"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

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon

Though a bit unorthodox, this comes from Wikipedia, :

"Snowdon did not read books and had no intellectual interests, but Margaret did; Snowdon therefore took to leaving lists between the pages for her to find, of 'things I hate about you.' According to biographers Sarah Bradford and Anne de Courcy, one note read: 'You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.'"

The Mind's Morning Dew

"In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty is fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things?"


Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759

Reality found in experience, not art

Bending the rules on this one (it's longer than three sentences):

"When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art."


Tony Smith

"In art one does not have to be 'realistic,' for man is at stake, not his occupation or status. Suffering is suffering and joy is joy. The world appears as what it is behind commodity form: a landscape is really a landscape, a man really a man, a thing really a thing."

Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture"

Edith Piaf on Love

"As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face."

I'm feeling generous today, so two quotes from "Grey Gardens"

"This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don't like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think...then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today."

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult."

Both quotations by Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, 1975

Sentiments on love

"I don't think I'll ever know Bruce, but he's mine, and he's a beauty."


Susan Rothenberg on her husband, Bruce Nauman, The New Yorker [June 1, 2009]

From a Review of StarTrek

"Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don't worry, he's still a natural dickhead underneath."

Anthony Lane, "Highly Illogical," The New Yorker [May 18, 2009].

A Medium of Ideas

The other day, I asked a girl I work with about her art. She said, "I want to work in a medium of ideas."

Trying to keep up with this blog...

"Also in the Frick show is a sumptuous painting by the sweet-tempered Bartolome Esteban Murillo, who ousted [Zurburan], late in his career, from clerical favor. 'The Birth of St. John the Baptist' (c.1660) teases softly glowing figures, including a rumpus of putti, from ambient blackness, with baby John, at the center, managing to be realistically infantile while conveying, by look and gesture, that he can't wait to get started prophesying."

Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker [April 6, 2009].

Responds to "Xerxes"

Matt Damon on a Unicycle

"Nothing in these operas is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average action movie. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs while singing becomes, under the circumstances, more plausible."


Alex Ross, "Unlikely Stories" (Opera Review in the New Yorker), [2009].

A photo tribute to Morgan the Wonder Corgi, who turns 10 tomorrow.

Corgi Guests

"Morgan can stay over too. We usually put our corgis in the Florida room."


My good friend Liz McInnes

Duchampian Nonsense

"Conclusion: after many efforts in view of the comb, what a shame! all the furriers have left and they mean rice."


Marcel Duchamp, [1915].

Colors as Sounds

"YELLOW, for example, possesses the special capacity to 'ascend' higher and higher and to attain heights unbearable to the eye and the spirit; the sound of a trumpet playing higher and higher becoming more and more 'pointed', giving pain to the ear and to the spirit. BLUE, with the completely opposite power to 'descend' into infinite depths, develops the sounds of the flute (when it is light blue), of the cello (when it has descended farther), of the double bass with its magnificent deep sounds; and in the depths of the organ you 'see' the depths of blue. GREEN is well balanced and corresponds to the medium and the attenuated sounds of the violin...and RED (vermillion) can give the impression of strong drum beats, etc."


Wassily Kandinsky, "The Art of Spiritual Harmony" [1912].

A Montage of Andy Warhol's Most Beautiful

Screentests from the 1960s Factory days of Andy Warhol (Paul America, Edie Sedgwick, Richard Rheem, Ingrid Superstar, Lou Reed, Baby Jane Holzer, Billy Name, Mary Woronov, Freddy Herko, Ann Buchanan, Susan Bottomly, Nico, Dennis Hopper).

Art is a Liar

"The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth."


Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" [1891].

Wilde's "The Decay of Lying"

"At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from poets."


Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" [1891].

This Week, on "The Hills"

"[Stephanie Pratt] went to work for Kelly Cutrone, and it went really, really well. And by really, really well I mean it was like watching Hitler fall down a flight of stairs. It was funny and banal, but still evil."


Richard Lawson, http://gawker.com/5221527/the-hills--working-hard-to-make-a-better-world-for-none-of-us.

An image is like a crystal prism.

“An image is like a crystal prism, it reflects light in the most diverse and unexpected directions illuminating and bringing to consciousness other unexpected images and ideas until, like in meditation, thought itself gets lost in the beauty of the experience."


Manfredi Piccolomini, “Foreward: Omnia Quae Sunt, Sunt Lumina,” On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, by Giordano Bruno [1991].

Beliefs

"To behave as a believer has less to do with the content of the belief we hold than with our commitment to the representations that frame it."


Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image [2004].

From my personal files

Dear Elizabeth:

On behalf of ___________, I would like to thank you for your interest in the curatorial internship. Although your application showed you to be most qualified for this position, we have received many more applications that we could anticipate. We simply did not have the opportunity to consider them all.

Best wishes to you,

Sincerely,

___________
Intern

Sometimes you feel like a rat...

"[The rat] seems to me as if to say, 'I know what you mean, I have gone through that myself.' You have a right to be fed up and you have a right to be a rat once in awhile. You don't have to be good all the time."


Louise Bourgeois

Paul Virilio on the Mind/Memories

"When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea. It is thus now common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense."


Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine [1994].

From Frank O'Hara's "Personism" (1959)

"You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'"

Frank O'Hara, "Personism" [1959]

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque

"Now this shows you the roofless motif which is very, very handsome...This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of just tearing it down at once they tear it down partially so that you are not deprived of the complete wreckage situation...They really don't know if they want this part of the hotel or not, so it seems very smart to just leave it there...and I mean you never know when you might have some traveler, some tourist who comes to the hotel and wants a place that doesn't have a roof on it."

Robert Smithson, "Hotel Palenque" [1969-1972].

Allan Kaprow on Routine

"I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect."


Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.