Jones on Damien Hirst

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]