1.
Today was unseasonably warm
There were mountains in the distance, and disaster was coming. I heard it on the evening news.
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What do we see when we look at art? What do we want to see? Answers come readily and are various: we seek beauty; enlightenment; pleasure; escape from ourselves; insight into those same selves.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault usefully reminds us that “[t]he frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.” Noah Eli Gordon’s new long poem The Source is such a node — a radiant node — within a site-specific network of other books.
Reviews of music by Bombino, Coldplay, Das Racist, Gang of Four, Fleet Foxes, Ruth Gerson, Paul Simon and Generation Bass Presents.
“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy,” Isabel tells the main character, Adam Gordon. Since the death of the self, the author and painting, the desire for significance has led to a daily slew of preposterous claims and downright silly statements.
This week, Knoedler scandal update, pleasure of art, how Cecil Beaton saved the Queen, Philippe Starck talks creativity/$/sex, rare African art, ringtone drama, Montreal artists remember slain homeless man, Rupert Murdoch’s art tweets, NY streets and the capital of Stolen Islamic art.
When Katherine Kuh asked Edwin Dickinson about his painting, “Self-Portrait in Uniform” (1942), where the artist depicts himself in a mirror dressed as a Union soldier, he answered, “I’ve had a number of hobbies; one was the Civil War. For about nine years I was particularly interested in that subject and the portrait comes from that time.”
Any year that begins with the caucusing of Republicans in Iowa and the sacking of Jim Hoberman at the Voice can come to no good. Yet here we are embarking on a new venture, Hyperallergic Weekend, to see what we can make of it.
Maurizio Cattelan’s All explodes on impact: all noise, heat and light, followed by gradually dissipating trails of smoke. The Italian anti-artist’s anti-retrospective at the Guggenheim, as everyone has heard, hangs in toto from the oculus of the Wright ramp.
Over 100 masterworks by 59 artists spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties are on view at China Institute Gallery in New York.
