2009
March 18, 2009
What is a blog for, if not shameless self-promotion? I'll be on David Cohen's monthly Review Panel at the National Academy Museum Friday evening. It's a series I've been attending regularly and find enormously interesting--for the audience's comments as much as those of the panel members--and David does an excellent job of keeping things lively. So I've been preparing for that as well as getting my taxes done and trying to figure out how I'm going to get around New York with a stress-fractured foot (I can't tell you the number of people who've said, "Well it's good you didn't break it")--and smelling spring which, even though it's faithfully followed winter every year of my life, always feels like a miracle.
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March 15, 2009
In our culture, outside of Carl Jung who coined the term, synchronicity hasn’t been given its due. It hardly ever shows up in literature—in fact a friend was once told in a writing workshop that, to be believable, “coincidences” should be strictly limited to one per novel. Go back another century, however, and we have Dickens, Trollope, and Austen peppering their books with unexplainable happenstances. Sometimes I think synchronicity is all over the place if you’re looking for it, but sometimes it shows up even when you’re not. I offer this story as an antidote to the tales of doom and gloom that saturate the media.
Last Tuesday night, a neighbor I’ve known since he was small, Oliver Antunes, was bummed. A 2008 graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Oliver left his job as poissonier at Wheatleigh, a posh Berkshire resort, and has been living with his mother, studying French, and catering private dinners, saving up to go live in Europe and pursue an apprenticeship with a top restaurant in Lyon. Through his Portuguese father, Oliver has a dual passport that allows him to live and work in the EU. He’d lined up his contacts and even an apartment in Lyon when, on Tuesday, a catering job that would’ve brought him close to his goal was cancelled at the last minute. Commiserating with her son, my friend Crane (a single mom who’s supported three children with her panoply of talents including cooking) asked how much more he needed. “$4,000” Oliver answered, before disappearing to the village market to buy a can of beer. The next morning Crane noticed that Oliver was up and out uncharacteristically early. It turns out that, along with his can of beer, Oliver bought a $1 lottery ticket, and not wanting to say anything until he had the check in hand, had gone off to the Lottery Commission in Springfield to redeem it. The amount? $4,000.
Bon voyage, Oliver!
Last Tuesday night, a neighbor I’ve known since he was small, Oliver Antunes, was bummed. A 2008 graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Oliver left his job as poissonier at Wheatleigh, a posh Berkshire resort, and has been living with his mother, studying French, and catering private dinners, saving up to go live in Europe and pursue an apprenticeship with a top restaurant in Lyon. Through his Portuguese father, Oliver has a dual passport that allows him to live and work in the EU. He’d lined up his contacts and even an apartment in Lyon when, on Tuesday, a catering job that would’ve brought him close to his goal was cancelled at the last minute. Commiserating with her son, my friend Crane (a single mom who’s supported three children with her panoply of talents including cooking) asked how much more he needed. “$4,000” Oliver answered, before disappearing to the village market to buy a can of beer. The next morning Crane noticed that Oliver was up and out uncharacteristically early. It turns out that, along with his can of beer, Oliver bought a $1 lottery ticket, and not wanting to say anything until he had the check in hand, had gone off to the Lottery Commission in Springfield to redeem it. The amount? $4,000.
Bon voyage, Oliver!
March 13, 2009
Photo: Scott Cole Today Bernard Madoff went to jail. Today my friend Scott was upbraiding himself for eating too many chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are, in Scott’s case, an occupational hazard: he serves delightful breakfasts and lunches at his Caffé Pomo D’oro in West Stockbridge (MA), doing all of his own baking, so as part of his job he makes some of the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Of course he’s going to eat them.
In a conversation about the financial crisis, so much of it having been caused by Wall Street greed, my friend Arthur, art director at TIME, said: “You and I like to make money, it’s a benefit of doing the work we do, but it’s not why we do it. Our occupations have many satisfactions, of which making money is only one. One of the problems in the current situation is that we’ve created a segment of the population whose only purpose in life is to make money.” True, they’re supposed to be making it for other people as well, but what’s to keep them from dipping their hands in the cookie jar?
In a conversation about the financial crisis, so much of it having been caused by Wall Street greed, my friend Arthur, art director at TIME, said: “You and I like to make money, it’s a benefit of doing the work we do, but it’s not why we do it. Our occupations have many satisfactions, of which making money is only one. One of the problems in the current situation is that we’ve created a segment of the population whose only purpose in life is to make money.” True, they’re supposed to be making it for other people as well, but what’s to keep them from dipping their hands in the cookie jar?
March 11, 2009
Why think? Adding to my collection of statements about art that say absolutely nothing, my new idea is to gather enough so that readers can string them together and make their own press releases and artist’s statements (students, listen up!), thereby avoiding unnecessary brain strain. Here’s an example from a current press release that could work for almost any kind of art. Just insert your name and medium in the blanks:
_______ is working within a familiar lexicon but the process of _______ pushes the imagery out of the realm of objectivity. _______sees this step toward abstraction as not necessarily in opposition to representation, rather as an abstraction of ideas. The iconography in these _______(s) relates sometimes directly and sometimes quite obliquely to the iconography of the world in which we live. By creating a parallel universe in which the artist investigates these themes, he/she is able to open the work to the viewer for further exploration.
_______ is working within a familiar lexicon but the process of _______ pushes the imagery out of the realm of objectivity. _______sees this step toward abstraction as not necessarily in opposition to representation, rather as an abstraction of ideas. The iconography in these _______(s) relates sometimes directly and sometimes quite obliquely to the iconography of the world in which we live. By creating a parallel universe in which the artist investigates these themes, he/she is able to open the work to the viewer for further exploration.
March 9, 2009
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens famously warns us against thinking of our particular times as unique, however there have been few points in my lifetime (the sixties, for sure, except I was too young to have anything to compare it to) where the extremes of best and worst were as clearly drawn as they are now. It’s a time of depression and darkness, but also of awakening and light, and we all know it. Everything this year is different from the way it was last year, and the ten years before that, and the ten years before that. It’s an epoch that will get a name, be called something, however just as people didn’t know that they were living in the Renaissance or the Roaring Twenties, we don’t know how history will remember these extraordinary times.
Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens famously warns us against thinking of our particular times as unique, however there have been few points in my lifetime (the sixties, for sure, except I was too young to have anything to compare it to) where the extremes of best and worst were as clearly drawn as they are now. It’s a time of depression and darkness, but also of awakening and light, and we all know it. Everything this year is different from the way it was last year, and the ten years before that, and the ten years before that. It’s an epoch that will get a name, be called something, however just as people didn’t know that they were living in the Renaissance or the Roaring Twenties, we don’t know how history will remember these extraordinary times.
In the art world, everything is up for reassessment, and whether it’s the worst and best of times depends on who you talk to. If you read the Armory Show wrap-up in the Times today, you’d think it was going down the tubes, yet the people I spoke with at a couple of galleries (Gering & Lopez, Sean Kelly) were more than pleased with their return at the Armory and others even suggested that the economic downturn could turn out to be a boon for art because the prices have been discounted and rich people have nowhere else to put their money.
One thing’s for sure: the era of second-guessing the art market and thinking that it can be controlled with any amount of hype is over. Remember Richard Prince? I didn’t come across a single piece of his in the Armory Show. Damien Hirst? Who?
In last month’s Art in America (February, p.33, not yet on the Web) Dave Hickey described the previous “period”—meaning up until last fall—as one where “ ‘fairness’ (read mediocrity) proliferated. Dealers diversified their offerings to disguise their personal taste, thus eroding their better judgment.” Or, as one dealer once told me blatantly, “I don’t show what I love.” The same was true for artists, who were coached by art schools to ape certain kinds of art.
Now all we have to fall back on is ourselves. How refreshing!
February 27, 2009
Now here’s a novel idea that recently cropped up in the Times—paying doctors to keep us healthy! When I was studying t’ai chi with Master Koo, he told us that in ancient China, people paid their doctors only when they were well. I’ve noticed that the biggest difference between holistic and conventional Western medicine is not so much the form of treatment but the fact that holistic practitioners ask questions and credit your knowledge of your own body. Accustomed to the former, I recently consulted a Lyme specialist at the Berkshire Medical Center and when I attempted to describe my symptoms she asked tersely, “Why are you telling me this?” I have a friend right now who’s being treated for sleep apnea, which I think is hilarious because his 30-year-old mattress is—literally—like trying to sleep on a pile of rocks. He’d rather get treatment (covered by insurance) than shell out for a new bed, although might feel obligated to if his doctor had asked him about it. Another friend was on Prozac, and when I inquired about his dietary habits, he told me he drank 12 cups of coffee a day. He thought it was normal. I also know someone who is getting disability, cannot work due to depression, yet his Dunkin’ Donut habit and addiction to diet Dr. Pepper have yet to be revealed to his doctor. Everyone always says that it’s hard to get people to make lifestyle changes. I bet that if doctors’ incomes depended on it, they’d figure out a way.
So, I began to think, in what other profession do we reward practitioners when they fail? Well, okay, maybe in the financial sector. But, unlike medicine, where they study sick people to try to figure out how to be healthy, at least in finance we don’t study the habits of poor people to learn out how to be rich.
So, I began to think, in what other profession do we reward practitioners when they fail? Well, okay, maybe in the financial sector. But, unlike medicine, where they study sick people to try to figure out how to be healthy, at least in finance we don’t study the habits of poor people to learn out how to be rich.
February 17, 2009
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jeremy Everett. The large-scale sculptural installation, Opium Feast, is his largest and most ambitious exhibition to date. Jeremy Everett's populated composition of wax sculptures is as decadent as it is dead. The massive grotesque accumulations underline his interest in archaeological strata, Classical antiquity and the modern landscape of detritus, emotion and memory. Constructed entirely from wax and fragments of architectural ruin, the artist builds layers of vast fields of opium poppies-a substance that has been used for pain relief and ritual since Neolithic man. What is left is a landscape of the subconscious void. The physical body is lost, notions of being no longer pertain. Surrounded by compositions of opulence and portraits of sexual climax, buried in a still life of the Symphony Fantastique, the viewer is left hovering between fantasy and reality, fame and oblivion.
Beverages provided by Grolsch.