If I were a slightly more cynical artist I’d make a work titled “Biograffiti” and be done with it. I’d probably project my own image (teeheeee!), and, hell, I might even use spray paint and an airbrush to do up a “sorta painting on da back/mud flaps of a rickshaw” kinda thing, and people would … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: October 2014
On Letters to Some Young Artists (in Newburgh)
Young artists, you don’t need to get your name out “there”; just make the best work you can make. Out “there” doesn’t exist in a way meaningful enough that you’d do, make, anything but the very best you can. Don’t schmooze and mingle, and don’t be a charlatan. No one cares enough about your art … Continue reading
Byrning Down the Wendy House
My friend, fellow-artist and collaborator, Odin, has just written a great piece on the recent David Byrne fluff and the riposte/retort “Boo hoo, fuck off” from artist and curator Ric Kasini Kadour. Those two call-response pieces are fun to read, and they say more about the writer’s views than anything indisputably true about the state … Continue reading
On Shakespearian Views on the Artist
Let me not to the making of true art admit impediments. But for fuck’s sake, artists, have some modesty, some restraint. Continue reading
On Art: Five Theses on Social Engagement
1. The foundational background of all engagement is culture, the one we’re embedded in, the one we seek to promote. Culture is the practice in equilibrium of the ways in which we encounter the world, and each other. Social engagement is a proposal on the contents and context of (that) culture. It’s not so much … Continue reading
On Local Maxima
In math, and economics–thanks to its 40-year-run of mathematicity–there’s this nice distinction between global maxima and local maxima. If you assume a bounded space, and assume that space includes rationality, consumption, writ however, then all you have before you, all you can maximize has to be maximized in that local space. Let’s try that in … Continue reading
On Necessity, Sufficiency, and Rules
The thing that’s got people pissed off today is that there are no longer any necessary or sufficient conditions for art. The other thing that’s got people pissed off today is that there never were. There were only, ever, rules. Continue reading