Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.
Too many younger artists critics and curators are fetishizing the sixties transforming the period into a deformed cult a fantasy religion a hip brand and a crippling disease.
Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye creating works of psychic and physical power.
When people in stadiums do the Wave it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion pass time and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.
'The Panorama' is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands whole as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting healing.
Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
In the seventies a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money no market and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened everything in America was being questioned.
One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs so do prospects for women.
Artists working for other artists is all about knowing learning unlearning initiating long-term artistic dialogues making connections creating covens and getting temporary shelter from the storm.
Our culture now wonderfully alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.
In 1998 Artnet was the site that convinced me that if my writing didn't exist online it didn't exist at all. It showed me criticism's future.
The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.
