Wandering Artist's Journal

Well, Randy Kennedy (see post below) seems to be back on the Art Beat, but I'm having trouble going there. Besides the obvious personal life issues, there's the great national distraction that has grabbed my attention more completely than anything since McGovern '72. My buttons from those days, even if this dates me: Edward Winkleman does an admirable job of balancing Art and Politics , and I may attempt to emulate him. I've been sending most of my art review posts over to BAArtQuake , which leaves other topics for this space. What topics, exactly? I haven't decided yet. Art-wise I'm in abeyance right now, awaiting the appearance or determination of my true course. I have various half-finished and partially-formed projects sitting about, but the main hands-on project these days is building a flat file for my studio. I designed it to have a day bed on top and a couple of deeper, rolling storage drawers below. Actually, it's all built and I'm in t...

Has anyone else noticed that the New York Times has assigned one their arts writers to the campaign trail ? Randy Kennedy has been covering Texas for the last two weeks: "In my regularly scheduled life at The New York Times, I cover the art world, but I grew up in Texas, in a small cotton-farming town in the panhandle near Lubbock, so it’s been nice to come back here to watch the state in electoral thrall. By the time I became aware of politics here in the 1970s (I remember Gov. Dolph Briscoe coming through our town on a campaign swing with lots of bunting and a truckload of barbecued buffalo meat) my corner of the state had pretty much already made its transition from yellow-dog Democrat to Republican. So it’s been strange and fascinating for me - as it has for many of the people I’ve talked to around the state, even staunch Republicans - to see a Democratic race matter here so much." His archived (art) stories at the NYT here . His recent contributions to the NYT politi...

SFGate is running a story by Kenneth Baker about art conservation today. In particular, the materials of contemporary art, which could be anything. He quotes Michelle Barger, SFMOMA's conservator of objects: "... what if you have a Sol LeWitt, and the work is not an object, but a certificate?" (For his numerous, often ephemeral wall drawings, LeWitt (1928-2007) issued precise instructions for their execution and a certificate of ownership that authorizes each owner to re-create the work as appropriate.) "Or you have a Dan Flavin, and the work is a fluorescent lightbulb - and the kind he used is going obsolete," Barger said. "Or a video by Gary Hill, "where you can't be all about preserving that material because it will die. You have to migrate what the heart of the piece is to a more stable medium. Or even a performance work by someone like Rirkrit Tiravanija" - who frequently works with food - "where you can't preserve the material...

from Michael Fallon at the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America : For the Young Who Want To by Marge Piercy Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job. Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of remarkable poems. Earlier they accuse you of withdrawing, ask why you don’t have a baby, call you a bum. The reason people want M.F.A.’s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and some- body else’s mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you’re certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is a...

Someone named Charmarley Nightfire just opened a gallery/museum devoted to the work of Banksy . Called "Banksy's Ghetto", it's a big three-story building located in Second Life, surrounded by replicas of the Palestinian Wall, the Berlin Wall and a painted elephant on the front lawn. It's billed as the "world's first extensive gallery of street art by Bristol graffiti artist Banksy!" Street art is ephemeral and much of Banksy's work has disappeared, so this sort of replay makes a certain kind of sense. You could see images of his older work in books , or on the artist's website , but this virtual museum helps provide a sense of scale, if not a proper sense of place. Some of the work on the top floor of "Banksy's Ghetto" is for sale, but it's unclear if Banksy has anything to do it. Banksy's web site states: "I don't agree with auction houses selling street art - its undemocratic, it glorifies greed and I never...

About a week ago, one of my friends gave me an old book that had been gathering dust for years on her shelves. She didn't know anything about it but thought it looked like something I might be interested in. Oh yes, I was interested - it was a copy of the show catalog for Eugene Carriere's postumous exhibit in 1906, held in his studio at the Hotel Drouot, Paris. Too bad the binding was trashed - if it had been in a little better condition the book would have been worth about $500. But it's still a pretty cool book - 14.5" x 10.25", 140 pages, softbound with 36 tissue-paper covered monochrome image plates. Eugene Carriere is almost forgotten today, but he had a tremendous influence on more well-known painters in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. He was influenced by Rubens, was good friends with Gauguin and Rodin, was hated by Degas. He was called a symbolist, and mostly painted portraits of his family and friends. His work influenced Picasso (his bl...

A friend just gave me a stack of " Cabinet " magazines. It's a quarterly art & culture journal that focuses on a single theme each for each issue. The name refers to the old fashioned Wunderkammer and I was struck by the similarities between the current evolution of the web and a cabinet of curiosities. Then I came across Albert Gilbert's essay In the Spring 2007 issue of Cabinet (#25): Web 2.0 is a partial deathblow to conventional aesthetics. This isn't so terrible, and was inevitable anyway, since aesthetics is a historical construction - a rapidly aging one at that. Francesco Bonami writes in a recent issue of Artforum: "If going to a museum is seen as a kind of airport-lounge experience, you have to accept that art can easily turn into 'stuff: meaning that viewers will experience mostly accumulation rather than sublimation." This is happening on a much more pervasive and invasive scale outside of the museum space as Web 2.0 continuously and...