An unexpected gift on the Times Op-Ed page last Sunday, cohabiting with bleak post election columns by Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd: Six poems marking the end of daylight saving time. The work is all by blue chip poets—James Tate, Vijay Seshadri, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin as well as the two whose poems I […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
Brice, What’s Not to Love?
Installation view: Brice Marden at Matthew Marks Gallery Currently on view in New York: Brice Marden at Matthew Marks Gallery. The show includes large works and drawings, with a smaller exhibit of older pieces next door. The range of these bodies of work—the gestural and transparent fluidity of the later work in contrast to the […]
Neri Oxman and Materialecology
Ab Ex at the MOMA The works of Abstract Expressionists are on view on multiple floors at the MOMA right now. Worth the visit, but it wasn’t a heart stopper for me. It felt more like the obligatory pilgrimage devout Catholics make to the Vatican out of respect rather than passion. My MOMA moments of […]
Hipsterdom and the Spiritual Middle Finger
The ever present spectre of urban expression…a wall surface in Brooklyn Most compelling article I’ve read in a while: What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, by the editors of n+1. The history of hipsterdom is rich and nuanced, and its current “apotheosis” is told with a superb eye for detail and those often subtle […]
What’s Too Small
Evenesse 2, 25 x 55″ Sweet Darkness You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive […]
Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew’s show at the deCordova Museum is strong, clear and grounded. Drew has artistic tendencies I admire, the same ones that separate his approach and his work from the current art mainstream. His is a quiet defiance because there is no raised fist or defensiveness, just the masterful seduction into a world where a […]
A Mind of Winter
Eva Hesse, No Title, Oil on canvas. 20 x 20 inches. Verso on upper stretcher ‘August 1960 eva hesse Top.’ On lower stretcher ‘eva hesse 1960.’ Private collection, New York. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth I need to take one more thinking lap with the paintings by Eva Hesse on exhibit at the Hammer Museum. (I […]
Bad Art Poisoning
The (in)famous Robert Benchley Maybe there is something more than wry humor behind Robert Benchley’s oft-quoted quip, “The world is divided into groups: those that divide the world into two groups, and those that don’t.” It is after all so comfortingly seductive, the beautiful symmetry of just two elegant and simple options. Like the essential […]
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Error and the Adjacent Possible
Kevin Kelly and Steve Johnson (Illustration: Jason Holley, Wired) This is a follow on to my earlier post about Steve Johnson’s new book, Where Ideas Come From. These excerpts are from a conversation between Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, and Steve Johnson published in Wired: *** Kelly: Really, we should think of ideas […]
Wired For Sound
Kathleen Kirk’s post, Persistence and Patience, is a thoughtful description of how she ended up, after several career explorations, being a poet. In her graceful telling, she describes her many forays into other creative fields—music, art, theater, teaching—but none of them evoked the necessary persistence and patience in her that is needed to keep the […]