represent

The progress of love

The Turning Season, handmade, clothbound chapbook at Viridian Artists

Over the past month I’ve become obsessed with creating a set of handmade books. I’ve never done this before. I essentially took lessons from the wealth of information available on the web, including many videos, so whatever craftsmanship I’ve achieved has been earned through many setbacks, mistake, do-overs, workarounds, and overall general trial-and-error. In the end, as of today, my efforts have resulted five sets of two-volume paperback chapbooks to show for my effort, and five clothbound, hardback single-signature chapbooks—a limited first edition. It’s been a long journey, but far more gratifying than I suspected it would be. In an age when the rate of e-book rentals at public library is skyrocketing, I like sinking into the long, slow, deliberate building of a physical book with an inkjet printer, printmaking paper, thread, binder’s board, bone folders, awls, glue and cloth, in a way that can’t possibly make me the kind of money that would justify the amount of time and, yes, cash, I’ve invested in the process. It’s been a labor of deep love, on a book that expresses some of my most fundamental values, and after working so many years on a story that has yet to find its conclusive form, it’s gratifying to see this small, elliptical child of that larger, difficult parent finally become something I can hold in my hands. When I see the final book, I feel: This is me. As much as anything I’ve created in my life, this is me. This is what I wanted these pictures and haiku poems to be when I first created them a number of years ago.

I backed into these weeks of consuming passion as a response to the theme of the next group show at Viridian Artists thanks to Vernita N’Cognita: Yin and Yang, a Fusion of Opposites. The show highlights the way member artists have drawn from Eastern traditions for inspiration or technique or a sense of purpose in their work. A few days after I heard about the theme of the show, it occurred to me to resurrect this series of drawings and poems I created as an appendix for a novel I wrote over the past decade but have never published, nor satisfactorily finished. Viking/Penguin published my first novel in the late 90s and since then I’ve either been working on this one—in between periods of writer’s block that many people call making a living. The novel is called The Turning Season. So is the book I’ve just designed, printed, and bound by hand. (I would have made the paper as well, if I’d had the time—and, well, if I’d ever actually made my own paper. Maybe that can wait for a second edition . . .)

The ten drawings I did for the novel were created as the work of two fictional characters in the novel: Rob Hapworth and Jill Pickett. They meet on vacation, they are attracted to one another, but they pull apart out of an obligation to people they already love, and yet they sublimate their affection for one another through a set of poems and drawings: Rob writes the poems and Jill does the drawings to match them. In the process, she delves deeply into a number of traditions and imaginative works, from the Buddhist Ox-Herding Songs to the central structure of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to The Wasteland as well as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. In other words she turns a set of simple haiku poems that chart the pull and push of her relationship with Rob into a reworking of an ancient mythic structure she detects at the heart of all these other sources: a universal spiritual journey toward fulfillment through loss. I spent more than a year writing the poems and taking the photographs to use as the basis for pastel drawings on watercolor paper, to accompany the poems. In other words, I did what Jill ostensibly does in the story. And then, when I put the novel aside, I hung the pictures on my wall and moved on to other things for the past few years. Until now.

Now I’m thinking I need to return to my manuscript and finally finish the novel.

Dante visits Cincinnati

Steam of Lethe, Sean Caulfield

Manifest is offering a fascinating exhibit right now: two artist’s books that use printmaking to merge images and poetry inspired by Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. The work draws on visions from the Italian poet’s trilogy and then reworks them as a way of meditating on what Sean Caulfield sees as the contemporary crisis of our relationship to the natural world, including the human body itself.  Caulfield, a Canadian artist, got the project rolling by devising images inspired by scenes in Dante’s great poem. Caulfield is a Centennial Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, and has exhibited his prints, drawings and artist’s books extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. He took his images first to Jonathan Hart who wrote poetry based on Caulfield’s work, at which point the collaborators called on Sue Colbert who helped create a unified, integrated book out of the work they’d produced. Caulfield was originally inspired by William Blake’s illustrations for Dante and Milton, as well as that brilliant, eccentric poet/printmaker’s ability to weave his world out of both text and visual imagery.

What inspired me to send questions to Caulfield about his work was his reverence for poetic and artistic tradition—his eagerness to see contemporary relevance in work done centuries ago. More

Asses of the world unite!

Kenny Schachter

Yesterday, an interesting and funny and startling conversation took place on Facebook between the informed and thoughtful curator Todd Levin and the self-described art hustler and polymath Kenny Schachter. It was a little like watching a car crash in real time, though no one really got hurt. More like a couple clown cars in a demolition derby. The conversation revolved around something Schachter wrote about Gallery Girls, a reality TV program built around the lives of young gallery workers. So this all started with a post from Schachter, who now does his thing in London. He’d gotten a scathing letter from the husband of a woman who had appeared in one episode of the show. His post:

Who is the poison pen in this instance, can someone please let me know, am i so terrible? Here is a scathing email I received, all because of this crap tv show I was asked to watch that was supposedly about the art market, not anyone’s academic achievements or accomplishments. Sorry.

Kenny,
I am a friend and subscriber of Marc Faber’s and so have read your art world More

Art I love

Karen Kilimnik, Me, Corner of Haight & Ashbury, 1966, 1998
Water soluble oil color on canvas

Should have started doing this from day one. A new, occasional department: Art I Love. Just great pictures, no words. (This was from a fascinating show Todd Levin curated.)

Oh, the ambition . . .

Lauren sent me an email a couple days ago: “Have you seen Hyperallergic today?” I knew what that meant. I don’t get many emails from her that don’t circle around to the subject of what she’s up to, so I figured somebody high on the 26th floor at Hyperallergic World Headquarters must have finally detected the sound of her painting boots stomping the floorboards at 3 a.m. all the way over on the other side of Brooklyn. Along with strains of Tom Waits from her Macbook. (That’s when she’s usually hard at work on her comics and paintings. I don’t think she actually sleeps.) So I clicked and found that one of my favorite art blogs had discovered her poster, which got tons of shares when she put it up on Facebook a while back. Right after she drew this, earlier this year, she showed it to me, while I was visiting Brooklyn, and pointed toward one of the panels and said, “That’s you.” At the time, I thought, “Oh, cool. I inspired one of these!” Upon further investigation (in other words, Lauren told me to get over myself, I wasn’t her inspiration) she merely meant that, as an artist, she was able to pigeonhole me into one of her well-observed categories. (This flattered me at first and then made me uncomfortable. Lauren’s too intelligent. She sees exactly where most things fall short of the ideal, and shortfall is my niche.) It’s unclear, at this point in time, which panel she meant when she was putting me in my place. I thought it was “Normal things need my help to be interesting.” However, she insists there’s a jar in here somewhere, and she knows I love to paint jars. Here’s the thing, though. Now I recognize myself in more than one of these drawings. At least three of them. Hm. No, five, actually. OK, this is as high as I’m going to go: eight. I’m definitely in eight of these. As Charlie Brown would have said if Lucy had drawn this: I am the inspiration for this comic, Linus! Then Lucy decks him with a roundhouse left.

One thing, though. Zero desire to get naked in public. Not that anyone was hoping.

Words to live by

Playtime, by Deborah Parkin

When I read this, I thought, yes! That’s exactly right! And then I reread it and realized that this would be something almost anyone who practices any kind of unrecognized art would think. Which doesn’t make it any less valuable, of course, but it was the way she worked in her children and possible grandchildren that somehow caught my eye. And also the quality of what she’s doing in the context of her struggle with obscurity. “I have also found the Internet . . .” Funny. Uh, yeah, Deborah. Ampersands and all.

From Lenscratch:

Robert Hughes

“Although art has always been a commodity, it loses its intrinsic value and its social use when it is treated only as a commodity. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of the contemplation of it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning, and visual experience generally, under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then hidden in storage, what would happen to one’s sense of literature—the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse?”

Even better:

“The Cultural Cringe is the assumption that whatever you do in the field of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, dance, or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society. It is the reflex of the kid with low self-esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father, but secretly despairing that it can. The essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live. By the manipulation of such standards, almost anything can be seen to fail, no matter what sense of finesse, awareness, and delight it may produce in its own setting.”

–Robert Hughes

1938-2012

And now the vegetables . . .

Radicchio from Ithaca, oil on linen, 16″ x 36″

We bought these on a trip down to the public market on Cayuga Lake, in Ithaca, a few weeks ago and I was fascinated by the elongated shape and variegated color, as well as the twists and flares in the leaves. I wish I’d asked how the vendor grew them. I’d try some myself next summer. Our lettuce is just about done, but the cherry tomatoes are starting to get red.

Meet your meat

Poultry for Smithfields, Sarah F. Burns

When I saw this, it reminded me of two different paintings by Chardin (also involving game birds one step away from the oven), both in the choice of subject, the simplicity of the staging and in the handling of paint. Great work, part of an interesting and compelling series of vanitas paintings by Sarah F. Burns in Oregon. At one point, the project involved dragging a bloody bear carcass into her Ashland studio. This woman is serious about her meat. And her art. Her friend Jennifer Nitson interviewed Sarah and came away with a nice small profile of the artist containing a wonderful, illuminating quote: “I have been particularly interested in small-scale meat production and nose-to-tail eating because I grew up in that type of lifestyle. My father was a farm-kill butcher when I was born. That means he went from farm to farm killing livestock and brought them back to the butcher shop to cut up and wrap.”  The work was commissioned by a local restaurant in Ashland, named after a London market. As Sarah puts it on her blog: “Smithfields is . . . named after a London meat market with a very long history, going back to the middle ages where it was the place of public executions, becoming a livestock market, and is currently a wholesale meat market today.”

It’s sense of timelessness is what especially appeals to me about this work. It could have been painted two centuries ago and yet it looks totally contemporary as well. I guess that last sentence is just a long way home to the word classic.

Beasts of Revelation, Nixon Pilgrims and Rastafarian Israelis

Kehinde Wiley’s “Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari (The World Stage: Israel)

My visit to Chelsea a couple of weeks ago turned up a surprising number of shows with religious content, presented in vastly different ways. I’ve already pointed out the quasi-Gnostic overtones of the Joseph Strau show at Green Naftali, which seemed to be a sincere attempt to produce art inspired by the German artist’s personal spiritual awakening, but at least three other exhibits approached religion in three distinctly different tones. At D.C. Moore, Beasts of Revelation offered a variety of interesting work, but the tone of the press release created a snarky lens through which it was nearly impossible to see any of the work as a genuine attempt to visualize religious faith in a non-judgmental way. Christopher Hitchens, if you’re watching, you should be grinning. The release was more than a bit pretentious, heralding that the show would break new ground into content heretofore taboo for contemporary art. Oh, that again. (Is that even remotely possible anymore?) The fact that, simultaneously, three other exhibits elsewhere in the city were infused with religious content offered a deflating reality check to this bit of bloviating on contemporary art’s ability to “pose uncomfortable questions and provoke disturbing answers.”

What the show appears to be is the gallery’s attempt to visualize what it calls . . . wait for it, wait for it . .  the “insidious aquifer of metaphorical power” exerted by “religion” but what’s clearly meant is right-wing Christianity. “Political issues that might have been considered personal during another era have become rallying cries for various religious groups.” It isn’t hard to translate what that means, and some of the idiocies of the Christian right-wing are easy targets for anyone who wants to pound the drum over their knuckle-headedness. Yet a show about “religion” that might have been far more interesting and resonant would have been one with images from Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist artists, as well as Jewish and Catholic, or maybe even a die-hard Taoist. Or a Rastafarian, anyone? A show that contained sincere images about personal faith: now there would be something that felt like a violation of a more genuine taboo, since we’re talking about More

What we talk about when we talk about Sol LeWitt

Very funny from Hyperallergic. A sample:

LeWitt’s paintings are clearly about making . . . anyone can make a Sol LeWitt painting. It might suck, mind you, but it’s still a LeWitt if it follows the instructions.

LeWitt’s conceptual approach is one of collaboration and is all about erasing, not only art as an object, but also the author himself. Because of this radical turn, one can say that he is seen as one of the most important artists in the conceptual art movement.

In fact, one should say that. You can usually get away with making a claim about who is “seen as” “one of” the most “important” anything — since these qualified phrases exempt you from having stated any facts. When a speaker says that X is seen as one of the most pivotal yadda, they actually mean to say something like, “Woohoo! I love this artist!”

However, in the case of Sol LeWitt, you can genuinely see that he paved the way for a whole new way of talking about art in terms of the concepts called up by viewing and or making it.

In fact, LeWitt’s new lexicon opened floodgates to a vast realm, a Pandora’s Box, one might say, of artworks that needn’t even be realized in order to be appreciated, and even bought and sold.

Intuition

Ok, from the beginning, again . . .

Joseph Strau, Exercises ab initio

“Josef Strau A former proprietor of well-regarded project spaces in Cologne and Berlin as well as an artist. Strau is known for combining aspects of automatic writing and automatic drawing into installations and sculptural ensembles that often include household furnishings—most notably lamps, which are something of a signature element for him.”

That’s the dictionary definition of Joseph Strau you can pick up at Greene Naftali, where you can inhabit his new conceptual installation until Aug. 10. That hand-out made me laugh when I got it home and read it, and laughter is so often my response to contemporary art, whether I’m laughing with the art or at it. Bottom line: I kind of liked the show, but I’m liking the guy who appears to be behind it even more than what he’s done here. If he’s real. Can you tell anymore? The ethereal quality of show makes you wonder if it’s all just a put-on, but I’m going to assume it’s sincere. It appears to be about recovered innocence, and it has a sense of rebellious spirituality you could trace back through the Hippies and Beats, on backward through Thoreau and Emerson and Rimbaud, all the way back to More

Thought for the day

Midsummer Night’s Dream

I want a painting to be as insignificant and perfect as a daydream. I want insignificant perfection.

Pink Slime, Zuccotti Park, and a little Led Zep

Fait II, Claudia Fainguersch

I spent most of Sunday helping to hang the new group show at Viridian Artists, on W. 28^th St., juried by Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was interesting to watch her silently visualize how each piece would look, deep in thought, while the rest of us moved pieces from one wall and to another and then often back onto the original wall, at her request. She required the center of each piece to be exactly 57” above the floor, so I helped Bob Mielenhausen, a fellow Viridian artist, in measuring each one, then bisecting it with a little plastic dot sticker. We then held up each painting to align the sticker with a levelled mark running along the wall at that height. It was something I’d never thought to do before: having the center of every work at exactly the same height in relationship to the floor and the viewer’s eye. No doubt it’s the most elementary rule in the curatorial book, but it was nice to finally learn it. It really made a difference in the look of the whole show when we were done.

As all of this went on, Chrissie was sensitive to distractions. “I don’t want to see those phones,” she said at one point, referring to a diptych involving a cell phone and a more traditional handset. So I would move them out of her sight. Same with a couple other paintings that seemed to keep getting shunted off to some place out of view. I was beginning to feel their pain. I’ve been ostracized; I know what it’s like. Finally, though, she would hit on the exact spot for a particular work and up it went, never to be reconsidered. Those seemingly neglected phones, in fact, were the first to find their home, long before everything else in the show. But for a long time, it was, “Just move that one somewhere else.”

She specializes in film, as well as film and video installation, and Minimalist and process-based art of the sixties and seventies. She is part of the curatorial team formulating the overall artistic policy of the Whitney Museum. For our day’s work, I joined our director, Vernita Nemec, her assistant director, Lauren Purje, and Bob. It took us six hours, from start to finish, with an hour break for brunch at the Half King a couple blocks away, where you get free Bloody Marys with your meal, their tomato juice loaded with bits of shrimp and hot sauce. When Chrissie came back from a long phone call from Europe, she started telling us about her close friend, the legendary international performance artist, Marina Abromovic.

Chrissie Iles

“I’m currently writing the text for a book on her performances. I did her first retrospective at Oxford,” she said, giving us a lot of background about how close the Abromovic family was with Tito in Yugoslavia, before it broke apart along ethnic lines. “The key to a lot of her work was her mother. Really rigid woman. Really awful.”

I wanted to hear a lot more, but our conversation was kept short by her long conference call with Europe and the need to finish hanging the show. Whan we got back to the gallery, the level of care she continued to put into every detail of our group effort impressed me enormously. The work was of varying quality, with many well-realized pieces More

Trail of sighs and whispers

Vernita N’Cognita

Vernita N’Cognita is heading to a 16^th century castle in a little town near Frankfort, Germany next month for a new performance, with a partner this time, David Rodgers, and she’s trying to raise money for the trip through Kickstarter. In this evocative Old World location, they’ll explore the clash between the European past, with it’s traditions and rituals, and the 21^st Century world. They’ll attempt to portray the conflicts and contradictions we all face on a daily basis. Their performances will be a mix of theater, music and dance.

The work will be called “Trail of Sighs and Whisper,” and will be as feminist as most of her work and, from the way she describes it, slightly mournful about the sadness of human relationships. She’ll perform at the town of Homburg, at the invitation of a university there. I first heard about the performance at the meeting of gallery members last week when Vernita announced: “I’m looking for a wedding dress. I’ll probably do bad things to it.”

Here’s how she described the project on her website:

I’m going to Homburg, Germany where David Rodgers & I are performing at the end of August for the Sommerakadamie of Kunst in Schloss Homburg, which is an annual art institute and creative gathering in the small town of Homburg-am-Main, in Bavaria, where Rodgers has been participating and performing since 2008. It’s called The Trail of Sighs and Whispers, a performance inspired by the ritual of marriage and the age-old tradition of “walking down the aisle”. In a twisted tale told through Butoh movement, costume and voice, I, The Bride, will take aim at this ritual of culture and seek to shed light on “The Wedding” and the difficulty of wedding the complex paths of two lives in the world of the 21st Century. Utilizing studies of Japanese Butoh, which I have practiced for over a decade, I will use masks and movement to create a work with feminist overtones. In this work, I will be using the streets and main plaza of Homburg as my stage, traveling by foot and bringing the audience to the entrance of the Church of St. Burkardus, where I will be joined by Rodgers as I finish my quest and he begins his. Our performances will be interrelated and collaborative, but conducted as individual performances. They will take place on Saturday, August 25, 2012, at 8 PM.”

 Rodgers’ performance is called The Music of the Spheres. It dramatizes an imaginary encounter between 17^th century astronomer Johannes Kepler and remarkable astronomical events of 2012, which he was able to predict mathematically in the 1600’s. The performance will explore how he reacts to finding himself 400 years in the future and learns to communicate his vital scientific discoveries to the people of the computer age. In this theatrical spoken-word performance, staged in the courtyard of the castle, Rodgers will work with local musician David Hartmann, who makes and plays all of his own unconventional musical instruments, providing the live soundtrack music to accompany Kepler’s journey through a new world.

Over lunch, on the day we put up the new juried show at Viridian, Vernita went into a little more detail on the spirit of this new work. “I’ll probably do some bizarre things along the way. I’m examining and confronting the underside of femininity,” she said. “All the things women do to make them who they are. I’m also exploring the impossibility of welding two lives together in this culture.”

She is preparing a Kickstarter project to raise money to cover the airfare to Germany and back for her and Rodgers. Other expenses they expect to cover themselves.

Black bean burger colloquy

Natalie Frank, Portrait of S at Fredericks & Freiser

I got home yesterday from a busy four days in New York City. I rode my R1150R down and back, and took it over the upper level of the George Washington into the city almost every day I was there. Though it was very hot most of the time, for the most part, it was bliss, not only the ride down through the Catskills but also the feeling of being able to weave and carve an original path along any Manhattan street clogged with cars. There is no such thing as a parking problem for a motorcycle in New York City. You just back the bike between two parking spaces, or at the front of a row of them, and you’re good to go. (I did bolt a lock to the brake disk.) I learned a lot on this trip, not only about riding a thousand miles on two wheels in four days, but also about a couple artists I thought I already knew fairly well and a slew of others I didn’t know at all. I also learned some basic rules about hanging a good show from Chrissie Iles, a young curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art with a British accent I loved, who showed up on Sunday—just back from Spain—to direct us in our attempt to properly exhibit the summer show she’d jured for us at Viridian Artists.

More on that show in another post, but the most fun I had on my visit was a day I spent with John Lloyd, a Brooklyn artist who joined me for a tour through various Chelsea galleries. Our conversation about art is something I want to share, mostly because it’s what I enjoy most about visiting the city. All the talk. The conversations about art and life. He’s fun to be with, because his knowledge ranges over a number of disciplines, and he touched on only a couple. John and I were comparing work histories and we followed similar paths, in terms of our art. In college, we both came to the conclusion that we needed to do something other than make art to pay bills, and I didn’t want to teach. Mostly, I wanted to paint without anyone else meddling with my head. I wanted to do what came naturally to me, not mold myself into a “career” based on what work was being done successfully at the time. John said, “I never did the bohemian thing the way our friend Lauren is doing it. I wanted an income so I learned computers and went to work at the stock exchange.” That’s more or less what I did as well: I worked two years as a staff associate for the United Way, as a way of making rent money, and then went back to grad school for an English degree, but again decided I didn’t want to teach in departments where people had to name-check Derrida while doing some savage deconstruction of Little Women or The Great Gatsby. So I got a second master’s in communications and became a reporter. I kept painting, and now it’s finally becoming more central to who I am. I do not miss the bohemian stage of being poor and struggling at all. When I’ve stayed with younger friends in Brooklyn, sleeping on an air mattress, it isn’t for the romance of faux poverty: it’s a free way to stage my visits into Manhattan, that’s all. I’m not trying to live out my twenties again in some way I missed in the past. If I had friends in a $3 million house in Brooklyn More

All you gotta do is act naturally . . .

Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, by Sargent

I’ve started another candy jar painting, part of a series I’ve been doing for several years now, off and on. This one’s a quarter the size of my usual work with these jars, which are a little over four feet by four feet. A while back, a friend at Viridian Artists, Bob Mielenhausen, suggested I try some of these in this smaller format, only two feet square, and so that’s what I’m doing, as a test, more or less. I’m also working on wood panel rather than on canvas or linen, as well as using a higher-quality paint—and I’m loving the changes—they’re teaching me a number of things about technique, but that isn’t what’s on my mind. What strikes me again and again about this series of candy jars, regardless of the materials I use, is how the results keeping reminding me of Renaissance painting. Feel free to say, Really, is that all? You and Michelangelo on the same page now? Lonely bloggers are allowed to make comparisons like this. It’s one of the perks of isolation. But that isn’t what I’m saying. I’ve never wanted to paint the way anyone did during the Renaissance—OK, that’s not true, because I’d give almost anything to paint nearly anything Bruegel painted, but I mean I’ve never attempted to adopt any methods or conventions from the Renaissance. I’ve never had the urge to paint one of Piero Della Francesca’s scenes. So I’m not entirely sure why the way I render a little oblong bit of translucent sugar reminds me of a Biblical scene from centuries ago. (It’s a coincidence that I’ve recently been reading about Italian painting from the 12^th through the 16^th centuries—and not because of any conscious connection between my intentions and what motivated painting during the Renaissance, but simply because I want to get into Vasari’s head, as a critic and historian.) Last year, this same similarity occurred to me. I remember looking at a previous candy jar I’d done, one that I exhibited at the last Halpert Biennial, and I thought that the loose way I’d painted some of the candy reminded me of Michelangelo. I know it sounds ludicrous to say this, but it was purely formal: the quality of the color reminded me of what the figures were wearing on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and there were other connections: the clarity of line I can get with these paintings, and also for some reason the organic curves of these oval objects often remind me of parts of the human body—a length of someone’s arm, or a shoulder. More

Vasari on Giotto

The Apparition to Brother Augustin, Giotto

Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists is an amazingly readable book, full of lore and wonderful detail about particular painters, even though it was published nearly five centuries ago. The author’s voice is as alive and vivid as a contemporary writer’s, and his enthusiasm for his subjects seems as if it ought to be a model for all art criticism, especially now. He wrote about human beings, in terms any commonly educated reader could grasp, and it’s clear why the reader should love the work he described. He wrote about what he admired, and his appreciation for the art he saw around him was boundless. The preface, amusingly, says that “in some respects Vasari’s vocabulary is limited. For example, he employs the adjective beautiful over and over again, much to the despair of all his translators.” It sounds less like a limit to his vocabulary than a sign that he adhered to the highest standards in what he treasured about art. There’s something ingenous and innocent in that little fact that he kept calling attention to the beauty of the work; it’s endearing. Tough luck for his translators, I guess, but great news for anyone interested in the Italian Rennaisance.

I ordered a used paperback of this book because I was eager to read about Giotto as much as any of the other painters in his dozens of biographical stories. I’ve always considered Giotto an austerely religious genius who initiated naturalistic depiction of individual human beings in Western painting. Instead, what seemed to emerge, while reading Vasari, was that Giotto advanced the depiction of the human figure as a necessity for conveying the reality of a human being’s inner life. He managed to show extreme human emotion in figures which lie somewhere between flat Byzantine icons and the full realism of the later Rennaissance. His work was almost exclusively devoted to Christian subjects, so when I came to learn how worldly he was, and how witty, it took some getting used to. He was a smooth, charming, totally at ease with anyone. His skills were legendary.

Vasari considers great draftsmanship as the foundation of visual art, a way of capturing More

Inside trading vs. love

Westbeth, Greenwich Village

Nicely written reflection in the NYTimes this morning on the high-end art market from Adam Davidson, from NPR. Loved his last paragaph:

The value of any artist’s work is determined by an insider world of cultural arbiters who coordinate with one another. They know long before the rest of us which new artist is going to have a big show, who is going to be trashed in a review or whose piece was just sold privately for a small fortune.

Because the art market isn’t regulated like financial securities, insider dealing is generally not illegal. In fact, being a truly influential insider is so rewarding that the slots are zealously guarded. Larry Gagosian, perhaps the world’s most influential gallery owner, needs a nearly impossible combination of skills — deep art knowledge, master salesmanship, charm, ruthlessness, financial savvy and the respect of the artists themselves — to maintain his edge and root out competition. When you start a consulting service or invest in an art fund, you are an outsider seeking to make money in a shadowy market filled with brilliant insiders just like him. No wonder it rarely works.

As I talked to art advisers and economists, I kept thinking of my childhood in Westbeth, a subsidized housing complex for artists in Greenwich Village. Our neighbors, painters and sculptors among them, were decidedly not rich. To them, the very idea that art should make someone wealthy was laughable, even offensive. It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.