The Confirmation Bias

Imagined map of the word, Japanese I am reading a book recommended by my daughter Kellin Nelson: The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli. It’s designed with the 21st century reader in mind—succinct, straight talking advice on rampantly human cognitive errors in 99 chapters, each only a few pages long. Dobelli nails all of […]

Painting with your Guts

Claerwen James (Photo: London Evening Standard) Every artist has a personal story of how she ended up spending a lifetime doing this thing that is all-consuming. It’s a strange decision really, that willingness to give yourself over to a passion that takes hold as soon as you awake and stays resident, in background or foreground, […]

Attentionality

Looking closely at a recent painting Robert Hass begins his extraordinary collection, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, talking about the photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams: What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that authority is […]

Visitors, Full of Yearning

One room from “The Visitors”, by Ragnar Kjartansson Installation view (Photo: Agostino Osio, courtesy Fondazione Hangarbicocca) The Clock, a video montage/art installation by Christian Marclay, artfully stitched together 24 hours’ worth of vignettes with references to time. Stipulated by Marclay to only be viewed in perfect synch with real time, The Clock‘s sequences are extracted […]