May 2012
28 posts
"I’m glad you came here to irritate and excite us and even give us some satisfaction." →
wnyc.org
Ruth Bowman interviews Dan Flavin in 1970 for WNYC.
“Is romantic love the enemy of a necessary aloneness? Or is it only through learning to be truly alone that we become capable of romantic love? Put differently, is independence a necessary precondition for any relationship or, instead, an end in itself?”
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Emily Cooke writes on companionship, creativity, and being alone in “The Lonely Ones”
via: The New Inquiry
Listen
A recent edition of the Modern Art Notes Podcast features one of my favorite artists, Robert Irwin.
via: manpodcast
image: Robert Irwin, Untitled, ca. 1960-61. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Who Made That Mason Jar? - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
my father has hundreds of “fruit jars” (as he calls them). they are beautiful. every time he shows them to me (they have their own shed, next to the house), he points out the different shades of color. the delicate, barely noticeable difference in blues. the spring rain green. the clarity of it all.
“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”
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John Steinbeck on falling in love: a 1958 letter
via: Brain Pickings
“Knowledge is specific to a person. It’s information that has been filtered by a person’s interests and integrated into his or her understanding. All that stuff you get from a Google search is information. You select a few bits from search and learn more about them, and some of them became part of your knowledge base – integrated into the arguments you make and how you think about things. Information itself is like a treasure chest – multiple users can draw from it and make knowledge from it in different ways.”
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Ann Blair in “Information hoarders”
via: The Browser
“The problem with making assumptions about any “red” state is that it ignores not only the pockets of blue, but the legions of people working hard to change the tide in their surroundings. There’s a particular kind of state pride among those who love their state despite their state, who have a seasoned respect that’s deeper and more honest than sheer boosterism. Making blanket statements about regions does so at the expense of the folks working hard there to make a difference…Change is slow, and it starts small. Bumper stickers matter. But more than that, so do conversations on front stoops, at the neighborhood park, in churches, in the checkout line. This small, steady change is happening all over the South.”
—via: Freckled Citizen: Tick tock, North Carolina
“His language is too frequently reckless and indecent… . His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society, and will justly prevent his volume from free circulation in scrupulous circles… . The Leaves of Grass … are full of bold, stirring thoughts … but so disfigured with eccentric fancies as to prevent a consecutive perusal without offense.”
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Charles Dana’s initial review of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass, noted in “The unbearable rightness of criticism” by William Logan
via: The New Criterion
“The role of imagination, desire, fear—emotion, we might say—on our concept of reality affects not just artists, but all of us, or at least, everyone who thinks, feels and uses language. Language spreads an overlay of thought and feeling over all our raw perceptions.”
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Maria Bustillos on authenticity in “What Is The Real-Real Thing?”
via: The Awl
“Renaissance painters were heavily influenced by x-rated picnics. No, they weren’t perverts. They were just a little curious, mythologically speaking. Slide. The gals at these picnics were fair-skinned and not all too skinny, and the guys were muscular and generally leaning against things. Sometimes they had wings. This will be on the final.”
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Advanced Amateur Art History, by Chas Gillespie
