Istanbul: a child connects with her grandmother (Photo: Collin Key) Every once in a while you find a post that says it just the way you would have. Here’s one at All Girls by Sally Reed, regular reader of Slow Muse, about so many themes and ideas that I find compelling—the work of D. W. […]
Month: March 2010
- Technology
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]
- 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 […]
The Ideal of Emptiness
The ideal of emptiness: Not there yet, but moving in that direction, the Fisher Center at Bard College designed by Frank Gehry I’ve written previously about the slim but beguiling book that I found at the William Stout bookstore in San Francisco, Poems for Architects by Jill Stoner (my earlier post is Poetry and Space). […]
Both/And, With a Bit of Pure Paralyzed
Winter view looking out from my friend Anne’s house in Carson New Mexico. The chair feels inhabited, and yet not. To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. –Lao Tzu And what do you get when you are in search of both? Martha Beck, a fan of the mangled […]
- Aesthetics
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A Bit More
March, a month to think about what green means A few follow ons to earlier posts… *** One more thought on Shenk’s book about genius…A quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. *** A few more places online where you […]
Practice, With Frequent Failures
Research continues in a pursuit of the how, why and where of who we are. A new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, by David Shenk is reviewed by Annie Murphy Paul in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. And for […]
Seeking Sonority
Edwina Leapman, Green Shade About 20 years ago, Wendy Beckett (AKA Sister Wendy) was busy bringing art history to the masses with her BBC shows and books. She’s not in the limelight these days but I still treasure my copy of her now out of print book from 1988, Contemporary Women Artists. Beckett was very […]
Ready to Embrace You, If You Would Just Turn Around
It’s so fragile anything can kill it— one cold night, the smoking chimney too far off in the distance, another drought, everyone at the table either drunk or estranged; but like a fisted bud, it rides out even the deluge that bends bough to ground, and so persists—sometimes unsure, like leaves curling and uncurling outside […]