Picasso at the Met

"I spend hour after hour while I draw," Picasso recounted, "observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they're up to; basically it's my way of writing fiction."

[Exhibition wall text]

What "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Could Have Said

"[Kurt] was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and 'Teen Spirit' had about a dozen drafts. One of the first drafts featured the chorus: 'A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we're so famous / We're so stupid and from Vegas.'"

Charles R. Cross [Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, 2001]

An attempt to revive this blog:

"In Marfa, the worlds of beef and art collide, giving the town a unique kick."


Arthur Lubow ["The Art Land," The New York Times, March 20, 2005]

"Ripped from the Headlines"

Emer Rooney, 33, on the last day of a visit from Ireland, took pictures of the scene. She said that despite the shooting, she had never felt unsafe in New York, noting the presence of “all the police officers.” She cited the shooting, in fact, as one of the more exciting moments of her trip — right up there, she said, with recovering lost luggage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and getting tickets to “Wicked.”


James Barron, ["In Holiday Crush, a Fatal Shootout in Times Sq.", The New York Times, December 11, 2009]

Adorno: Perennial Fashion-Jazz

"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows."


Theodor W. Adorno [Perennial Fashion-Jazz, 1953]

Matthew Collings on Tracey Emin's "My Bed"

"What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorializes or stands for is Saint Pain, Saint Class, Saint Gender, Saint Femininity, Saint Abjection, Saint Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father), and, of course, Saint Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped, and Can't Spell."

Matthew Collings ["God Save the Queen," Modern Painters, November 2008]

Mary Magdalene, Seductive Sinner/Repenter

"Every genuine work of art may have a good moral drawn from it, but, of course, in doing so much depends on interpretation and on him who draws the moral. Thus one may hear the most immoral representations defended by saying we must know evil, or sin, in order to act morally; and, conversely, it has been said that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the beautiful sinner who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes it looks so beautiful to repent, and you must sin before you can repent."


G.W.F. Hegel [Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 1820s]

Urs Fischer's "Holes"

"When it comes to installation art, he is prone to an efficient form of spectacle: he simply has very large holes cut or dug in the walls or floors of galleries, museums and the occasional art fair booth, usually to startlingly beautiful effect. Implicitly Duchampian yet marvelously experiential, these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy."


Roberta Smith ["Exploration of Space," The New York Times, October 29, 2009]

Fred Asparagus

"Is Fred Asparagus the only guy who is long and green and dances beautifully?"


Jill Johnston, "Holy Christometer" [The Village Voice, December 19, 1968]

An errant muse

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."


John Updike