Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cold media bother me.
blog
on photography, false promises, and melancholy
Francesca Woodman, House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
“I would argue that the compulsion of the narrative derives its interpretive animation from the real threat of loss,” Michael Ann Holly writes in her book The Melancholy Art; whether as an art historian you are acting the detective solving the mystery of a painting, or the philosopher attempting to articulate an affective response to a work of art, the motivation for the work remains the same: the experience of a loss.
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on notes on the death of culture
The spectacle is the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society. – Guy Debord Continue reading “on notes on the death of culture”
loquela: a book about the impossibility of writing a book
Carlos Labbé is kind of a downer. Well, sort of. Maybe he’s just a realist.
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towards a variety of acceptable art
Caption: Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923.
Is the art world’s codification of meaning-making in art responsible for the general lack of public engagement with it?
on richard serra, context and museum-going in 2017
This is a cross-post of a piece of mine recently published in Arts+Culture Texas that tackles an excellent example of the tension between curator and audience.
Richard Serra’s work in print-making may be unknown to the casual art-goer, the artist’s name associated instead with his massive, imposing sculptural work in steel. But as Richard Serra: Prints, on view through April 30 at Dallas’ Nasher Sculpture Center details, for the last 30 years or so Serra has worked extensively with an array of printmaking processes.
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on memoirs and memory
Memory is to one what history is to another – an impossibility. – Chris Marker
on context
I don’t think there is anything more important to our understanding and appreciation of history, literature, art, philosophy, and beyond, or anything less taught, than cultural context.
On museums and technology
Caption: Gerald Murphy, Watch, 1925.
“Museums innovate at their own risk,” was the way writer Mike Pepi concluded a recent piece for Art in America on New York’s New Museum’s “New Inc.”, the first “museum-led incubator for creative entrepreneurs.”
I’ve been spending a good deal of time recently thinking about our experience of art in 2016. Not just mine but generally how I imagine people are experiencing art both inside and outside of museums in an age of mediated encounters.
On the search for a literal art
Caption: Long before Michael Heizer brought “Levitated Mass” to LACMA, he took pictures of massive boulders, above. The photos and “Munich Rotary” are on view. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
A few weeks ago I was reading an essay about Michael Heizer and came across a reference to Frank Stella’s assertion concerning his own work that “what you see is what you see.” The author of the essay seems to leave space for the literalness of Stella, Johns, or Rauschenberg’s art while using Heizer’s photographs, with his manipulation of size and scale, to “explore the ‘truth claims’ of photographic media,” to assert, in fact, photography and film as mediums in which, contrary to what one might think, literalness is more difficult to take for granted.
jennifer l smart 