Open and ready: Art smart guy Jerry Saltz I am off to New York City for a couple of days and will return to Boston on Friday. In the meantime here’s just about the best message I’ve received in a long time. This wisdom came to me from Jerry Saltz, someone I hold in the […]
Aesthetics
- Aesthetics
- ...
A Week’s Worth of Responses to Smith’s “Post-Minimal to the Max”
Terry Winters, Freeunion (Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery) Winters was highlighted as one of Carol Diehl’s favorite “overlooked” artists. He’s on my list too. Over the week since Roberta Smith published her article, Post-Minimal to the Max in the Sunday Times (I wrote about it here) the floodgates opened. Do a search and you will find […]
Cézanne: A Multiplicity of Successively Probed Sensations
Apples and Oranges, by Paul Cézanne (Photo: Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer sat for several years on my bookshelf (the one that is, unfortunately, gravitationally challenged and is sagging precariously) waiting for its chance to get cracked open. That finally happened during those luxurious, divinely isolated hours […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Inner and Outer
The Crossing, video/sound installation by Bill Viola (Photo: Kira Perov) One of the added pleasures of the MOCA Los Angeles show (reference to this is in the blog below) was the quotes from artists that accompanied their works. Many are worth sharing and are compelling even without the specific context of the work on display. […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Reporting in on the Other Coast
View of the Pacific Ocean from Marin County, with the Farallon Islands in the distance How does it work, those mysterious tendrils that some part of us knows how to sprout, rooting us to the places that feel hospitable, that feel like our native habitat? I spent my childhood in California but expatriated to the […]
Jones on Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst Gotta love Jonathan Jones at the Guardian. He’s calling it as he sees it. Bad art is ugly art, in the end. Whatever language we might prefer to use, it all comes down to beauty and ugliness. Hirst’s ideas seemed to me once to possess an intellectual and emotional beauty – and their […]
Keeping it Experimental. And Fun.
(Photo: Horace Ové) It has been several years since Rudy Giuliani catapulted English/African artist Chris Ofili into this country’s art adversarial conversation by trying to have Ofili’s work taken out of public view. It was the elephant dung on the Madonna painting. And of course the magazine images of female genitilia flying about like delicate […]
Finding (and Keeping) the Mind of a Child
“My Hands Are My Heart,” by Gabriel Orozco (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) The Gabriel Orozco show at the MOMA has disappointed more critics than it has pleased. Orozco now is, after all, an international jet setter art star (who, as Deborah Sontag pointed out in her review in the New York Times, can afford […]
Fashion as Metaphor
“The world of fashion. I’m interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like any other industry, like the movies for example?” I resonate with these words from Wim Wenders’ unforgettable film, Notebooks on Cities […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Creativity 2.0
Margaret Kilgallen at work A provocative article on Slate reviews Jaron Lanier’s latest book, You are Not a Gadget. Written by Slate senior editor Michael Agger, the essay digs into many of Lanier’s ideas and just says No. Lanier, one of the leaders in the early days of virtual reality and an respected Wired alum, […]