A heads up for anyone interested in getting an overview of the state of arts journalism: Regina Hackett has put together a good list on her blog, Another Bouncing Ball, In the fast-morphing world of art criticism, I found this posting helpful. Here’s an excerpt: The Brookyn Rail does not pay its contributors. Living on […]
Month: September 2009
Leaky Margins
For the last few years I have been following the fascinating discussion around what is socially transmitted and what is not. (Here’s an earlier post on this topic.) While the claim that happiness is contagious (and the subject of the lead article about the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the Sunday New […]
Brucing Into Something Better
The BHQF, in Bushwick A small article by Roberta Smith from the New York Times shed some light on the ongoing and ever morphing state of fine arts education. She begins her piece with the now famous quote from Barnett Newman—“Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds.” And given where things have gone […]
Silence’s Non-Narrative
Isle of Skye, 1999 A respectfully reverent review of Sarah Maitland’s latest book, A Book of Silence, appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review. Written by Dominique Browning, the review and book both speak to many of the aspects of silence that I have written about here in earlier posts. It is something I think […]
More on Abstraction and Nature
Rock and fungi, Tasmania, 2007 Two of the comments to my earlier post, Threading through Abstraction, Micro and Macro, came in from Down Under. Both of these writers offered a thoughtful expansion of the discussion I began in my post. My experience is that this issue of nature and abstraction has particular significance in the […]
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Threading Through Abstraction, Micro and Macro
In 1968 two of mid-century’s most influential designers, Charles and Ray Eames, made a short film called Powers of Ten. In just ten minutes they explored the universe from one end of the scale to the other. A book based on that film was published some years later and had a lasting impression on me. […]
Letting the Window Open
Christ’s troubled sleep from Milton’s ‘Paradise Regained’, Book IV lines 401-25, c.1816-18, by William Blake Once again I am moved to share an excerpt from my friend Andrew’s Sunday epistle. Armed with a piercing intellect and a PhD in literature, he often crafts entrances into Blake or Milton or Donne that I would not be […]
Thigh Line, and Other Urban Tales
The High Line as it looked in August Like just about everybody else, I love the new High Line in Manhattan. So it is easy to enjoy a recent piece about public spaces in the New Yorker. Written by Lauren Collins, the newly-created (and mixed blessing) pedestrian mall at Times Square is juxtaposed to the […]
A Controlled Refinement of Sobbing
Nicholas Baker’s writing ranges between forceful and compelling tirades (like his exposure of the wanton destruction of books by the San Francisco Public Library in favor of microfilm) and those excessively detailed, slightly OCDish, minutiae-driven novels that can sometimes be just a little too much. But I always pay attention to what he’s paying attention […]
Onion Love, Part 2
The Traveling Onion It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an object of worship—why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe. –Better Living Cookbook When I think how far the onion has traveled […]