Probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
Tag: art
On the Problem of Form – Wassily Kandinsky
In practical life… one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing. Sometimes even the engineer does not want to go any further, and all of the passengers get off in Regensburg. How many, who sought God, finally remained standing before a carved figure! How many, who sought art, became caught on a form which an artist had used for his own purposes, be it Giotto, Raphael, Durer, or Van Gogh!
Denis Dutton on Kitsch
The impact of kitsch is limited to reminding the viewer of great works of art, deep emotions, or grand philosophic, religious, or patriotic sentiments.
Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.
Fish-eye Picasso, 1963 by David Douglas Duncan. One of many of his awesome photos of Picasso in his collection at the Ransom Center. I learned about his work when I was looking at art in Tokyo a couple weeks ago.
Picasso’s Upholstery. Design by Picasso, embroidered by Alice Toklas. (via via)
Back by Mary Henderson. The great majority of photorealistic painting leaves me cold, but that skin and sand… (via this month’s Harper’s)
Art Space Tokyo. If my vacation wasn’t the last-minute cluster that I seem to specialize in, I would have purchased this book ahead of time. Luckily, Craig Mod is kind and has some awesome Tokyo art maps online, too.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Exit Through the Gift Shop. I wish I felt more strongly on the love/hate spectrum for this one, either direction. Hoax or not, this was a little… boring? I’ll add the disclaimer that street art isn’t really my thing. It was fun to see the gleeful rush that the artists get from making their projects come to life in the dark of night. There’s some kind of manic drive to it all, legal/ethical/logistical difficulties be damned.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
“City of Words” by Vito Acconci.
How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) – Austin Kleon. Umm. Meant to get this out of the drafts pile a long time ago. Great stuff, as usual.
The Magician (Self-Portrait with Four Arms) by René Magritte, 1952. Sometimes I wish I could do this.
Los Angeles-based artist Steve Roden has worked in an overwhelming variety of forms throughout his career, creating everything from conceptual recordings and sound installations to color field paintings and experimental films. For his latest project, Roden has teamed up with Atlanta-based record label and publisher Dust-to-Digital to release a book and two cds culled from his extensive collections of early photographs and 78 rpm recordings. (via Preview: Steve Roden’s collections at the Contemporary | Atlanta A&E Blog)
It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
If you inspire people to make things, it just makes them love you all the more.
How to Behave in an Art Museum – Paper Monument
Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed. But refusing to answer your friend’s questions is no solution either. You’re paralyzed. And you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of. You’re not sure whether your replies will make you look like a philistine or a snob. Which would be worse? Which are you more qualified to be?
I think painters and sculptors react to music, more naively, in a sense, because their politics are a lot different from our politics. It’s very hard for one composer to listen to another composer without somehow bringing his own mind-set to the music he’s listening to. It’s not that it’s impossible. And that’s only natural, whereas someone in another art field is going to listen to it very naively, in a sense (you hope), and that’s a worthwhile, unbiased opinion. Ultimately, it’s a naive opinion that rules the roost.
Woman at the Piano by Philip Evergood, 1955.
Riff Market: Theoretically Unpublished Piece About Girl Talk
I endorse this criticism, particularly regarding the uniformity of timbre/texture/tempo. And/or I’m just old and cranky and don’t understand kids these days. (via)
With Girl Talk, we get that blissful moment of recognition without having to suffer through the next three minutes and thirty seconds remembering exactly why it hasn’t been Hammertime for more than a decade now.
Also:
Girl Talk’s insistence on not being a pure DJ is a key to why the music sounds like it does, why it has only one speed, one timbre, and one density: if he lets a sample or phrase or loop breath on its own without some kind of additional percussion or secondary element, he is violating his own semantic scruples. Rule Number One of Girl Talk Club: Everything must be mashed at all times or otherwise the whole musique concrete / “art compounded from other art” rationale falls away, and Gillis is “just a DJ.”
This was intriguing, but has maybe been true for decades:
With Girl Talk compositions, one wonders how much of Gillis’s ease is a testament to his technical prowess, and how much is just an articulation of the fact that pop music has become increasingly standardized.
And also:
Forget art. The question is, without a public hungry for the references, is Feed the Animals anything at all? Does Girl Talk hold up as “music” without all the extratextual information? If you had no idea about mash-ups or hip-hop or “No Diggity” or “Epic” by Faith No More would you really be all that impressed? It would just be a long stream of unstructured pop drone. Imaginary straw-men that have lived in a underground bunker for fifty years would totally hate Girl Talk!
Riff Market: Theoretically Unpublished Piece About Girl Talk
Mark Larson 