Smells like hell but taste like heaven, or as one writer aptly described the dual pleasure and pain of the durian fruit: “It’s like eating the most delicious custard out of a toilet bowl.” It’s something I think about frequently: What if you really dislike an artist—or a thinker—in their real life form but you […]
Art Making
- Aesthetics
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Bento Reimagined
The pleasures of making marks In writing Bento’s Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin?, John Berger has fashioned a book that is a hybrid cobbling of many facets of the his persona—memoirist, philosopher, art historian, artist, political essayist, cultural critic. Berger has a long history as a writer and a well recognized […]
- Aesthetics
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Timely Candor
Beck and Philip Glass in Los Angeles (Photo: Catherine Opie for The New York Times) The political campaign seasons that seize up our nation’s mindshare every four years have become a gladiator’s spectacle of showmanship and theatrics. The truth, whatever that may be, is not what anybody hears or expects from the political campaign process. […]
- Art Making
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Thanks for the Resonance
Happiness studies (Is that a legitimate category of research now? I think yes) have produced results that often surprise me and feel counterintuitive. One well known study from a few years ago found that happiness is not just the product of a proactive program of self help books and positive thinking. It also is impacted […]
Empowered, Innocent and Sometimes Lonely
Orhan Pamuk’s new book catalogs the objects in his Museum of Innocence.(Photo: Refik Anadol) Holly Brubach has written a compelling take on novelist Orhan Pamuk‘s latest book, The Innocence of Objects. This latest publication is a catalog of the contents of a museum Pamuk conceived in tandem with the writing of his last novel, The […]
- Aesthetics
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Whole Body Art
Close up view of one of my recent paintings A book I have referenced here before is From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual, by David Levi Strauss. (Previous posts referencing the book highlight artists Ursula von Rydingsvard and Donald Lipski.) Strauss writes in a way that his responses to a particular artist’s work […]
Riding the Continuum
Rhizom, by The Fundamental Group (Photo: The Fundamental Group) The Fundamental Group, an up and coming Berlin architecture and design studio started by Gunnar Rönsch and Stephen Molloy, was named after the concept from algebraic topology that describes complicated 3D surfaces. The Fundamental Group’s mathematically inspired approach to design would appear to be in opposition […]
Begin Again
John Cage, from “William Gedney Photographs and Writings” One of the most important books of my summer was about John Cage: Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson. (Read my initial post about the book here.) I have been a long time fan and admirer […]
- Art Making
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Field Work
The Sower, by Vincent Van Gogh My longtime readers are familiar with my view of an art making world that is so striated that the layers often never even touch each other. For the alien who arrives on earth wanting to crack the code on what is going on with these humans and contemporary art, […]
- Aesthetics
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Entrance
Wasp’s nest: Entrances abound, but are hidden Not Writing A wasp rises to its papery nest under the eaves where it daubs at the gray shape, but seems unable to enter its own house. –Jane Kenyon This poem is so succinct and so artfully constructed. Haven’t we all had that daubing frustration of madly circling […]