The Niagara River As though the river were a floor, we position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation. As it moves along, we notice—as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced— the changing scenes along the shore. We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but […]
More on Arts Funding: Art, Entertainment and Rights of Citizenship
Elatia Harris, commenter extraordinaire, left this as a response to a comment left to the post below. Thank you Elatia for your reliably insightful and sense-making point of view. Re: Arts funding: Much depends on whether you think art follows consumer taste or leads it. And on whether you would be happy for art to […]
Arts Funding, Policy and Politics
The politics of art. That isn’t my field, and yet it is. I listened to the back and forth about arts funding during the Stimulus Bill discussions with mixed emotions. Sometimes the arguments rang true, sometimes they didn’t. The fact is that OF COURSE we need to fund and support the arts. Those who think […]
The Family Tree
One of the wisest people I know said to me this morning, “You know all that New Age lore about how the world would come to an end in 2012? That’s what has happened. It just arrived a few years early.” But being truly wise, she didn’t spend time outlining all the conspiratorial considerations evoked […]
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In Search of the Unified Field
Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Picasso I mentioned a book a few posts ago that I wanted to talk about in more depth. David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a very useful “map” through the historical survey of the visual arts. Galenson is an economist, not an art historian, but his passion for art runs […]
An Infinite Succession of Presents
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins So much has changed in the texture of our cultural consciousness over the last six months. The underbelly of our collective thinking has gone ventral, exposing itself rather nakedly to all the world. In just my last 24 hour random walk through the “elite” media (you gotta […]
Wood and Water
Ganesha, festooned with the dried flowers of a Hawaiian lei, in my studio Holland Cotter wrote a piece over the weekend in the New York Times on the state of the art world, The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! This article was not unlike about 20 others on the same topic that I’ve […]
Fairey: The Conversation Continues…
I have received quite a few emails about my earlier posting on Shepard Fairey. Seems to me that Fairey has come to embody the complexities of a whole slew of third rail issues—image appropriation, intellectual property rights, public arts by decree or default, the acceptable limits of “going commercial”, artist as deviant and miscreant, institutional […]
Ruth Stone: Black High Flung Patterns of Flocking Birds
Always on the Train Writing poems about writing poems is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you. But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words. Trash […]
Picasso and the Ocular Rape
Pablo Picasso in his Cannes studio, 1965. Photograph: Arnold Newman/Getty Images Like many other artists (and many of them female), I take a detached and ironic stance with Picasso. There’s no arguing his impact on the trajectory of contemporary art. But thanks to the compelling book, Old Masters and Young Genuises by David W. Galenson, […]