Damien Hirst Gotta love Jonathan Jones at the Guardian. He’s calling it as he sees it. Bad art is ugly art, in the end. Whatever language we might prefer to use, it all comes down to beauty and ugliness. Hirst’s ideas seemed to me once to possess an intellectual and emotional beauty – and their […]
Art
Wisdom Teacher
A few remembrances from the inimitable John Cage: “The sound experience I prefer to all others is silence,” he says in this short clip on You Tube. And for most of us on the planet, says Cage, the sound of silence is actually traffic. He rhapsodizes that the sound of traffic is constantly modulating and […]
Keeping it Experimental. And Fun.
(Photo: Horace Ové) It has been several years since Rudy Giuliani catapulted English/African artist Chris Ofili into this country’s art adversarial conversation by trying to have Ofili’s work taken out of public view. It was the elephant dung on the Madonna painting. And of course the magazine images of female genitilia flying about like delicate […]
Finding (and Keeping) the Mind of a Child
“My Hands Are My Heart,” by Gabriel Orozco (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) The Gabriel Orozco show at the MOMA has disappointed more critics than it has pleased. Orozco now is, after all, an international jet setter art star (who, as Deborah Sontag pointed out in her review in the New York Times, can afford […]
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Creativity 2.0
Margaret Kilgallen at work A provocative article on Slate reviews Jaron Lanier’s latest book, You are Not a Gadget. Written by Slate senior editor Michael Agger, the essay digs into many of Lanier’s ideas and just says No. Lanier, one of the leaders in the early days of virtual reality and an respected Wired alum, […]
Architecture in the Aughts
Blur, Expo 02, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002. This sensational pavilion, which was designed by New York architects Diller + Scofidio, was the star of Switzerland’s Expo 02. A cat’s cradle of tensile steel, 20m high and 100m long, it brooded at the end of a steel-and-glass jetty over Lake Neuchatel. Inside, some 30,000 water jets created clouds […]
The Laser Gaze
Herb Vogel doing his laser gaze thing on a John Chamberlain sculpture, part of the Herb and Dorothy Vogel collection that was donated to the National Museum of Art. I’ve been thinking about Herb and Dorothy all weekend. I finally saw the Megumi Sasaki documentary (it was released on DVD on December 15). It isn’t […]
Seeing and Looking
Bridget Riley Bridget Riley describes her mother thus: “She was always pointing out colours: in the sea; the sparkle of dew: changes of colour when the dew was brushed away. If she arranged anything on the table like a bowl of fruit […] she would point out the colours. ‘Look it’s almost got a blue […]
Responses to Jung’s Red Book
Rubin Museum of Art chief curator, Martin Brauen, left, and Felix Walder, great-grandson to Carl Jung, inspect Carl Jung’s “The Red Book” (Photo: Rubin Museum) The Rubin Museum exhibit (and accompanying lecture series) that features The Red Book by Carl Jung has been on my mind since I first saw the show a few months […]
Cracking the Nut
Ert, by Tomma Abts, 2003. 48cm x 38cm. Boros Collection, Berlin Timing can be a bitch. One of the most poignant examples for me is the 2008 publication, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. The “sociologist of culture” (self-titled perhaps?) spent five years assembling her book about the red hot, way cool, […]