Modernism, Part 2 Here are a few more selections from the Mia Fineman/Peter Gay book discussion from Slate. (For the full conversation between Fineman and Gay, start at the beginning on Slate.) Mia Fineman: Though I don’t think Pop Art brought about the end of Modernism by democratizing art, I do agree that Modernism suffered […]
Ideas
The Lure of Heresy and Other Modernisms
Mia Fineman, art critic at Slate, employs a more dynamic approach to the slightly tired category of the book review. Her approach is to write an email to the author and then post the exchange. This can go back and forth several times, and the conversation that results is more multifaceted and provocative than one […]
The Democracy of the Imagination
Style and substance may represent a class system. The imagination is a democracy. –From The Triggering Town by poet and teacher Richard Hugo I love this book. Opening it up to a random page before heading to the studio is to find a heartwarming wink, an approving nod, a much-needed nugget. It is at times […]
Warren Wisdom
This is Rosanna Warren, part 2… An interview with Warren was published in the Kenyon Review. She shares some deeply considered thoughts on a number of topics including the structure of poetry, writing about the visual arts, absorbing traditions, apprehension of the real. Here are a few salient excerpts: In a way, I have a […]
Leaky Margins
The interface between the self and the Web has been a topic that I think about a lot. I’ve written previously about Sherry Turkle’s work and her new book, Evocative Objects, and some of the ways the porous membrane between a cyber persona and a physical self can almost disappear. The generational implications of the […]
Pandemonium in G Major
I love this guy. Alex Ross writes about music for The New Yorker. He is so reliably brilliant, and my musician sister Rebecca and I both turn to his articles first when the magazine arrives at our respective homes. Then we call and talk about the nuance he captured or yet another poignant insight. His […]
The Power of Things
My post earlier this week referenced Sherry Turkle. Here is more about her from a review of her new book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. In this book she pursues more than the psychological/sociological implications of computers and life on line. She has extended the concept of the “evocative object” to computers as well […]
Privacy
This morning I posted an excerpt on Slow Painting from a New York Times article, Yours for the Peeping. Penelope Green reports on the new trend of glass apartment buildings with little or no concern for privacy, from pedestrians on the street to the residents in the spaces themselves. I have been thinking about her […]
The Rounded Head
Francis Picabia in his studio If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts. Our heads are round so that our thinking can change directions. –Francis Picabia Picabia (1879-1953) had a life that included a number of shirt changes. He lived in Paris at a point in time […]
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Claiming the Unk Unks
I was intrigued by an article in the Summer 2007 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review titled Discovering “Unk-Unks”, by John W. Mullins. “Unk-Unks” is an engineering term that means unknown-unknowns.* Mullins, a professor at London Business School, focuses his article on entrepreneurs since he contends that the Unk Unks are the mostly likely […]