Japanese calligraphy, beautiful in its inexplicable mystery (From the LACMA collection) *** Beauty is not a concept. …Beauty harmonizes consciousness from top to bottom. It is as organically vital as digestion. Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Without regular events of beauty, we live estranged from […]
Art
Unaffordable Art Fair
New York Studio Gallery (Photo: NYSG) My Facebook friend Agni Zotis sent me a notice for this event, the Unaffordable Art Fair. Here’s the copy from the event’s FB page: Several years ago, my friend took a collector to Julian Schnabel’s home in Montauk with $10,000 ready to spend right there and then. Mr. Schnabel […]
Left Coast Report
Back from California, visiting with both the Northern and Southern tribes. As always, the eye gets fed, and sometimes the finds are a surprise and unexpected. San Francisco Richard Diebenkorn: A gallery show at Paul Thiebaud Gallery consists of works that belongs to the late artist’s son Christopher. (In strange symmetry: Paul Thiebaud is artist […]
Wisdom from the Art Tribe
Connecting—in the dark, in space, in time Some of you are part of the Jerry Saltz Facebook Tribe. And what a tribe it is, nearly 4600 strong and growing daily. For those of you who are not, here’s my take on what Jerry is doing on Facebook: By operating as more of an art advocate […]
Culture is Dark Matter
Plate XXII: “[The Milky Way] a vast Gulph, or Medium, every way extended like a Plane, and inclosed between two surfaces.” From Thomas Wright of Durham’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). The Warder Collection Michael Kimmelman’s piece in the Sunday Times, D.I.Y. Culture, touches on themes that I have been […]
The Whitney and Other Museum Sorrows
Roberta Smith continues her one-woman campaign (or so it seems—are there others on this bandwagon?) of bringing thoughtful and reasonable thinking to the world of art making, viewing and buying. Like so many other subcultures, this is one that regularly runs off the rails and into the hollers of ego, greed and elitism. Her recent […]
Spring Leaves the Station
A visual/verbal commentary on a few days in New York City, where spring has come and spread its gorgeousness everywhere. First on the list: The High Line, my favorite urban touchstone for seasonal drift. Two views looking south from 20th street—two months ago and this weekend: Comparing urban flora and fauna in February and then […]
The Evanescent, the Mysterious and the Intuitive
Stadia II, by Julie Mehretu (Photo credit: Richard Stoner, Copyright 2007 Julie Mehretu) I’m just coming out of what feels like a deep sleep. It was in fact not a sleep at all but a protracted and extremely focused period of time working in my studio. Making: it’s a strange state of mind, hard to […]
- Aesthetics
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Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting
Roberta Smith keep the dialogue about contemporary painting current and vital. Regarding that old saw, “painting is dead,” Smith is consistent in her refusal to buy in. In today’s New York Times Arts section (I refuse to call that part of the paper by its full title, Arts & Leisure since it is irritatingly effete, […]
- Aesthetics
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Wood, Water and Meaning
Studio view, South Boston Art making is, for me, a zone of inchoate nonlinearity, one that does not have the Wallace Stevensish delineations* to mark direction or any measure of “progress” (a word that, these days in particular, seems to always need to wear a pair of quotes.) Mostly I am thankful for having worked […]