With so many postings on the demise of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (here and on Slow Painting) I have been thinking a lot about art ownership and how a work can take on a life of its own. In her scathing jeremaid about the Brandeis decision, Roberta Smith of the New York […]
Art
All Art Worthy of the Name
Thanks to friend and artist George Wingate for sending me to Jed Perl’s latest essay in The New Republic, “The Spiritual in Art”. Focusing primarily on the works of George Rouault and Marc Chagall (not two of my favorites BTW) Perl brings some salient issues to the fore, raising questions that concern a variety of […]
- Aesthetics
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Whither the Rose?
I’m still reeling from the news that Brandeis University has announced the closing of the Rose Art Museum. Once a bastion of painterly painting under Carl Belz’s visionary directorship, the Rose has been a cherished art destination for me for many years. The building, designed by Philip Johnson, is small and not one of Johnson’s […]
Whistling Wind
Balancing intuition against sensory information, and sensitivity to one’s self against pragmatic knowledge of the world, is not a stance unique to artists. The specialness of artists is the degree to which these precarious balances are crucial backups for their real endeavor. Their essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, […]
- Art Making
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Truth, Lies and Dodges
I had a conversation yesterday with LP (Lisa the Poet) about speaking the truth whether it be in poetry or in the visual arts. She went to the same lecture by Jenny Saville that I have written about here (although at the time we did not yet know each other) and felt immediately at home […]
This Plague of Paint
View of my studio, looking north Friend and artist Pam Farrell has invited artists to do a show and tell on her blog. Calling her project Interactive Studio Blog Post–ISBP–Pam now has nearly 10 artists who have participated. Their postings typically feature a work or body of work and an image of their studio. Pam […]
- Aesthetics
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Hypo-Hope
Today is the last day of the show Drawn to Detail, at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln Massachusetts. From their description of the show: Drawn to Detail features a variety of contemporary drawings with a very particular focus. This exhibition displays the work of 26 American artists who explore extreme attention to detail, obsessive mark-making, […]
- Aesthetics
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Winnicottisms
In a remembrance of the writer Harold Pinter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (and posted on Slow Painting), Charles McNulty included a memorable quote by D. W. Winnicott: But for all his vehemence and posturing, Pinter was too gifted with words and too astute a critic to be dismissed as an ideological crank. […]
- Uncategorized
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Report from the North
It’s hard to not be cynical when the talking heads announce that the US economy is “officially” in a recession and has been since December 2007. The absurdity of not being able to name what everybody knew until a year after the fact is one more piece of what feels like the cold-blooded machinations of […]
Elizabeth Peyton: In Between
Flower Ben, by Elizabeth Peyton I have had a long relationship of ambivalence with Elizabeth Peyton’s work. And I’m not alone. As famous as she is–she is a true art world “darling”–there are many like me who cannot find their deep way into her work, to that place where you really feel connected. Sometimes a […]