On the topic of the current state of art education, here are a few highlights from School is Out: Rethinking Art Education Today, in Modern Painters magazine. Steven Henry Madoff: In recent years the role of the art school has moved to a position of prominence, pushed there by the encroachments of an aggressive marketplace […]
Art Making
Learning Rumanian
DM, one of my favorite blogging buddies, is the voice behind the always thoughtful and provocative blog, Joe Felso:Ruminations. In a posting a few weeks back, he wrote about a book by Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. I ordered a copy without hesitating, after reading his inspiring riff […]
Art, Politics and Boiling Points
When the concentric circles closest in to consciousness are vibrating, there’s less bandwidth for the larger view. My commitment to political change, always an ambient ideal, goes in and out of sharp focus for me depending on what else is in the foreground. There is also the additional burden of how art and politics coalesce. […]
Mabou Mines
Yet another reason to be in New York sometime in the next week, more specifically Miller’s Launch, a forgotten corner of Staten Island. Mabou Mines, a theatre company that has been thrilling my sensibilities for 30 years, has done it again and stepped way outside the expected. This time it is a new production from […]
Matisse, Giotto and the Religious Imagination
Giotto fresco in Padua Another excerpt from Out of Eden by DiPiero. This one is from the essay, Matisse’s Broken Circle, and is particularly interesting in its reference to Matisse’s concept of the religious imagination and his emulation of Giotto. I am compelled by DiPiero’s claim that Matisse’s career was “the most sustained and variegated […]
Painting the Facelessness
Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden: Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch […]
Diebenkorn in New Mexico
If you are a Diebenkorn fan (as I am,) you will be dazzled by the new catalog for a show currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico (though September 9, 2007.) The show features work from Diebenkorn’s two and a half year residence in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, […]
Discourses and Artifacts
I’ve pulled down a few books from my library about primitive art. I am looking for some clues or insights into a personal question that has been lingering for some time: Why are non-Western, non-contextualized images increasingly compelling to me? Perhaps this can’t be parsed into logic and language–that’s a conclusion I’ve come to many […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]
The Cleaving of the Art World
Roger Kimball, Managing Editor of The New Criterion and author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, has published a jeremiad about the state of the art world. It’s not that he’s saying anything that hasn’t been said by others, but the piece is a concise outline of the […]