Screw self-pity; Enjoy This Instead

Lately life just appears to bring one adversity after another, reminders not to take anything for granted (but I'm having trouble listening).

What does this have to do with art? Maybe nothing but at this point, who cares?

In the face of reigning self-pity, there is a light of joy: Filipino prison inmates do Thriller en masse.

Having a Cow over Homer

(click on image for story)

Oops! No more expandable posts

Sorry, something got screwed up w/the HTML template so the expandable post option no longer works, and the new Help instructions are different, so I don't know how to fix it . . .

A-I-R: the next step?

I think I'll apply to an artist residency at the end of the year/new year, starting to feel like a natural next step towards becoming a professional artist. It's less investment and commitment than grad school, yet can still provide an ideal environment and community for productive process. Do they award them to non-degreed artists, or those w/o MFAs? I intend to find out, starting locally. Here are links to A-I-R databases, national and global:

http://www.artistcommunities.org/
http://www.resartis.org/
http://www.transartists.nl/

Bejewelled Skull Art prank

Last month, artist Damien Hirst unveiled the most expensive contemporary artwork ever made, a skull bedazzled with more than 8,000 fine diamonds. It's expected to sell for as much as $100 million. In response to the skull's exhibition at London's White Cube Gallery in Mason's Yard, an artist named Laura created a replica covered with 6,522 Swarovski crystals and dumped it outside the gallery in the middle of the night on top of a pile of trash.

Revelling in a contemplation of impotence

With no prior planning, he starts and develops his complex compositions on canvas. He told an interviewer, “I understand myself to be a director of plays.” The plays, such as they are, emerge in the process. . .

In terms of narrative content, the work is maddeningly coy—unless you fancy Jungian woolgathering about archetypes and suchlike—but it is so well designed and painted that, once you have started looking, resistance gives way. . .

Rauch tends to use oils as if they were poster paints, flatly—often scumbling, rather than glazing or blending, to modulate tones and colors. The result is a surreptitious richness. The rhetorical potency of oils—sensuous texture, light-drinking color, infinite suggestiveness—strains at a short, taut leash. The constrictive effect strikes me as perverse, but it is certainly original. It also anchors Rauch’s importance as an artist of and for the historical imbroglio of art today. . .

Rauch’s work provides a cultural moment that seeks legitimacy in art with talismans of rhapsodic complacency.

The surprise is that worry-proof conservatism can generate real artistic force. It does so, in Rauch’s art, by finding opportunities, in trumped-up fantasy, for recovering traditional aesthetic capacities of painting. Having nothing to say, he says it ever more marvellously. . .

The more observant you are of erudite allusions in the show (some male figures display particular airs and dress styles of nineteenth-century German Romanticism), the more acute will be your frustration in trying to make sense of it all. If Rauch’s work is nightmarish, as some critics have asserted, the effect pertains not to its dramas but to their mockery of understanding. They are not mysterious, because mysteries imply solutions. Rather, they convey that we may know plenty but our knowledge is useless. There is a highly contemporary sting in this. Today, we are flooded with accurate information—letting us confidently judge the failures and iniquities of political leaders, for instance—and we naturally feel that such clarity must influence events, but it only amplifies our dismay as the world careers from one readily foreseeable disaster to another. Rauch sets us an example of getting used to it. . .

But I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were.

Peter Schjeldahl on Neo Rauch at the Met, in the New Yorker June 4, 2007.

Jazz Wisdom, via novelist

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
--Haruki Murakami, in the NY Times 7/8/07

Peko-chan Obsession?

Just a couple of entertaining links on a subject that's included in my latest exhibition:

Scandal Wipes Smile from "Peko-chan's" Face

They steal Fujiya Peko chan dolls

Post-Opening Syndrome: Symptoms, Treatment?

In the week and a half since a group show I'm in opened, I've experienced

depression
self-loathing
extreme craving for recognition, praise, accolades
consumption by vanity

all of which put me at risk for behaviors that had nothing to do with making good, honest art, and everything to do with ego-centrism. With that driving force, I did discover a couple of resources for artists obsessed with their own so-called "success" . . .

1. Reconnaissance: Google Alerts -- you can have Google scour the web, news, blogs, and groups, to keep you informed on a daily basis via e-mail of any postings with YOUR NAME or any other search terms you wish (e.g. show or gallery name, etc.). This way you don't have to keep obsessively googling your name to see if anyone likes you. (Actually a useful tool to yourself keep posted on developments in subjects of interest in your work).

2. Free promo? Gawker.com -- if you have a sample jpg of your work, brief bio/statement, and a website to refer to, it looks like these folks will do random free promotion of you and your work. You have to submit a proposal, but from a brief glance, looks like a range of artists at various levels of development. (Now, to get a website . . . but is that a good use of a true artist's time? I mean neither Michael Arcega nor Daniel Joseph Martinez have websites . . .).

Would you make it if you couldn't show it?

"The way to go in the art world is to get an MFA or drop out of high school," he said. "Even better, drop out of junior high." Daws not only graduated from high school, he went to college for a semester before coming to his senses. In school, he was a painter. One day in class, students considered the following question: If someone offered to pay them a decent living to make art under the sole condition that they never show it, would they take the deal?

"I was the only person who raised my hand," he said. "I loved the process of painting. What happens to the paintings interested me less. The work I'm doing now I wouldn't do if I couldn't show it to people. I'd leave it at the level of ideas, because fabrication is a pain in the ass."

From The Pennies of Jack Daws