Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden: Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch […]
Art
Diebenkorn in New Mexico
If you are a Diebenkorn fan (as I am,) you will be dazzled by the new catalog for a show currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico (though September 9, 2007.) The show features work from Diebenkorn’s two and a half year residence in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, […]
Discourses and Artifacts
I’ve pulled down a few books from my library about primitive art. I am looking for some clues or insights into a personal question that has been lingering for some time: Why are non-Western, non-contextualized images increasingly compelling to me? Perhaps this can’t be parsed into logic and language–that’s a conclusion I’ve come to many […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]
The Cleaving of the Art World
Roger Kimball, Managing Editor of The New Criterion and author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, has published a jeremiad about the state of the art world. It’s not that he’s saying anything that hasn’t been said by others, but the piece is a concise outline of the […]
Leaving it in the Unknown
Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of something “more,” vestiges of some unknown venture. The ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more the viewer is forced to depend […]
The Rag and Bone Shop
In the spirit of “everything is autobiographical,” I found a conversation (in the Telegraph) with architect Frank Gehry and filmmaker Sydney Pollack that is compelling in its honesty and reassuring in a “misery loves company” sort of way. When asked if things got easier as they got older, here are their responses: SP: It doesn’t […]
Painful Beauty
Chris Jordan’s photographic works are extremely memorable. He knows how to create retinal appeal to be sure, but he also packs a political wallop. Some of you may know of his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, published earlier this year. Circuit boards Another […]
Descent, and Descent
The Death of the Painter At the end of his life he had money and attention, and certain towns were known in connection to his name. He was fastidious, and wore a tie, was photographed with brushes, with a bird. under the subtropical sky he forgave the things long done. He hardly saw his children, […]
Good Use for Mediocre Looks
I’m a serious “not fan” of David Brooks, op ed writer for the New York Times. But his June 15th piece on the future of genetics is actually pretty funny: At this very moment thousands of people are surfing the Web looking for genetic material so their children will be nothing like me. They are […]