Open and ready: Art smart guy Jerry Saltz I am off to New York City for a couple of days and will return to Boston on Friday. In the meantime here’s just about the best message I’ve received in a long time. This wisdom came to me from Jerry Saltz, someone I hold in the […]
Left Coast, North and South
Matthew Barney leaves his mark, Drawing Restraint, inside SFMOMA Follow up on an earlier post: Chloe Veltman has written a very good piece in the Times highlighting the two shows I reviewed here (Reporting on the Other Coast) currently on view at MOCA Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I am […]
Analytical vs Creative: Pick One
According to the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sexual fantasizing improves analytical skills. But daydreaming about love impacts your creativity. This sounds downright Jill Bolte Taylor-esque. Left hemisphere versus right. Melinda Wenner of Scientific American goes into more depth. Previous research suggests that our problem-solving abilities change depending on our states of mind and that […]
- Aesthetics
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A Week’s Worth of Responses to Smith’s “Post-Minimal to the Max”
Terry Winters, Freeunion (Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery) Winters was highlighted as one of Carol Diehl’s favorite “overlooked” artists. He’s on my list too. Over the week since Roberta Smith published her article, Post-Minimal to the Max in the Sunday Times (I wrote about it here) the floodgates opened. Do a search and you will find […]
- Books
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Spellbound
My friend Thalassa recently lent me her copy of Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, translated from the German. Our tastes are highly confluent, so I was ready and primed for something delicious. And indeed it is. This book cast a spell on me. I don’t know what other language I could use to […]
Life That Doesn’t Lie Flat
Galactic beach wood, from Half Moon Bay We fall into a story about enlightenment—about life, in fact—and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but […]
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)
Kenneth Noland passed away in early January. Although this is several weeks after the fact, my response to the Roberta Smith article in the Sunday Times has led to a more contemplative approach to the strange journey of painting that I have observed during my many years as an artist and art lover. Mark Dagley […]
Do Something Else Next
Adam, Eve, by Philip Taafe (Taafe is one of several undervalued painters mentioned in Roberta Smith’s Sunday Times piece) Roberta Smith secured the premier position in the Sunday Times Arts section, above the fold and in the center. The visual arts rarely show up in the top slot these days. Her article, Post-Minimal to the […]
Gaia And/Or Medea
In his book “I Am a Strange Loop”, Douglas Hofstadter argues that complex feedback loops in the brain are the origin of consciousness and the illusion of self. That illusion is absent or muted in lower life forms. In consequence, it is ethically neutral to swat a mosquito, which is a half step above an […]
Hand in the Water
Sometimes the online world reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s image from Haroun and the Sea of Stories: In this tale written for children (putatively) stories live in the sea like currents. All you have to do is sit in your boat, reach your hand into the water and pull one in. Yesterday’s post about Diane […]