Connecting—in the dark, in space, in time Some of you are part of the Jerry Saltz Facebook Tribe. And what a tribe it is, nearly 4600 strong and growing daily. For those of you who are not, here’s my take on what Jerry is doing on Facebook: By operating as more of an art advocate […]
Austen, Now and Forever
As hackneyed as it may be to wirte this, I adore Jane Austen. I will state up front, I am not a member of the ultimate fan club, The Jane Austen Society. (Is it true they gather monthly in period clothing to discuss textual differences in editions of Mansfield Park?) But Pride and Prejudice, as […]
Listening Between the Silences
Crop circle, 2009 Cocktail party show stoppers, of which there are many, include any mention of a proof for the existence of god, the possibility of aliens in our realm and the supernatural creation of crop circles. Bring up any of these topics and the air in the conversation deflates instantly. It is the spoken […]
(Im)Perfect Circles
And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? This koanic line from Bashō became the thread through a variety of impressions and images for me this morning. *** When The Shoe Fits Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more perfect circles freehand Than with a compass. His fingers brought […]
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On Examing Life
The Thinkers: From left, Slavoj Zizek, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler and Cornel West discuss ideas in the documentary “Examined Life.” (Photo: Zeitgeist Films) The title of this post of course is making reference to the famous line from Plato about unexamined lives not being worth much. That phrase was also the inspiration for Astra Taylor’s […]
Culture is Dark Matter
Plate XXII: “[The Milky Way] a vast Gulph, or Medium, every way extended like a Plane, and inclosed between two surfaces.” From Thomas Wright of Durham’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). The Warder Collection Michael Kimmelman’s piece in the Sunday Times, D.I.Y. Culture, touches on themes that I have been […]
Choice and Meaning
Remember the jam experiment? Actually it was the work of Sheena Iyengar, a psychologist who convinced a luxury food store in Menlo Park to test customer responses to jam samples. Sometimes there were 6 choices, other times 24. What Iyengar discovered was that lots of options drew more shoppers over to the display, but after […]
Volcano Art
Munch’s The Scream More on the Iceland volcano, from an op ed piece in the New York Times by Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester compares our current struggles with a volcanic ash plume over Europe with the 1883 eruption on the island of Krakatoa between Java and Sumatra. More […]
Eyjafjallajökull the Magnificent
Black rivers of meltwater mixed with volcanic ash, spreading from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) A seven-mile-high (11-kilometer-high) cloud of steam, smoke, and ash billows from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Thursday (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) Steam explodes from a glacier-topped Iceland volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, […]
Doing Dawn, Doing Dusk
Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, San Marino CA Wait Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years […]