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"