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In 1943, when she was working in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker was one of the pre-eminent figures in the American intelligentsia. Her poems and critical writing in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair had made her a force to be reckoned with in highbrow circles; even if she wasn’t revered in academic circles at that time, she was still a shining example of the liberal, educated mind.
So a confession she made that year about the uneasy relationship that has always existed between intellectuals and the popular art form known as the comics was both startling and revelatory.
john allen
"I listened yesterday. It's no reflection on you but I could'nt see where you were going or what you were going for. This early seventies thing did'nt get noticed the first time and you talk about friends of like Dealney and Bonnie who had records out like we're supposed to remember who they are. Then you play this long winded free jazz stuff that really grates on my nerves. And that noise without a beat and sounds like someones being pinched. Then you play a reggae song, I think you called it Dub, to what, be cool? You seem to really fetishize the whole folk thing too which is obnoxious to us who don't even care. I liked it when you played that punk song though."
archive_playlists /terry reid interview
cuechamp working title
random notes on flavin at nga
Late last week I posted an excerpt from my Dan Flavin review (scroll down to the image). And smart readers know how to get their eyes on a full copy. Today I wanted to toss in some random thoughts...
I mentioned in my review that Flavin is installed on carpet. It's really awful. Buzz is that the show's curators know it, aren't happy about it, but couldn't put down wood floors because the structural floors in the I.M. Pei building are uneven. (The wood floor would crack.) Look for the NGA to do some significant floor work in the East Building sometime in the next few years; I also mentioned that some of the rooms are too densely installed. Flavins bleed into Flavins, thus diluting some of their power;
My favorite mix of installation and artwork is Flavin's monument for those who have been killed in ambush... When I blog I try not to 'give away' parts of shows, so I'll just leave it at that; If you're art-smart enough to be reading MAN, you'll love one of the last rooms of the exhibit. In it the curators have assembled Flavin work that Flavinizes other artists. Go with a friend and see who can nail all the references;
Dear National Gallery: Benches!!;
The curators of the Smithson show in LA and the Flavin show in DC independently made the same decision: My artist made site-specific works. Nothing I can do in my show can capture those works because they're so site-specific. So I'm not going to show them. Even as I type that, it sounds like it should be a mistake. But it's not. Both teams of curators made the right choice. Photographs of Spiral Jetty or Amarillo Ramp would look cheesy when surrounded by Smithson's other work. Same with Flavin's site-specific work;
Speaking of installation... why is there still a Tony Smith and Gerhard Richter installed on the mezzanine? They weren't made to be lit by green light.
Why do the Flavins in the catalog look so good? Most of the works shown in the catalog were installed one at a time in Dia's building in Chelsea, then photographed, then taken down. Smart.
No one was better than Adorno at dissecting the psychic and emotional brutality of capitalism’s regimes of commodification and the increasing pressure it exerts on individuals to define themselves through consumption. This, he argued, led to the compulsion to shut off one’s capacity for empathy, whether with working people whose labor produces commodities (how could we shop at Wal-Mart otherwise?) or those whose homes, lives and futures are being sacrificed in the name of a market-friendly abstraction called “Iraqi freedom.”via arts and letters daily
Adorno referred to this “shut off” compulsion in refreshingly severe terms, calling it “the mechanism of psychic mutilation upon which present conditions depend for their survival.” As Lee suggests, he surely would have had much to say about our contemporary equivalent of proto-Nazi “body culture,” in which such perverse phenomena as full-body cosmetic “extreme makeovers” have moved from creepy evidence of psychopathology to prime-time entertainment.
Thus, those who assume that Adorno was politically conservative because he didn’t like American mass culture don’t look closely enough at why he didn’t like it—they miss the deep ideological interconnectedness he traced between subjectivity, consumption, production, the conditions of possibility for empathy and, with this, political agency. Because he saw these questions as interconnected, his work can be very hard to read. Yes, it is stylistically complex to an extent that can repel even those who agree with his analysis—“Critique of Capitalism for Dummies” this is not. But I would argue that the complexity is necessary to accommodate his consistent constellations of concerns.
opera cast
public radio fan