May 2012
2 posts
April 2012
4 posts
March 2012
1 post
February 2012
1 post
December 2011
3 posts
November 2011
3 posts
In 1996, Robert Adams sends a letter to the New York Times Magazine. “I have simpler advice than that offered by the decorators who were asked (in “Style,” June 16) how to use Damien Hirst’s ‘sculpture’ consisting of a real pig sliced in half: don’t buy it, don’t go to see it, and don’t write about it.” The letter is not published.
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2 tags
Yes, I was horrified to wake up to the coordinated police crackdowns on OWS. But I also think Bloomberg released the movement from a trap last night. The long-term occupation of Zuccotti made OWS what it is while becoming a liability, a weak spot vulnerable to distractions like a splinter faction of drummers, vagrants from Rikers dropped off by the police, the police themselves. Why get sucked...
Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.
-Walker Evans, “Collectors Items,” Mademoiselle, May 1963.
August 2011
1 post
“When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.
-Borges, “The Immortals”
Reading the postscript of Borges’ “The Immortals,” which suggests the entire story...
July 2011
1 post
Guy Davenport’s 1978 essay on literary anecdote, “Seeing Shelley Plain,” draws from Davenport’s extensive knowledge of the genre and his own contributions to it - for example, the time he assisted in extinguishing Sartre’s jacket pocket (“Monsieur, vous brûlez”). Rereading the essay last week, I ground to a halt, laughed disbelievingly, and texted Nozlee...
May 2011
3 posts
God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels...
In many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species.
-David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not...
March 2011
3 posts
I love to write, and not speak, and when I write it’s by hand, not on a typewriter. Several factors contribute to this choice. First there is a refusal: my body refuses to speak out loud to … nobody. Unless I’m certain that another body is listening to me, my voice gets stuck, I can’t get it out. If, in a conversation, I notice that that somebody isn’t listening to me, I stop speaking, and...
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I though it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and...
To dismiss the category “art” as parochial, romantic, Orientalist or intellectually bankrupt may lead us into another rut that is equally parochial, romantic, Orientalist, or intellectually bankrupt.
-Open Mouths, Bound Arms, Hollow Fingers by Kelly Presutti in the Art History Newsletter
cf. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. The modern system of the arts, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12,...
January 2011
1 post
Many, perhaps most of us, tend to connect art with the past. Faced with the art of our own time we become unsure: every thing important seems to have been done, the vocabulary of art exhausted, and attempts to develop new vocabularies more interesting than convincing. Ours tends to be an autumnal view of art. The association of art and museum has come to replace such older associations as art...
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
2 posts
It is essential to making an aesthetic judgment that at some point we be prepared to say in its support: don’t you see, don’t you hear, don’t you dig? The best critic will know the best points. Because if you do not see something, without explanation, then there is nothing further to discuss. Which does not mean that the critic has no recourse: he can start training and...
August 2010
4 posts
My point here is that there are issues worth advancing in images that are worth admiring - that the truth is never plain nor appearances sincere. To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that images are always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial....
July 2010
4 posts
The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.
The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.
They just fill your head with...
June 2010
3 posts
Science fiction as frustrated eschatology - The Future as a religious idea that became a technological one.
(photo via sfreviews.com)
Little Platoon
Recently saw Philippe de Montebello, Richard Feigen, and Laurence Kanter (director of the Yale gallery) on a panel together. Much grandstanding all around. Feigen, a collector, made self-consciously controversial pronouncements about connoisseurship in a chummy little-platoon tone that Montebello sagely (savagely) mocked. Those moments were an entertaining diversion from the main point reiterated...
1 tag
Philip Glass
Saw Philip Glass perform yesterday. The Etudes in particular stop rather than end, like modernist poetry. Similarly, the avoidance of climax and familiar musical sentiments. The modern reticence. Yet his technique can so quickly become a rote cliche or idle ambiance.
(Photo via artnet.com)
April 2010
2 posts
March 2010
5 posts
