Opening scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Boston MA What is the point of making beautiful things, or of cherishing the beauty of the past, when ugliness runs rampant? Those who work in the realm of the arts have been asking themselves that question in recent weeks. The election of Donald Trump, and […]
Month: July 2017
- Art Making
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Irrefutable Presence: Picasso and the Primordial
Some ideas come in tangles, the kind that don’t disengage by applying analysis and logic. One of those is ethnocentrism in art. Brewing under the surface for some time, that particular net of knotted issues came into high definition in 1984 when Thomas McEvilley mounted his vociferous attack at the MOMA for its show, “Primitivism […]
- Art Making
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Make a Mark
A page from a letter written by Van Gogh The question, “What really matters?” is one I ask a lot more frequently these days. One reason is that getting older makes the need to vet more important. Life gets to be like a hard drive that is nearly filled, and decisions have to be made […]
Sense Making
“Night Sea,” by Agnes Martin (Photo: San Francisco Museum of Art) What we read and hear, how we form our sense of a something—the way we give shape and meaning to information—is going through a major evolution and change. When I read the personal accounts of how people responded to the invention of the printing […]