Pottery by Lucie Rie; painting by Okada Kenzo, “A Story” A seasoned and accomplished artist friend recently shared a painful encounter with a curator. During a studio visit, the curator—much younger than my friend—declared that her work lacked irony and anxiety. In his view, her approach was not relevant to the contemporary 21st century experience. […]
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Certain Geographies
That subtle ridge is the edge of an exquisite slot canyon, the perfect metaphor for the beauty and enchantment that is hidden from our view Every time I spend time in the Great Basin desert, I feel an irrepressible sense of resonance. That soil is in me, energetically and literally (my mother being conceived in […]
Taking Flight
Small Point, Maine Angeles Arrien assembled The Four Fold Way after spending many years living with indigenous cultures as a cultural anthropologist. She observed that these non-first world cultures actually did a better job of offering their residents a way of life that has more access to joy and happiness than ours. In case you […]
The Don’t Know Mind
The human brain contains structures and shapes that may have up to 11 dimensions. (Photo: Blue Brain) Being baffled, confused, incredulous, angry, outraged—those are the emotions that I feel and hear more than ever before. Going through the Slow Muse archive, I found a few segments from a post in 2015, Identity, Universality and the […]
The Distance Between Us and the World
Clouds over New Mexico A few weeks ago I wrote Sense Making, a post that praised those who take on meaning in smaller, more intimate chunks. When you are caught in the middle of a maelstrom, it is difficult to see the larger patterns forming. While dodging the barrage of fire hoses indiscriminately blasting information […]
Time Outside of Time
Diana Al-Hadid, at Burlington City Arts, Burlington Vermont Artists have to find a way to pull the audience in, for only when people come to understand that within a painting or a sculpture they can find a time that is outside of time will they want to keep looking. . Jed Perl . My experience […]
Self-Preservation During Dark Times
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]