TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "art"
We all know that art forgeries are just cheap rip-offs of real art. What Jonathan Keats’ new book presupposes is, maybe they’re not?
Forgers are the foremost artists of our age.
I’m not talking about the objects they make. Their real art is to con us into accepting the works as authentic. They do so, inevitably, by finding our blind spots, and by exploiting our common-sense assumptions. When they’re caught (if they’re caught), the scandal that ensues is their accidental masterpiece. Learning that we’ve been defrauded makes us anxious — much more so than any painting ever could — provoking us to examine our poor judgment. This effect is inescapable, since we certainly didn’t ask to be duped. A forgery is more direct, more powerful, and more universal than any legitimate artwork.
Note, too, his answer to the question, “But isn’t forgery like plagiarism?”
Technically speaking, it’s the opposite. (Plagiarists take credit for other people’s work, whereas forgers attribute their own work to others.)
Which is almost exactly what Andrew Potter says in The Authenticity Hoax:
Plagiarism is the flip side of forgery: forgers pass off their own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own.
Filed under: forgery
Slow down.
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“The process of writing, editing, selling, editing and publishing a book is agonizingly slow, perhaps even slower for the blogger who is used to the immediate gratification of seeing work published immediately.”
— Claire Zulkey
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“I want to be forced to work slowly.”
—Gay Talese
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“I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.”
—David McCullough
* * *
“I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself.”
—Lynda Barry
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“Let’s slow down, not in pace or wordage but in nerves.”
—John Steinbeck
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“The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own.”
—Joseph Epstein
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“To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens, we should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. May suitable does of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
—The Slow Food Manifesto
* * *
“The way [Bill Callahan] listens to music is one of the most endearing and sweet things I’ve ever seen. He takes off his shoes, sets them down and gets comfortable. He kneels or sits in front of the record player, lifts the cover, reverently chooses a record, puts it on, closes the cover and just listens, start to finish. Whenever I go to see him and we listen to music like that, I register in myself how much better it feels than other ways of listening, which are like rushing to eat a meal because you’re super-hungry.”
—Joanna Newsom
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“A challenge for you: devote ten uninterrupted minutes to looking at a single work of art slowly.”
—SFMOMA’s Slow Art Day
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“When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries. The most important discovery they make is that they can see and experience art without an expert (or expertise)… One day each year – April 27 in 2013 – people all over the world visit local museums and galleries to look at art slowly. Participants look at five works of art for 10 minutes each and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience. That’s it. Simple by design, the goal is to focus on the art and the art of seeing.”
—About Slow Art Day
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“[We] slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all…”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
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“A man’s work is nothing but his slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
—Albert Camus
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“A tree is a slow explosion of a seed.”
—Bruno Munari
* * *
John Baldessari - Four Rules (1978) -ds
To-do list.
Filed under: Baldessari
In the 1960s, Ed Ruscha started putting out his own cheap artist books as a way to get his work out there. The books were “mostly about other everyday sights, like swimming pools, parking lots and palm trees.”
Shunning the elite notion of the “livre d’artiste” — those luxurious, limited-edition works that are collaborations between artists and private presses — he reinvented the genre as something inexpensive, accessible and easy to produce.
The books weren’t precious artworks, they were books, sort of proto-zines:
Mr. Ruscha’s books were not always considered so precious. Mr. Monk remembers his days in the late ’80s as a student at the Glasgow School of Art when he was able to check “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” and books like it out of the library. “I’d take them home, and they got me thinking about this idea of publishing, how you could make something cheap,” he said. “It had a lot of potential.”
U B U W E B has a couple PDF scans of 1921 books by the amazing George Grosz.
Exquisite Corpse by Andre Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy, ca 1927
One of the oldest Surrealist games is Exquisite Corpse. Fold the piece of paper into thirds (or as many sections as there are palyers). The first player draws a head and neck in the top section, extending the lines of the neck just below the fold, then folds it over and passes it to the next player, who continues the drawing without looking at what the previous player has drawn. The second player draws the torso, also extending the lines just below the fold, then passes it to the third player who draws the legs and feet. The final product is called the exquisite corpse. This game can also be played using collage instead of drawing, and online at Draw and Fold Over. Note: you don’t have to draw people! Your section of the picture can be anything you like, as long as it connects to the lines left for you by the previous player. For more information and ideas, visit ExquisiteCorpse.com
Artists often cling to control of their work and the context of its display, but to interact with Tumblr, they must give up that control. Art on Tumblr might get seen by many people, but 1,000 reblogs doesn’t mean anyone will be looking at your art next week, know that you made it, or be having a critical discussion. Given these reasons, it would make sense for artists to be wary of putting their work on Tumblr. But this isn’t always the case; a younger, more internet-savvy generation has embraced the web 2.0, feeling that the costs outweigh the benefits.
cf. Cory Doctorow’s “Think Like A Dandelion”
Filed under: Tumblr
