Carl Belz, my kind of thinker (Photo: www.berkshirefinearts.com) How do we currently write current art’s history? How, given its elastic chronology and ever-widening geographic reach, its self-consciously elusive look, the multiple urges and identities and media it comprises? How, in the absence of a canon of artists around whom a history might be structured, its […]
Aesthetics
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Going with Surprise
My daughter Kellin, clamming at Duxbury Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. —Robert Rubin, In an Uncertain World Susan Cain used this quote at the start of one of her chapters in the very engaging Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. I am […]
Wise Ones
George Saunders (Photo: The Guardian) Is it just my bias or is it truly hard to find an artist who is a gifted creator and also wise? Another personal bias (since we’re divulging these proclivities): It is my experience that wisdom comes from those who have figured out how to get out beyond the distracting […]
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Seeing as Making
David Esterly* studied philosophy at Harvard and Cambridge before the trajectory of his life changed and he became a professional limewood carver. In his book, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, Esterly describes a challenging year at Hampton Court where he had been hired—an American no less—to repair the fire-damaged wood […]
Art and Meaning, Price-wise
Venus, by Ken Price I have had many exchanges over the years with other artists about the issue of meaning in art. It’s a topic that is continental in size and comes with a similar geographic diversity. Like large land masses, meaning can accommodate the needs of the “meaning is everything” crowd as well as […]
Subliming Vessel: Matthew Barney at the Morgan Library
Matthew Barney (Photo: Private collection, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels) The Cremaster by Matthew Barney, a five part film cycle, was shown repeatedly during a retrospective of Barney’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in 2003. I drove down from Boston three times to see it and dragged my friends, […]
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Epic Out, Epic In
Rama Burshtein, the Israeli director of “Fill the Void,” at right on the film set. (Photo: Vered Adir/Sony Picture Classics) Some art forms favor expansion. Those are the ones that ask—require?—you to untether yourself and be taken outward, into a nimbus that exists beyond the quotidian of terrestrial constraints. The epic experience in art is […]
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De Out and De In: Selected Passages from the Price Show Catalog
The Ken Price show catalog, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, is full of gems. Here are a few: Price tended to progress in loose series. “It’s the most enjoyable way to work. It’s a lot more satisfying than taking a single piece to completion before you begin the next one…You get a lot more feedback, […]
Price in Perfection
Every once in a while you encounter a show that feels, well, perfect. Where the work is exquisite and the container for presenting it is up to the job. This doesn’t happen frequently but it did on Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum’s installation of work by Ken Price. I was so moved by this exhibit […]
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Adventures in the Impossible
Songwriter Bob Russell ( “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, among many others) wrote these lyrics for Billie Holiday back in the 1940s: The difficult I’ll do right now The impossible will take a little while. The second line was the inspiration for the title of one of my favorite books, The Impossible Will Take […]