Beautiful: new Nabokov book covers like specimen boxes for butterflies. Reminds me of “Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes” and so on. Via. Makes me want to cut out pieces of paper and start taking pictures.
Category Archives: art
and if we’re wrong
The writer Angela Carter was a great friend. They were both “fanatical atheists” and would talk till 4am. The last time they met, Carter said: “Well, goodbye. We may be wrong, and if we’re wrong we might meet again.”
– fab article on painter Gillian Ayres in the Times Online. Via AJ.
get myself out of the way
“Sometimes the instrument tells you something after you’ve played it,” Sutherland says. “It’s never quite right until I let the instrument tell me what to say. I have to get myself out of the way.”
– an interview with Peabody organist Donald Sutherland in the fall 08 Peabody Magazine
the butler did it
11 large Andy Warhol paintings were just stolen from a Los Angeles home. Via AJ. Seems like the kind of thing the ghost of the man himself would have orchestrated – or perhaps even some pranksters in his spirit.
I’m not moving to Warsaw!
Amazing Rachel has a new collaborative art project, called I’M NOT MOVING TO WARSAW, and she needs YOU!
You can participate at their site by answering these questions:
Co jutro? | Define tomorrow.
Opisz swój sen. | Describe a dream you remember.
Dlaczego jesteś tu gdzie jesteś? | Why are you where you are?
and emailing your responses, along with the name, real or pseudonymous, that you want to be known by, to imnotmovingtowarsaw @ gmail.com. It’s fun.
They are going to make some kind of magic out of all the answers.
A. square
I have taken some time, the past couple of weeks, to rest before a major undertaking. I feel much better. The most reassuring outcome of this rest (grantspeak! stop!) is that when images of dancing people or objects pop into my head, as they do all day long, I no longer feel compelled to suppress them. This makes me and the dancing people less irritable.
I was in a CVS about a month ago, before taking this time which I have now taken, and I imagined some people bobbing up and down the aisles, and it made me so furious with my imagination. “What is the point of having these ideas?” I would ask myself, sometimes out loud.
I am now content to enjoy them again without asking why. There is no point – the point is the process. The point is the style, as we know. No one asks the red square why it is a red square. I know this, but I had forgotten. Or it had been obscured from me.
you can’t do both
Two interesting things from a NYT article about SXSW and media:
it was obvious after a few days here that the people formerly known as the audience were too busy making content to consume much of it, unless it came from their friends. The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.
I’m very interested in this point – the (supposed) decline of the audience with the expansion of authorship, or, perhaps, the idea that everyone in the audience is now an author. That there is no separation between authors and audience members any more. And, even more importantly, this:
One participant [in a panel called “Sex Lives of the Microfamous”] said he had some very firm boundaries. If a first date goes well, and he is interested in seeing the person again, he sets out the rules of engagement.
“You can blog about me or you can date me, but you can’t do both,” he said to audible approval.
Exactly. You can’t do both. Same theme: the idea that you can’t simultaneously be experiencing and documenting something, whether that something is a person or a concert. A warning, a ultimatum, a cautionary note.
Unless, that is, the documentation is part of the experience. Somehow, I think that most people who consider themselves to be writers (bloggers, authors, humans) have already come to terms with this idea, the pillaging of experience for expression. But I, dissatisfied, am still circling it like a block in West Hollywood. I do not know where to park the car of my writing in the neighborhood of this idea. I am afraid of getting some kind of a ticket. There is a Denise Duhamel poem – but I’ll make it a separate post –
do you want the good news or the bad news?
No more Madison Rep, the Los Angeles freelance artists are having to go back to working day jobs, and just because everyone’s going to the movies doesn’t mean the film industry will thrive. I guess I forgot what the good news was. Via, via, via ArtsJournal, which is more and more and more like the TickerTape of DoomForTheArtsWorld.
making things harder
Yesterday, I had one of those false revelations, distilled out of ignoring problems, that seems to clarify everything: the most important thing to do with your talents is not what is hardest for you, but what is easiest and most natural.
For a short time, this answered all my questions. A few hours later, it clarified nothing, but today, it still seems true.
Challenge is good, but to challenge yourself to the extent of consciously ignoring the work at which you’re most talented is perverse. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? It has never been, for me, and this formula is the opposite of how I’ve worked for a long time.
I frequently make a point of avoiding the easiest and most natural areas of art in which I can work, and have pursued other artistic objectives, not exclusively – but partially – because they are difficult to the point of being impossible.
I have other friends who work in this way, too – deliberately against their own strengths. Although we all spend a lot of time half miserable over it, I respect them. I have the same condition. I know it comes from a desire to have no shortcuts, no favors, no lucky breaks – but to win whatever artistic achievement you can through nothing but cutting through granite with a plastic spoon.
You know that line in the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “Everything we got, we got the hard way…” ?
Sometimes I wonder if we will ever settle ourselves down to doing the things at which we are best. Trying to do so is the next step. We are all getting too old to keep working on the rock.
unwarranted
“Shepard Fairey was completely unaware that there were any warrants for his arrest. Had he known, he would have resolved all such issues before the opening of his art exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston,” [Fairey’s attorney Jeffrey] Wiesner said.
– LAT, via AJ.
Dara Weinberg 