"It was an attempt to see the world afresh. For many of its leading figures, from the Impressionists in the 1870s to conceptual artists a century later, this also meant proposing new and better solutions to the problem of how to be and how to live together. These proposals, many times rooted in sympathy and love, were presented as alternatives to the political structures and market logic that had so often led to war, exploitation, hopelessness, and suffering. Even when attempts to turn these imagined alternatives into reality failed—and often dismally—the avant-garde stood in a clear relationship to modernity’s traumas. It was like the whistle cap in the spout of a boiling kettle: both a release of suppressed pressures (psychic and cultural) and an alarm. But society got sick of hearing the alarm. And the kettle got tired of whistling...."
"Kusama... talked about her repeating dots as an expression of an inclination toward 'self-obliteration' —an urge to dissolve into forever-expanding patterns.... The artist—an adorable maker of giant spotted pumpkins who lived in a psychiatric institution—became beyond criticism. You could no more criticize her than you could a grandmother giving a teddy bear to an orphan.... Successful branding is exactly what art at its best is not: a form of general seduction rather than specific engagement...."
"As Ms. Heilmann later recalled, Mr. Voulkos liked to walk across the classroom holding a homemade pot, then trip (or rather, as she said, 'fake trip'), with the pot smashing on the floor. He would collect the broken shards and assemble them into a surprisingly interesting sculpture. Ms. Heilmann’s own early sculptures, which consisted of ragged-looking objects constructed from inexpensive craft-shop materials like plastic clay, tin foil, cotton balls, bamboo and glitter, similarly sought to foreground the process of their making."
ADDED: Something about the attitude in the comments here made me remember a line from the movie "Blue Moon":
She’s a college student. Sophomore. Yale. Not the general school; that’s for the guys. This is the School of Fine Arts! Bohemian goddesses in gray smocks mixing paint in morning light. She’s all of twenty years old.
I bought the screenplay so I could quote that. (I highly recommend that movie, by the way. It's the most like "My Dinner with Andre" that I've ever run across: An unusual man talks about theater for a long time. Catch it on Netflix.)
I do appreciate the commenters focusing on the phrase "An emblem of the obstacles."
Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.... The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers....
Nice photos. I like this kind of art installation. Comical. For the people.
Without forebears to teach them, Mr. Kopua — a tohunga whakairo, or a master woodcarver — learned tā moko from the patterns he used in carving and weaving. They studied moko kanohi patterns on decapitated heads that were under the care of New Zealand’s national museum.
Māori warriors believed that decapitation severed their enemies’ connection to the gods. In the 19th century, British settlers collected the heads as curiosities and trophies and offered guns and gold in exchange — prompting some Māori people to hunt down those who wore mataora and moko kauae.
"... boxes, buckets, complex assemblages of forms and materials, some indecipherable and unfinished. The workshop shed shows the scale and breadth of Exworth’s technical acuity and thinking – everything from drills, jigsaws, sanders and glass cutters to grinders, putty and tiny paintbrushes.... 'For me, he was a really genuine artist – solving problems about how to make things. He was engaged in the activity of making, and found that far more rewarding than presenting it. Ray was just engrossed every day in how to move forward and make something.'"
"... he said, powerful people 'caused workers to build things in honor of gods, heroes, battles won and the usual.' Works of land art like 'Star Axis' are 'specks in the scale of the landscape. They’re not monuments to anything except the fragility of our own perception and experience.'"
"How often are they just walking around their house nude, like by themselves, or are they just wearing PJs like a normal person? Like, as as a normal part of self-expression, do you just like walk around nude... do you walk nude to the grocery store as a form of self-expression? You know, just walking around in public nude... Would you be walking around as a form of, you know, just knowing yourself? Would you be walking around naked?"
Ben Shapiro — listening to Miley Cyrus talk to Monica Lewinsky — asks, rhetorically, because he's very sure the answer is no.
But maybe you yourself or somebody you've known does walk the face of the earth nude because that's who they really are.
I know I've said this before and maybe I was quoting someone else, but I just spent an absurd amount of time searching for that, unsuccessfully, so I'm just going to try to say it again, though I'm quite convinced I said it better that other time: Nudes have virtually no role in human history.
"... art turning into sex, all of it transforming what was ostensibly a holiday by the sea among friends into a frenzy of erotic and creative expression — an outpouring that, as Europe girded for war, acquired a rebellious political charge. 'It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism,' Thomasson writes, their lives and work serving as a 'manifesto for an alternative world to the one that was coming into being.'"
Is the book readable? Sample text: "We get a powerful sense of physicality. Of bodies, of limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined, still or in action. We feel the warm sun and salt water on bare skin and sand between toes, intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire." It's really hard to write about sex! Actually, that writing reminds me of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep." It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds.
"In the meantime, he has goaded the competition. In response to a post about [Russian billionaire Pavel] Durov notching triple-digit offspring, Mr. Musk replied, '"Rookie numbers lmao" — Genghis Khan,' a nod to the Mongol leader’s supposed millions of descendants. What drives these men to reproduce at an industrial scale? Mr. Musk’s reference to Genghis Khan holds one clue.... Like kings of earlier eras who claimed divine lineage, many of these men hold their own bloodlines in exalted regard. Mr. Musk, who in 2021 changed his job title at Tesla to 'technoking,' has said he wants smart people — or even just rich people, according to a report in Business Insider — to have more children. One of the mothers of his offspring, an executive in his business, told his biographer that he encouraged her to have kids and suggested he be her sperm donor...."
"Technoking" is not a gerund. I can't believe I spent time trying to understand "to technok" as a verb. The "ing" goes with the K. It's "Techno King."
You know, "nok" isn't just the NYSE stock ticker for Nokia. It's the genus of the bare-faced bulbul (Nok hualon). The Nok were an ancient African people, known for their terra cotta sculptures.
And never forget the Nixies — Danish: nøkke, Norwegian: nøkk, Swedish: näck; Icelandic: nykur, Faroese: nykur; Finnish: näkki. These were "male water spirits who play enchanted songs on instruments, luring women and children to drown in lakes or streams."
So, ladies, resist the nøkk, the techo-nøkk, the technoking. No kings! No nøkkings. Maintain a no-nøkk policy.
MADONNA: Well, every song on this record is—not every song. Some are just joy. “Love Sensation” is just joy. But a lot of the songs here are confessional.
OTTENBERG: What about the last time you confessed in a church?
MADONNA: Oh, that’s been a while.
OTTENBERG: Do you have a relationship with organized religion?
MADONNA: Well, I was raised a Catholic and I’m a cultural Catholic.
"It depicted a tiny Putin sitting on Stalin’s lap. He also stuffed a Russian flag into a bin during the protest, which was staged on the Russia Day national holiday.... On Saturday Kuzovkov posted a painting on Telegram showing [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov and his teenage son, Adam, as pigs. His work included sexually explicit images of Kadyrov that suggested the Chechen leader was gay. He also mocked Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces unit...."
"... is warm and incorporates inclusive sayings like 'Be seen' and 'I love all of you.' The message is perhaps muddled by the price tag. Reserving all of a subway station’s walls and other surfaces, a package advertisers sometimes call 'station domination,' can cost more than $250,000 per month, said Seneca Mudd, a managing partner at Brand Bravery, a marketing firm helping to coordinate Ms. Gilbert’s plan. He declined to give the total cost of the ad-space purchase, but said that it was over $1 million, including station rentals and marketing expenses...."
From the comments over there: "I see this story a lot differently than the journalist. A woman from a family of billionaires uses her financial connections to fund a vanity project so full of itself that it includes QR codes for people to send photos of themselves enjoying it. The art itself is simple and juvenile, like something a grade schooler would draw. This is the type of art a parent would put on a fridge, but because Ms. Gilbert has friends with deep pockets it’s being put up for months in the New York subway."
"We really are finding our soul. And that means having the number of artists that you can perform extraordinary things for. It means just the really core relationships," Glimcher explained.
One of the artists who got cut is Glenn Kaino, who said: "It’s been clear to me for a while that their model was optimized for a vision of the art world that never materialized. The art I create is concerned with the world and our place in it.... I’m a romantic about good, meaningful art creating value, and not the other way around...."
The judgy comments are mostly resentful of Sedaris's wealth and his choice to spend what he has on art and on chairs that seem as if they might be uncomfortable.
And here's Sedaris's new collection of essays: "The Land and Its People" (commission earned). It came out 5 days ago. I've read it and will read it again and again. I love David Sedaris's voice and his books are, by far, my favorite book to listen to while falling asleep. But this new book won't work for that. It's got loud, aggressive clapping/percussion between the essays.
"... and a fierce engagement with the complexities of 20th-century German history.... Mr. Baselitz’s 'Hero' series of 1965 and 1966 — blocky figures in thick impasto stumbling through tormented landscapes — plunged the viewer into a nightmare vision of postwar Germany. No less disturbing were the woodsmen, hunters and cows of the 'Fracture' series, disassembled into horizontal strips and merged with the landscape. In a break with convention, Mr. Baselitz began turning the central images in his canvases upside down in the late 1960s.... 'The hierarchy where the sky is at the top and the ground down below is in any case only an agreement, one we have all got used to, but one that we absolutely do not have to believe in,' Mr. Baselitz told the critic and historian Walter Grasskamp in 1984."
I wish Baselitz could have done the official portrait for... various political figures. But I will not say who because I'm chilled by the arrest of James Comey.
And here's an example from the "Fractures" series, totally inappropriate for an official portrait:
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