Temple site at Mahabalipuram, India Many of us have been discussing James Gleick’s recent piece in the New York Times, Books and Other Fetish Objects which addresses the digitization projects that will move historical documents into the cloud, available anywhere and by anyone. Gleick is a bit impatient with the sentimental attachment that some have […]
Aesthetics
- Aesthetics
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Unchained
Many of you have undoubtedly heard about the Chain Letter Show. The idea was a robust one—using the existing network of artists, create an international, artist-curated, pop up event at several locations around the world all at the same time. Ten artists were asked, and then they asked ten more, who then asked ten more. […]
Assessing the State of Visual Culture
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson, published in 2008, is one of the most evenhanded descriptions of the flamboyant, unpredictable, arcane—and at times, utterly exasperating—world of contemporary art. Thompson teaches marketing and economics and, refreshingly, doesn’t write from the point of view of someone who has been […]
Blank is Blank
Jerry Saltz in front of a piece by Takashi Murakami The last few months have been a period of burrowing down deep for me, of incubation and isolation. But now my show is up in Provincetown and a new body of work has emerged, I am back up on the surface again and getting re-acclimatized. […]
Eye R&R
My show opened last Friday, and the next morning I left for several days of giving my eyes a little R&R. Which really means letting them look without a job or a deadline. It was luscious, and they loved this little road trip. So what follows is (mostly) a visual diary of the last four […]
- Aesthetics
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Raccoons and Uncertainty
Markings on wood, from the African art collection at the Brooklyn Museum: Beautifully ambiguous Poems, poets and poetry provide a parallel universe that sometimes helps make a little more sense of my own huddled world of paintings, painters and art. A good example is this excerpt from an essay by Joel Brouwer that appeared on […]
Resonance is Real
Our minds and eyes are editing and practicing selective neglect on a daily basis, so what each of us sees creates our customized version of reality. One of the most stimulating aspects of traveling to a new venue is watching that process happen with fresh material. My visit to California was full of that selective […]
Scale it Up, Scale it Down
“System 4, Hummingbird”, by Richard Tuttle Notes from a few days in New York City: Richard Tuttle’s current show at Pace Gallery, What’s the Wind, consists of significantly larger scale works than his show at Sperone Westwater in June of 2007. (I wrote about it here.) Intimate and miniaturized, the wall pieces have now been […]
- Aesthetics
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Stella, He Da Man
The way I prepare for a show is to go into hermit mode: Sequester yourself in the art cave and don’t come out until the work is ready. That also means that most of the conversations I am having these days are with non-sentient beings (i.e., my paintings). It is in a small way like […]
The Art Healer
Melamid in front of his “Art Healing Ministry” An article from the New York Times provocatively titled Can a Picasso Cure You?, went viral as soon as it was published. References to it were appearing repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter all day. First of all, the title is just too delicious to not stop and […]