Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian Kiefer pierces my circle of empathy, that field we all carry around us that determines who and what we care about. It is not that our work shares a similar sensibility. Hardly. Kiefer is a legend in his own time, and his art goes grand, epic and high concept as dramatically […]
Journey In
Photomicrograph of different components of the rat cerebellum, including Purkinje neurons in green, glia (non-neuronal cells) in red, and cell nuclei in blue. (Image from Hello I am Here.) Carl Schoonover’s Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century was reviewed in the New York Times on November 29, and […]
Life Happens
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own, or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life…what one calls one’s real life is a phantom of one’s own imagination. — C. S. Lewis And […]
Abandoning Old Ones Like Musical Notes: Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier Most of us can recognize people who think like us. It’s the ease we have in following arguments, the familiarity in the way someone moves from one idea to the next. Sometimes it is subtle, but when you share your thinking mother tongue with someone, there is comfort in that shared vernacular. Most […]
Everything is Continuous
A skin drum, hand made in Morocco and an artifact of extraordinary presence, was lent to me by my friend John Wyrick and now hangs on my studio wall. Exercise First, forget what time it is for an hour. Do it regularly every day. Then forget what day of the week it is, and do […]
Up Against Oblivion
Sargy Mann, blind painter Here’s a story I have never encountered before. Sargy Mann spends 25 years as a painter and ends up losing his sight. But he decides to keep painting. From an article about Mann by Tim Adams in the Guardian: “After a bit I thought: ‘Well here goes,’ and loaded a brush […]
- Aesthetics
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Resting on Perception
Saul Bellow Art and meaning. Big topic, and one that just keeps morphing and moving through our relationship with art making in whatever form that takes. I’ve written on that complex topic a lot here, if only peripherally given its depth, but my interest in it is tireless. Leon Wieseltier’s New York Times review of […]
Openings
The universe in a blade of grass (…or in a lid left on your work table in the angled light of afternoon) Here’s more on the theme of looking for and relishing the unexpected, life’s little and big exceptions, those “black swans” that appear out of nowhere (as I wrote about here.) I am also […]
- Philosophy
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Tinker Away
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain […]
PEM Update
18th century lacquer work from Quianlong Garden Currently at the Peabody Essex Museum: The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, on view through January 9 before it moves to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This collection of artifacts, never before seen by the public, is taken from a sanctuary built in the […]