Some things we only figure out after the fact. I wish this weren’t the case, but the evidence in my life is too strong to argue otherwise. It’s more than the wisdom of hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking. It is the state of mind that cannot be recognized and named until its absence gives it […]
Month: February 2009
- Creativity
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Not the Pipeline, Just the Mule
I find it humbling that my opinion-generating, perpetual judging machine of a mind gets called out over and over again. My assumptions become hardened into fact more rapidly than is healthy for someone who professes to have the “open mind” approach to life. I’m guilty as charged. But the one nice thing about being guilty […]
Poetry, Politics and Inaugurations
The only truly uncomfortable moment for me during Obama’s inauguration was the moment I least expected to dislike—Elizabeth Alexander’s poetry reading. I haven’t wanted to talk about that particular feature out of respect for what was an emotional and history making moment. But enough time has passed I suppose, and the rattle of discontent from […]
Fairied
This morning a group of us went to see the Shepard Fairey retrospective at the ICA in Boston. Having lived through the viral spread of Andre the Giant and the OBEY stickers and stencils in Boston and Providence, I had a preconceived idea about what it would be like to see his work assembled in […]
The Rape of Europa
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 […]
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 […]
Through the Walls
Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City . . .telling those who swarm around him his desire is that an appendage from each of them fill, invade each of his orifices,– repeating, chanting Oh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeah until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached consummation. Until […]
Dispensibility and Other Sorrows
Bravo to Roberta Smith, the New York Times art critic who journeyed to Boston this weekend to see firsthand just what was at stake with Brandeis’ decision to close the Rose Art Museum. Her report is a devastating one, revealing a process that is more egregious than I had previously realized. (You can read her […]