The Graces, David Salle, 1991 (Photo: Christie’s) Journalists are their own category of beings. While I respect the ones who do their art and craft with skill, I’d rather wrestle with a big game hunter. In the words of Adam Kirsch, “Goodness, which we praise so highly in life, is infertile terrain for a writer, […]
Books
- Aesthetics
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Belzing Into a Better Place
Carl Belz, my kind of thinker (Photo: www.berkshirefinearts.com) How do we currently write current art’s history? How, given its elastic chronology and ever-widening geographic reach, its self-consciously elusive look, the multiple urges and identities and media it comprises? How, in the absence of a canon of artists around whom a history might be structured, its […]
More of “The Best is Next”
Note: This was originally posted on Slow Muse in March 2011. It came across my screen this morning quite unexpectedly and just seemed so timely. Again. Grand master for a lifetime: Henri Matisse, photographed by Man Ray The nature of art making over the lifetime has been a recurring theme for me these last few […]
Solnitessence
Vascular bundle of a fern rhizome (Image from a fascinating website, Urbagram which addresses a set of interlinked concepts, models, speculations, probings, essays and artefacts based on urban systems.) I first encountered Rebecca Solnit quite by accident. About ten years ago I was making my usual pilgrimage to the lusciously overstuffed and highly iconic City […]
- Aesthetics
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De Out and De In: Selected Passages from the Price Show Catalog
The Ken Price show catalog, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, is full of gems. Here are a few: Price tended to progress in loose series. “It’s the most enjoyable way to work. It’s a lot more satisfying than taking a single piece to completion before you begin the next one…You get a lot more feedback, […]
- Aesthetics
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Equipment for Looking
Table (Tisch), by Gerard Richter No.1: First Works of 362 Artists is a book based on the premise that most artists have a piece they consider their true first painting. Editors Francesca Richer and Matthew Rosensweig attended a lecture by Robert Storr in conjunction with the Gerard Richter retrospective at MOMA in 2002. Richter had […]
Meaning Afloat
The Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, Layton Utah My mother grew up less than a mile from what is now a Nature Conservancy preserve on the Great Salt Lake. This landscape has fresh water and salt marshes, ten foot high grasses, ponds and pools, mudflats and fields. The colors and textures change constantly throughout the […]
Stafford on Stafford
William Stafford (Photo by Kim Stafford) Early Morning is a memoir of William Stafford written by his son Kim Stafford. This book is so singularly satisfying, so full of wisdom I can’t put it down. Is there another case of a larger-than-life writer whose story has been told by his or her child who just […]
Books, Forgetting and the Pure Joy of Reading
My favorite library belongs to my friends Andrew and Kathryn: Color coded throughout the house. This week I have been inundated with references to a piece by Ian Crouch, The Curse of Reading and Forgetting, on Facebook, Twitter and in my email. Bullseye. This is what perfect targeting looks like, exactly the kind of tailored […]
Attention
The view this weekend from my kitchen window 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 […]