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 […]
Seeing and looking
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 […]
Map Lust
Ancient Mississippi courses For those of you who fell in love with BibliOdyssey, here’s another site to delight your mind and your eye. Strange maps is chock full of images that provoke, delight, entice, perplex. Maps must be on the mind since I found this site quite by accident just hours after reading about two […]
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 […]
Wisdom, and Lots of Silence
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. –Rita Mae Brown These days I’m filling life with a lot more silence than is usual for me. Just a single thought or insight seems food enough for a day in the studio. And each morning begins by breaking everything apart […]
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 […]
Nature, Seeing, Thinking
A few koan-like insights on art, nature, seeing and thinking: Art is not what we see; it is in the spaces between. –Marcel Duchamp . . Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, […]
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 […]
Visual Cornucopia
Moroccan calligraphy, 19th century (courtesy of BibliOdyssey) I know many of you are regular readers of 3 Quarks Daily and the fascinating posts by Elatia Harris. But for anyone who may be a newcomer here, run, don’t walk your way to her latest foray into the extraordinary blog, BibliOdyssey. In her words: “One of my […]
Skid Marks: Inflection or Innuendo
In Wallace Stevens’ oft-quoted but still provocative (IMHO) poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, he captures a simple dichotomy that has served as a divining rod for most of my creative life: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just […]