“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to … Continue reading
Category Archives: Art History
On Teleology, Evolution, Suit-Wearing and History as Novelism
I was having this conversation yesterday with my girlfriend about how in talk of evolution there is room to disagree with so-called evolutionists because some evolutionist don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. There is room to disagree because many evolutionists don’t talk about evolution as premised in a way we think about the … Continue reading
Departure
Dan: I’m older, and I’m much less friendly to fuckin’ change. Al Swearengen: Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to. —Deadwood The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives … Continue reading
On Art as Experience: “Saving” a City
This weekend is the run-time for the second coming of the Newburgh Illuminated Festival. A city-wide gathering of art, music, retrieved and lived history, and a co-mingling of different people on different cross-roads. It’s part of a move to recapture the history, the culture and context of Newburgh, the city that in the until the … Continue reading
On the Throwingness of Good Art
A proposal for a new association between good art and good pizza: Throw your art up in the air and catch it—or don’t—and if you still like what you caught– or didn’t catch, and it’s shattered and cracked, jagged, dead in many pieces or just that first one, alive–then you’ve got a supple and … Continue reading
Art and Philosophy as Complements
Art is not philosophy embodied. Arthur Danto’s account was something along those lines, in an end-of-the-road kind of way. However, I can’t put any distance between myself and the view that art and philosophy are complementary accounts of the world that use labor, temper and function to model chunks of the world we thought … Continue reading
As I Lay Dying Both Ways
The problem with art is not only that it is in and of the commodified world. It’s also that no one knows what the fuck for. Continue reading
Art Doubles
There is a doubling down in art. It runs through it. Representation is the act-fact of showing what is not there. The act of showing requires doing something and the fact requires, often, doing something, somewhere, already done by others, with materials already hitched to the thing both not there and somewhere. Art runs afoul … Continue reading
Art Works As
Art works as sites of engagement; art works as sites that trigger our response biases. The thing there, then, is to make work that activates those responses. Good art makes us all reactionaries. Continue reading
A View To Beauty and the Sublime
Beauty is your sure bet that desire, unmolested, is going to make you feel around. The Sublime is your failure to feel anything around the beautiful, knowing well it’s there. Desire is the brown box. Continue reading
anartism 