group and has a “writing partner,” Rose Bloom, to whom she shows everything, and vice versa.

Like her characters, Ms. Pearlman has lively intellectual pursuits. She has studied Japanese for more than a decade and at the age of 60 moved to Jerusalem for a year to learn Hebrew. With her husband she regularly attends early-music concerts. Their son and grandson live a few miles away, in their former home.

When I ask if I may mention when she was born, she laughs. “My age is 75,” she says. “Everybody knows. It’s always mentioned, and it’s where people get things wrong. They say, ‘Here she is, 75, she’s been trying so hard to be noticed all these years.’ Well, I think I had success before, and I wasn’t looking for anything more.”

Whether we should believe her or not, she has ascended to a new plane of renown and deserves to be there.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared March 1, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Butterflies and Pariahs.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Future retrospectives honoring Mike Kelley, who died last week at the age of 57, reportedly a suicide, will be tricky to organize and assess. A Los Angeles artist who gave that city’s art establishment a bursting sense of pride for having nurtured such an obstreperous talent, he earned his celebrity status in part by retaining the obsessions and wounds of a smart Catholic working-class kid from the suburbs of Detroit who had never entirely assimilated to his sun-splashed California home. It’s hard to imagine any museum containing enough jagged parts of his legacy, and in the right proportions, to please the majority of his hard-core fans.

Should curators devote more space to his sprawling crypto-autobiographic video and sculpture installations of recent years? Or to his musical career, begun while a University of Michigan student and never abandoned, as a member of the Dada/glam-rock/free-jazz/heavy-metal/punk band Destroy All Monsters? (He seemed to give equal weight to both expressions of his personality.)

His most identifiable body of work (late 1980s to early ’90s) are the thrift-store stuffed animals that he placed on blankets in the middle of gallery floors. Their air of soiled hopes and cheerful failure became central to the critical movement of “pathetic” or “abject” art. But how should the icky pungency of these pieces be balanced against his later wish to distance himself from their popularity? “I was viewed as an infantilist, possibly a pedophile, or victim of abuse myself,” he complained in a 1996 essay.

Furthermore, how should museums handle an artist whose stance was one of perpetual irreverence? (The tendency is to overcompensate and treat every piece of ephemera with undue reverence.) Kelley’s standing as an anticorporate subversive was already open to doubt in 2005 when he left his longtime dealers for the Gagosian Gallery. How his art’s authority as a disrupter of artistic norms survives the burnishment his works will now receive from the smoothest, most powerful art operation in the world will be something to watch.

What can’t be questioned is Kelley’s importance for scores of younger artists in the U.S. and Europe. His was often the name first mentioned in the early ’90s if you asked young art-school graduates around Los Angeles about figures they looked up to. The outpouring of emotion over his death can be gauged by the spontaneous (and messily Kelleylike) memorial that sprang up in a driveway near his home. As Catherine Wagley wrote in the L.A. Weekly, it looked as if it were put up “for those who came to L.A.’s art scene because he was a part of it.”

Kelley’s emergence in the ’90s helped change how the art world viewed Southern California art. With exceptions like the combative Edward Kienholz, its purveyors had tended to shun raw emotion in favor of light, clean, cool, easily readable images.

Kelley’s art was different. Even his name sounded as if it belonged to a scrappy Irish club fighter. Energy and content (often sexual and scatological) trumped finish and form, and he didn’t confine himself to any medium. He was cartoonist, performer, writer, sculptor, painter, video and film maker, and architect. Much of his work reeked of passive aggression. He dared you to hate it and pretended not to care.

“Much of his work reeked of passive aggression. He dared you to hate it and pretended not to care.”

Destroy All Monsters, the band he formed in the early 1970s with fellow artists Jim Shaw, Cary Loren and Niagra, was the seedbed for many of his ideas. Steeping themselves in surrealism, they reveled in Dadaist gestures and became connoisseurs of American weirdness. The collective functioned, in the words of one critic, as “a dorm-room version of Warhol’s Factory.” To call them musicians was a stretch. “We played one song: two lines from Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ repeated over and over against a wall of feedback,” Kelley said of an early concert at a comic-book convention. “We were thrown out.”

Kelley’s is in some ways a classic avant-garde story: Make art with and for like-minded friends, and the world will finally take note. His acceptance by the art world was relatively smooth. After moving to California and attending the California Institute of the Arts, where he had another band (the Poetics, with artists John Miller and Tony Oursler), he was having regular shows in prestigious New York and Los Angeles galleries before he was 30.

Kelley never lacked for honors. He was championed early on by the critic Ralph Rugoff, who helped carry his reputation to Europe and England. This month Kelley’s work will be featured at the Whitney Biennial for the eighth time. “Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites,” a mixed-media installation with stuffed animals from 1991-1999, sold in 2007 at Phillips in New York for $2.7 million.

But he may be an artist so identified with his own moment that his flame will gutter when individual pieces of larger enterprises are broken up and confined in permanent exhibitions. This is the context where deceased artists (without their own museums) have to compete to be noticed and live on, and it’s one reason painters have an advantage in art-history books. Perhaps the single iconic image Kelley produced was the knitted puppet on the album cover of Sonic Youth’s “Dirty.”

His vast project “Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008,” which had him drawing and building scale models of every space where he was taught anything—from his boyhood home in Wayne, Mich., to Cal Arts in Valencia, Calif.—never made emotional sense or had narrative coherence, at least not the parts I have seen. A video-sculpture installation about Burning Man, the annual psychedelic art trip in the desert, which I saw in 2010 at his studio, was ambitious but not memorable.

Will Kelley’s influence dissipate? Or is he like Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys, a protean figure who, for better or worse, will haunt the next half-century of artistic thought and practice?

YouTube has a charming 2010 video of Kelley from the series “What’s in Your Bag?,” which asks shoppers to describe their purchases. Unpacking the CDs, DVDs and books that he and his girlfriend bought on “a whore binge,” he discourses with affection on a poverty-row Bela Lugosi movie and a late Sun Ra record called “Nuclear War.” Kelley never lost his interest in the cut-rate products of American culture, work that for one reason or another ended up discounted and ignored. His art tried to make failure into the highest form of achievement. Capturing this paradox in art museums will be a difficult, and maybe impossible, challenge.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared February 8, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How Will the Future Judge Him?.